I tried my best to like SideQuest Studios’ Rainbow Skies, but I will admit that I’ve always harbored a personal hurdle with fantasy role-playing games. I wouldn’t call them bad games, just that I’ve always found them to be a stagnant genre, often repeating similar story and visual elements without much differentiation. That’s partly why I gave Lisa: The Painful such high marks in my review: it broke the mold and did it spectacularly. Unfortunately, Rainbow Skies doesn’t do the same. It retreads very familiar ground, and doesn’t do it particularly well.
In Rainbow Skies, you step into the combat boots of Damion, Layne, and Ashley: a warrior, archer, and novice sorcerer respectively (you can change the names of each member if you so desire) as you are thrust into a war between two competing empires in typical RPG fashion. It’s an ambitious story that does a decent enough job at getting your party into action. Unfortunately, I found most of the dialogue to be insufferable, especially in the early game. Most of it is just the other characters calling out Damion for being an arrogant moron (which, to be fair, he absolutely is), bad comedy, or exposition. The presentation of said dialogue also doesn’t help matters as, in spite of a few CGI cutscenes, the game rarely exits its isometric angle. So most of the story is delivered through dull cutscenes of watching the characters through a fixed top-down camera angle, and it makes for a fittingly dull experience.
Speaking of presentation, Rainbow Skies’ art style is disappointingly plain. The environments and character models look plasticky, the animations look stiff and lifeless, and neither feels like a deliberate artistic choice. The art direction also feels uninspired, portraying very generic environments for players to explore and combat enemies in. It just looks cheap, like something you’d find off the app store.
The combat is probably the game’s strongest aspect. The isometric art style carries over into the game’s turn-based battles. In spite of my earlier game’s lack of originality, it does do something cool with the turn-based combat: granting all combatants multiple moves in a turn. You can use this to capitalize on damage, defense, or inflicting status effects on opponents. Because of this, battles can go fairly quickly, though they quickly grow dull over long periods of playtime.
I’ve used some variation of the word “dull” several times over the course of this review as this game doesn’t do much to make an impression upon the reader one way or the other, but if there is any aspect of this game that evoked any kind of emotion within me, it’s the inventory system. It’s frustrating. The player always seems to have more items than they can carry in any given pouch, and using up or getting rid of a potentially useful item because, for some reason, items for story progression share the same slots in your inventory as torches needed to see in the dark. You can purchase extensions (by one slot every time you purchase an extension) for your item pouches, but these also take up slots in your inventory before you’re able to use them instead of, say, just automatically extending your inventory upon purchase. It’s just a hassle.
As I’ve looked over this review, I’ve noticed that this review has been shorter than my previous fair, and I’m unhappy to say that this really does portray how I feel about this game. Though I’ve given negative reviews in the past, those games usually do something to inspire me to talk about them in great detail. They were memorable or interesting in some way, shape or form. This didn’t. In my humble opinion, the worst thing a video game (or any piece of art for that matter) can be is boring. Technically sound as it may be, nothing could save Rainbow Skies from its own unmemorable story, combat, or art style in my opinion.
For more information, visit the Nintendo eShop.
Related: Reviews by Josh Freeman
I love games and love talking about games. Some of my favorites include action games (both 2D and 3D), metroidvanias, roguelikes, shooters, and Indies.
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