Blue Dragon for Xbox 360

My friend let me borrow Blue Dragon about a year ago after he found it in a bargain bin--and he DESPISED it. Thus, I opted to give it a try because it was from the Mistwalker studio, which contained some important folks behind the super solid Final Fantasy game series.

Ten minutes in I was extremely disappointed and shelved it for a year until a few weeks ago when I roughed it all the way through. My basic outlook of the game changed while playing it, but the overall notion remained the same: this is a disappointing and generic Japanese RPG for the severely lacking-in-the-RPG-department XBOX 360.

The basic premise of the game is that you are responsible for three childhood kids as they fight an evil sorceror, Nene, from taking over and destroying the world. As they travel the world they encounter two other kids with a similar passion to take down Nene and his evil reign of pain.

That pretty much sums up the story--sound familiar? That's because it caves into every single RPG convention known to man. Not only does it lack in balls as far as plot is concerned and as I was playing I kept asking myself why I was still playing--there wasn't any reason to! It's not like the story kept me engrossed, the game just shovelled me along from place to place until the final showdown in the game.

So what kept me going? The battle system for sure! Early in the game your enemy, Nene, instills these orbs of light into all of the characters (?) which gives them lean, mean, fighting shadows--a dragon shadow for one character, a bat for another, etc.--which fight the battles for you. As you play through the game you are able to choose which classes to put your experience points towards whether it be the Assassin or Black Magic class.

You earn SP as well as gold and experience in battle which aids in the learning of new abilities that you equip to each character. They range the awesome Counter-attack maneuver to being able to use higher forms of magic or advancing your HP (health points) or MP (magic points). As you level up so do your ranks, which makes earning these abilities a snap. By the end of the game you'll have all of your characters with crossing abilities making them an unstoppable force for Nene to reckon with!

However....the game's battle system is remarkably easy in every way. Instead of the random encounters system evident in a lot of RPGs, there's a real time encounter system where you can see the enemies on the field and if you run into them or initiate the fight it will push you into the battle. There's a system that makes multiple encounters a snap and possible for you to earn more experience as well.

Like all RPGs, the elements play an important role and finding weaknesses is fun with the enemies you encounter, but a lot of the run-of-the-mill non-boss fights you get into are ridiculously easy. A majority of the game I just button tapped the attack button without any magic to defeat the monsters without any skill involved.

That said, the boss fights are similarly disappointing with a really low skill level to conquer. I'd even go as far to say that the side-quests you complete dealing with killing dragons and stuff later in the game are harder than all of the fights in the game--last boss included.

Speaking of boss fights, there is a disgusting butt rock song that plays during them that is so cringe worthy that I can't even put into words how displeased I was with it. The fact that the makers thought it was a good idea is preposterous.

On that side of things, Final Fantasy's hit composer, Nobuo Uematsu dealt with the music in Blue Dragon, but I'd go as far to say that a lot of it is derived from outtakes for the aforementioned series and doesn't have a lot of heart involved. It's not grating, but, again, it's quite generic and familiar.

Don't even get me started on the voice overs featured in the game. Playing Blue Dragon around my girlfriend and her roommate made me positively embarrassed as you hear terrible character after terrible character overact with wooden performances. The worst of the bunch is this little kid, Marumaro, who's a part of your group of fighters that screams the whole game and leads to some of the most uncomfortable parts that never failed to force me to turn off the volume at points in the game. It failed to stop the atrocious script from flowing across the screen...

Moving on, this is an XBOX 360 game--and one of the early ones released for the system so I expected some bland graphics, but Blue Dragon's are completely uninspired. From the generic characters with the Dragon Ball Z hue surrounding them (courtesy of the actual Dragon Ballz designer), to the boring environments you travel to--there's nothing I'm going to remember about the areas in this game a year from now. At some points in the game there are sections that show a lot of cogs moving and tons of action on the screen, but they are cartoony and very mediocre looking in comparison with some of the other games out on the 360 (even at that time period in 2007).

I'm really picky about RPGs because if I'm going to devote a series number of hours dungeon crawling and levelling up, I want to be comfortable and enjoy many aspects of the specified game I'm playing. Blue Dragon takes the easy road and doesn't really offer anything new and certainly isn't the sharpest RPG on the shelf, but in hindsight I think this would be a perfect game for a kid who's interested in RPGs, but doesn't have the time nor the patience for a more mature adventure like a Final Fantasy game. This is definitely an easy outing but one that I think would be more enjoyable for children--as far as story, layout, simplistic game play, and graphics are concerned--than for adults.

With that in mind, I tentatively recommend this because, while I didn't have the most stellar experience from this RPG, I did have a fun time item collecting and solving easy puzzles for 40 hours. The levelling up aspect was simple and easy to get into and I would definitely love to get my kid this (if I had one).

I think that Mistwalker could have done a better job with Blue Dragon, but everything is forgived once you've played their second offering, Lost Odyssey (also for XBOX 360), which I still say is the best J-RPG for the console. This one? Meh, it's in the cheap bin at ten or fifteen bucks and that's well spent for what its purpose is.

(c) Jason Haskins, 2010