I was really looking forward to this game to see what my hero, good old Sakaguchi, could do starting from scratch. Sadly, I was put off by the poor presentation and lack of balance to the dungeon crawling. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy a good dungeon crawl, but when you can see the same rock on your screen for going on 40 minutes and you’ve only been in 3 battles with the only 3 monsters you are going to encounter for the next couple hours it starts to lose it’s charm.
The game lacks variety. But not only that; it lacks appeal to the small bit of variety it actually has. The characters’ personalities are flat and drab–The main character, Shu, reminded me of Naruto with his constant repetition of the phrase, “I won’t give upâ€. The metaphorical intentions of the characters’ personality styles are beaten to death and then beaten a little more just for good measure. It’s not a good sign when you despise every character you’ve encountered before you’ve even made it an hour into the game.
I found that the graphics were very lacking for a next-gen game. Maybe I’m just spoiled by Bioshock–but’s that’s a topic for another post. The maps all felt so barren and empty aside from over 9000 of the same 3 monsters wandering around off in the distance. When you happened to catch the attention of one of these odd creatures, you would swear to your name was an acid trip hallucination, you are hurled into a battle of not-so-epic proportions as you use the exact same move over and over again with every character. You can earn skills from every class, so no need to specialize; every character can have the exact same menu options. It kind of defeats the concept of strategy when you don’t need to wait for your healer to cast Cure on the party. I also was somewhat turned off by the blatant overuse of distance blurring; there was so much distance blurring in that game I felt like they were trying to hide the fact that there actually wasn’t anything at all of interest in the background–apparently it didn’t work.
I tried normal mode expecting a bit of challenge here and there but not nearly to the extent of hard mode…yeah, wrong choice. I took nearly 2 hours to reach the first sign of civilization after being dragged away from my town at the beginning of the game. I thought that was plenty enough training to advance to the next area, but alas; I was wrong. 20 seconds into the first battle past the Sheep Tribe camp I had my precious behind handed to me by some goofy looking lizard that looked like he just broke out of Disneyland. I trained for another hour and managed to get through the next area alive, albeit out of any sort of healing items, to find myself all alone in a big desert on the world map.
I wandered around for a short while and was fortunate enough to find some odd looking drill…vehicle…thing…I thought perhaps I was saved and could take a nice leisurely short cut home, maybe get some more healing items. No, I guess that was too much to ask; I’m now trapped on a runaway drilling watchamacallit–can’t go back because I’m somewhere underground where the escape hatch is no doubt blocked by a boulder and I can’t go forward because, who would’ve guessed, I have a boss fight to do now…a boss fight with a boss that wipes out my entire party in 3 hits…and he gets 3 turns before I do. Yup, odds are ever so much in my favour.
Perhaps I should reload my game and go train some more before getting on this drill of death. But wait–there was a save point I saved at after I boarded this obnoxious vessel…there is not enough facepalm image macros on the entire internet to properly express my realization at this point. But lucky me! I’m smart enough to keep ten different saves in case something unforeseen happens to occur. If you give this game a try be sure to keep several saves to save you the trouble of having to start the entire game over again 4 hours into the game. As much as it is good practice to keep multiple saves it shouldn’t be necessary in a properly play-tested game.
I feel this game is really only suited to children with way too much time on their hands and too shallow an understanding of life to properly enjoy many of the more complex modern RPGs. The game just feels far too simple-minded and mediocre to be at all engaging–I’d almost rather play Beyond The Beyond…almost.
If you really insist, you can order Blue Dragon online at Play-Asia. You could, perhaps get the soundtrack to the game; it’s actually quite good. Too bad it didn’t save the rest of the game from disaster.
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