It's perhaps become something of an overdone trope in video games, yet whenever a game chooses to have one of its cities or a larger land mass floating through the air, it never fails to impress both conceptually and visually. As long as you can look past the science of a giant rock suddenly deciding that terra firma is for suckers and taking off into the clouds, at least. Eh, it's probably magic.
One of the games I played this year, pretty much all of Bastion's world is floating after some nebulously-defined calamity named, uh, the Calamity. What's left is slowly crumbling away to nothing as well, though it's usually kind enough to hold off on that until you're walking over it. The titular Bastion itself is perhaps the coolest part: A floating island that can augment itself with distilleries. Now that sounds like a great spot to sit and watch the end of the world from.
Skyloft, the sanctuary home of the hero and heroine, is a tiny island paradise of a dozen people presumably constantly in-breeding in the centuries since the Goddess herself elevated the land to its safety in the skies. The legends don't explain why the Goddess also lifted a bunch of tiny rocks and a one giant pumpkin pub up there too, but then she moves in mysterious ways. Man, that sounds like such a Prince lyric.
The home of the Krityan, Vesperia's take on elves that are totally not elves despite being ancient and laid-back know-it-alls, is the hidden city of Myorzo, which is revealed to be a broken-down dump of a place carried around by a flying jellyfish. If the Krityans care that their ancestral home got eaten by a monster jellyfish, they don't make it obvious.
The flying city of Alcamoth is the capital of Xenoblade's elf people (whatever happened to forests?), the High Entia. Clearly not just a clever name, the High Entia sit in their futuristic wonderland and refuse to co-operate in the war going on further down the Bionis. At least until the Mechon make it personal for them.
During the last act of Tales of Destiny, which is traditionally the point in any JRPG when shit gets real, the world is blanketed by an enormous flying continent peppered with the game's marathon of final dungeons. The way the continent continues to expand by absorbing the ground below, threatening to completely black out the world, makes it suitably apocalyptic. If a little silly.
I've brought up Zeal a few times, a continent of entitled aristocrats and researchers who decided the crappy Ice Age currently going on in the world below was not for them and decided to literally move mountains to get a decent tan. Then all they do is study and sleep indoors anyway, so who even knows what they were thinking.
Unusually, everything is a floating country in the world of Skies of Arcadia. The inhospitable ground, seen briefly during one harrowing trek under the cloud cover, suggests that everyone lives on islands of varying altitudes or on the ships that fly between them. It's a world rife with adventure and discovery, which makes it one of the more enjoyable RPGs out there.
Another flying world that lives in constant fear of the mythical "ground" rushing up to meet them, where the heroes putter around trying to figure out how to save everyone before all the food in their card-based inventory goes off. Storing your lunch on a playing card can't be hygienic.
One of the best mid-game reveals, back in the age of NES JRPGs where you were lucky to get a speech bubble about being knocked down, is that the entire first half of the game took place on a floating continent that made up less than a quarter of the globe. The rest of the world is kind of a cesspool, it turns out: Full of hideous monsters and moogles. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
The futuristic Gardens, training centres for SeeDs the globe over, already seem incongruous in a picturesque world resembling post-WW2 Europe. But then they start flying around and end up ramming each other like a college football rivalry that got way, way out of hand.
XIII has Cocoon, which is another instance of a game subtly approaching the class warfare between the haves and have-nots by giving one a flying city and space cars and the other a crappy, desolate land where you're just as likely to get stepped on by gigantic dinosaur turtles than find food. As it turns out, though, the people in Gran Pulse are probably better off.
The luxurious Glitzville, clearly taking the same leaf as some of these other places from the book of "skies are for rich people", is one of The Thousand-Year Door's many oddball locales.
Skytown, an abandoned research station floating over the gas giant Elysia, is clearly supposed to evoke a hypothetical Bespin Cloud City that had been brought to ruin by their Administrator's destructive obsession with Colt 45. It's every bit as precarious as a bunch of poorly-maintained metal walkways over a massive gravity well sounds like it would be.
Granstream, like Skies of Arcadia and Baten Kaitos, has a world that is entirely airborne, with the ground being merely theoretical. The hero goes on a journey to discover why the continents have suddenly decided to start sinking, which is probably not going to end happily if gravity finally wakes up and decides to do its job.
Likewise, Death Gate has a Western fantasy world (in a point-and-click game, I should specify) that is comprised of a group of elemental-themed lands that float in the cosmos independently from one another. They're all facing their own little individual apocalypses too, but protagonist Haplo mostly doesn't care. He just escaped from a hellish inter-dimensional nightmare prison and is on a quest for vengeance against the people who stuck his entire race in there. It's not a cheery game.
Of course, sky-based settings won't be going away any time soon. BioShock Infinite is arguably the most anticipated game of 2012 and is based entirely within the floating city limits of Columbia, another insane vanity project facing its demise because of hubris or impractical political beliefs or what have you. Robobirds, bodices and warping a dead horse - coming soon!
