The Shrine

So from the music thread I went back and checked out Skies of Arcadia, and this game reminds me of Xenogears a lot. A great game that you probably won't play again, and a game that's not as good as its individual parts because although it has great graphics/story/music/everything, there's some gameplay mechanism that seriously hoses the game to prevent it from being even equal to the sum of its parts.

The underyling problem is that Skies of Arcadia is really, really, really hard if you play it like a normal RPG. Your standard MP can't possibly keep up with the last two boss's damage (Galcian and Ramirez) and most likely long before that, but since you can buy items that are as strong as the best healing spells you can always brute force the problem by throwing money at it. This means you end up going through items the same way one might use Megaelixirs in Final Fantasy but you can do that for every fight. You can even do that in the ship battle as there's literally no point to stop healing your ship when you can just use an item for full health. It's not even clear to me if you can beat the last 3 battles, including the air battle, while being appropriate level without the items. Zelos took me close to an hour to beat (if you miss the round with auto critical) and you can't make your ship do any more damage, and if you've to stop to actually use attack points to heal the time it takes to beat Zelos can easily double. On Galcian/Ramirez you probably end up just doing Delta Shield -> Charge X 3 and then Pirate's Wrath or whatever your strongest move, and use the max healing crystals whenever you take damage from a major move like Silver Eclipse.

The funny thing is that the whole system was actually really well thought out. Delta Shield stops all spell attacks + status effects but it also prevents you from healing, so the whole point is that you're supposed to be vulnerable to instant kill/status attacks when you need to drop Delta Shield to heal. In the end you get these battles where it's actually impossible to lose to that may take half an hour doing exactly the same commands over and over since the last two guys do so much damage a lot of time you spent the whole turn healing, but eventually they'll use a move that can be stopped by Delta Shield and then you can finally do damage back to them. So the most epic encounters in the game basically all turn out to be completely trivial and a huge waste of time which detracts from the whole game.

In fact, the game overall's pacing is really, really slow. It's okay the first time you play through it but there's really no motivation to slowly slog your way through a dungeon again, or fly on your airship that's a lot slower than walking in most RPGs. You should at least have the option to just avoid all random encounters once you get the Delphinus (why are there so many guys randomly assaulting a superweapon you hijacked?) Yes you can go above/below eventually but that actually defeats the whole point of Skies of Arcadia, which is exploring. You don't really see much when you're way up or way down in elevation and it's boring. This is a game where you should be able to simply cruise around the world seeing what's out there but because you can never avoid encounters at normal elevation, this just isn't something that's going to happen if you can avoid it.

Funny that you bring up Xenogears. For long length RPGs - Xenogears and Skies of Arcadia are the only two I regularly replay; and I think they're both excellent.

If it were 2002, I would agree with your post when comparing these two games to other RPGs of the time; but in 2012, where 10 hours of nothing but traveling, grinding, and filler questing are commonplace in home console and PC RPGS, Skies of Arcadia and Xenogears are fairly quickly paced in comparison.

I would also agree only for the the first 15 hours that these games (and perhaps a couple of later dungeons in each). I feel that once this establishing phase is passed, the volume of great scenes and interesting segments is presented at a fairly heavy rate for the most part over the next 30-40 hours. Not that the first 15 hours of the games have nothing, just that they are more sectioned off, because each game is focused on establishing the world.

Anyway, just to leave off on a related note; I think the reason so many people expect 80+ hour RPGs nowadays is the slowness of current RPGs. People also don't even expect the sort of value that is packed into 55 hours of Xenogears or Skies of Arcadia will be in an 80+ hour game; they expect something more along the lines of what's in FF12 - except often even slower. What they expect is grindy and repetitive sequences filled with optional and filler quests. In my opinion, while it can be addictive to some players, I find that these new sort of RPGs are much less interesting and rewarding than most of the top RPGs from 2002 and earlier.

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For replays of Skies of Arcadia, I would recommend the remake - which has 1/2 encounters, and then items like the White Map which lower that rate (for ships) even further. Along with smoothed out character graphics, and about triple the number of discoveries; and WAY more Black Pirates. Which makes outside airship travel much more rewarding than it already was; and without the same encounter frustrations as the original version. The only thing that SoA Legends loses over the Dreamcast version, is that because the trip across the Southern Ocean isn't nearly as punishing, Ixa Taka feels like less of a reward; same goes for crossing the Dark Rift (it seemed so long the first time I played, but it's always about 10-15 minutes now on replays).

Just because games today have even more filler isn't an excuse for a slow paced game to be deliberately slow. You can easily spend an hour fighting Zelos while never being anywhere close to dying.

I mean, at least back in the old days you can make argument like loading time, as a very significant portion of both game is lost just from loading the battles over and over.

Skies of Arcadia can definitely be compressed into 30 hours without losing anything if you just get rid of most of the overworld battles, or even just get rid of them altogether. Xenogears is harder to manage because there's just a ton of stuff that happens in the game though I'd say cutting out some of the pointless side story stuff could've helped.

I do think there's this trend toward RPGs taking even longer and longer because longer is clearly better even though most RPGs don't have enough content to keep 20 hours filled. In Final Fantasy X and Chrono Cross you can run away from every encounter 100% of the time and that didn't make the game less enjoyable. In fact FFX would probably be unplayable if you actually have to fight the Behemoth Kings or Master Tonberries that requires you to be much higher than what you need to beat the game to even have a chance at beating them.

That's why I recommend Skies of Arcadia Legends; because that is precisely what they did. They did get rid of most of the overworld battles; and in addition, lowered animation times (by speeding things up) in battles to make things go faster. For ship battles, they threw in additional weapons for the Delphinus that, by the end of the game, allow you to finish off Zelos in about 5-8 minutes; you probably wouldn't even want to use the moonstone canon in that battle, actually, because it is not very efficient compared to other weapons by the end of the game.

I forgot to mention above that, in addition to the extra content mentioned, there is also new story content; mostly relating to Ramirez and Valua.

While I would probably agree that the original Skies of Arcadia is slow, I don't find Skies of Arcadia (Legends) or Xenogears to be slow. Although this is on replays where I already know what to expect; I did find Xenogears slow on the first playthrough (I think if I remember correctly, the first 15 hours of the game took me about 4 months to get through, but then I finished the next 30-35 hours in about a week and a half =P

As far as poor pacing goes; from the era of those two games (where load times isn't the cause of the issue), the one that comes most to mind is Final Fantasy 9. Nowadays, I would say most RPGs (and adventure games) that aren't on handheld have both poor and slow pacing (by poor pacing I mean it is difficult to gauge when the next meaningful step is going to be).

Moonstone Cannon does something like 2 shots from Moon Gun and I made the mistake of using that instead of just firing all your 3 Moon Gun/Cannons at the same time instead. You pretty much had one round where you either can use Moonstone Cannon or get crits on all your other weapon, and if you do something like Moon Torpedo from previous round + Moon Cannon + Moon Gun X 2 then you can take a quarter of his health off in one round which makes the battle more tolerable.

Xenogears had relatively signifcant loading time and the world is also just very big so it all adds up. It's not like they're purposely trying to drag the stuff out but there's just too much stuff to go over.

Skies without the overworld battle would be pretty good in terms of pacing, but you didn't have a choice with that in the Dreamcast version.

I think another problem with Zelos is that he is only vulnerable for exactly one turn in the whole fight.