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Blue Dragon
Platform: Xbox 360
If you own an Xbox 360 and are a fan of Japanese RPGs, you should pick up Blue Dragon as long as you don’t mind a little cliché storyline.
Review by Sirus
Blue Dragon has been hyped extensively by anyone who is a huge RPG fan because of the big names working on it. The only time before Blue Dragon when Nobuo Uematsu, Hinorobu Sakaguchi, and Akira Toriyama worked together on a game, they created Chrono Trigger – a game fans believe to be one of the greatest RPGS ever created. Blue Dragon may never get the same amount of praise as Chrono Trigger but it is the first great JRPG to be released on the Xbox 360; hopefully the first of many.
The story in Blue Dragon follows a group of three friends who rise to the challenge to save their village from the Land Shark that has been terrorizing them and destroying their homes. In their pursuit of the Land Shark they find themselves on a large Airship. On the ship they encounter a multitude of robots whom they have a hard time defeating. They meet a wrinkled man on the ship who calls himself Nene and tells them that he is the one who has been terrorizing their village. They attempt to attack him but are not strong enough to do any sort of damage. While trying to escape the ship, they stumble upon a room where three light spheres descend on them. A mysterious voice tells them to swallow the spheres. At first they are hesitant but the voice is insistent and they are still having trouble defeating the robots so they finally decide to swallow the spheres.
As soon as they swallow the spheres they feel a burning pain throughout their body as the magic fuses with them from the inside. After the pain subsides, they notice that their shadows have come alive, giving them the power to fight back. With their newfound power they are able to escape from the airship and attempt to make their way home. Soon, they are flying away on a ship they steal, the ship breaks down and they crash land somewhere. They spend a good amount of time trying to get back to their village and on the way meet two more magic users who each has their own reason for wanting to defeat Nene. The story starts out a little slowly but at all times you understand why you are where you are and the combat is good enough to keep you playing till the next scenes. The game has plenty of epic moments leading up to the finale to keep players interested. The story is somewhat cliché but overall it’s generally solid. The game has its emotional moments and, while some brought me on the verge of crying, none actually made me cry. The characters are similarly cliché but they felt genuine and I really took a liking to everyone I met in the game.
Blue Dragon progresses through a series of linear dungeons followed by towns and more dungeons for the most part. There are a few areas where you are allowed freedom to walk around the world map but they are usually quite short and just serve as the go-between before the next dungeon area. Combat on both the world map and in dungeons initiates when you touch an enemy wandering around the area. The enemies are generally well represented by the monster you see although they do tend to have some monsters of other types along with them. While walking around the field you have to be careful that you don’t get surprised by the enemy attacking you from behind while at the same time looking for opportunities to get “back attack” on the enemy (surprising them from behind).
To complicate matters further, you have a combat circle you can bring up any time by pressing the right trigger, which you can use to attack multiple enemies around you at once. If more than one enemy is within the circle, you will initiate combat in which you will fight each enemy in succession. Later in the game, fighting multiple enemies at once leads to quite a few variations in tactics because you can have one character charge his attack so that it is ready to launch off as soon as the second or third enemy group attacks (once you defeated the last enemy in the previous group). You can also initiate a monster fight when two types of enemies who don’t like each other are within your combat circle. While an interesting addition, there are very few enemies with which this works although it does make battles easier.
There are other ways that you can manipulate enemies on the field that come in the form of field skills. Field skills tend to be pretty useless except for Field Barrier, a skill learned by the Barrier Magic class. Field Barrier allows you to defeat weaker enemies on contact and costs MP for each one. Defeating the enemy with Field Barrier doesn’t give you any experience but you gain half of the SP that you would have gotten from that enemy. Many of the other field skills simply attract or scare away enemies but they replace items that generally have a similar effect in most RPGs. Every character in your party gains experience and skill points when you defeat an enemy along with gold that can be spent to buy upgrades in accessories as well as spells and items.
Each character starts out a specific class but they can be switched to other classes if you don’t want to follow that path with the character. Every 10 levels, until you gain access to all classes at level 50, you get to pick one of the classes to unlock. There are 9 classes in all including four combat classes, four magic classes, and generalist which isn’t particularly combat oriented but gives you access to more skill and accessory slots. Characters increase their rank in each class with the skill points gained after battle to gain access to new skills which can be equipped once learned no matter what class you are.
