Rainbow Moon and Vita fans, this is your moment! Rainbow Skies releases June 26
Here’s a fun one: Rainbow Skies, the sequel to 2012’s PS3 and Vita hit RPG Rainbow Moon, is releasing on June 26th after at least six years in development.
Following the successful release of Rainbow Moon (that game still haunts the Vita version of the PlayStation Store with its 500 DLC offerings), the team at SideQuest Studios got to work on Rainbow Skies, and have been heads down on it ever since. During the dev time, the team of five (five!) managed to create versions for PS4, Vita, and PS4, which they are selling altogether through the magic of cross-buy. You can also flip your save between systems with cross-save, which - if you have the right gadgets to use it - is an awesome feature.
In addition to the multiple versions, SideQuest Studios also localized the game into five different languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Italian), added a new battle rank system (sort of a sliding difficulty), and threw in a bunch of endgame content and side activities, all while creating a 40 hour main storyline and literally hundreds of hours of side quests (they are SideQuest Studios, after all). The game will run at 60 FPS, even on the Vita.
Like Rainbow Moon, Skies is a tactics-based RPG, though according to Marcus Pukropski, the CEO of SideQuest Studios in a post on the PlayStation Blog, the gameplay has been “tweaked in almost every aspect.” The game certainly looks tweaked. That trailer is very nice looking, hinting at a deep experience with a surprising amount of fun content.
“At SideQuest Studios and publisher eastasiasoft, we have put all our creative energy into Rainbow Skies, which we believe both fans of the series and newcomers will appreciate and love. From the outset, we set ourselves high targets and goals so that we could to deliver the best indie RPG experience possible. We have implemented some exciting new features which were not part of our original concept, such as a deep in-game awards system that tracks trophy and general awards progress,” writes Pukropski.
No word yet on pricing (the game is not listed in the PlayStation Store yet), so your guess is as good as mine. An even better question is whether this game will be as focused on microtransactions as the last. While there was nothing on offer that could not be gained through grinding, gold and EXP were (and still are) readily available in the PlayStation Store for players that wanted to skip past slow parts of Rainbow Moon. We won't see until Tuesday whether Rainbow Skies carries this dynamic forward, but I'm hoping that SideQuest Studios has either reined this in, or eliminated it entirely.
Rainbow Skies will be available this Tuesday, June 26th on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita, with one purchase snagging you all three version.
