The Case for a Remake
History
Why
How
Skies of Arcadia holds up extremely well mechanically to this day, with only some minor issues caused by limitations of the day that are now easily overcome, which I will discuss later in this page. The biggest issues Skies of arcadia has are audio and visual, so let's start with those
Skies of Arcadia has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard, but disc space limitations mean it was never presented at a high enough quality to easily appreciate just how good it is. simple answer? find the original music files and import them, or worst case some fans have edited a lot of the imperfections out of the music for their own enjoyment, bring one on board to remaster the music for you. A much bigger issue is the sound effects, many of them feel massively outdated and ideally should be replaced completely, though there are certainly some that could easily be re-used if original, higher quality audio can be found. one more thing that would be very good for the game is full voice acting, this is the kind of game that could really struggle to attract new players without it.
These are where Skies of Arcadia fell down from the start. While the game incorporates many stunning pieces of art, getting close to any of them will reveal a very low polygon count and some very pixellated textures. The game looks great from a distance as you can see in the first of the pictures below, but the second makes the graphical issues all too clear, hence this being probably the most intensive part of the whole remake. The graphics need a complete overhaul from the ground up, and armour pieces being shown on the characters certainly wouldn't go amiss as part of this
As i said earlier, the basic mechanics of the game are a solid foundation and nothing would need to change all that much. Camera control could maybe use some minor tweaks, ladder climbing speed could use an increase, there are a few other bits of cleanup and modernisation that would be nice. The encounter rate is extremely high, though that could be easily addressed by having enemies wander the area for you to run into as Final Fantasy 7 remake does. The one thing that needs to remain relatively untouched is the battle system shown below.
