The pacing may appear slow when you watch Sky Odyssey clips, but it’s a truly dramatic, nerve-racking experience when you actually play it. I know I’ve buried the lead a bit with my ramblings about why Sky Odyssey may have faded into obscurity, but the obvious reason is this: it’s a niche game that was seeking that rare PS2 owner sitting in the middle of the unlikely Venn diagram of mostly old airplanes, combatless flight simulation, brutally difficult object-based missions, and an almost roguelike quality of trying to teach you that frequent death is just part of the experience. If you're somehow here on this article today, I'd like to say thank you for being part of my secret club! It’s a testament to its strong design and timeless gameplay that when I brought in my copy to capture footage for the above video, our Video Production Lead Dave Toole’s eyes lit up and we ended up taking turns to beat the brutally difficult missions – even after we had already captured everything we needed. We don’t know what ultimately led to Sony getting cold feet and not wanting to bring the game to America, but Activision's interest wasn’t a surprise: the publisher had already made a practice out of picking up the US distribution rights for Japanese games like Tenchu and Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram.įast forward to today and I can count on one hand the amount of people I’ve encountered in the last 23 years that know of and have played Sky Odyssey. Secondly, while it arrived as an Activision game stateside, it was actually commissioned by Sony Computer Entertainment as a PlayStation 2 DualShock 2 controller showcase. It’s the Rogue of flying games – only that there’s no flight equivalent of Beneath Apple Manor that predates it. It’s an archetype of a sub-genre that never took off – and never will. That response, while not unexpected, is notable for a few reasons. Perhaps I talked about Live A Live so much in the years leading up to the remake that I had already trained those around me to go “oh, it’s that multi-scenario Square RPG always wanted to play it” – but with this week’s pick, Sky Odyssey, the answer is usually, always: “never heard of it”. Not only do I have a huge list of games that are obscure and nearly forgotten in my figurative backpocket, I immediately thought of "the One". If you’ve been reading this Forgotten Gems column, you know that I raised my hand within seconds.
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