Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire (Nintendo Switch) – Le test

Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire was released on October 10, 2024. It is a J-RPG and adventure which was published by PQube and developed by Octeto Studios for €24.99 on the eshop.

PQube is a publisher specializing in the localization of Japanese games and they also publish independent games. Their studios are located in the United Kingdom in Bristol, they have been active since 2011. The 1s^ers The games they made were on the DS, and they also made a few games for the DSIWare.

Octeto Studios is a game studio, founded in 2012 with around ten people. The studio is located in Chile, in Santiago more precisely. He honed his skills with web games and with Cyber ​​Ops, released in 2020.

History

You are Glenn, an apprentice aviator leader of his troop made up of Fio, Ren and Mica. 3 years before your mother returned alone from a mission while she was accompanied by your father as well as many people who never returned… Glenn has the same nightmare every night, but today is a special day since he This is a mission to become a real aviator.

The story sets the scene directly, the loss of his father, a trauma for your hero and despite everything a mission that will change the course of his life. This is not a scenario that has never been seen before, we saw it in Tales of Symphonia for example.

The 1st mission serves as a tutorial as well as to discover the relationships between the members of your team. We haven’t developed the story any further since there are so many crucial things happening that we’ll leave it to you to have the pleasure of dissecting it all.

The story is gripping, and the interactions, although somewhat limited, with the NPCs will develop what there is to know about your city and the surrounding area.

There will regularly be conversations between your characters, which will start when you wander around the current mission or during an event they have just experienced. As you explore, you will even be rewarded with small cutscenes that will further deepen the bond between your heroes.

You will find a lot of adventures already seen in other games, but Sky Oceans manages to do it in its own way, without making the story monotonous.

Walk, fly, shoot and the fight is over

There are two important parts, exploration and turn-based combat.

Exploration takes place on the ground and in the sky. When you are on the ground, you will be able to purchase various healing and equipment items. And you will have the opportunity to chat with local NPCs and advance the plot. There is no combat on the ground, only combat in the air. When you have finished your purchases of all kinds, you will use your ships which are aerius.

Aerial exploration allows great freedom of movement, although it is limited by “wind walls” which are a little too present, which limits exploration at times.

The aerius control has two options: either standard or simulation, but no matter which way you choose it remains horrible. The aerius is very slow when it turns and the camera struggles to follow it in narrow places.

When you go up or down, there is a kind of weight that jerks the movements of the aerius. You can bump into the scenery, and with the camera struggling, all in a tight space, we let you imagine the struggle every time you touch a surface.

It should be noted that each character on your team has a unique ability to their aerius. These are practical, or allow you to solve small puzzles.

In short, air travel is extremely frustrating and cumbersome to control for no good reason.

Turn-based combat takes place in the air: you will shoot at an enemy or they will attack you, which starts the fight. You have 5 choices, attack, special arts, dodge, arsenal and retreat.

Attacking is the basic shot, it is a neutral shot that does little damage.

Special arts depend on the character, your heroes each master two. One of the two is the element he uses, and which represents his resistance and weakness. You have fire, ice, lightning, wind, light and darkness. In true Pokémon fashion, opposing elements are super effective and using the same element as the other character will result in resistance. Each element has 3 different attacks per element which can be upgraded up to 3 times with skill points.

Each special art has a secondary effect such as freezing or burning, if you don’t guess it it’s a shame since the game will never explain it to you.

Dodging serves to recover more AP while increasing defense which is used to use special arts. You collect a small quantity at the start of the turn for each hero.

The Arsenal allows you to use consumables to recover HP, AP or even obtain resistance to certain elements.

Retreating is used to escape fights, but it is impossible against bosses.

The combat system is relatively simple, apart from using the right elements to inflict maximum damage, healing your allies at the right time or boosting them with special arts, it doesn’t go any further. Ultimately, fights don’t need a great strategy, it just comes down to using the shot that hurts and hoping it hits the target. Afterwards, there are mechanics which arrive later in the game, that would amount to spoiling the game, but the criticism that it remains simple still remains valid.

You will also be able to equip your ships with new parts which will increase the statistics of your characters.

The delicious pixels on your screen

Choosing manga + animation graphics should make the graphics timeless, but that’s not the case… If you look a little closer, you’ll see that the pixels look like black dots on a white page.

3D models can shoot the mouth with a ridiculous viewing distance. The face is rarely visible in all its splendor, you will see more of a mush of pixels waging war, especially with Ren, one of the members of your troop.

Although 2D models for discussions are, at 1^is First, they look great, but they were converted to a poor quality image format. It’s so easy to see flaws that you’ll notice them quickly.

Also, and this is a problem only linked to the Switch version, the characters during conversations change their expressions (sad, happy, angry, etc.), but it is missing. During the aerial phases the emotions are present, but as soon as you are on foot Ren, Mica and many other NPCs only have one face available. Other versions of the game don’t have these issues, but the developers are already aware of most of them. They should be resolved when the game is released, we just need to see the result when it is officially released.

The animations are decent overall, it’s a shame that the 2D and 3D models don’t line up when a character emits a different emotion. Unfortunately, some animations do not display well or simply do not play.

Too many bugs, it kills the immersion

The game is riddled with bugs, which are difficult to ignore. To the point that it spoils certain moments of the game, particularly in terms of the speed of the fights which, suddenly, go to X3 speed… There is no option to increase the speed of the fights, nor to skip the cutscenes , so it makes no sense.

There were, on several occasions, animations that corresponded to a special art to heal an ally that turned into ice attack animations on the enemy, but still healed the ally.

There are many more to mention, but we are not going to take the whole test there. You should know that the game, even after a recent update, is still full of inconsistencies.

The beauty of the sky lets itself be carried away by its music

A lot of music is quite calm, and you feel like you’re being carried by the clouds. Then suddenly, the sky darkens and a fight begins. The combat music speeds up a bit while remaining light, but it announces the delicate tension you find yourself in.

The general atmosphere is rather serious in combat, but without going at full speed. Outside of the fighting, it’s calm, it’s peaceful, so you might as well enjoy it without rushing.

The sound design is impactful: each attack emits a sound, your hero launches a catchy phrase for his special moves. There are rarely any unwanted gaps, and it is controlled.

It’s difficult to determine how long it will take

An RPG often takes its time to set up its story and its characters and that’s a good thing. The problem here is not the story, but everything else that takes up a lot of time.

You have a lot of loading time for everything and almost nothing at times. The fights are quite long, even for an average fight. As we’ve said before, moving your ship around is a pain. You have access to the entire gameplay part after chapter 3 (more than 2h30).

Everything takes time, it really doesn’t make us want to invest in a game that makes us suffer from its slowness. Being an RPG, its lifespan should be significant, especially since it is inspired by Sky of Arcadia which lasts 42 hours for its main story.

You guessed it, we didn’t finish the story, the bugs having cooled our enthusiasm. And in particular a certain black screen which ended the game since the automatic save brought back in a loop to this unfortunate event.