Leveling Down

In Blue Dragon, the party members’ shadows perform the combat actions, not the little kids.

I haven’t completed Blue Dragon yet, but with almost 40 hours put into the game and being on the last of the three discs, I figured now was a good time to seriously evaluate the game. I’ve been enjoying the game for the most part – it has its share of annoyances but it plays well enough that I expect to easily be able to make my way through the game and get all the Achievements.

For those of you that enjoyed the classic role playing games (RPGs) that we grew up with on the SNES, you’ll find a similar charm here in Blue Dragon and I encourage you to read this review (and consequently get the game). But for those of you that don’t enjoy RPGs or started RPGs after they became more mainstream with Final Fantasy VII, Blue Dragon will most likely be a let down for you and I recommend skipping it.

Even though Nobuo Uematsu composed the music in this game, even he makes mistakes. The theme music whenever you fight a boss in this game is horrible – think Marvel vs. Capcom 2, but with vocals.

Intro
One of the main reasons that the original Xbox failed to thrive in Japan was due to its lack of Japanese RPGs. In a nation where camping out for the newest Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy is considered normal, Microsoft missed it when they had no unique Japanese RPGs of their own for the Xbox. Microsoft learned their lesson with the original Xbox, and has readied exclusive Japanese RPGs for the 360 console. Blue Dragon is the first.

Blue Dragon, developed by Artoon and Mistwalker and published by Microsoft, was a colossal team up of three of the most recognizable people in the Japanese RPG world: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Akira Toriyama, and Nobuo Uematsu. Sakaguchi was the creator of Final Fantasy and the director of the first five Final Fantasy games. Akira Toriyama was the creator of Dragon Ball and the character designer of the beloved Chrono Trigger and the Dragon Quest franchise. Nobuo Uematsu is the composer of the game soundtracks for Chrono Trigger and every console Final Fantasy to date (1 through 12). This was a serious team-up to appeal to the Japanese audience.

How did the game do? Famitsu, the most well-known game review magazine in Japan, gave it 37/40, 3 9′s and a 10 (they also just gave Halo 3 the same score). Blue Dragon sold a little over 80,000 units in its first four days of release in Japan to an install base of about 230,000 owners. Including people that bought 360s with Blue Dragon, that averaged out to about 1 out of every three Japanese 360 owners buying Blue Dragon. Rarely does any game sell that much to a console install base.

A demo was released for the game in late July and it was poorly received by the majority of the public. I think this was due to the fact that the demo had the player playing a stage more than halfway through the game with characters that were very strong already. This not only made the public lost and confused when trying out the demo, but it probably lost potential sales. I did not enjoy the demo myself and was even considering canceling my pre-order after I played it. Fortunately, the game itself turned out quite well. It would have been a much smarter decision to allow for the demo to show how the game begins, so the player gets eased into the world, so they are left wanting more by the end of the demo instead of trying to figure out what is going on and deciding not to buy the game due to its complications.

The U.S. reviews for the game vary considerably, from Gamespot’s 6.0 to Game Informer’s 9.0. The average score comes out to a high 7, but it looks like reviewers that disliked it or enjoyed it had the same reason: old school Japanese RPG gameplay. The reviewers that gave the game good scores were most likely people that enjoyed classic, old school JRPG games, while the reviewers that disliked the game were annoyed that the game seemed archaic and childish – where was the innovation for next-gen? There is a general agreement that the presentation was well polished – great aesthetics, sound, dialogue, and music, but the game was too simple for some reviewers while perfect for others.

Get used to this party of five kids – this is your group for the game.

Storyline and Premise of the Game
The storyline to Blue Dragon centers around a boy named Shu and his friends Jiro and Kluke. Each year their small town is attacked by a land shark, and one day the three of them lay forth a plan to defeat it to save their village. They go on to discover that the person responsible for the land shark attacks on their village is a man named Nene. Aboard Nene’s warship, they find themselves trapped by enemy robots before discovering small spheres of light. A mysterious female voice instructs them to swallow the spheres, which they reluctantly do. Upon swallowing the spheres, each of their shadows grows until it becomes a monster: Shu’s shadow becomes a blue dragon, Jiro’s a blue minotaur, and Kluke a blue phoenix.

The main villain of the game, Nene, is often accompanied by the robot General Szabo at his side.

