Rainbow Skies (PS Vita) Review

Rainbow Skies takes place in a fantasy setting with humble beginnings, before things ramp up when protagonist Damion's lazy lifestyle gets disrupted and the plot kicks off. In general, and sadly so, the writing and characters aren't interesting, and it's often tempting to skip through much of the dialogue. There are occasionally a few good gags here and there, but most conversations between characters are otherwise mediocre.

As for the battles, they operate on a grid-based system. Characters move around the field, one space at a time, and require the use of proper positioning to gain an advantage during the turn-based skirmishes. There are special attacks that can be used at the cost of mana, weapon classes that do extra damage to some enemies and less to others, and so on, but while there's some depth to be found in optimizing strategies and building the best character possible, much of it is typical fare.

From a presentation standpoint, Rainbow Skies is passable. The character models aren't anything special, and environments tend to blend in from time to time. There is a certain charm to it all, though, even if the animation and general look of it all isn't that impressive. The soundtrack in particular is quite good, and the battle theme in particular does a good job at providing an energetic atmosphere.

When it comes to actual content, throughout the world at hand there's quite a bit to do, like side-quests and a nice number of optional activities, and even an interesting challenge system that involves unlocking new difficulty modes with greater rewards by finishing a certain number of battles. If one decides to turn down the difficulty, the harder modes will be re-locked until the proper amount of fights has been won again.

One jarringly standout flaw in here - if not the biggest issue of them all - are the long animation times in each fight. At first its... fine, since seeing an enemy pull out a new attack or watching your character use their fancy new skill is somewhat entertaining. However, the further the game goes on, the more these animations have to be watched, and the time spent watching them adds up very quickly. It's especially obnoxious since many encounters have several enemies which can attack multiple times in a single turn - and it takes no longer than an hour into the storyline before this problem already becomes apparent.

For what it's worth, these animations can be skipped, but the process of doing so isn't nearly as simple as one would hope. For your own team's special attacks, the animation plays out once, and then it can be skipped the next time the special attack is used. This only applies to that specific battle; the next time a fight begins, the animation will become unskippable again until the skill is used once more.

To give an example, if a character casts a fireball, the animation can be viewed, and then it can be skipped for the rest of the battle, but once the fight is over and another battle starts, the fireball animation has to be watched again before it can be skipped. For enemy attacks, their animations have to be viewed twice in order to skip them. It's infuriating. It would be remiss to neglect that this problem only exists in the current version of Rainbow Skies, as there is an upcoming patch that will allow all animations to be skipped from the start of story, no strings attached. However, until this patch is released, much of the combat is still a slog.

Even if that issue does get fixed, though, it's still arguable if it'd be enough to recommend Rainbow Skies. There's otherwise not a whole lot necessarily wrong with the game (at least on the level of the animations problem), it's just that it isn't all that spectacular in the first place. The soundtrack is great, but there's not a whole lot else that would stick out as to why you should buy this RPG over any other.