Blue Dragon

The other game I've been playing recently is Blue Dragon. Blue Dragon is a JRPG and in some ways, it is very similar to Final Fantasy (For example, the main character is another spikey haired teenager who has more guts than sense :p ). I guess this shouldn't be surprising as the creator was the guy who also originally created FF.

The art style is also very good. The game uses lots of bright colors and almost looks like an animated feature. In fact, its almost like watching a cartoon at times especially when you watch a cutscene. Again, this isn't be too surprising when you consider that the lead artist was Toriyama (the guy who did the Dragonball series).

The gameplay is, for lack of a better description, almost copied from FF. Your characters have jobs (Black magic, white magic etc) and skills and you can level them up however you like. However, one area that Blue Dragon is very good at (and bear in mind that the last FF game I played was FFX) is that there are no random battles.

One of the most annoying features of FF is the random battles. Sometimes, you just wanna get somewhere quickly (for example to progress the story or to save the game) and you keep getting interrupted by random battles. Fricking annoying and one of the main reasons why I don't whole heartedly endorse the FF games. However, in Blue Dragon, you get random monsters - but they show up on the map and if you don't want to, you can just run past them without engaging them.

Anyway, I've only played around 15 hours so far (which isn't much considering the game comes on 3 DVDs!) so I can't give a definitive impression yet. For example, my party isn't even complete yet (I know there is another girl still to join the party). Having said that, my initial impressions are very positive.

The game looks good. The story seems quite interesting so far (I'll elaborate more on this in a later post) and the gameplay is quite fun. So far - thumbs up!