Memorable characters, great presentation, and family friendly plot all make Blue Dragon a must own for RPG-centric fans.
Characters are endearing right from the start of the game; games storyline is involving without being too complicated; visuals and presentation are top-notch; Uematsu’s score is superbly composed; battle system offers a lot of strategy without seeming or feeling overwhelming; small features here and there make the game feel unique; lots of humorous references to poo.
Bad
Boss battle music doesn’t fit well; manga shadows are iffy; lots of humorous references to poo.
Story
Anyone who’s played a Japanese role-playing game in the last decade knows how things work. Huge overarching plot lines that could easily pass themselves off as an epic novel with aplomb and then some – and characters that are deep enough to give the Pacific Ocean a run for its money. Sure, that’s a good thing to have when the story is deep – the characters need to be deep as well – but when you have a game where the story is lighthearted with a just a touch moral involvement, the characters need to be the same. That’s not to say that the story in Blue Dragon is shallow – the contrary actually – but it isn’t so complicated that it won’t appeal to family audiences either. And to be honest, it feels like this is the audience that Sakaguchi and the developers at Artoon were shooting for. Whereas his previous works were geared towards the late teenage crowd, Blue Dragon comfortably and easily directs itself to the entire family, whether it’s through its endearing characters and their situations, or its storyline that just barely goes deep enough to get the player involved without overloading them with so much information that it’s hard for them to follow.
Blue Dragon begins with bang actually; a scene that will most assuredly interest those in the family that are interested in Japan’s anime art style. Taking place in the village of Talta, it seems that once every year for the past ten years violet clouds have appeared overhead and a huge beast called the Land Shark has terrorized the townsfolk. Well, this year it just so happens that Shu and his friend Jiro have come up with a plan to put the beast in its place. Add a bright eyed young girl named Kluke and a few unfortunate mishaps, and you’ve got the beginning to Blue Dragon’s storyline.
Blue Dragon never gets much more serious than this, but that’s to the game’s credit actually. The story is incredibly easy to latch onto and follow, and even though it doesn’t take much interest in fleshing out some of the side details, it does enough to keep you hooked. The writing in the game is exceptionally well paced and quirky – it’s hard to get bored here – there’s a lot of tiny little fragments of dialogue that will have you laughing or chuckling at the personalities of the characters.
And here we have another strong point of Blue Dragon’s storyline, the characters themselves. For the most part there are only six main characters in the game – five of them being your main characters – and the sixth being the villain, but they have interesting personalities and you’ll never get tired of them. For instance, Shu tends to be cocky when rushing into situations and its amusing when his fellow friends badger him about it and he reacts. Or a character you’ll meet later on that could be the spitting image of the alien Han Solo shot in the original Star Wars. While he’s not a main character, even his personality is so well defined that it’s hard not to be impressed by the trouble that the writers went to make all of the game’s characters unique.
Outside of all of these strong points, it’s worth noting that the game makes heavy use of references towards all kinds of poo. Whether it’s the names of several monsters like “King Poo Snake” or “Stone Poo Snake” or the fact that treasure dropped by monsters comes in the form of little piles of poo – which also go *squish squish* when you loot them, the game comes up with all kinds of insane and oddball ways to use the word. For the parents out there that may take this as reason to have their kids steer clear of Blue Dragon, it should also be noted that all of these references are also done with pretty tasteful tact. The mentions of poo are never outright obscene or rude.
Gameplay
Blue Dragon doesn’t do much to change what’s always been the tried and true Japanese role-playing formula. The battles are turned based and menu driven and the spells are your standard fare. What it does do however is include a few extra features that make the game feel a little less like those games around it.
One of the most interesting is the ability to use field skills to engage multiple enemy parties at the same time. Much like classic games like Chrono Trigger, you can see the enemies on the field screen before you actually do battle with them. This makes is much easier to avoid battles and eliminates a lot of the frustration caused by random battles. But supposed you’re running through a dungeon and two enemy parties pop up around you. By pressing the right trigger on the controller, you’ll bring up a green ring around your character and a list to the right of the screen. At this point, you can select both of the enemies and choose to fight both of their parties at the same time. Not only does this let you take them both out faster, it lets you get some nifty bonuses while you’re actually doing battle.
Once a battle starts in Blue Dragon, things go much like any other turn based role-playing game would. You choose your attacks and spells from a menu and then watch your characters perform them against the enemy. At the top of the screen the attack order is displayed for everyone in the battle including the enemies. Another difference between Blue Dragon and its peers though is the Charge system. Some attacks – and all spells – can be Charged to reduce the amount of MP they use and increase their damage. This appears as a bar at the top of the screen under the turn around with an orange section either in the middle or the far right. Lines will appear at points in the bar representing the trade-off that the Charge system presents. While Charging will indeed reduce the MP you use to use that skill and increase its damage output, it will also usually mean you will have to wait longer to cast it if you go for the orange “sweet spot.” This presents some mild strategy to Blue Dragon – do you wait for a more powerful attack or do you simply do the standard attack which might have its own advantages?
