Mani-Kanina
@Mani-Kanina

False Skies is unlike any other JRPG I've ever played, it's also exactly like JRPGs I've played.

This review will contain spoilers in text form, as I'll be talking about the game as a whole. If you just want to know if I'd recommend it, then yes, I would. But it's very clearly a retro style JRPG, so you kinda need to like that genre to enjoy it.

That was your spoiler warning.


I recently obsessed over this game, clearing it from start to end in the span of about a week. That might not sound very extreme, but the final playtime ended up at roughly the thirty hours mark; it's not a short game.

There's a lot I like about the game, and I knew I would probably like it going in, but there is also a lot of things about how it plays that I didn't even consider till it was right up in my face. My thoughts here are going to be a bit unfocused, so let's have some clarity right from the start:

I adore this game, I also think it's class build system is quite interesting and worth experiencing. The story has a lot of good to it and can carry the game; you'll want to know where some of these characters go, even if the party you're controlling isn't among that number.

All clear? Good.

The game plays like DQ

Specifically early Dragon Quest titles, like 3 or 2. Not the NES ones, and not in all aspects, obviously. But the overworld structure and progression very clearly takes it's cues from there. Locked doors in every town that you don't have a key for? Absolutely.

This was probably the biggest hurdle to get over when I started playing this game, because it was quite unexpected. Mind, I like DQ 2&3, I played the GBC version of both. But it's not what you'd expect from a JRPG made today, even if it's in a retro style; most developers have done away with that style entirely.

This extends to most of the overworld progress, though in that sense DQ was hardly unique. No, you go on a road trip across the continent, once the story is done there you get dumped on the next content for a second trip. Once that is done you're finally given leave to take a ship to the scant few remains of the world that you've yet seen.

It's a formula, not good or bad, but this is not an open ended game, make no mistake.

Side Quests? Perish the though!

The game has a lot of side quests, the issue is that most of these side quests are not really side quests at all. There are a few, mostly early on, that are quite charming. Someone in town had heard of a strange beast roaming the coastline, and would like to secure proof of its existence.

So you go there to beat it up to secure it in your bestiary, from there you get a reward after showing it to the NPC. Honestly this interact was one of the cooler side quests, mostly because it was completely missable yet still fleshed out the world.

But that's not most side quests.

The vast majority of side quests in the entire game unlock more classes. You start what characters with tier one classes, and you get all of those handed to you. By tier two you only get a scant few just given to you by the main quest, the rest? You need to track down a sidequest in order to secure them.

This is a double edge sword. On one hand: Sidequests always give a meaningful reward. On the other: You feel like you need to do them, because otherwise you can not advance your characters. Having an archer class unlocked is not very helpful if you need to promote your healer.

Now, the game does try to be good here. A large portion of the classes have multiple ways to unlock them, making them harder to miss. I actually unlocked a tier three class before I unlocked a single tier two class, simply because I had stolen the correct item from a plant enemy.

In fact, the guide on steam didn't really seem to be aware of that unlock condition.

Ah yes, the guide. There is a guide on the steam forums that provides info on where you can find every class. I normally don't like depending on guides when I play video games, but I felt the need to do so here. I didn't want to progress the plot and level up my characters further when they had hit the point where they could promote to a higher tier class.

This was often a problem because I was still missing a couple of classes. This problem is especially bad with the last tier of classes in the game. Some of the interactions for that to start those side quests I would never have guessed, and resorting to stumbling around an entire large world and talking to every single NPC again is not exactly feasible.

Classes? Classes!

The class promotion system is one of the game's biggest selling points if you ask me. I've never seen a JRPG have character progression like this before. Did it live up to my own self inflicted hype? Possibly?

It was fun to play around with, and my characters ended up quite interesting by the end of the game. (You can see the screenshot of them at the top). My team was probably far from optimal and I took down the final boss without problem. You could very well skip the final class promotion too and make it just fine anyway.

But for me, seeing something good? It also makes me see the flaws so much more. The class system screams experimentation. Each tier does not have classes that are direct upgrades of ones in the previous, so you need to diversify. This is great, it promotes thinking about what choices you want to make, where you want the character to go next.

Except, there is a problem with this.

Your previous stat progression from level ups that align with what the class did before, might be quite bad for the class they are doing now.

This creates this situation where you'll actually want to specialize more, not diversify. I had a Recon for tier one (read: thief). I decided that for tier two, I'd make them a medic. This generally had the consequence of making them bad at both things. I course corrected in later tiers, of course, and they were good by the end game. But it still kind of sucked.

Equipment proficiency are also a stick in the wheel for going crazy. Generally they feel a bit too restrictive. Honestly, the way I though this part was going to work before I played the game was that they stacked.

So if you had an archer that was good with bows in tier one, they'd keep that proficiency into all further classes. This is, sadly, not how the game works. This does not stop the game from giving you gear that seemingly has very little use. The two archer specific classes are in tier one and tier four respectively, between that there is not many, if any, classes that are good with bows.

