Blue Dragon player blog Xbox 360 Question

Ok everyone, starting here is the first sections of the blog. I will move this to PSU.com if the opertunity becomes available.

Spoiler material is contained within spoiler tags.
In addition, this is broken up into the top of the thread being focused on NON-Spoiler content, with the matching Spoiler content below.

The spoiler content is not a walkthrough of the story. It does contain some extra details concerning how far into the game you acquire extra characters and stuff which some people would rather not be privy to.

One last side note before the meet of the topic, for those wondering, BLUE DRAGON is NOT region free. You currently have to own an Asian Xbox360 to play the game.

DECEMBER 8th, 2006 - NON SPOILER CONTENT

Spoiler:

So, first two hours of Blue Dragon.

I like it. A lot.

My liking of the game is not even significantly diminished by the fact I accidentally started playing it under the wrong profile and had to restart after putting 2-3 hours in. Okay, so some of the parts weren’t AS great the second time, and the earlier battles aren’t as fun, before you get the shadows, but I enjoyed watching the plot again.

Let’s start with the graphics, because that’s the first thing anyone notices when they start the game. It’s pretty. While some have complained that the models aren’t detailed enough, they do have subtle details (like the shading on Shu’s shorts) which help set them off. And they’re smooth and clean. It holds together, a good representation of Akira Toriyama’s designs, though not so faithful that those who dislike Dragon Ball Z would find it a chore to play. Yes, the basic drawings have Toriyama’s style, but the rendered versions are softer. The only problems I’ve noticed are some distortion on the larger fonts, mainly in the definition of the outlines, and frame rate issues. This isn’t running at 60fps everywhere. I would judge it at 30fps or higher for most of the gameplay, dropping down to 20-25fps during rendering of some spell effects. There’s some minor tearing in some of the FMV, but overall these aren’t going to be problems unless you are either trying to nitpick the graphics, or if you’re one of those unfortunate people who are excessively sensitive to video problems. I was looking for them.

Characters and Plot. The characters are a little clich? so far, but definitely not as bad as Enchanted Arms, and, at least to me, are very likeable. Clich? also isn’t uncommon in the first parts of a story – writers often call upon stereotypes to give the reader a broad sketch of the character with which they can identify, and differentiate them later. I’m expecting them to grow significantly as the story progresses, given what I’ve seen in some of the trailers that have been released. As for the plot, I will say that I don’t think I’ve seen this exact story done so far, which is promising. The characters are operating under understandable principles – there’s no arbitrary ‘get you acquainted with the game system’ dungeon or pre-plot. You’re treated directly to the meat of it. Further details will be gone into in the spoileriffic version.

Battle system. Okay, this is a turn-based battle system. I can hear the back button clicking for some of you; I’ve seen the complaints. They have gone to an effort to differentiate it. There are two types of actions during combat – normal actions, and charge actions. Normal actions behave exactly like most turn based RPGs. You select the action, select the target, and the action goes off. When you use a charge action, after selecting the target, a bar is displayed at the top of the screen. This bar may contain lines that identify the expected action times for player characters and enemies (sometimes it’s blank, if no one is going to be acting any time soon). It also has an orange area, called the Sweet Spot, which appears to vary by skill. (Yes, that’s its official name.) Once this bar appears, you press and hold the A button, at which point the gauge starts filling and emptying. The simple rule is that further to the far edge you get, the more power to the attack.

However.

Those lines that identify PCs and enemies? Any line behind the point you’ve filled to means that character or enemy gets to go before your action goes off. So, you could be forced to consider a tradeoff – do you want to let that enemy get its attack off and be sure to kill it? Or would it be better to take the chance and go with a less powerful attack? Then there’s the Sweet Spot. Hitting the Sweet Spot can result in a lower magic point expenditure or faster turnaround for your next turn. It’s not always at the end of the bar (though it may be). So you have to juggle these three factors: power, speed, and bonuses. Also, the bar isn’t trivial to hit where you want it to go. I believe I’ve seen it go at a steady velocity, possibly while casting Heal, but every black magic spell I’ve tried accelerates as it gets closer to the end, making it harder to be precise.

One final option, which may be obvious, but which they call out anyways, is that you can hit and release the A button immediately. In that case, you’ve missed the chance to power up your attack and get some extras, but if you really need that heal now and the enemy is only a few pixels into the charge bar, you’ll get your low powered heal. By the way, the effect of the charge bar is significant – I’ve seen the power of a spell double by hitting somewhere around halfway down the bar.

Oh, and one other thing – at least so far, you can use magic frequently in this game. One of the earlier skills you unlock in the Black Category is an MP regen as you walk. Maybe you don’t want to blow off more than a couple of spells during a single battle, but otherwise, your MP drain is going to be low to non-existent. The power of spells is fairly high. Mage is a viable class.

