Rainbow Skies
Developer: SideQuest Studios
Publisher: EastAsiaSoft
Rainbow skies is nowhere near perfect but it is very close to the perfect KIND of game for a certain KIND of gamer (like myself). It’s sort of an enigma as well. Its humorous, light-hearted and simple while also incredibly deep and addictive. I personally love tactical role-play games and I get easily sucked in by stats and completion tasks so this game was all the way up my alley. It’s a wonderful blend of old school play-style and new school stat-keeping that just kept (and keeps) me coming back for more!
First of all, the story is much stronger than that of Rainbow Moon. It took some time to get into Moon and I never felt compelled to finish but with Skies I was in from pretty much the beginning and I’m still going strong after 25+ hours! Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing fancy or innovative about the story. It’s as standard as it gets but the narrative flows much deeper than expected and the dialog (while pretty dad-jokey) gave me quite a few chuckles along the way. Most importantly, the elegantly simple battle system kept grinding away (and you WILL need to grind!).
The game isn’t hard by any means. In fact, there is no such thing as game over in Rainbow Skies. Instead, when you lose in battle, the game just strands you right where you are with 1 hit point, which in some instances is almost worse! The battle system has you moving square-by-square to strategically battle enemies. Everything levels up separately, from weapons to skills, so the more you use a certain weapon or skill, the more powerful it gets. Also, levelling certain skills is the only way to unlock others. I love this kind of mechanic as it really encourages the gamer to dive into a new skill and see where it takes you.
The game is built to cross-play between PS4/PS3 and a Vita so the graphics are not too heavy duty. Very old-school influenced and simple. It didn’t pain me to look at but it looks about as good as a really good-looking mobile game. The music, while nothing special, is actually pretty decent, but the audio quality lines up pretty well with the graphics. Aesthetics are definitely this game’s weakest point. I definitely like the idea of portability with this game and I think it could be a great fit for the Switch.
Ultimately I really enjoyed my time with Rainbow Skies but I couldn’t shake the notion that everything I was getting from it, I could get a better, more refined version of elsewhere. While it may not be worthy of 100 hours of gameplay, it’s definitely built for it and if it’s your thing, there’s an insane amount of time to be sunk into this game.