Blue Dragon (360)

[Winnow]

Apparently Blue Dragon has been available for about a week but I didn't realize that the PAL version was region free so I could play it.

I grabbed the first DVD to check it out and sure enough it works fine. One advantage over the version that will be sold in the U.S. is that the PAL Multi version gives you the option of hearing the voice acting in English, French or Japanese. I think the U.S. release will be English only. After hearing a bit of the voice acting, I most likely will be switching to Japanese voices although out of laziness of not wanting to read subtitles, it's not a for sure thing.

I only played long enough to get through the opening and kill a single "poo snake". It's a complete 180 from Bioshock. I think it will be a nice change of pace after Bioshock is complete.

I don't know what the demo covered but I had to kill a "land shark" to open up the game. I tried to readjust to the cartoony graphics. As Stragi said somewhere else, if you can deal with the toony look of things, it should be a fun game. As with all Japanese RPGs, I can tell there's a lot of text clicking that's going to take place (not as bad as Enchanted Arms though)

The menus, etc all are very well done but you saw that on the demo. I'm going to need a game like this after Bioshock. As long as things get a little more challenging than the first Poo Snake, I'll be enjoying the game for the next few months off and on mixed in with all the other great games (for the 360/PC) being released leading up to the holidays.

The reviews for it are right on the money. It looks to be a solid FF type RPG but nothing earth shattering beyond that. Since there's no other game like that out for the 360 or PS3 (and won't be for the PS3 for half a year or more), it should make most peeps happy!

[Fash]

While YMMV, I tried the demo and have zero interest in this. totally lame.

[Boogahz]

YYMV

?

[Fash]

sorry, ymmv, your mileage may vary.

[Somali]

I can't get by the DBZ characters. The graphics annoy the crap out of me.

[Funkmasterr]

I can get by the graphics, the game seems like a lot of fun to me from the demo. I also liked Eternal Sonata, it reminded me of Tales of Symphonia for the game cube which I liked a lot.

[Winnow]

Played Blue Dragon tonight instead of Bioshock because I was a little under the weather and don't think my stomach could have handled the intense atmosphere of Rapture.

I've played about two hours now. Some observations: (written quickly so typos and grammar chaos a'plenty I'm sure)

-The intro to this game is horrible IMO. You kind of get thrown into a scripted scene with no abilities when you do get to do something in battle. The opening scene graphics are also sub par for the overall quality of graphics for the entire game. IMO, this makes for an unnecessarily bad first impression of the game (or not as good as it could be)

-Help screens don't pop up in the game until about 45 minutes into it. So, while you can't really do anything in the beginning besides hit "attack", you do gain some skills that you could use... items, etc that aren't explained to you for another 30 minutes. I'm guessing the designers didn't want to throw a lot of info at the beginning of the game but it leaves you with a kind of, "is this a game for six year olds?" feeling.

-To add to the feeling that you (initially) may have wasted your money, the first mobs are "Poo Snakes". Now, one nice thing about BD is the Creature Compendium. If one of your characters uses it on a mob during combat, that mob's basic abilities and weaknesses get added to your book of knowledge. The thing that bothered me somewhat is that you can't see how many HPs your opponent has left or even a health bar for mobs. You'll have to rely on your memory of which mobs have been taking damage during the fight and now many hps a mob can take from previous encounters.

-The designers very well may have a scat fetish as along with the Poo Snakes, when you defeat an enemy, their loot drops in the form of a pile of shit (poo).

From Creature Compendium:

Poo Snake:

Monsters created when a parasite starts living in lizard poo. Weakest of all creatures of this kind. But be careful, they sometimes summon their friends.

When loot drops (looks like pile of shit):

"There is a small poo on the ground. Search it?"
<yes>
"Squish squish"
Gold 18

o.O

So, you're fighting poo mobs and searching through all types of mob's piles of poo to find your loot. I guess they had a sense of humor in that area.

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-The game picks up when you finally learn about skills, shadows, accessories, etc

-The attack bar in battle is interesting for spells. You have a power up bar that lists out the other party members and mobs in the fight. You hit "A" to start the powerbar (which moves quickly), if you release A fast, you cast your spell right away. If you hold A longer, you start to pass the other players in the attack bar's time line...what this does is delay your spell from casting until after that mobs and players that you pass get their turn, but the attack becomes more powerful. There is also a little "critical" area on the bar which, if you release accurately enough, will result in a crit attack. That's kinda nice addition to attacks in the FF fomat of battle.

-Far as I can tell (so far) there are three major areas of skills. Magic Sword, Black Magic and White Magic. You can assign these skills to your characters to shape their powers. Your healer, white magic, wizard (black magic) etc. You can change swap these around easily so you don't have to stress too much about it but do want to have your characters set up before going into battle. (accessories may be echanged easily between players as well.

-each of your characters also has a shadow creature which can be assigned these bacic abilities as well. Specialized skills can be added to the three general skills (an early one for Magic Sword is mob sweep which hits all mobs in the front row).