From that point on, the trio learn to harness the power of their monster shadows for combat. They discover that Nene, the arch villain in the game, is actually causing all sorts of trouble in towns all over the world, so they spend time moving from town to town, saving each town’s residents while pursuing Nene in order to stop him for good. Along the way they pick up a cute little guy named Marumaro (which reminds me of a moogle or Tarutaru character in Final Fantasy XI) and a female mercenary named Zola, who both also have monster shadows of their own.

The game is a very typical JRPG. The easiest way for me to describe this game is to say that it’s like any of the Final Fantasy games from 1-6 (NES-SNES ones) but presentation has been souped up for our current console. It has top notch voice acting (English or Japanese dialogue with subtitles, thankfully!), music, graphics, and plenty of cutscenes throughout (game is on 3 DVD-9s, after all). Unlike other more recent RPGs though, the gameplay remains simple like the classic NES/SNES RPGs – simple story, mostly linear plot, simple RPG elements, etc. You basically go from a dungeon of some sort to a town, buy all the spell/gear upgrades in that town, and go on to the next dungeon. Repeat for 40 hours while throwing in lots of storyline and cut scenes, and you got yourself a classic JRPG! I personally find the story cute and charming. It may seem childish for the more Western audience, but this type of storyline tends to appeal a lot more to anime fans and JRPG gamers alike. Plus, there’s a certain level of nostalgia I have for the character design, as Chrono Trigger is my favorite JRPG of all time.

Each party member has his own shadow. Marumaro’s shadow is a sabertooth tiger.

Game Mechanics
Combat
The most important aspect of an RPG is its combat system. It better be fun, because that’s where a majority of your game time is spent. Thankfully, Blue Dragon’s combat system is refined enough from the classic RPGs that it is quite fun to play. First of all, there are no random monster encounters. Every enemy you see on the screen you can either avoid or engage. Games like Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2 annoyed me with their random monster encounters since every few steps you took you had to fight a monster. With all enemies being visible on screen, there are no annoying combat surprises in Blue Dragon.

At the top of the combat screen is a fight order so you can see whose turn is next.

With all enemies being visible in Blue Dragon, the developers took it one step further and even added refinement to how a battle opened based on how you engaged the enemy. If you attack an enemy from the front and he sees you, it will open with a normal combat order. But if you attack an enemy from behind, you can often get a Back Attack or a Surprise Attack, meaning when the battle begins the enemy is facing the wrong direction, allowing you to get in a free round of hits. Consequently, the same rules apply to you – if you get attacked from behind by an enemy in the field, the combat screen will begin most likely with the enemy getting a free round due to a Surprise Attack or all of your characters may be facing the opposite direction due to a Back Attack.

The combat itself focuses on the use of the character’s shadows. If a character chooses to attack or cast a spell, the shadow performs the action. But if the character uses an item or gets attacked by an enemy, the character takes on these motions. It’s easiest to just treat the shadow and the character as one, as there really is only one life bar and magic bar for each of the five characters in your party.

Blue Dragon has limit break summons like Final Fantasy VII, where you charge a meter to pull off a super attack with your shadow, doing lots of damage.

Leveling and Classes
Upon defeating an enemy, you earn three things: experience, gold, and SP. Experience points go towards leveling up the character, while gold is used to purchase things in town and SP is used to raise the level of a shadow’s currently equipped class. In Blue Dragon, there are a total of nine different classes that can be equipped by each shadow. As a shadow levels up an equipped class, it learns the skills for that class and the character can assign any learned skills to the shadow even after the shadow changes to a different class. This allows for a large amount of customization, as you can have characters that can cast white magic and steal items at the same time, provided that the shadow has learned those skills.

The nine class types for the Shadows in Blue Dragon are as follows:

1. Swordsman
All around average fighting class – general skills learned include Life Leech and Magic Leech.

2. Guardian
All around defensive class – general skills learned include 50% More HP and being able to take damage for other party members.

3. Monk
Melee class – skills learned include counterattacking hits and raising critical attack %.

4. Assassin
Thief class – skills learned include steal, attack while stealing, and double attack.

5. Black Mage
Offensive magic class – skills learned include elemental spells.

6. White Mage
Healing magic class – skills learned include healing party members.

7. Support Mage
Buff magic class – skills learned include spells that buff party like speed up and attack up.

8. Barrier Mage
Debuff magic class – skills learned include spells that debuff enemies like elemental resist down, etc.

9. Generalist
Skill/accessory slot upgrade class – skills learned include allowing you to equip more skills from other classes as well as more accessories for your character.

