The sound is, unfortunately, an area where Skies of Arcadia does not score quite so highly. The music is very good, and in places excellent, but it never quite reaches the uniform brilliance of games like Xenogears, Grandia or Chrono Cross. The sound effects are equally good, although somewhat sparse in places. Any RPG lives or dies on two things - Combat and Plot.
Character can attack, use items or spells, and perform special moves each turn.
This does add a certain twist to the available strategies - often a good policy is to get physically weaker party members to heal and boost the SP gauge so that your attacking characters can do repeated specials. Once moonstones of the appropriate colour are in your possession, you may switch the colour of your weapons at any point during battle, which in turn affects how much damage you do to the enemy. This system certainly forces you to think carefully about tactics in battle, although it can get somewhat annoying as the rules for the colours are somewhat arbitrary - I found that even after 45 hours of play I still had to keep the manual open in front of me to tell which colours were effective against which others. As well as the normal character battles, Skies of Arcadia also features battles between airships. Ship battles are in ways much more tactical, as it is necessary to plan ahead and work out what the enemy will do in the next set of moves.