When you hear a Japanese development house consisting of Hironobu
Sakaguchi (creator of the Final Fantasy series), Nobuo Uematsu
(composer behind the most memorable Final Fantasy orchestral
scores), and Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball and
illustrator behind the Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior series) is
creating an epic role-playing game for the Xbox 360, you might expect
the kind of intensely creative, amazingly impressive work attributed to
musical supergroups like Broken Social Scene or the Breeders. Sadly,
Blue Dragon, the first game from Mistwalker—the supergroup
development house in question—is something closer to Velvet
Revolver: solid, yet intensely derivative.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The game looks and sounds
stunning. Unfortunately, while Uematsu and Toriyama can sleepwalk past
the work of their contemporaries, Sakaguchi seems to have phoned the
entire story in. If you’ve ever played any of the Final Fantasy games, you’ve already been through Blue Dragon‘s story, and
telling you that it’s an epic quest to take revenge would be the kind
of redundancy only equaled by my referencing said redundancy within the
sentence I’m currently writing.
Sakaguchi somewhat redeems himself with the design of the combat
system, however. While it never treads unfamiliar ground, it seems to
be a quality amalgam of previous battle systems used during the last
decade of Final Fantasy titles. It might seem a bit daunting to
beginners, but anyone who has played a game like this before will pick
it up almost instantly—and once learned, it provides a clever,
entertaining alternative to the traditional “Fight-Item-Magic” menu box
system.
Ultimately, if you own an Xbox 360 and enjoy Japanese-style
role-playing games, you will buy this game. It’s simply the only viable
title within the genre available for the system—and while it
didn’t sway the entirety of Japan to the Xbox 360’s side upon its
release, Blue Dragon should provide a good month of
entertainment for anyone with the patience to ignore its lack of
originality.