Once the first collection of enemies is gone, a roulette feature will appear on the screen before the next group of bad guys comes in. This roulette will have rewards like increased attack power or increased agility; sometimes it will even increase your max health for the remainder of the battle. In reality, this will almost never determine the outcome of your battle set, it’s an interesting feature to include and at the end of the battle, the more enemy groups you fought, the larger your combo reward – which grants you an increase in experience and skill reward.
The heart of Blue Dragon’s gameplay is its class system. There’s a variety of classes available – most of them you have to unlock as you progress through the game – and you can easily switch between them at any time as long as you’re not in a battle. As you win battles, you class will gain skill points which essentiall work as experience, but for your class. When you reach a certain number of skill points, your class rank goes up. At certain class ranks, you gain new skills. You can generally only have three class skills equipped at any given time – they do things like allow all characters in the party to share your attack rating or let you use more than one item in a turn – so there’s a little thinking involved in choosing which skills you want to have and the tradeoffs between the various effects. There’s a class that lets you have more than three skills slots, but the tradeoff is that this class can’t use any fancy skills like the rest can.
As for actually exploring in Blue Dragon, it’s what you would expect from this kind of game. There’s a large world world map for moving between locations – or you can use warp points, which have to be unlocked as you reach them – and even on the world map you’re able to see the enemies instead of engaging in random battles. Enemies tend to be more plentiful on the world map, so you’ll have to be a little bit more suave to avoid them. There’s also quite a few treasure quests scattered around the world map, so exploring every nook and cranny is rewarded with treasure that might be pretty useful. Once you make it to a location, you’re given the pretty standard Japanese role-playing game field map.
Villages are scattered with houses and people will engage in idle conversation with and the people that rarely have an actual task for you will keep it rather simple. Each village tends to have the same kinds of shops lying around; an accessory shop, item shop, and spell shop – and it’s fairly simple to find them all. As for dungeons, these maps tend to be a little more complex, consisting of winding passages and a few puzzles here and there. The game rewards exploration and patience in these areas as well, as they’re chock full of hidden treasure chests. Most dungeons have a boss at the end, which require the player to think a little during the fight to get by them.
Even though the game rewards these dungeons explorations though, there’s not really too much to them. While the environments are well detailed and colorful, they mostly consist of running through passages looking for either the way out or extra treasure. There are a few dungeons here and there that are multi-layered, which adds some variety to the mix, but even those essentially still force you to go from point A to point B. Every dungeon in the game follows the same formula and while you might be a little bit weary enough towards the end, the game always seems to have an uncanny knack to throw in the end before you want to throw the towel in.
Presentation
Graphically, Blue Dragon pushes the Xbox 360 to its limits. The game makes heavy use of antialiasing techniques and depth of field, and because of this the game does choke on the framerates in a few instances during the game. The anime art style is incredibly smooth the entire way through and even though the game makes heavy use of pre-rendered cut scenes throughout its campaign, there’s isn’t a whole lot of difference between them and the actual game. All of the characters are detailed and unique in their body styles and their animations never look choppy or out of place. The environments themselves, while looking too big for the characters sometimes, are all superbly detailed and colorful, and there’s not one single instance of the game making use of blurry or low resolution textures. To the game’s extra credit, the developers seemed to have wonderful use of modern texture mapping techniques because while Blue Dragon does use them, it doesn’t suffer from the “shiny” effect that many other games that use this technique do.
It should be noted though that the shadows in Blue Dragon are of questionably quality. While the suffice in most scenes, it’s easy to notice that there’s something a little odd about them, primarily in the way that the developers chose to smooth them out. Artistically speaking, it seems that the developers where going for sort of a manga shading look and while this deserves a little credit for merit on their part, in reality it didn’t work too well and is more distracting than good looking.
On the audio side of things, players can find joy in the fact that the game’s score was composed by the famous Nobuo Uematsu. As usual, his score is on top form here and nothing feels out of place in the game world. The game sounds brilliant in a surround sound setup and the music makes the game feel that much more immersing. Character voices are superb in any language, although most players will most likely find themselves listening to the Japanese audio track for the full effect.
The one piece of the game’s audio presentation that doesn’t fit though is the boss battle music. It’s hard to describe what it sounds like and players will ultimately have to make their own decisions about whether they hate it or like it, but it doesn’t fit well with the theme of the game at all.