Blue Dragon

The Blue Dragon experience started out well enough. In fact, I was enjoying myself more thant I had imagined I would. It was so incredibly beautiful and it jerked all the right JRPG strings.

The soundtrack is amazing, from start to finish. As are the graphics, and even though the art direction can be somewhat dull in some areas (like the Robot factories you visit, it’s all grey) it comes out looking really great. The monster design is spot on, and the cel-shading really does the trick.

Where the game is lacking, however, is in the story and dialogue department.

The dialogue - even with Japanese voices turned on (the English voices are truly horrible…) - feels out of place and down-right strange at several points during the game. So much so that I found myself giggling during several of the silly-cute cutscenes. Not because they were funny, mind you, but because the dialogue was so out-of-sync that the cutscene came out feeling like a strange joke.

The story starts out well enough. A group of kids live in a small, sheltered village that for some reason is plagued by something called a Land Shark. This time around, the group of kids are determined to capture and kill the evil thing. Naturally they fail miserably and become caught up in a plot where they ultimately have to save the world. We’ve seen it before and we’ve loved it before. It’s been done, and it’s a concept that usually works in Japanese RPGs. But not in this one. The story quickly turns into a big yawn and, quite frankly, the end pissed me off to such extent that I vowed never to play the game again.

It took me ~40 hours to play through the game and I got around 300 achievement points for it. I spent 5 or so hours trying to get some of the easier ones, but after that I simply gave up. The developer - Mistwalker - did something wrong with the achievements in this game.