Not that such matter stops the game from handing you bows or NPCs from selling them in shops. That's of course not a bad thing, it's better if the gear exists, but it makes it hard to have a through line.

With the way the game is structured currently I wish more classes had higher levels of proficiency with more weapons, even if it's just a slight increase here and there. I think that would make things more exciting when it comes to getting involved with the characters you create.

The Striking Spear

Liss is a gem. Really, False Skies is Liss's story, if anyone's. The narrative starts of on such a weird note that for several hours I just describe the plot to my friends as "throw away", and really, it takes quite many hours till I got properly hooked.

That's probably bad, right?

Most narratives want to pull someone in quick, but that's really not what's happening in this case. Not that I blame the game, I had other reasons to keep playing (I really like character building in RPGs), but I feel like this, if anything, would be where people have complaints with the title.

When the story picks up though? Then it's really good. It remains good up until the final act. The final boss while, sufficiently evil and world damaging, didn't really seem to have huge stakes in the plot. The bad ending where you don't confront them at all almost felt more fitting, as strange as that sounds.

The final boss fight itself was proportionally epic, though perhaps not extremely challenging. But the ending afterwards felt pretty short and didn't really answer any questions on what the relevant characters in the narrative ended up doing after it all.

A looker

The game looks great, like really good. I have a few pet peeves with the visual design in places, but on the broad side? Everything looks great, and some things look stunning.

This game couldn't run on a GBC for several reasons, but that can be very hard to tell when you're playing. There is a lot of attention to detail, stuff that people who have never drawn pixel art in a limited system wouldn't have thought about. It's that attention to detail that elevates something like this, you can really feel that the developers were passionate about it being in the GBC (or similar) style.

The music is similar in that it matches style, though on the whole the soundtrack felt a bit lacking.

Then the second battle theme kicked in

Which drastically changed my mind about the music. Overall the game has a few tracks that are real bangers, several which are great, and then plenty more which are just okay. Thankfully no bad tracks to speak of, which is an achievement in itself.

The issue is where the music is situated. One of the tracks I like the least is the overworld music, a track you will be hearing the most throughout the game. The first battle theme, while good, also don't inspire much confidence.

Kind of like the plot the music takes a huge lift a third to halfway through the game.

Why can't I be unicorn people?

And with that, we come to my list of nitpicks. This is stuff I wish the game did, or things that I'd like to see it do that, at least I, think would improve it.

1: Portraits. When you make your party members, you have a selection of four portraits for each of them. There's more than four portraits in the game, but they are arbitrarily locked to whatever your starting class is. Considering how little proportional time you will be spending as the starting class in this game, that really isn't good enough.

Here I'd like to see all options be open for those who want them, as well as just more portraits in general. It would also be cool if after a certain point in the game if you could recruit new party members that have horns (it makes sense in context).

2: More nyooms. I upped the movement speed right away and I don't regret it. For dungeons this is fine, but considering how much walking you do on the overworld, the walking speed there really is just too low.

Like, I can tolerate it because I liked everything else in the game, but it was constantly grating on me.

3: Menu QoL. All the menus in this game need QoL. Targeting selection in battle don't loop, for example. If you're on the leftmost enemy and press left, you don't go to the rightmost enemy. In a game like this you're spending a lot of time in your menus, so anything that speeds that up helps.

Likewise, an option for battle menu memory would be nice, so it remembers the cursor location in skill menus, etc. Some people hate this feature, some people love it, but for those who use it it speeds up menuing a lot.

If you turn on the option for reduced flashing, then the cursor selector in some menus is really hard to read. It will be a slightly different shade of gray from the non-selected text, which isn't good enough.

4: I'll sort my inventory myself, thank you. The auto sort feature is really bad. It will split items from Equipment... and that's it, that's all it does. It does not group healing items of specific types together, nor does it separate battle items from other consumables.

Ideally it would group healing items by type, and order them by tier. So slot one has s.tonic if you have them, the next tonic, the next l.tonic, etc.

This game is HOW MUCH?

Seriously, crank up the price. This game should at least cost 15 euro. Price matters, you know? I expected a 5-10 hour experience when I bought this, not a thirty hour epic that could stand tall among the classics.

Frankly, the game has better encounter design and boss fights than most of those old classics that are mostly hanging around on reputation alone.

I'm sure there is more to say...

Really, the game is great, even if I think the appeal might be rather niche (which is part of the reason I'm even writing this post: to spread awareness). I'm sure I've got more to say on it, but I've rambled enough.

If you like old-school JRPGs, but also like games that try new things and don't waste your time with grinding? This game is for you.

If you want it, it's here: Itch.io, Steam.


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in reply to @Mani-Kanina's post:

You do get to decide the core colour for each character when you make them, there's some eight or so options to choose from.

And yeah, the game definitively felt like old school DQ when it came to the overworld progression, and just how towns and places look. It has that feel to it.