Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire was another one of those games I saw on TikTok and was immediately excited about. Not only did it look genuinely interesting, but it reminded me of Skies of Arcadia—which was one of my favourite RPGs growing up. I was ready to take to the skies for some interesting turn-based aerial combat once again.
And I genuinely can’t recall how quickly my excitement careened into abysmal disappointment. Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is a pretty bog-standard RPG, but it is beyond unfinished on the Nintendo Switch. To call it amateur feels like an insult to amateur developers—this is borderline unacceptable. Before I dive in, many of the technical issues mentioned have been flagged by developers, and a patch will be coming before the game goes live. However, the comments going forward are my experience with the game, and many of the issues drastically affected my gameplay.
I’m honestly not sure if I can even review this game in my usual style because its problems are so multitudinous and interlinked that it defies my more traditional style of analysis. However, I want to make it clear that this review is mainly focused on the Nintendo Switch version of Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire. For comparison, I did play the PC version, and, while many of the fundamental issues are present, the Switch version, in particular, suffers on all fronts from the dual problems of performance and presentation.
Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is not just a technical mess on Switch, but it’s kind of all over the place. There’s nothing wholly consistent about any aspect of it. I knew things were off to a bad start immediately with the intro cinematic, which was told in a sort of comic-book style. All of the art they used for each panel was HORRIBLY compressed as if they saved JPEGs on the lowest possible settings.
This continued into the main game, where every character’s profile image was so compressed you could actually see all the pixel artifacts around the character. I thought this was perhaps a problem only while playing in handheld, but even on the dock, the game just looks like this—though it is marginally upscaled. It immediately took me out of the experience.
“Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is a pretty bog-standard RPG, but it is beyond unfinished on the Nintendo Switch.”
This would go further to the actual character models as they interact with each other during in-game cinematics. None of the characters have any kind of facial animations and their textures also suffer from the same low-resolution artifacting that the JPEG images do. They just stare at each other with giant Chesire Cat smiles and unblinking pixelated eyes while their peaceful town gets bombed into oblivion by a sinister regime.
How am I meant to take any dramatic moment seriously when none of the characters are acting or emoting in relation to the scene? And if the visuals weren’t bad enough, the delivery of the plot is constantly interspersed with pointless interjections to run across town, have a meaningless conversation, and then run back so that the plot can progress.
That or it’s broken up by tedious loading screens for two seconds of exposition dialogue or bizarre fades to black before a still image depicting a degree of emotionality that the in-game models are apparently incapable of. There’s almost no flow to it, even by RPG standards, and there are a few moments where actual details you just witnessed are repeated incorrectly, so you start to lose interest incredibly fast.
And it’s honestly a shame because you can see the little moments where Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire tries to have a good presentation. Every now and again, it blends its in-game cutscenes with little comic panels to further articulate the characters in the scene, but this happens so sporadically that every time it does, it feels so incredibly jarring against how awful the rest of it is.
“I was really hoping, at the very least, that the gameplay in Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire would offer some form of redemption, but it is, at best, hollow and, at worst, genuinely broken.”
I was really hoping, at the very least, that the gameplay in Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire would offer some form of redemption, but it is, at best, hollow and, at worst, genuinely broken. It takes the form of a semi-exploratory RPG where players fly little planes around areas to complete missions and take place in turn-based battles. This was where I was hoping my imagined comparison to Skies of Arcadia Legends would really come in. But it doesn’t.
Exploration is not really exciting because the planes have a strange control scheme that doesn’t really enhance the feel of flight. You’d think they’d have gone for something like actual plane control or even just a simple attempt at Star Fox, but the planes feel both unwieldy and overly technical at the same time. There are no opportunities for cool tricks or fluid movement. It’s just extremely standard.
Not only that but flying on the Switch version is ABYSMALLY bad, thanks to a horrible framerate that chugs at 5fps whenever you turn the camera. Not only that, but since the game’s resolution is so low, almost all the environments look incredibly choppy or appear as pixel mesh, so it’s hard to know what’s a cloud or what’s a landmass that hasn’t loaded in yet. Once again, it immediately took me out of the experience.
And the combat is nothing more nuanced than your bargain basement turn-based FPS. Players take turns attacking enemies, using standard attacks, magic attacks or evasive maneuvers. The game telegraphs everything ahead of time, telling you what enemies are attacking what characters, which I guess is good for strategizing but takes a bit of the danger and excitement out of turn-based combat.
