'Budget price' review: Blue Dragon (Xbox 360)

Blue Dragon is a very traditional JRPG.

This is the first RPG I played on my 360. After a few hours of playing, the first impression I got was that the game felt a lot like Final Fantasy V, as to how the character development works. Just like in FF5, where you assign jobs for the characters to learn skills that you can equip for the character, in Blue Dragon you assign classes for the Shadow creature of each character, and can then equip certain number of skills learned from them at a time. The difference is that in Blue Dragon you can ultimately equip more skills, and many of the attack skills have a large area of effect, meaning that in later parts of the game, battles consist of nothing but attacks on all or half of the enemies. Basically, if you don't avoid random encounters, the characters will become so powerful that there's no challenge in the battles at all, down to the last bosses.

Another thing lacking a bit is the story. With the toy-ish and silly character and villain designs, the story doesn't feel serious until the latter half of the game. The monster designs are imaginative, but not very interesting.

Music is a mixed bag. Definitely not one of Uematsu's best compositions. Piano tunes were nice in the few places they happened.

Graphics look ok, though a bit too simple in some places for the current generation of consoles. Framerates dropped quite heavily in many battles too, probably because of the shadow creatures. Too much small detail in such simple designs, I guess.

Not an easy game to score gamer points in either. I finished the game with level 70 characters and had gotten less than 100 points. I sure hope maxing out some levels or shadow ranks will grant a lot more, because I doubt I'll be playing the game much more than that.

With the current low prices though, this is an ok purchase if you're not tired of JRPG's yet. Just be prepared for a very retro, old-school game, which feels like something from early 90's, with modern graphics.

Scoring:

Visuals: 8/10
Audio: 7/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Lasting value: 7/10

Overall: 7/10