Another interesting system which you can use is the Encounter system. While walking around, you can bring up an Encounter Circle by pressing the RT. This displays all the enemies in your immediate area. You can either initiate a battle with one of them, or a few of them, or all of them. If you initiate a battle with multiple types of enemies, those enemies may dislike each other and you may find one of them eating the weaker creatures instead of beating up on you – this is called Monster’s Fight. If they’re all of the same type, or don’t care about each other, you’ll instead get into a series of battles, one for each monster you decided to fight. Okay, so why would you do this when you know the monsters aren’t going to kill each other? At the end of each battle in the series you complete, there’s a short roulette which gives you a benefit that lasts until all the battles are finished. These benefits are very useful. It can be tricky getting several enemies into an Encounter Circle, though – it’s mainly a matter of luck and recognizing the opportunities when they come.

So, those are two of the big innovations. They add variety into the battles – the Charge bar in particular reminds me a little of Shadow Hearts, though Blue Dragon isn’t as dependent on it.

Job system. A big selling point for this game, if you were expecting the job system from Final Fantasy Tactics, you will be disappointed. However, it’s not bad, it’s easy to pick up, and they don’t insist on keeping all the cool skills until the end (see MP refresh as you walk mentioned above, which is the second Black skill). Rank Ups are frequent, though you won’t get a new skill on every Rank Up. (I do believe every Rank Up positively affects your stats while you have that Category equipped.) I’m not certain what drives the unleashing of new Categories (you start with Sword, Black and White), but it may be level based or rank based. As you unleash a new Category, you may select ANY Category from the ~10 available. However, Category Unleashing is character specific. If you unleash Armor on Shu as your first unleash, and Barrier on Jiro, Shu will now have Sword, Black, White and Armor, and Jiro will have Sword, Black, White, and Barrier. Skill equips work very similarly to most job systems, where you can equip a limited number of skills that you’ve learned in addition to the default skill from your current Category. One interesting thing is that you can acquire more slots as the game progresses.

Music. The fact that Nobuo Uematsu is doing the music for this game is much touted. After hearing perhaps ten of the pieces of the game, I have to admit it’s a bit hit or miss. The theme song is gorgeous, and I like the battle theme a lot, but don’t expect that the soundtrack is going to be filled with all hits, all the time. One of the songs made me smile because it sounds very much like a song from Final Fantasy – and when I say this, I don’t mean that it ‘feels’ like a Final Fantasy song, which would be expected since it’s the same composer. I mean a particular song, but definitely not one of the key songs like the Prelude or the Crystal Theme. Overall, however, there have only been two songs which I disliked – one because it felt a bit too repetitive, but which thankfully was played only over a fairly short sequence, and the other of which because it happened to hit a note which I think is a bit too high for my ears.

Extras. Positive or negative, it’s beneficial to investigate everything in the world, and I mean everything. Loose change, items, and even stat ups are hidden under rocks, between tree roots, and in the ubiquitous crates, barrels, and boxes that no RPG NPC seems to care if you loot. This is in addition to the traditional treasure boxes. And this doesn’t just apply to the first town, as far as I can tell. I’ve found myself canvassing every single inch of every map trying to get the goodies.

It just feels like a good game, overall.

DECEMBER 10th, 2006 - NON SPOILER CONTENT

Spoiler:

Six hours in. You can probably take the fact I was supposed to be doing this around every two hours as a hint that perhaps I got caught up in the game.

Overall, the game isn’t that difficult, especially if you’re wandering around and beating up on every poor monster in sight. (This is my approach.) The dungeons feel a good length, though they can take a significant length of time if you decide to search everything in the area. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve thought ‘could I just make a Search check for the entire room?’ But the benefits are significant if you find the good items. It appears that it’s not random (I’d love to see that table, as there are on the order of a hundred searchable objects in each dungeon), so you’ll be able to use a strategy guide to find the important things if that’s your preference.

Cutscenes are frequent but not annoying. The only annoying part about cutscenes I’ve found so far is that either each cutscene appears to be broken up into several different pieces, meaning you can get strange pauses when it’s trying to load up the next part, or it’s just having trouble maintaining a sufficient buffer to ensure smooth playback. I’d say it would take significant coincidence for the breaks to happen to be placed so that they feel more like short scenes than blatant screw-ups, so I bet it’s the first.