Blue Dragon took an interesting path by doing away with the typical equipments and instead using accessories for everything. This means that there isn’t going to be any sort of different look on your characters when you equip the new accessory but it also means that every character can equip every accessory (with very few exceptions). There are four basic accessory slots, one for attack, one for magic attack, one for magic defense, and one for physical defense. Other accessory slots are unlocked through usage of the generalist class and the accessories equipable in that slot vary widely in their effects.
Magic in the game works similarly to Final Fantasy XII in that once you buy a spell or find it in a chest, anyone who would have access to that spell through their class or an equipped skill can use it. A good number of the magic spells in the game have to be purchased at the shops although one or two can be found in chests within dungeons. Magic for each class is divided into multiple levels. While equipping a specific magic class, characters have access to all levels of magic for that class but each individual level must be unlocked through increased ranks to be usable when equipped as a secondary skill on that character. For example, a black magic shadow user can use all the black magic skills until they switch to a white mage and equip the black mage skill. The level of the skill they can equip lets the player know which level is the highest they have access to. This gives players incentive to level multiple classes quite extensively if they want to have the ultimate multi-tasking magician.
The actual combat is turn-based with a turn meter at the top of the screen that shows you the order in which each character will act. Most actions are taken instantly but magic and attacks done by characters of the Monk class are able to be charged to increase the power. Attacks that are chargeable allow you to hold down A until you see the cursor reach the point on the bar you want. Areas closer to the left add less power but act more quickly while the areas on the far right tend to require quite a bit of charging but increase the power of the attack significantly. The meter shows you an indication of where your attacks will land in relation to the enemies turns so that you can strategize depending on whether or not you need the skill to go off before the enemy gets its turn.
Charging attacks adds a bit of depth to the combat. Combat tends to be fairly fast and quite engaging. While there is the occasional slowdown in battles, it tends to only occur when three or four characters are charging attacks at the same time, causing all their shadows to be out at once. Even then the slowdown tends to be minor with only a few occasions where it becomes a pain but still the slowdown doesn’t change the outcome at all. I found myself choosing to fight multiple enemies at different points in the game simply because I enjoyed the combat, making me overleveled at times. The game tends to be fairly easy with only a few challenging bosses towards the end of the game. Skilled players looking for a challenge will want to rush through the game with minimal leveling or download the hard mode update from Live that requires connecting to Xbox Live using a Hong Kong profile. There are guides all over the internet that tell you the specifics of how, if you are interested.
The music in Blue Dragon is another Nobuo Uematsu masterpiece. I imported the soundtrack as soon as it was released in Japan and was really glad I did. The music can get repetitive at points because some songs are used multiple times but the same thing can be said for most RPGs. The nice thing about the music is that very few of the songs are the same style so while they are all from the same composer, you might not be able to tell. The boss music is especially awesome, featuring vocals from Ian Gillan although it also gets used too often by the end. Thankfully, the final encounters feature different music that really sets the mood perfectly.
The voice acting in the game seemed pretty mediocre from what I saw in the videos online so I played the entire game with Japanese voices. My brother seems to be fine with the dub but he doesn’t tend to be very critical of English dubs. Still, with the Japanese as well as a French track available, there is no reason to dock the game for the English voice acting that I never really listened to enough to hate. The game features some beautiful graphics with tons of next-gen lighting effects and nice textures on most of the world. My only problem with the graphics was that they decided to leave all the shadows that are used by your party completely blue. This was especially hard to get used to after watching a good amount of the anime where each shadow is fully colored. Even so, I got used to the colors of the shadows pretty quickly in the game so it wasn’t too big of an issue.
Blue Dragon lasts 30-40 hours (my own final time was 43 hours which included doing most of the sidequests). The game is three discs but the second and third discs are fairly short. The third disc pretty much only consists of the final dungeon although I found the final boss to be a challenge even after doing some of the sidequests so it’s better to do them before tackling the final dungeon. Blue Dragon was one of the main reasons I purchased my Xbox 360 and I feel it met my expectations. It is a great turn-based traditional RPG for anyone who can’t get enough turn-based combat. For someone like me who is disheartened by what seems like a move towards making all RPGs real-time, Blue Dragon was a refreshing romp that felt like it was just long enough without overstaying its welcome. If you own an Xbox 360 and are a fan of Japanese RPGs, you should pick up Blue Dragon as long as you don’t mind a little cliché storyline.
Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 9/10
Story: 8/10
Lasting Appeal: 8/10 (30-40 hours, took me 43)
Final Score: 8.6/10 (an average)
Platform: Xbox 360
If you own an Xbox 360 and are a fan of Japanese RPGs, you should pick up Blue Dragon as long as you don’t mind a little cliché storyline.
Review by Sirus
Blue Dragon has been hyped extensively by anyone who is a huge RPG fan because of the big names working on it. The only time before Blue Dragon when Nobuo Uematsu, Hinorobu Sakaguchi, and Akira Toriyama worked together on a game, they created Chrono Trigger – a game fans believe to be one of the greatest RPGS ever created. Blue Dragon may never get the same amount of praise as Chrono Trigger but it is the first great JRPG to be released on the Xbox 360; hopefully the first of many.
The story in Blue Dragon follows a group of three friends who rise to the challenge to save their village from the Land Shark that has been terrorizing them and destroying their homes. In their pursuit of the Land Shark they find themselves on a large Airship. On the ship they encounter a multitude of robots whom they have a hard time defeating. They meet a wrinkled man on the ship who calls himself Nene and tells them that he is the one who has been terrorizing their village. They attempt to attack him but are not strong enough to do any sort of damage. While trying to escape the ship, they stumble upon a room where three light spheres descend on them. A mysterious voice tells them to swallow the spheres. At first they are hesitant but the voice is insistent and they are still having trouble defeating the robots so they finally decide to swallow the spheres.
As soon as they swallow the spheres they feel a burning pain throughout their body as the magic fuses with them from the inside. After the pain subsides, they notice that their shadows have come alive, giving them the power to fight back. With their newfound power they are able to escape from the airship and attempt to make their way home. Soon, they are flying away on a ship they steal, the ship breaks down and they crash land somewhere. They spend a good amount of time trying to get back to their village and on the way meet two more magic users who each has their own reason for wanting to defeat Nene. The story starts out a little slowly but at all times you understand why you are where you are and the combat is good enough to keep you playing till the next scenes. The game has plenty of epic moments leading up to the finale to keep players interested. The story is somewhat cliché but overall it’s generally solid. The game has its emotional moments and, while some brought me on the verge of crying, none actually made me cry. The characters are similarly cliché but they felt genuine and I really took a liking to everyone I met in the game.
Blue Dragon progresses through a series of linear dungeons followed by towns and more dungeons for the most part. There are a few areas where you are allowed freedom to walk around the world map but they are usually quite short and just serve as the go-between before the next dungeon area. Combat on both the world map and in dungeons initiates when you touch an enemy wandering around the area. The enemies are generally well represented by the monster you see although they do tend to have some monsters of other types along with them. While walking around the field you have to be careful that you don’t get surprised by the enemy attacking you from behind while at the same time looking for opportunities to get “back attack” on the enemy (surprising them from behind).
To complicate matters further, you have a combat circle you can bring up any time by pressing the right trigger, which you can use to attack multiple enemies around you at once. If more than one enemy is within the circle, you will initiate combat in which you will fight each enemy in succession. Later in the game, fighting multiple enemies at once leads to quite a few variations in tactics because you can have one character charge his attack so that it is ready to launch off as soon as the second or third enemy group attacks (once you defeated the last enemy in the previous group). You can also initiate a monster fight when two types of enemies who don’t like each other are within your combat circle. While an interesting addition, there are very few enemies with which this works although it does make battles easier.
There are other ways that you can manipulate enemies on the field that come in the form of field skills. Field skills tend to be pretty useless except for Field Barrier, a skill learned by the Barrier Magic class. Field Barrier allows you to defeat weaker enemies on contact and costs MP for each one. Defeating the enemy with Field Barrier doesn’t give you any experience but you gain half of the SP that you would have gotten from that enemy. Many of the other field skills simply attract or scare away enemies but they replace items that generally have a similar effect in most RPGs. Every character in your party gains experience and skill points when you defeat an enemy along with gold that can be spent to buy upgrades in accessories as well as spells and items.
Each character starts out a specific class but they can be switched to other classes if you don’t want to follow that path with the character. Every 10 levels, until you gain access to all classes at level 50, you get to pick one of the classes to unlock. There are 9 classes in all including four combat classes, four magic classes, and generalist which isn’t particularly combat oriented but gives you access to more skill and accessory slots. Characters increase their rank in each class with the skill points gained after battle to gain access to new skills which can be equipped once learned no matter what class you are.
