Blue Dragon

August 31,2007 - When Mistwalker first unveiled Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey for the Xbox 360, heads were immediately turned. Not only was it strange having Japanese styled role playing games as front-and-center Microsoft-published releases, but also Mistwalker as a company was comprised of legends in their respective field. It was the creative force behind Chrono Trigger, the Super NES’ masterpiece that would be heading up development on Blue Dragon. Now after a long wait, it’s finally here. To put it simply, given the team’s talent and prestige, this is not the game they should have put out by any stretch of the imagination. This game feels so archaic and so uninspired that it would even be curious if a first time developer released something along these lines. Pretty graphics and high end production values don’t save this boring, clichéd RPG.

Blue Dragon has you play as Shu, a rather typical young leading character with a silly ponytail. He looks about five years old, but he’s probably closer to fifteen. You never really learn much about him, or any of his comrades as there isn’t any real character development throughout most of the game. Most of the time you’ll just see Shu yelling about how he won’t let Nene, the main enemy, get the best of him in this uneventful story. He won’t ever give up, or at least that’s what he says. If he were playing the game, however, that might be another story.

The other four characters are rather forgettable, to say the least. The only two that add anything to the story besides Shu are Marumaru and Zola. Marumaru is this funny looking rat-feline creature with an obnoxious screech for a voice. While he starts out as being annoying, he starts to grow on you rather quickly as he’s one of the only interesting things in the game. Zola, on the other hand, is an older character—by comparison to the rest of the kids—and she plays the sultry vixen that adds at least a little maturity to the team. The other two characters are Jiro and Kluke. They’re Shu’s friends from his village and they’re pretty uninteresting as a whole.

Storyline is easily Blue Dragon’s biggest flaw. It basically doesn’t have one; or at least one that you’ll even remotely care about. The game starts where your village is getting attacked by something called the land shark. It’s destroying the buildings in your village and apparently this is an annual thing so all the town’s folk are scared out of their minds by the thing. Shu and Jiro decide to end it once and for all, so they pick a fight with it, and Kluke eventually joins in on the fun. The three of them sort of defeat it but then find out it’s this ancient robot being controlled by this goblin named Nene with mystical powers. He’s also got a creature sitting on his shoulder repeating everything he says, much like the one on Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. Anyway, nothing really happens in the story for the large majority of the game and you’ll mostly just find yourself traversing different dungeons and landscapes fighting monsters and the like. The story ultimately picks up much later on in the game but that will only be rewarding to those of us who actually got that far before turning it off.

Now to be fair, Blue Dragon is by no means a bad game, it’s just simply unremarkable. There are some places where the game actually shines to some degree. For one, its control on the battlefield is rather inventive and adds a certain degree of strategy to going into combat. While it still plays with the standard turn-based menu system, you actually have the ability to set up different combat structures right before you get into a fight. For example, you can set up a monster fight which would be you combining two different enemy groups on screen into one battle. The best example of this early on in the game is when you are traveling through a turf war between fire and ice wolves. The clearly despise each other, so if you can get them in on the same battle, they’ll mostly take care of themselves in the fight so you can finish them off while they’re weak and collect the experience. It’s actually a really nifty system. Other than that you can also have different field abilities, such as attracting enemies to you, hitting them with back attacks, or something of the like to turn the fights in your favor.

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