REVIEW: Rainbow Skies


Title	Rainbow Skies
Developer	SideQuest Studios
Publisher	EastAsiaSoft
Release Date	June 26th, 2018
Genre	Tactical RPG
Platform	PS4, PS Vita, PS3
Age Rating	E 10+
Official Website

Rainbow Skies is a tactical RPG and the successor to Rainbow Moon, which came out in early 2012. The sequel seeks to improve on the game, while at the same time giving an entirely new story that new fans can enjoy. But the question is, is this really an improvement, or will it fall victim to the sequel curse?

At first, I genuinely enjoyed the art style of the game. The small characters were cute, and the enemies were really varied and cool looking. But, for some unknown reason, as the game went on I started to notice a huge glaring issue. Maybe it’s that the game is over 70 hours long, but either way some of the areas seem way too busy, to the point where they’re really distracting. The forest is a good example of this, as there just seems to be way too much going on. That doesn’t take away from the good style, but it is a fairly noticeable flaw.

Speaking of fairly noticeable flaws, we have the story. The writing when it comes to characters is wonderful, as they all feel unique and there’s a lot of genuinely funny moments that got me to laugh out loud. As well, the story is pretty unique in that your party gets hit by a binding spell which locks you all together. Seeing as how no one in your village knows how to fix it, you have to venture out to find someone who can. There’s also some hints towards potential class related issues.

The problem is that the story is way too long, which is surprising for an RPG. It took me close to 80 hours to beat the story, and I don’t really feel like it merited that. Some of the character interactions were stiff, and there was a lot of unneeded fluff when it came to exposition. Usually in RPGs I like to take my time and talk to all the NPCs, but by the final stretch I found myself just doing quest after quest to reach the end faster. The characters are interesting and kind of funny at first, but slowly all started to muddle together for me. It was to the point where after the Monster Rancher in the first main town, I really didn’t care a whole lot for any other character. The story could have easily been condensed into a 30-40 hour game. This is a good example of quantity over quality.

Lastly we have the mechanics, and honestly they’re pretty standard. You move your character into various positions in order to better win the battle. Some attacks are better than others on certain enemies, and all of the characters have different stats and moves that you can level up. The only really interesting thing of note is that you have armor and weapons that you can upgrade and level up along with your character. They all have good looks on the model, and add a good variety of customization stat wise. There’s also a mechanic where you can change the difficulty by defeating a certain amount of monsters, but I really didn’t like this mechanic as it turned into a grind-fest really quick.

You’ll get to a point in the game where you meet someone who tells you that you can get better rewards by increasing the difficulty. You do this by beating a set of monsters, then backtracking and increasing the difficulty. They work well enough, but as stated previously you use the mechanics for so long that they begin to get stale, especially with the ridiculous amount of grinding that you have to do. You can get monsters and tame them to help out, but I never really found them entirely useful. The game functions well, but it’s nothing really special.

Overall, Rainbow Skies is great if you want something to play in short bursts every now and again, but I wouldn’t expect anything special. It’s an average game that’s very grind-heavy and has a lot of fluff. But if you have 80+ hours to kill, you’d probably have at least a pretty decent time. I just wouldn’t recommend binging it.