This game may be easily overlooked but once you play it you'll be pleasantly surprised on how deep this RPG goes.
THE GOOD
-Excellent leveling system
-Great music
-Enjoyable story
-Entertaining battle system
THE BAD
-Marumaro is an annoying character
-Some frame rate and load time issues
OVERVIEW
Blue Dragon is an RPG that really grows on you. When I first started playing the game I thought that this game was going to have a "kid" story with very weak character development. That view quickly changed as I progressed through the game. The story is actually really good (and not kiddish) and most of the characters are very likable.
The story starts off in a rural town where you meet the main character, Shu. Shu is a 16 year old kid with a lot of heart and never gives up at anything. Shu's two friends Jiro and Kluke (playable characters) also live in this town. Everything seems peaceful until a "land shark" comes and starts destroying the whole town. Shu, Jiro and Kluke decide that they have had enough of the land shark's destruction and devise a plan to take it down. Somehow their plan actually works in stalling the land shark from further destruction.
The three find out that this land shark is actually a machine. Later they find out that an evil wizard named Nene is behind not only the destruction caused by the land shark but the destruction of other villages all across the world. So, Shu and company go to confront Nene, which proves to be useless, and they are captured. When they succeed in escaping, a mysterious voice tells them to swallow these "Light Spheres". The hesitant party does what they are told and then come to find out that there shadows can come alive and have magic powers. With this new found power and the help of Marumaro and Zola, who also have this magic power, they start their quest to find and stop Nene from destroying the world.
The story starts off a little slow but really picks up through out the game. One thing to watch out for is the annoyingly long loading times between cut-scenes. There are some exciting plot twists in this game and the character development is done well. I liked all the playable characters except for Marumaro. Marumaro is younger then everybody else and it definitely shows with his whining and loud, stupid comments. Most of the time when he speaks you'll find yourself saying "shut up"! But the other characters are really cool that you can relate too.
GAMEPLAY
Mistwalker uses some old tricks for the game play but also looked at some of the annoyances of RPGs, like the leveling up period, and made them less painful. The leveling system is based on a semi-job class system. Each character's shadow can be equipped with a class like Black mage, White mage, Monk, Sword Master, etc. Once the class is equiped that character can start unlocking skills with that class like White magic, counter attack, charged defense, etc.
Now what makes this different then a full job system is that once you learn a skill from a specific class, you can use that skill on any other class. You have a certain amount of skill slots (which you can unlock more with the generalist class) where you can use any of the skills that you have already unlocked. So, you have the option to freely customize each character in your party. In Blue Dragon you gain experience points (EXP) which levels your character and Skill Points (SP) which levels your class. Another thing to you note is that when you level up your class (with SP) your characters attributes (strength, magic attack, defense, etc...) increase. I really enjoyed this the most about this game because you can customize your characters, it is easy to use and leveling up is easy, which I will talk about later.
The battle system combines the MMORPG and RPG styles. You move around with one character in your party and you can see the enemies on the screen. To fight the enemy you just have to touch them and if you hit them from behind you'll get a back attack but be careful because this also applies to you. Once you activate a fight with an enemy the game changes to a Turn-Based battle. You can see the attack order on the top of the screen so you can plan out your attacks accordingly. Another thing that you can do is charge up your individual attacks to do more damage but this takes longer to perform. One down fall to this is that the frame rate slows down when you have multiple characters charging up an attack. You also have the option to fight multiple enemies at once by pressing and holding the RT button. When you do this, any enemies that are inside of the radius of the attack circle will be involved in the fight. Now there are one of two things that can happen. First, you could have a Monster Fight which just means that you go up against all the enemies that you chose to fight at once. But don't worry it is called a Monster Fight for a reason because the enemies start fighting each other first before they attack you. The second thing that could happen is that you fight each enemy in consecutive order with a chance for a bonus, in between fights, like HP restored, all status aliments cured, magic attack up, etc... So, there is a big advantage to attacking multiple enemies at once. Like I said before leveling up can be easy in this game with the right skills. Along with skills that you can use in battles there are skills that you can use on the field. One skill in particular is in the Barrier magic class called Field Barrier. With this skill all you have to do is defeat a specific monster once and then every other time you can just run into them on the field and automatically kill them and earn SP. This is a huge help later in the game when you need to level your characters up because it is very quick and easy. I really love this feature in Blue Dragon.
Blue Dragon offers a decent size world with lots of secrets to find and mini games to play. If you are finding that the bosses in the story are easy you might want to try fighting some of the optional bosses like the King Poo Snake and the five dragons. Each are difficult even for the high level and well experienced gamer. But, like always, the reward is well worth your time. Along with some other side quests there are some parts in the game where you have to do some first person shooting (on a flying machine). This is a good break from the norm and keeps things fresh.
GRAPHICS & SOUND
Not too much to look at here. The graphics are very plain and there isn't too much detail in the game. This is probably the weakest part to this game.
Well most of the music is very good, mainly because Nobuo Uematsu is a brilliant composer. However, the boss music feels a little out of place. The sound effects and voice are very good as well.
CONCLUSION
Blue Dragon is a great RPG. It is one of those games that can be easily overlooked but if you really sit down and play the game you'll find that this game has a lot of depth to it. I would recommend this game to anyone. There is a great story told here and plenty of good RPG action. So, just like Shu saying that he will never give up you shouldn't give up on this game.