-Each player has four accessory slots, ear, ring, neck and something else. ability enhancing items may be placed in these slots.

-Like FF, you run around the world and when you encounter mobs, you enter into a battle screen. BD has "field skills" which allow you to use certain abilities before entering combat. I don't have any yet so don't know what they do.

-Monster Battles are another cool addition to the FF battle system. While running around, you can pull the right trigger to show a "battle radius" or something like that. Mobs within that radius may be attacked..either individually or alll mobs at once. Attacking multiple groups of mobs at once can be beneficial as certain mobs naturally hate each other and will attack each other instead of your party. Some cricket type mobs were attacking the poo snakes instead of me for example) You learn these traits from using the creature compendium skill.

-I ended the night at a village. There are merchantt for general items, skills, accessories and also Inns where you can pay some gold and recover some mana and hps.

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This game is three DVDs long because there seems to be a buttload of cut scenes. With all these cut scenes, it they would have used Fran (the Rabbit Women from FFXII) instead of some cartoony chick, this game would be rated much higher for the pure visual entertainment and eye candy for all the cut scenes. As it stands, they're interesting but I find myself just trying to get a panty shot which is never going to happen in this game.

My advice to people that buy Blue Dragon is to not panic when it doesn't seem like a whole lot is going on and all you see are a bunch of cross-eyed cartoon people in the initial opening scene. It takes a good hour before things get rolling along and maybe 1.5 hours before you may have to actually plan out a battle against a mob that won't drop in a single hit.

I ended up sticking with the english voices. It's not so bad. With the 40-50 hours of game play, I think this will be a good game to pick up and play off and on while also playing other games. It has the feel of watching an animated movie with some participation from you. I'd kill to have an FF game with this many cut scenes with normal looking toons but it's still is entertaining. I hope it gets a little more challenging as the game progresses.

[Winnow]

I'm still recovering from slight food poisoning or something so opted for more Blue Dragon tonight over Bioshock.

About four hours into it, I can confirm that the mobs do get toughter to fight and some strategy is needed. Stick with it through the first few hours of pretty easy gameplay. More skills, etc are introduced which begin to make it more entertaining. I still think Blue Dragon is doing itself a disservice by how it presents the opening hour(s) of the game. About three hours in, the game finally explained the attack, power up bar..it's also possible all of this info is in a nice manual that comes with the game! Don't know!....although most good games these days have built in tutorials that get you rolling along.

Search everything. There are traditional chests, but wierd stuff is also searchable. You'll see some pipes or a guage on the wall that would be a decoration in any other game but you can search it in BD and find loot...useful loot as potions, etc are very helpful in battle.

My first Boss fight was kinda fun. Rock music starts playing (lyrics and all) when you enter a boss fight. Besides being able to research mobs to find their weaknesses, you'll sometimes see visual indicators of weakspots on mobs and during the course of the battle, can figure them out, hopfully in time to take them down before your party is wiped out.

I have to mention another scat fetish theme in the game. A Giant Rat mob I was fighting farted and another giant rat appeared. Some strange "shit" going on in this game!

Another way to rate games is just like movies. This game is a great Sunday evening game...or beginning of the week game...it's leasurly paced. Bioshock is a prime time blockbuster Friday and Saturday night game that you play when it's "go time". It demands and deserves your full attention.

[Winnow]

You've got to give this one some time.

Seven hours in and the entertainment value has been improving steadily.

The characters are more customizable than they at first appear. It's nothing spectacular but does get more interesting. It still involves lots of fights as do the FF series games. It won't tax your brain too much but is worth it if you like FF type games.

I'm still on first DVD and haven't been asked to switch to the other to DVD's for any reason yet. If you have to switch DVD's once every 20 hours of game play, I don't think too many people are going to be worried about multiple DVDs. There are 28 warp stations in the game though so possibly as the game progresses, there may be a reason to jump back a DVD to a warp station but I won't know that for awhile. Also, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that after you finish the game, there is a random dungeon generator in the game to extend the game's playtime even more.

Kluke is my favorite. I tend to favor the spellcasters in these type games that can drop the big bomb DD on enemies. One thing to know is that although Shu's shadow defaults to sword mastery, Jiro to white magic, and Kluke to Black Magic, you can mix them all up right away or make them all one type...there are also about ten total shadow types of which I've unlocked maybe six so far...support, assassin, etc. The shadow skills increase separately for each character depending on which shadow they're using in combat. Outside of combat, you may switch someone's shadow powers at will. I've kept Kluke and Shu with their defaults but am leveling up Jiro in Support shadow instead of white magic. I think for the most part that you'll want to keep characters using the same shadows to build them up but the support shadow seemed more useful than a dedicated healer as support can use level one and two white magic spells anyway.

Anyways, expect 3 hours before tutorials kick in and about six hours of game play before things are more varied in the battles. Since the game is 50-60 hours long, that's not a big deal except for a slightly bad first impression (IMO).