Strategy RPGs are a strange beast. They’ve never been popular with most mainstream gamers, and yet they’ve persistently endured for almost as long as modern gaming has existed, first on DOS PC games like X-Com: UFO Defense and Dune: The Battle for Arrakis, then on consoles with titles such as Shining Force (Sega Genesis), Final Fantasy Tactics (Sony Playstation), Dragon Force (Sega Saturn) and many many others. They’ve almost invariably been low release titles that only hardcore gamers bought. Limited print runs, obscure publishers, and generally overlooked. But they’ve been around, they’re still around, and likely they’re not going anywhere. In fact, strategy RPGs have been going through something of a renaissance, with a significant number of titles being released in the last few years, many of which are from independent publishers.
Enter Rainbow Skies, the game with the ridiculously generic title which is actually a sequel to a clever little game that came out a couple of years ago, Rainbow Moon. Both titles are from Eastasiasoft and were primarily distributed digitally for the PS4 and Playstation Vita. Rainbow Skies, as with its predecessor, is a Sony exclusive and not available in any other format. Chances are you haven’t heard of Rainbow Skies, since very little marketing was done aside from banner ads in the Playstation Store and some emails from Play-Asia. Rainbow Moon suffered the same fate, only gaining some slight notoriety as a Limited Run Games release in physical format. But even that market is quite small overall, and so essentially the Rainbow series is unsung, even in strategy RPG circles.
But what is Rainbow Skies? Well, it’s a quirky little ‘strategy’ game with some unique differences from the standard strategy RPG. You start off as Damion, a brash young hothead living on a floating island with his friend Layne. After wandering about on the island for a bit and fighting a few enemies, you have an accident and end up meeting a girl named Ashly (and yes, the spellings are correct, but you can thankfully change them, as they are atrocious). Unfortunately, spelling isn’t the only thing that’s atrocious about this game. As indie games go, it’s well polished and whatnot, but it just misses the mark a bit in every way, and it’s hard not to compare it to Rainbow Moon, which was very similar but simply more enjoyable.
The storyline in Rainbow Skies is quite simply, fairly weak. The backstory is non-existent, the NPCs are lifeless, and even the art style is inferior compared to Rainbow Moon. In fact, the art comparison reminded me very much of another two game franchise that had similar issues. Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole for the Sega Genesis was a fantastic isometric platformer with a steep difficulty curve. It was later succeeded by a relatively obscure game for the Sega Saturn called Dark Savior, which tried to capture and improve upon the flavor of Landstalker, but pretty much failed in every way and is the overall inferior of the two titles. But Dark Savior at least had the excuse of a transition to polygons from pixels. Rainbow Skies has no excuse for its painful art style, especially being on the same exact hardware and six years after Rainbow Moon.
As for the gameplay, it’s relatively unchanged from Rainbow Moon, with semi-strategic grid based battles, a myriad of upgrade options for virtually everything, and essentially no strategic challenge. While this was fun with Rainbow Moon, it becomes a bit more tedious with Rainbow Skies. The controls aren’t quite as crisp, the menus aren’t set up quite as well, and it feels more like a chore than a challenge. I certainly expected to be challenged more than I was, and I hated the tutorial system which rips the fourth wall out from under you with a pure and shining hatred that radiates from me like the Eye of Sauron. There are lots of neat little extras, minigames, and even some monster breeding, but everything feels like it’s tacked on just to make your experience longer, rather than better. And they’re not the cool minigames like the snowboarding game in Final Fantasy VII, which was better than the entire rest of FFVII itself (flame away, people, flame away).
It seemed like the whole menu system was pretty much designed by someone who wanted it to be needlessly awkward too. From the way quests and side quests were categorized, down to having to buy extra slots for pretty much everything that you mostly aren’t using, it’s just irritating. And don’t get me started on trying to switch between characters in the menu…I’m still not entirely sure how. I just kind of mashed buttons like a bad Street Fighter II player until it worked. I feel like there’s a rather angry Dilbert in a cubicle somewhere laughing about that menu system as he goes to bed each night (note to self – rewatch Dilbert: The Series…so very dark, so very entertaining).
Play-Asia did make an excellent physical limited edition of Rainbow Skies for both PS4 and Vita however. Or at least, I think it’s most likely excellent since I ordered it months ago, it shipped over a month ago, and I don’t know anyone who’s received their copy yet, including myself. It comes with a two disc soundtrack, a strategy guide (because…the challenge) and a map. It was only $35 and if it ever actually arrives, that’ll be a great deal. You can still buy the physical regular edition exclusively from Play-Asia right here though. Maybe spring for the faster shipping if you do, as they’re not exaggerating when they say a slow boat from China (I think it actually ships from Hong Kong or Singapore though).
There are a couple of redeeming qualities for Rainbow Skies, believe it or not. It has a neat concept for difficulty, where you have to actually earn higher levels of difficulty, called Battle Rankings, rather than just selecting it, and if you want to go back down afterward, you simply visit the tutor. It also has cross-save enabled through servers for the PS Vita and PS4. Even if you’re too cheap to have Playstation Plus (like me) you can still cross-save and local save with no problem on both systems. I love cross-save and it’s frustrating not to be able to use it on every cross-play title. But since I’m mentioning the Vita here, I’ll give you a warning. DO NOT PLAY Rainbow Skies on the Vita! It runs like a dream on it, but it’s a straight port, not an optimized one, and there’s one tiny little issue. It turns out that the text for the game is fairly small, even on the PS4, and on the Vita, it’s virtually microscopic! This is easily one of the hardest games to read that I’ve played in a long time on the Vita, a system known for its many text-dense titles, especially visual novels like Steins; Gate which I had no problem finishing. I don’t know what Eastasiasoft was thinking when they put out the Vita version but either they all have the eyes of a falcon, or they leave nose prints on their Vitas when they play them, because it actually hurt my eyes to attempt to play Rainbow Skies portably. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I did, vehemently.
Ultimately, Rainbow Skies is a half-decent title that could have been much better with a few things. You know, a script, some strategy, and some decent artwork perhaps. But it doesn’t really have any of those things. Do not expect a serious strategy game or a serious RPG here because the game is neither. It’s a decent time waster at 30-40 hours for the main quest on the lowest difficulty and not too much dinking about, but if you’ve played Rainbow Moon, don’t bother with Rainbow Skies, especially at a $30 MSRP. There are better strategy games for the Vita and the PS4, better RPGs, and better games period. Go play them, and thank me later.
Disclaimer: A digital copy of Rainbow Skies was provided for the purposes of this review. All screenshots are direct from the official Rainbow Skies website and copyrighted as such. Also, for some reason, I keep wanting to call this game Rainbow Rain and I can barely help myself. I have no idea why.