Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire Review – The Sky Is the Limit, Until It Isn’t

When I first laid my eyes on Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, I was quite interested, because there were some raving comments about it paying a homage to a Dreamcast classic: Skies of Arcadia.

While the marketing for this game was absolutely abysmal, with many of my friends not even knowing of its existence, it looked promising in the trailers. So I absolutely had to check it out for myself. So prepare for takeoff, we’re off into an adventure.

Prepare for Takeoff!

In Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, our story begins with Glenn Windwalker, a young man who aspires to be a pilot adventurer. A few years ago, his father died in an expedition, which caused his mother to sadly isolate herself from the rest of the world, never telling anyone what truly caused the crew of twenty-two people to all report as missing in action or dead.

After Glenn passes his final exam and officially becomes a pilot, things soon get messy when the Alliance suddenly attacks Blossom Village, destroying everything. Their objective is to capture the Windwalkers, and while Glenn manages to escape, he is separated from his mother, with the last thing he remembers seeing is her airship engulfed in flames.

Okay, now where do I start with this…the story falls flat, especially in the beginning. Its pacing is also all over the place: sometimes the game feels it needs to dump a lot of lore in your face, while other times, you’re sort of just wandering around, defeating enemies with not much going on. Even the Alliance, which are supposed to be the “antagonists” of the game, are terribly generic, and not well fleshed out at all.

A Cute Nod to the Dreamcast Era, I Suppose?

One of the things that charmed me at first was this game’s keyart, and I do like the art style that the developers used for the character design, but sadly, that doesn’t seem to have translated well to the other aspects of the game, as the game lacks voice acting outside of some blurbs during combat.

This lack of voice acting absolutely ruins the immersion for me, especially considering the way these cutscenes are structured makes them feel very awkward without it. A shame too, given that the 2D animations are really well made. The 3D models also look like they were shoddily made with three clicks and maybe half an hour. They look nothing like the 2D-expressive portraits, which are far more expressive in comparison.

Even the opening cutscene, which is played every time the game boots up, suffers from a heavy case of screen tearing, something that I feel should’ve been addressed easily in QA. I would even argue that even the Skies of Arcadia it’s trying to inspire itself into looks better, and THAT was a game made in the year 2000, for crying out loud.

Clunky Turn-Based Combat and UI Navigation

Battles in Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire take place in a turn-based aspect, and this is where you’ll see a lot of the classic JRPG inspiration that went into the game. However, after selecting what each party member will do, you NEED to press Square to let the game know this is what you wish to do, which is needlessly clunky.

And I hope you make double sure of your actions before confirming them, because there’s no undo if you accidentally make a character retreat from combat, leaving you with a party of just three people. I learned that the hard way.

Each character has a specific “element”, such as Ice, Fire, Dark, Lightning, Wind, and so on. And certain enemies are weak to or resistant to certain elements, but your only clue is by looking at the numbers of when you perform your attacks. Some elements are also more focused on healing, such as Light.

And here’s where a bizzare element comes into play. On the bottom right of the screen, there’s a bar that reads NEUTRAL, ADVANTAGE or DISADVANTAGE. However, the game makes almost no such mention on what on earth it even means. Does it mean you’re likely to lose? Likely to win? After all, if you manage to shoot an enemy in the overworld, you start with an ADVANTAGE, but that’s really all it says. You don’t get any buffs or…anything really.

The Arbitrary Boundary of the Sky

Another aspect that was heavily marketed is the game’s exploration. Which, sounds cool on paper, but I think the environment and design team just didn’t get the memo because what we got here are large, empty parts of land that are an utter mess to navigate through.

I can’t count how many times I tried to get to my supposed objective, only to ram my airjet into an invisible wall. The sky’s the limit, as they say, but without a minimap, I find it extremely difficult to navigate. Worse, colliding with your airjet in anything will cause your party member to start the next battle with reduced HP.

You can also swap between party members in the overworld, and each of them have a different “ability” that can be triggered using the Square button, but even the tutorial doesn’t make it clear on what some of them do, such as Ren’s Demolition skill which is supposed to work on “obstacles”, but the explanation makes no effort in defining what counts as an “obstacle”.

The plane controls are also abysmal, as the camera is super sensitive if you even so much as stroke the control stick. And also, up is down, and down is up, yet left is left and right is right, so I don’t get why such an inverted control scheme is only applying to the vertical axis, but not the horizontal.

Replayability: An Easy Platinum, At Least…?

Believe me when I say that the story of Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is shockingly short for what it’s worth. In just 10 hours of gameplay, you’ll already be on your way to the game’s ending, and believe me when I say that half of it is probably spent trying to navigate the confusing layouts of the overworld.

In just my first hour, I already obtained roughly 15% of the game’s trophies, and was already in “Chapter 3”. Furthermore, this game’s sidequests are a SNOOZE. They’re nothing more than simple fetch quests, and there’s simply no variety to them. And speaking of, none of the story-related trophies are hidden, so spoiler beware if you look at the trophy list mid-gameplay.

A Busted Engine Before Liftoff

From its clunky combat and technical issues, there is a lot of things that just make this a frustrating experience. Now, patches exist, and as of October 17th, 2024, nearly a week after release, the developers released a 1.02 patch that fixed a lot of bugs and problems, but they didn’t address all of them, such as the graphics pop-in and the screen tearing.

And after reading those patch notes, it feels like QA slept on the job here, or just wasn’t performed at all. It only gives me the message that this game was released in an unfinished state, which is disappointing, to say the least. It’s truly a shame that half-baked QA or none at all seems to be the norm these days.

Maybe Avoid this One if You Can

It’s clear that the developers at Octeto Studios had an ambitious idea, and tried making a title that pays a homage to the classic Dreamcast JRPG that is Skies of Arcadia. However, Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is a game that is simply not up to par, and it’s evident they didn’t manage to cross even 10% of their lofty expectations.

I can only recommend this to the Skies of Arcadia fan that is desperately begging to play something while Sega keeps the game rotting in their huge vault of abandoned IPs. And even then, I would honestly just avoid it entirely, because I don’t think patches can save this one, not with its numerous fundamental failures.