Blue Dragon Review

My guess is, you're not interested, but I play alot of videogames. And when I'm done, I usually review them on Gamespot. So I finished Blue Dragon yesterday, wrote a review today, and now you get to read it, if you want.

Blue Dragon has some serious clout behind it, being crafted by the very hands that began Final Fantasy, my favorite game series of all time. But despite all that genius, Blue Dragon turns out to be a rather uninspired, yet solid, JRPG.

The game is graphically gorgeous, as is expected, though the depth of field trickery actually takes away from the environments. A little blur to items that would normally be out of focus might add realism in a realistic setting, but in the cartoonish and fantastical world of Blue Dragon, it is a hindrance. The story, penned by Sakaguchi of FF fame, takes pretty much the entire first disc to launch into anything of substance. And from there, it builds and builds to an almost climax, but then dithers into nothing as the story ends. The twists and turns add no drama, but rather another boring cut-scene.

The battles are monotonous, but not unenjoyable. They offer little in the way of challenge, except for sparse boss battles. I only died once in the entire 40 hour game, and that was on the final battle (and I quickly saw my error and beat it the next time around).

The music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, famed composer of much FF music. His style was very apparent in Blue Dragons sounds, but most of the music faded into the background, leaving me without toe tapping or whistling later.

Overall, the game wasn't bad. I enjoyed my time with it, but I wasn't left with a feeling of accomplishment, or really even anything satisfying. I only finished it because it would kill me to leave it unfinished. That said, for any devoted RPG fan, Blue Dragon is worth playing.