Blue Dragon
By Will Bartos
Monday. Feb 04, 12:34 PM
I’m playing Final F… I mean ChronoTr… I mean Dragon Ba… what the hell?

If the XBox 360 has a lack of a certain genre, it’s the Japanese RPG. Microsoft has never had a big foothold in Japan, and (in this reviewer’s opinion) this genre of game may be one of the big reasons why. Enter Blue Dragon, made by Mistwalker, a company formed by a legend in the RPG business, Hironobu Sakaguchi. Add in music by RPG music legend Nobuo Uematsu and art by Akira Toriyama, and you have quite possibly the masters of the RPG. Backed by successes like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Dragon Quest, Blue Dragon had the makings for the best RPG ever…

Except it falls short. Blue Dragon doesn’t seem to add anything new to the JRPG formula that would make it stand out. Instead, it seems like a game I played back in 1990. And while it’s solid, it makes me feel these legends are trying to recreate the glory days of old instead of evolving the concept or having a special characteristic to make it stick out.

The game starts in a non-descript village in some non-descript part of the world. It has just come under attack by a land shark, some sort of phenomenon that attacks yearly. Enter Gok… I mean Shu, a small boy with spiky hair who wants to stop the shark from attacking again. With help from The Great Sai… I mean Juno, and Pan… I mean… AGH!

Enter the first problem: EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING FROM DRAGON BALL. All the costumes, hairstyles, and even some of the typecasting looks like it got pulled directly out of the pages of the famed anime / manga. The Dragon Quest games and Chrono Trigger don’t even look this obvious, and it’s really disappointing considering Toriyama’s art style can go and has gone beyond the bounds of Super Saiyans.

Blue Dragon’s biggest problem is it lacks something many of the older JRPGs have: charm. Quite a few people know that I’m a big Dragon Quest fan, and Blue Dragon looks a lot like Dragon Quest, particularly due to the Toriyama art style. However, Blue Dragon doesn’t have the same charm that Dragon Quest had and seems to draw WAY too much from the Dragon Ball series. The gameplay and management also draws heavily from Final Fantasy. The shadows, for example, are basically simplified Guardian Forces from Final Fantasy VIII without the ability to switch them between characters, and the different ability classes they can learn come from the job systems of Final Fantasy III, V, and X-2. Even the fanfare music sounds like Final Fantasy, with the notes being put in a different order. With the exception of the actual story, I can confidently say that the bulk of the game is copied or borrowed from some other source material, and I find that VERY disappointing.

That’s not to say the game’s all bad. There are a couple mechanics to liven up the monotony. The ability to force monster battles is pretty nice, and adds a way to lighten the level grind load. And for what they did borrow, the game does a good job of using the tried and true, or expanding on it. Attempting to multi-class is as easy as choosing the skill after it’s earned – something straight out of Final Fantasy V – but now you have extra slots to munchkin out the character. Everything is balanced well, and it makes for a solid RPG… just not one that stands out from all the other JRPGs from the past or present.

Blue Dragon was hyped as the first big JRPG for the XBox 360. Unfortunately, it’s just the first JRPG for the console, and one that comes in vanilla flavor only. With extremely limited original material and no new big innovations or directions, Blue Dragon ends up being a decent RPG at best, and something somewhat avoidable if you’ve been following the genre. Hopefully the folks at Mistwalker can stop reminiscing about old times and come up with something new… but for now, this just isn’t it.

Will Bartos

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