>Played this game when I was much younger

>Fucking charming jrpg in an incredibly unique and awesome setting

>great adventure where you play a fucking sky pirate

>decide to be a (sky) pirate myself to revisit the game, so download a rom from vimms and play on dolphin

>combat is excruciatingly slow, taking minutes to resolve even basic mob encounters, which happen frequently

>even simple navigation stuff like climbing ladders can take 20+ seconds

>try and mitigate the issue by using fast forward, which helps somewhat but now any time I'm not fast forwarding seems like molasses 



I have been utterly ruined by modern games and can't enjoy this game now because everything is too slow.

I had a similar experience. Even for the standards of its time it was a slow game. It could just be us getting older and having less free time to waste.

>>635735069 (OP)

When you're a kid you don care about things being slow, because you have less to do and feels like you have all the time int he world.

Also airships are so cool.

Also back in those days, kids had maybe 3 or 4 games a year max, in general (I feel like 3 was average). It being slow wasn't as big a deal.

>>635735069 (OP)

The battles can be pretty slow I'll give you that, but the world navigation is fine.



>It could just be us getting older and having less free time to waste.

This is a big part of it. A main reason I didn't love Xenoblade 3 is because there are so many unnecessary, drawn-out cutscenes that absolutely bloat the hell out of the runtime. This is an issue more with JRPGs in general, but damn.

It's a shame because I still love the genre, and even XB3 (when it wasn't wasting my time). For my money, the perfect JRPG length is ~30 hours. Bigger does not equal better; if nothing else, the battle system almost unfailingly gets old beyond that point.

>world navigation is fine

Ladders man. Go to the 45:40 mark in this video. It takes 30 fucking seconds to climb this ladder. This is probably the worst offender but there are dozens of ladders and poles all over the place that you have to navigate and they take fucking AGES to climb



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwFlnXBnKYg [Embed]

If anybody ever threatened to remake Skies of Arcadia I would consider firebombing their offices

My view of this game really changed when I found out it pretty much got rewritten from scratch for the localization. Still fantastic, but knowing that the story isn't that close to the original japanese made me question how we consume foreign media in general.



In terms of localizations today, I think we have things pretty good despite what you may think of all the controversies here and there.

It's a good point. Maybe someone will start a fan translation one of these days.



A sequel with the same atmosphere, more sophisticated combat, and some modern comforts would be welcome.

A fan relocalization being our best bet for more SoA is what I would say, but with sega seemingly reviving old IP like JSR I wouldn't write a sequel off either. Every time one if those feedback polls came around I always checked the boxes for stuff like Valkyria and this game, like to think we've made an impact (lol)

>>635735069 (OP)

TikTok Timmy strikes again.

Sad.
