Blue Dragon Review (X360)

Gameplay (cont)

There are no random battles, thankfully, and instead your enemies inhabit the game world and you initiate a battle by touching them. The battles are turn-based, and play out just like any JRPG. An interesting thing about the battles is that some attacks and spells require you to charge them, and by carefully timing how long you charge, you can determine not only the power but when the attack will actually be executed. This allows you to strategically heal and attack before the enemy’s turn, which is pretty cool.

Blue Dragon is rather easy, however, and as long as one character is a white mage, it is a challenge to actually die in this game because the enemies are wimpy and your white mage can heal the group while everyone else fights. You can also give your characters abilities like HP and MP regeneration during battle and automatic counter attack that make them extremely powerful. It is also noteworthy just how little use you get out of items in this game. Your white mage can take care of pretty much everything, including reviving KO’ed characters, so most items are fairly useless. Another interesting thing about Blue Dragon is that you can search trees and rocks and crystals and a ton of other in-game objects, and the vast majority of them will give you items and stat bonuses and money so you very rarely have to actually buy anything in shops. Like I said, this game is easy. The lack of difficulty isn’t really a problem, however, because I honestly kind of like the mindless fun that this game offers.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Blue Dragon is a fairly nice looking game, but it isn’t going to blow you away. Like I mentioned earlier, the character designs all look like Dragon Ball Z rejects, which can either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes. The environments are surprisingly bland, but when you come to a city or town things look quite a bit nicer. There are a lot of CG cutscenes, which is why the game had to be on three discs, but they look really nice and while you can tell a difference between the cutscenes and gameplay graphics, it is a smooth transition and isn’t jarring. Some of the cutscenes, particularly the entire sequence at the end of the first disc, are actually really cool.

The sound is a bit of a mixed back in Blue Dragon. For the most part, the music is appropriate and quite good and very familiar if you have played any Final Fantasy game over the last twenty years. But when you get to a boss battle, the music shifts to a goofy rock song with absolutely stupid lyrics. It is one of those songs that you’ll hate the first time you hear it, but then it gets stuck in your head, which makes you hate it even more. The voice acting is another area where it is fairly good for the most part, but a couple of bad apples ruin the bunch. Specifically, Shu and Marumaro are absolutely obnoxious. You can switch to a Japanese or even French language track, which helps, but they still manage to be annoying.

Bottom Line

All in all, Blue Dragon doesn’t really bring much new to the party, but it is an enjoyable game overall that is worth playing. It is a lengthy game, and while if you really took your time to level up and earn achievements and do all of the little things the game offers it can take 50+ hours, just playing through the story at a normal pace will result in a total play time of around 25 hours. It isn’t particularly challenging, but there is something strangely satisfying about searching every nook and cranny of an area for hidden items and building a powerful team so you can just waltz through the game without a care in the world. Blue Dragon is simply an enjoyable experience. It isn’t great. It isn’t bad. It is just fun. I highly recommend it for at least a rental.