Legend of the Skyfish 2 from Crescent Moon Games is a “top-down Zelda-like” RPG that promises players a medium length Apple Arcade experience filled with action, great art, and the spirit of fishing.
Readers must understand that fishing in games is one of those things that always perks my ears up. In my experience, fishing as a minigame will be either it will be handled in a fun, engaging manner with lots to find, or it will be soul-crushingly boring and repetitive. Legend of the Skyfish 2 was neither, because players don’t actually fish. They use their fishing rod as a weapon in battle. Admittedly, going into the game almost entirely blind to the concepts of the story or gameplay was probably a bad idea. The game did turn out to be an excellent diet cola version of a Zelda game.
Legend of the Skyfish 2 does a great job with its combat. Everything is quick and responsive in an arcade’ish way that makes the experience of fighting the games’ variety of enemies quite enjoyable. In combat we’ll dodge roll through a monster’s attacks, smack them a few times with our sword, then snap the right thumbstick to aim at another enemy pulling them towards us with the fishing hook to rinse and repeat. Combat encounters are quickly finished once one is in the groove of things. I love how quick the fishing hook is to use in combat, it’s something I’d love to get to play with more in a combat arena setting or something.
The exploration parts of Skyfish 2 in this “Zelda-like” comparison are a bit weak, as this is certainly a game designed to be finished under ten hours. The way things work here is that there are chunks of maps all designed to fit together on an Overmap. In a perfect world, every single grid of a 8×8 square map would have a chunk, like in the older Zelda games. With Skyfish 2 however, we only get a few map squares that connect to each other in a decent sized path. I think this is absolutely a fair compromise from the developers, as filling in every single chunk would have made the game a much longer experience than intended, and obviously taken much more time to develop.
The art in Legend of the Skyfish 2 is great. There are a whole bunch of character designs for NPCs like merchants and city folk, and a lot more designs of monsters to fight. Committed players can even collect different looking outfits for their character to wear that will affect their stats. The world felt good to see, despite the ridiculous amount of spike traps.
I really enjoyed my time in Legend of the Skyfish 2, bashing enemies, exploring dungeons, and seeing all the cool looking characters. I do wish there had been a bit more of a story than what we ended up with, and of course I mentioned my disappointment regarding the not-fishing. Looking back on my time with this game, it was well spent. It’s worth keeping a look out on Crescent Moon Games to see if they release any new content to the game, or maybe a sequel? Either way, they have thoroughly impressed me with Legend of the Skyfish 2, even if it could use more actual fish!
Interested players can find Legend of the Skyfish by Crescent Moon Games on Apple Arcade.
Want to talk to Sam about YOUR favorite indie games? Give him a shout on Twitter! Or follow him on Instagram for quick indie game thoughts!
IndieSamAdonis 