Blue Dragon took an interesting path by doing away with the typical equipments and instead using accessories for everything. This means that there isn’t going to be any sort of different look on your characters when you equip the new accessory but it also means that every character can equip every accessory (with very few exceptions). There are four basic accessory slots, one for attack, one for magic attack, one for magic defense, and one for physical defense. Other accessory slots are unlocked through usage of the generalist class and the accessories equipable in that slot vary widely in their effects.
Magic in the game works similarly to Final Fantasy XII in that once you buy a spell or find it in a chest, anyone who would have access to that spell through their class or an equipped skill can use it. A good number of the magic spells in the game have to be purchased at the shops although one or two can be found in chests within dungeons. Magic for each class is divided into multiple levels. While equipping a specific magic class, characters have access to all levels of magic for that class but each individual level must be unlocked through increased ranks to be usable when equipped as a secondary skill on that character. For example, a black magic shadow user can use all the black magic skills until they switch to a white mage and equip the black mage skill. The level of the skill they can equip lets the player know which level is the highest they have access to. This gives players incentive to level multiple classes quite extensively if they want to have the ultimate multi-tasking magician.
The actual combat is turn-based with a turn meter at the top of the screen that shows you the order in which each character will act. Most actions are taken instantly but magic and attacks done by characters of the Monk class are able to be charged to increase the power. Attacks that are chargeable allow you to hold down A until you see the cursor reach the point on the bar you want. Areas closer to the left add less power but act more quickly while the areas on the far right tend to require quite a bit of charging but increase the power of the attack significantly. The meter shows you an indication of where your attacks will land in relation to the enemies turns so that you can strategize depending on whether or not you need the skill to go off before the enemy gets its turn.
Charging attacks adds a bit of depth to the combat. Combat tends to be fairly fast and quite engaging. While there is the occasional slowdown in battles, it tends to only occur when three or four characters are charging attacks at the same time, causing all their shadows to be out at once. Even then the slowdown tends to be minor with only a few occasions where it becomes a pain but still the slowdown doesn’t change the outcome at all. I found myself choosing to fight multiple enemies at different points in the game simply because I enjoyed the combat, making me overleveled at times. The game tends to be fairly easy with only a few challenging bosses towards the end of the game. Skilled players looking for a challenge will want to rush through the game with minimal leveling or download the hard mode update from Live that requires connecting to Xbox Live using a Hong Kong profile. There are guides all over the internet that tell you the specifics of how, if you are interested.
The music in Blue Dragon is another Nobuo Uematsu masterpiece. I imported the soundtrack as soon as it was released in Japan and was really glad I did. The music can get repetitive at points because some songs are used multiple times but the same thing can be said for most RPGs. The nice thing about the music is that very few of the songs are the same style so while they are all from the same composer, you might not be able to tell. The boss music is especially awesome, featuring vocals from Ian Gillan although it also gets used too often by the end. Thankfully, the final encounters feature different music that really sets the mood perfectly.
The voice acting in the game seemed pretty mediocre from what I saw in the videos online so I played the entire game with Japanese voices. My brother seems to be fine with the dub but he doesn’t tend to be very critical of English dubs. Still, with the Japanese as well as a French track available, there is no reason to dock the game for the English voice acting that I never really listened to enough to hate. The game features some beautiful graphics with tons of next-gen lighting effects and nice textures on most of the world. My only problem with the graphics was that they decided to leave all the shadows that are used by your party completely blue. This was especially hard to get used to after watching a good amount of the anime where each shadow is fully colored. Even so, I got used to the colors of the shadows pretty quickly in the game so it wasn’t too big of an issue.
Blue Dragon lasts 30-40 hours (my own final time was 43 hours which included doing most of the sidequests). The game is three discs but the second and third discs are fairly short. The third disc pretty much only consists of the final dungeon although I found the final boss to be a challenge even after doing some of the sidequests so it’s better to do them before tackling the final dungeon. Blue Dragon was one of the main reasons I purchased my Xbox 360 and I feel it met my expectations. It is a great turn-based traditional RPG for anyone who can’t get enough turn-based combat. For someone like me who is disheartened by what seems like a move towards making all RPGs real-time, Blue Dragon was a refreshing romp that felt like it was just long enough without overstaying its welcome. If you own an Xbox 360 and are a fan of Japanese RPGs, you should pick up Blue Dragon as long as you don’t mind a little cliché storyline.
Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 9/10
Story: 8/10
Lasting Appeal: 8/10 (30-40 hours, took me 43)
Final Score: 8.6/10 (an average)
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