Time Extend: Skies Of Arcadia

[ookaze]

This is one of my favorite JRPG, a true to the core one.
It has an amazing story and very good mechanics (it never required grinding for example). It was also challenging : my heart was pounding in most boss battles, and even sometimes against some common enemies. I think that's why people hate random encounters in this game: they always feared to be wiped out by any random enemy appearing.
It's a true to the core JRPG, as JRPG focus on the journey from beginning to the end, while western people apparently easily forget the whole experience and only remember the ending. That's why most western people will rate a game by the ending ("it was a bad game, the ending sucks"). It's the same kind of core JRPG as Dragon Quest, where what is important is the whole experience.

I also like these JRPG the most, because they reward completionists like me. I always give myself a goal to get everything in my JRPG, which often make these games more challenging. In SoAL, like in FFVII, like in Dragon Quest games, if you don't complete most subquests, you lose a lot of the story. Not the main story, but you discover lots of thing on the protagonists' past in SoAL. Which is optional of course, but makes the story even better.

Just reading the OP made me want to go back playing some of SoAL.