Furthermore, there’s a turn-order bar akin to games like Grandia or Trails of Cold Steel, where certain actions are meant to place characters higher or lower on the order, but it doesn’t seem to work as you’d think. No matter what you choose, the game just puts them where it’s going to put them, and there’s no way to influence it—I think it has something to do with character stats. You’d think certain attacks or evasive maneuvers would affect the order, but it just doesn’t.
But so much of the combat is just not explained. There’s a bar underneath the turn order that sometimes has a colour gradient and a little meter pointing in a direction. Sometimes, it says advantage or “leverage,” but at no point is it ever explained what that is or what it does. Furthermore, on a technical level, the combat is just badly designed. There’s a shodiness to it that defies the way buttons have worked in RPGs for years.
Basically, if you select an action for one character, it’ll cycle to the next. You’d think pressing B would remove the previous action and allow you to reselect. Instead, for whatever reason, it just jumps to the last member of the party. Instead, you have to cycle through each member with the D-Pad and press A to bring up their menu and reselect.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but it’s definitely better than the PC version of Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, which, and I’m not joking when I say this, has no way to cancel actions. If you select an attack, you better be 100% confident in it because pressing back does NOTHING.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. There is a workaround where if you switch to a character and press the X button—which is meant to show you your current status effects—and then press X again, it’ll bring up the combat menu, and you can choose a different attack. Also, there’s a fun way you can bug out the menu in the Switch version by pressing the D-Pad up and down, and if you mess with it enough, you can give yourself extra turns. It’s a mess.
You’d think a game about aerial plane-based combat would have some kind of nuance, like maneuvers that changed your position relative to the enemy, being able to target specific parts to gain a tactical advantage, and ways this could work against the player to keep battles exciting and strategic. But it doesn’t. It’s just simplistic and badly executed.
And even on the presentation side, combats are just boring. There’s no sense of fluidity or movement you get from fighting in aircraft. It repeats the same animations for every attack—for both players and enemies, players shout the same lines of dialogue for every attack, and there’s almost no dynamism to any of it. Not only that, what little animations are on offer play out so incredibly quickly that they don’t really have any resonance. It’s like Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is rushing through itself in an attempt to seem more exciting.
And speaking of presentation, the whole game is pathetically delivered on the Switch. Almost every texture on the Nintendo Switch version is so horribly rendered and pixelated to the point you’d think this was a PSX game. And honestly, I’d be fine with that if that was the game’s aesthetic, but I cross-referenced the PC version and that one has really smooth and clean textures with an art style that looks more like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. It genuinely feels like they just made the game, and for the Switch version, they set the visual settings to Ultra-Low and called it a day.
And the thing that really cheeses my onions about all of this is that this game is coming in the wake of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which, despite some framerate issues I didn’t mention at the time because it didn’t really matter; looked so incredible at every moment. Even with its flaws, we know the Switch is capable of much better than this.
Also, Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire feels particularly broken on the Switch. A lot of contextual voice lines are just missing from combat, battle text overlaps dialogue during fights and makes it impossible to read, there’s a serious inconsistency between text you can advance by pressing A and text that auto-scrolls, remaining on screen for a fraction of a second. There’s a fun bug where you can choose a certain number of items to buy from stores, but it always just buys one.
Audio can just break sometimes—leading to a hilarious moment where the footstep sound for walking on medal just got locked and just sounded like that on every surface—and the same five NPC models are repeated at infinitum, so you’ll see an entire dock being worked by one guy and his nine clones.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point, Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire is a fairly mediocre game, but if you were like me and longed for an interesting RPG on the Nintendo Switch, then your desires are going to be actively punished. Perhaps it’s my own fault—I built up an idea of this game in my head in comparison to one of the best and most creative RPGs ever made, how was it ever supposed to live up? But even if you remove any perceived relation to Skies of Arcadia, this game is just not very good, and it’s a real shame.
I really hope Octeto has a good hard think about the game they made compared to the game they could have made—especially the one they were supposedly ready to give to critics AND release on the Switch. Perhaps extensive patching may bring this game up to snuff, but honestly, I won’t stick around long enough to find out.
