Blue Dragon

5

Blue Dragon offers up lots of story but not a whole lot to chew on.
Reviewed By: gp_MrSock

The original XBox earned a reputation for being a dumb jock's game platform because it was filled with action and sports games. Its follow-up, the Xbox 360, seemed to be heading down the same path, until a few RPG titles were announced about a year after the system launched.

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Not to stereotype anyone, but RPG gamers are typically frail, bookish types who shy away from sunlight and whose bones are brittle and shatter like delicate crystal on impact.

These Creatures of the Basement rejoiced when Microsoft announced Blue Dragon, an exclusive XBox 360 RPG that united Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi with Dragonball Z artist Akira Toriyama. Would this unstoppable force create the greatest RPG evar??

If we go back in my time machine to 1989, then yes: Blue Dragon is best RPG of 1989. It has all of the things that players loved about RPGs in 1989. You have a never-changing party of (eventually) five heroes. You move around a vast world battling hordes and hordes of identical creatures in turn-based combat.

Later in the game, the character models are painted a different colour, given a different name and more hit points, and voila! Brand new monsters. The combat is turn-based, which means that the monsters wait patiently for you to finish stomping on them before they attack.

All of this stuff is older than old school. The one saving grace is that Blue Dragon doesn't have random battles, where you can't even see the monsters as you're walking around … you just hear "doobley doobley DOO!" and the fight starts. It does have "representational" monsters, though, where you'll attack a single scorpion in the overworld, and then enter a battlefield strewn with seventeen scorpions, three ancient moths and some kind of monster made of poo. Really.

It doesn't bring a lot of new material to the RPG genre. Turn-based battles feel monotonous and boring. Each of your characters is backed by a monstrous magical shadow, and each shadow can spend its experience points unlocking skills within a handful of classes. The skills can be shared around between the classes so that, for example, a Black Magic shadow can use skills it learned from the Assassin class. While this is one of the more interesting features of the game, it's not earth-shattering.

Monster Fights, where you rope multiple monsters together in the fight with you and watch them eat each other, are pretty fun until you realize how contrived they are. Not all monsters will fight each other, and the game sets up many maps where you have to make certain monsters fight or risk getting slaughtered.

Blue Dragon's cut-scenes are all very high quality with solid voice acting and a halfway-interesting story, but I don't think it's fair to gush over them because as a gamer, you've come to play, not to watch. Nene, the geriatric floating wheelchair-bound villain, is intriguing, but not intriguing enough to make me feel good about fighting the exact same enemies over and over and over and over again to raise my stats.

Blue Dragon gave me a lot to gripe about, but after many hours, I'm still playing. It's the same impulse that makes me eat an entire bag of potato chips in one sitting. The action is repetitive. The chips don't get any more delicious the farther into the bag I get. Sinking so much time into it makes me fat and lazy. But there's still that weird compulsion to ignore all of that and keep eating.

Blue Dragon is the video game equivalent of a bag of chips: at first glance, it's a tasty treat wrapped in a shiny package. By the time you've finished, you'll have had zero fun and you'll be five pounds overweight to boot. Maybe there's more to be said for action and sports games after all?

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