Zola is a little older than the rest of the group and starts out as an Assassin class. Of course, this can be changed if you wish.

For example, if I raised my Assassin class for one of my characters to level 30 and got the Mug ability, I could switch to a White Mage and begin learning healing spells but still equip the Mug ability on my character.

This amount of customization is both a blessing and a curse. I’ve always enjoyed Final Fantasy IV more so than VI because the characters were all distinct and played specific roles. One was a tank, one was a white mage, one was a black mage, etc. But in FFVI, there were no predefined classes for the characters – everyone could learn every skill so by the end of the game I had all my characters casting Ultima for 9999 everyone on the screen.

One can successfully create interesting hybrids with the five characters in Blue Dragon (i.e. Protector/White mage = Paladin, etc.) but what’s happening is that I’m finding a skill combination that is so effective that I’m subconsciously raising my characters to all be like that. I’m guessing by the end of the game I’ll have a whole party of the same type of character, much like my endgame party of ninjas in Final Fantasy Tactics. Still, it’s fun since I’m making my own character classes but it feels a little cheap that I can make them all the same way (i.e. have everyone learn life/magic leech, counterattack, mug, and double strike for every character and they just all become a bunch of hardcore bloodthirsty melee dudes).

The shooting mini-game is no Ace Combat, so when will RPG developers stop including these poorly done non-RPG mini-games into their games?

Minigames
There are also several different mini-games in the game. I’m not a fan of these mini-games, as many of them are either button mashing ones or shooting ones in a low class game engine that isn’t the best suited for it. Maybe some people enjoy them since they are a nice little break from the cycle of town, dungeon, cut scene, town, and so on, but I found them annoying. If I wanted to play a button mashing game or a shooter I would have bought one! Why force me to play those in this game?

Achievement System
I’ll just come right out and say it – Blue Dragon has the best Achievements of any RPG I’ve ever played on the 360. It may even contain the most well-thought out Achievements on the 360, but I also really like the Dead Rising ones so I am not going to nitpick there. The reason why the Blue Dragon Achievements are so good in this game is that they really are Achievements. There are no Achievements associated with simply going through the storyline like the other two RPGs on the system (Enchanted Arms and Oblivion). It’s possible to complete the first two discs and only have 2 Achievements completed (10 points total)! You can even go on and beat the entire game and still have only those 2 Achievements totaling 10 points.

The developers of Blue Dragon have really done a superb job in pushing the player to play more of the game. I seldom enjoy Achievements in a game that are simply handed to me as I play through it. I like when the Achievements encourage one to play more, or to try aspects of the game that are optional. Thus, a normal 40 hour game can suddenly become a fun 100+ hour game. That is value right there.

With Achievements based on defeating the hardest optional bosses in the game, finding the rarest items in the game, and maxing out all the characters and classes, this is a long game if you enjoy getting Achievements. I tend to play through games based on how the Achievements are awarded, as I believe that is how the developers want you to experience the game. Looks like the developers want me to totally conquer Blue Dragon instead of just half-assing my way through it. I am not complaining at all and am glad that they are rewarding me for my efforts. I just wish there weren’t any Achievements based on the mini-games as I had to button mash in agony on some of those for much longer than I wanted to. But then again, I wish there were no mini-games in general so I guess my beef is more with the inclusion of mini-games than the Achievements related to them.

My wife asked me if Marumaro ever opens his eyes. Nope. That’s why he’s so cute!

Final Thoughts
I’m a fan of classic JRPGs. When I go on trips, I tend to break out an older Final Fantasy to go through, as the gameplay is still fun and easy to comprehend for me unlike more traditional JRPGs (FFX’s Sphere grid anyone?). Thus, with Blue Dragon containing the simple JRPG game play that I love along with the removal of the one JRPG element I hate (random battles), how could I not like this game? The presentation is top notch and the Achievements are well thought out. However, the storyline is a little cliche and childish while the minigames were sometimes just plain frustrating.

I give this game a B. This is more of a “niche” titles that non-fans would most likely not enjoy. At the end of the day, the score for such a game will differ from person to person based on how much they enjoy classic JRPGs, but if you enjoy them, your expectations will be met. If you’re a completionist, this game will last you for a very long time without necessarily causing much frustration. It doesn’t have the epic feel or magnitude of Final Fantasy games, but it is charming in its own way.

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