A decent game, that builds on the story from Blue Dragon.
This game is very similar to Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. Its a RTS game with some RPG elements. The game starts out with Shu and his friends a year after they defeated Nene. This time around it seems like one of the cubes is being attacked by mecha robos. Immediately Shu and his friends think its Nene again. I dont want to spoil the story anymore, but it does get very interesting throughout the rest of the game. It does come to a very happy conclusion at the end for all the parties involved. If you were a fan of Blue Dragon, then play this game for the story. It is very well put together and even somewhat better than the original's story.
The music in this game is also very amazing. It is done by no other than Nobuo Uematsu, a musical genius. Most of the music is rehashed from Blue Dragon, but it still sounds so good. There are some new songs in the game that are really moving. The piano ballads are especially notable!
The in game graphics are pretty average, but this game has many CG scenes that are very impressive. These scenes are mainly used during the beginning and end of the game. The scenes are beautifully created and great to watch. (No voice overs in the game unfortunately...).
There were some things that obviously kept this game from being perfect. The main element in video games is the gameplay. A game can have a great story, graphics, and music, but if the gameplay is broken then so is most of the game. Unfortunately the gameplay in this game fell flat. As I mention this game plays like FF XII: Revenant Wings, but not as well. Your characters are incredibly slow moving on the battle field. There are only 2 characters that can move at a decent pace. There are many times when I felt like I had to sit and wait for all my characters to come together so they could all fight a difficult enemy or boss at once.
Also the A.I. in this game is completely stupid. If you tell a character to move to a certain position, the character will usually take the long way there, or instead of walking in a straight line to the designated position they will purposefully walk in zig-zags or by an enemy and start a battle all by themselves. The A.I. in this game caused lost missions and the loss of important characters during missions.
Now the gameplay isn't a total hindrance to the game. It takes awhile and you kind of learn tricks to move your characters successfully. You want to move your characters one at time, and make them walk short distances and not across the whole battle field. Moving all the characters at once makes things a mess. Characters cant walk through another character, so if you have 10 characters walking in a narrow hallway and a slow character is in the front then everyone moves at the pace of the slow character. Even though I found ways to work around the broken gameplay, it still kept them game from being superb, and it will ultimately keep people from playing the game.
If you played Blue Dragon, I strongly suggest playing the game. It continues the story beautifully, and the great music is back. The game can last you about 25-30 hours if you do all the sidequests. Playing straight through the 1-player campaign is about 18-20 hours...maybe a little less. If you can stand the difficult gameplay then you will find a lot of enjoyment through the story.