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| A review of: Blue Dragon Plus by: Erila |
| Platform: Nintendo DS | Publisher: Ignition |
| Rating: 7.0/10 |
Blue Dragon Plus is a Nintendo DS game set in the Blue Dragon universe — which may be familiar to you from the anime series and the Xbox 360 RPG.
Blue Dragon Plus continues the story of the original Blue Dragon RPG, and contains all of the important original characters, including Shu, Marumaro, Jiro, Kluke, and Zola.
The game starts you off with just the main characters, and there is a rather long 'tutorial' where you are taken from encounter to encounter to learn the basics of fighting. After this introduction, the game opens up and feels more like a traditional RPG.
The story begins on the cube that you may recognize from the end of the original RPG. There are several threats to the cube — including mecha robos equipped with bombs, and a dragon called Balaur.
In the introduction, you are controlling just one party, but as time goes on the party splits up into several groups, and more characters join the adventure. You end up managing quite a large number of characters and their associated skills and equipment. Party balance becomes quite important.
In Blue Dragon Plus, almost every character can control a shadow. This makes the initial encounters (probably about the first five hours or so ) very simple. Once you get to having four separate parties, some of the encounters do become more challenging, depending on the makeup of each party.
Money comes in pretty quickly — which is a good thing, as you may find you need to spend a fair amount on items and medicines to keep certain parties alive.
The story is enjoyable, for the most part. Some of the characters are rather annoying, but they're annoying in the cartoon and the console RPG too. The plot actually has some interesting and surprising moments. The story advances through cutscenes — which are spectacular, and dialogue segments which are presented in-game.
The core of the game consists of moving your party around the map of the cube. The overall map appears on one screen of the DS, while a view of the party you currently have selected appears on the other screen. You can scout out sectors before you move, giving you some ability to avoid combat, but there are occasions when enemies in a sector adjacent to one of your parties will move to attack you, and you will be forced to fight. You can also choose to move into a sector with enemies and attack them, or move to a friendly area to shop and pick up quests.
Unlike the original Blue Dragon, combat takes place in real time. You tap a party member to select them, or you can select all units by tapping the 'all' icon on the screen. You can also draw a line around the units you wish to select, RTS style. You then issue an order — such as walk to a certain point, or attack a certain unit, by tapping on the screen in the relevant place.
The issue with the control system is that once you've tapped on the screen, the units become deselected. This gets very annoying when you’re moving long distances, especially since the pathing system is rather erratic. I found that most of the time the pathing problems were manageable, but despite paying close attention to all the characters, I still found some occasions where a character would walk off in the wrong direction and attract the attention of a group of monsters when the rest of the party was almost at another big fight. Situations like that are usually recoverable from, but they are still frustrating.
Each character has a wide selection of skills, but selecting the characters to activate the skills is a cumbersome process, and many of the skills have a three or four second animation which pauses combat while it is playing, breaking the immersion somewhat.
Shadow combat involves rubbing the stylus back and forth across the screen to make your Shadow grow more powerful than the enemy's. Since Shadows (a form of ‘summon’ which was considered rare and powerful in the original Blue Dragon) are so common in Blue Dragon Plus, this is an important technique to learn.
I think the combat could have been improved if some of the second screen was used to display information about your party member's health and states, rather than being entirely devoted to displaying the map.
The graphics are very good — both in the cutscenes, and in the game itself. The story is well-told, and as I said earlier actually has a few interesting moments to it. The characters remain true to their original personalities, and the audio is well done too, with combat scores you will recognize from the console game.
If you are a fan of the first game or the cartoon, then Blue Dragon Plus is certainly worth a look. It's also worth a look if you're looking for an RTS/RPG hybrid. The game is supposed to take around 30 hours to complete, and while the combat does get repetitive if you’re playing the game for an extended period of time, the bite-sized mission encounters are perfect for a little lunch break play.
Overall, I think the game is a solid attempt at an RPG with real time combat. The control system lets it down a little, but if they can refine the combat controls for any sequels, I’ll be quite eager to check them out.
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