According to Wikipedia however, the popular Tales entry didn’t reach the million mark, and no traditional JRPG resides within the top 28 best selling games on that Nintendo system. Many will point out to Tales of Symphonia as a big seller seller on the GameCube in order to enforce their point that Skies of Arcadia would have sold poorly regardless of the system. That top ten is rounded out by – wait of it – J League Pro Soccer Club which sold about 360,000 units. The Dreamcast didn’t have a big JRPG fan base. It’s Highest Selling title was Sonic Adventure at just 2.4 million units, followed by Crazy Taxi, and NFL 2K. Disastrous, yes, but consider this: No JRPGs exists within the top ten selling Dreamcast games of all time. Skies of Arcadia sold 90,000 units on the Dreamcast, and 220,000 units on the GameCube. Culturally speaking, Sega was known for making dumb moves. That question has never been answered, but Sega managed to reach some incredible highs with its Sega Genesis console in the early part of the 90s, only to consistently shoot itself on the foot thereafter. Why then, put Skies of Arcadia in Nintendo’s ecosystem? The GC had a very small JRPG fan base, and it (Skies) was doomed to be lost in the shuffle of Nintendo’s own first party hits. If you didn’t like JRPGs (and didn’t want a cheap DVD player) then the PS2, in my opinion, offered little value in comparison to the GameCube which was more powerful, and had Nintendo’s excellent lineup of first party titles (but aside from Tales of Symphonia, and Baiten Kaitos, what was really there for JRPG fans?) and the Xbox which was even more powerful, and had the best the first person, action, sports and western RPG experiences available.Ī colorful cast of unforgettable characters breathed life into Skies of Arcadia’s massive world. In fact, its wide library of JRPGs might have been one its strongest sales points. The PS2 was the JRPG machine of its time. Such a decision would be counterproductive to sales, wouldn’t? But that’s exactly how Sega’s handling of the IP went. Let me put it like this, as a 93 metacritic rated game, there was no reason for Skies of Arcadia to tank…unless it was placed within a market where few cared about J-RPGs. The GameCube being more powerful than the PS2 (in almost every way) had no such issues, but at the same time if Sega really wanted Skies of Arcadia to succeed, a bigger effort could have, and should have been made in order to get the game running on Sony’s mega popular console. Perhaps, the development team tasked with porting the game had issues in porting it to the PS2, as the PS2 was more powerful than the DC, but also had twice less the amount of V-RAM. Sega never gave anyone a proper explanation as to why they canned the PS2 version. It certainly would have fared better than it did on the GameCube. To this day I wonder how its fortunes would have fared as a PS2 port. Skies of Arcadia failed, commercially at least, but again, the game was never given the proper chance to succeed. It was almost as if Sega sabotaged the game by dooming it to appear in the lowest selling consoles of its era, and by keeping it away from the PlayStation 2, a system that was populated by Japanese Role-Playing Game fans. A great game, that never got a sequel, it got a GC port, but it never got a proper sequel, and more importantly, it never got a PlayStation 2 port. Professional reviewers rated the game as one of the greatest Japanese Role-Playing Games ever. The game holds a whooping 93 rating on Metacritic. Skies of Arcadia (2000), is living proof that you can be a great game, and by great I don’t mean that it is ‘beloved’ by those fans who played it, by great I mean, that it was critically – meaning really – great. One of the downsides of the company going under, and being bought out by Sammy Corporation in 2004, is that games than were deemed ‘un-profitable’ were given the proverbial ax. Sega’s demise as a hardware maker limited their ability to create and fund their own projects.
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