Blue Dragon Plus (Nintendo DS)

[aruljothi]

Release Date: 02/24/2009
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Genre: RPG
Publisher: Ignition
Developer: Mistwalker/Artoon

I may have moaned about its flaws when it was released, but I didn't think Blue Dragon on Xbox 360 was an outright failure. It was a gorgeous game, and established a neat little Japanese RPG universe that could compete with those of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games it was taking after. So when Blue Dragon Plus was first announced, I honestly wanted to try it -- to give it a chance as both a sequel and as a potential improvement on developer Brownie Brown's other real-time strategy RPG, Heroes of Mana, and the similarly-built Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. Much to my disappointment, it doesn't succeed in either way.

A lot of that disappointment comes from the fact that the gameplay improvements I hoped for -- technical and practical -- just aren't here. Blue Dragon Plus uses the same engine as Mana and Revenant Wings and leaves it virtually untouched. Therefore, you also get the same problems found in those games: awful pathfinding (characters don't overlap or walk past one another if they're blocked), dreadfully slow movement, and a general feeling that you're not really putting as much strategy into it as you could be, despite the game repeatedly suggesting how you should use your new characters when on the battlefield.

Like the original game, the plot of Blue Dragon Plus is pretty straightforward -- a "one year later" affair where the planet's inhabitants have started colonizing the Cube World that appeared after the planet split in two. Adolescent heroes Shu, Jiro, and Kluke find themselves in the depths of the cubes to investigate some strange Mecha Robo activity inside, and they stumble upon a magic force even more powerful than that harnessed by their longtime enemy Nene. Old friends appear early and often, and pretty soon, your army consists of one of almost every character you saw in the original Blue Dragon: Yasato the Robo, Marumaro's siblings, a little girl from Shu's village, and even a Poo Snake. And they all have the power of Shadows, the blue animal spectres that gave the original heroes their magic powers. Personally, that part of the story dilutes the "magic" (for lack of a better term) of the Blue Dragon mythology for me -- it's like if everybody in the Star Wars universe was a Jedi. And yet characters are constantly surprised when the next new party member just happens to have a Shadow. We get it.

As the story moves on, our heroes split into set parties, meaning that certain characters are "locked" into their own parties, while the ones that aren't can freely join anyone else. On the outside, it's nice to have a character "on point" that can either explore or hang out near an item shop, but some key story battles need specific characters, and if they're too far away from the battle on the world map, it will take a few minutes of moving and changing turns to get them to the action -- slightly inconvenient, but not too bad when you can tap an icon to bring all the "free" characters into the selected party, thus readying a beefed-up group in a snap.

In virtually every battle, my general instinct was to make sure everybody stayed alive via healing herbs or spells, and then just head to the nearest enemies -- they're rushing you, so you're going to want everybody up front and helping out. Unlike in Revenant Wings, you don't assign "grunts" to a leader and command them as one unit. Instead, everybody is an independent unit, which makes micromanagement (what little there is) more difficult. Rushing usually works best anyway. You have everybody in one spot, making it easy to see HP and status effects change and to manage when needed.