Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire promises a lot, giving impressions of an open sky to fly through, putting together a crew, and going on a lot of adventures. Unfortunately, the reality is that Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire wasn’t yet ready to set sail, with issues galore that just compounded until I had to throw in the proverbial towel around what felt like the halfway point.
The story of Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire follows Glenn Windwalker, the latest in the line of adventurers from the Windwalker family. The story starts with his mum returning from an adventure alone, with Glenn’s father nowhere to be seen. Some time passes, and whatever business Glenn’s parents got involved with catches up with them when their home of Blossom is attacked by the Alliance. Glenn ends up escaping with some of his buddies and vows revenge against the Alliance. It’s all very by the numbers, to be honest. Later on, more factions make themselves known, but by then the problems of Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire and have compounded into a rather boring mess.
For much of the game you will be flying through the skies of Sky Ocean in either a small airjet or a big airship, depending on the environment. The airjets are used to explore the few floating islands and outposts dotted about and used in combat against other airships and flying beasts. The big airship is used to fight the bigger pirate and alliance ships that are all sitting in place across the Sky Ocean.
For what should be an ocean filled with hustle and bustle of other adventurers, traders and more, it feels strange that only your ship is moving through it. It also suffers from lacking draw distances and other issues. This sky ocean has lots of floating lands that appears via pop in or form right in front of you. In the basement region, the island artifacts just did not render properly, constantly appearing and disappearing. One of the areas you’ll find in each region is a hunting zone to gather resources from the flying beasts and they may even have treasure chests, but the random generation is so poor that some treasure chests just won’t open and others just do not exist even if you have flown to the spot that the marker is pointing to.
Combat takes too long and is unrefined. Combat is turn based with parties of up to four facing off against each other. On your turn you can choose to attack, evade, use an item or retreat. There are also Arts, elemental based weapons that can confer status effects on friend and foe alike. There are status effects which come up with the message ‘translation description missing’, so I couldn’t even tell you what some of these do. It isn’t just here that item descriptions are missing, as they are also missing for some items in the shops.
It also just takes too long. If you play battles at normal speed they can take over ten minutes just before of the repeating animations that play out for every attack. Luckily, you can fast forward through these animations to cut down on the time battles take. Early on, battles can be tough, but very quickly they become easy to pass because the enemy patterns hardly change letting you use the same routines to take them out as quickly as possible.
You would also think in the Sky Oceans there would be quite a lot to do, but there isn’t. In each region, there is at least one outpost that you wander around on foot to get quests, which break down into hunting creatures for meat or taking out pirate airships. When you accept a quest to take out pirate airships, the quest giver says you need to take out five to be successful. In reality, the quest counter requires you take out six to complete the mission. In addition, when fighting in my giant airship, none of my characters ever earned any XP or levelled up, which meant the ship crew remained at level one. Not that it mattered, since the airship is totally overpowered and can take out a pirate ship in a couple of turns. Another issue popped up here, where after finishing battles against pirate airships my airship would inexplicably have drifted off to the edge of the map, smacking up against the air wall that separates regions.
When you are hunting, you will need to gather a certain number of resources, and take them back to the quest giver. First time, complete success. In the second region, I completed the hunt and returned to the town and quest giver, but I could not complete the quest because the game decided I had already completed it despite the quest being open, and the trophy for it never popping.