I’m not entirely sure whether their intention is for you to frequently switch Categories to keep them roughly even, or not. Switching to a brand new Category can be a bit frustrating, as you lose any inherent stat bonuses your rank in a leveled Category confers. For example, when I first switched Shu from Sword to Monk, his damage suffered since his Sword was somewhere around R8-10, and thus conferred a significant benefit to his attack power. Monk can hold its own in attack power, but it was at R1 to start, and Monk R1 vs. Sword R8 wasn’t even a contest. However, ranking up a low-ranked Category is fast – it only takes 2 SP to get to the next rank. Of course, six hours in and I’m still only getting 2-3 SP per battle, so around R4-5 you’re starting to get into the field of grinding (…or just letting the Category rank while you’re wandering around the dungeon searching for all the items… ).

Achievements aren’t trivial – I’ve been playing for 6 hours, and still only 10GS. Unlike Enchanted Arms, Blue Dragon’s gamerscore is primarily linked to succeeding at the game system – the first two (not secret) are “Successfully Back Attack (First time)” and “Successfully initiate a simultaneous encounter (First time)”. There are 18 secret achievements which may be story related, but four of them are likely extensions of others that are hidden for plot reasons.

DECEMBER 11th, 2006 - NON-SPOILER CONTENT

Spoiler:

…I’m still on the first disc, by the way. 12 hours in?

So, it turns out that filling the charge bar can have additional effects aside from power – a maxed or nearly maxed charge bar can have special effects, such as hitting a group of enemies instead of one, etc. Note: this doesn’t work for everything, it’s dependent on the spell in question.

The game is getting harder. Some of the enemies have hit for over half of the hit points on my mages – one of them died for the first time. Correctly using Monster’s Fight is becoming more important. There’s usually an appropriate monster near the difficult ones (or something else you can do to make the battle easier), but if there is a Monster’s Fight option, you may need to be quick footed or creative on the pull. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve pushed for a Monster’s Fight only to get nailed from behind by the Monster I was pulling. It’s not uncommon to be faced with a crowd of monsters who have huge defense.

Actually, thinking about it, they’ve been steadily ramping up the strategy. Many of the enemies require some attention to detail, either an elemental weakness, where applying that element directly causes more damage, or an elemental effect, where casting a particular spell type may make the enemy more vulnerable. Enemies can charge attacks as well, and it’s apparent when they’re doing so. Sometimes you can break their charge by applying a correct magic spell or by deciding to strike a separate point on the monster. They aren’t hard, or exceptionally difficult to figure out, but it does add variety to the combat.

They’ve added some puzzle solving to the dungeons, but it feels more like excuses to make you run back and forth than anything else, which is a little disappointing. However, monsters in dungeons don’t respawn unless you exit and return, and you’re pretty fleet footed, so it’s not too bad. The dungeons are also getting more complex – it’s easier to get lost in them.

DECEMBER 10th, 2006 - SPOILER CONTENT

Spoiler:

DECEMBER 11th, 2006 - SPOILER CONTENT

Spoiler:

I really regret that I chose Monk for Shu’s first Category. I’ve started advancing Sword more forcefully on Shu and Monk more forcefully on Marumaro, to try and differentiate them better, but I was really happen when I unlocked the new Category at level 20. I’ve selected Armor for Shu and Assassin for Marumaro, which should help give them more definition. I’m a little worried about when the new character comes in, what I’ll select as their niche. I wish they had given more Category options. However, you don’t have infinite skill slots, an issue I’ve begun to run in to as I’ve advanced more Categories. So, it could be that from now on I’ll see more definition in how I construct my characters, instead of so much in what Categories they’ve advanced. I am beginning to see that more as I’ve begun to focus more strongly.

Oh, I’ve started collecting warp areas. It’s an interesting approach – you can warp from ANYWHERE, at ANY TIME (outside of combat), to any of the warp points you’ve unlocked. Of course, you can’t warp back unless there’s an unlocked warp point there. I have this hunch that there’s going to be something that’s going to shut this down due to plot reasons.

There are some interesting, though subtle, things that they’ve done in the plot already. I guess I sort of feel like all the characters should be in the story. Going from RPG clich?s, it’s obvious that Shu is the hero and Kluke is the heroine. So Jiro’s like Shu’s best friend, right, tagging along? But no, they’re friends, all three of them, together. I was a little surprised when there was a scene just between Kluke and Jiro. I know it happens even in games that aren’t going to give a fair amount of focus to the other characters – they have to have some definition aside from cardboard cutouts that abruptly gain the ability to move during combat or because someone outside of the main character has to know something – but I’m hoping it’ll continue. I like the idea of it being a story about a group of people, instead of a story about how the hero and heroine (and a few others) defeat the villain and fall in love, in some order. That doesn’t mean I’ll be upset if Kluke and Shu hook up, but I want the rest of them to have a fair shake.

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Original Post below...

Spoiler: