Review: Blue Dragon Plus [DS]

When I received this title in the post, I approached it with a degree of trepidation. Not overly impressed with the first of the Blue Dragon titles, I did at least approach it with an open mind, as always! One thing that lost me with the original Blue Dragon was how visually familiar it felt to Dragon Quest. Both titles’ feature character designs by renowned artist Akira Toriyama, but the first disc of Blue Dragon was such a chore that the charm of the game’s art style became, well, lost. Blue Dragon Plus is a strange one for a variety of reasons. In fact you can’t fairly say that it’s a good or a bad game as for every positive step it takes, it also takes one backwards. In terms of design it plays vastly different than the previous title, with Mistwalker opting to eschew the traditional turn based combat system in favour of a real time strategy format. From here on, there will be spoilers for those who never finished Blue Dragon on Xbox 360, so be warned.

The story of Blue Dragon Plus takes place one year after the conclusion its predecessor, making it a direct sequel – oddly enough, the first direct sequel to a game that only appeared on a rival hardware manufacturer’s system, which is strange. The reason why I’d label this an irregular move is that the first half hour of play directly references, via in-game text and pre-rendered FMVs, events from the preceding title. If you haven’t played it, which is honestly a likely problem for potential DS owners, the story would be as hard to get into as writing a meaningful explanation of the background story of Noby Noby Boy.

Another strange development in this story is that everyone in this game in the space of a year has managed to find the ability to wield their own shadow. The first game was built on the premise that the ’shadows’ were rare, special and unusable by anyone (apart from the likes of Shu) who was tricked into swallowing the spheres by Nene, the main villain.  In BD+ however, everybody from the King to Shu’s grandfather to EVEN the soulless robots who the heroes fought over the course of the first game can control their shadows.  That’s right; somehow an animated machine without a soul seems able to harness the power of shadows. In what just seems to be taking the premise one step too far they try to explain the whole thing away in glossed over exposition: “Yeah I’ve been learning to harness a shadow, didn’t wanna tell anyone.” Oh, of course you were.

Things become interesting later on, once your team is broken up. Splitting the team leads to a feeling of depth and allows for two separate threads to intertwine allowing for customization of your party and units between missions. Units have their own specific strengths and weaknesses, as discussed in the fleeting character intros at the start of the game but due to issues with the control scheme they prove ineffective and usually I found myself just attacking like a pack of wild dogs in order to quickly finish off one enemy at a time. I’ll discuss controls just a little further in, but let’s talk imagery first.

In terms of design, I must say that the graphics are beautiful – for a DS title. Brownie Brown have taken the cubic world of Blue Dragon Plus and made it feel unique, yet familiar. Oozing colour, style and utilizing great 3D effects when shadows come into play makes the title stand out from Brownie Brown’s previous work on Heroes of Mana. It’s a shame it couldn’t have taken more from the critically acclaimed Mother 3, another title upon which their services were employed in the Game Boy Advance era.  The camera system is represented by a single shining light, controllable with the top L and R buttons, which allows you to look at the action from one of four isometric angles.  This is actually something I discovered by accident in the middle of a battle, but a welcome discovery nonetheless, as sometimes units will get stuck behind areas making them more vulnerable to attack.

Also, it really is such a shame that the controls aren’t up to scratch at all. If you want to move all of your characters at the same time, you click the applicable ‘Select All’ on the right hand side of the touch screen and you send them where you want to go. Now, every time you perform a function it makes you select your units every time so it’s, select, action, select, action….you get the message. It would have been nice to have them stay selected throughout the mission until you decide to either select a singular unit or perform another function. This also leads to another problem – pathfinding. Your characters, whilst given the illusion of free roaming on wide maps, must traverse an invisible grid at the slowest, most maddening speed I’ve ever had to deal with. When I was facing the first boss within the game, I was getting my ass kicked only for the fact that – whilst there was ample room for movement – my characters were incapable of passing each other on the battlefield. The slow, plodding nature of missions – or battles rather – confounds the split second decision making usually associated with the real time action genre. It’s the one area that I feel could really have benefitted from implementing a user controlled battle speed option in the options menu, which I couldn’t find anywhere in the game!

The sound design is a curious mix of highs and lows with regards to the choices implemented by developers Brownie Brown. Almost SNES quality, the in-game sound effects tend to disrupt your enjoyment of the more positive elements of the title, like the graphics, as mentioned before. I also found that when in conversation with other characters, the old school scrolling text sound became such a nuisance that I played with no sound until the next mission began; it was seriously that annoying. The music, however, on the occasions when they obviously threw in their all, is still nothing short of exceptional; they wisely reused new arrangements of the key themes from the original title, and Nobuo Uematsu has expanded on them just enough that they vastly eclipse the banal SFX track. So it’s hit and miss there, in fact you might be better off playing the game with just the soundtrack from Blue Dragon playing on CD and the DS on mute. Just a suggestion.

In the end, Blue Dragon Plus is one of those games that smacks you around the head for daring to presume that you won’t enjoy something that it has to offer. That being said, though, it doesn’t do anything particularly new in terms of innovation, it actually manages to backpedal within the genre with some serious flaws, such as the pathfinding during missions. I’d say give it a go should you be the type of person who is into JRPGs and enjoys a slight bit of deviation from the norm with regards to the first game, which was truly a solid JRPG experience, albeit a flawed one.  However, if you haven’t played Blue Dragon on Xbox 360, then this title likely won’t appeal to you. Exposition and plotlines will roll over your head like a summer breeze, leaving you bewildered and confused as to who each character is and what their role was in the original game. So, if you feel that you can overlook that and just enjoy Blue Dragon Plus for what it is, then this is your game! I found myself enjoying this experience more than I thought I would based upon preexisting thoughts on the franchise, so I would definitely say that it’s a game that is worth a shot! One more thing, don’t even get me started about playing as King Poo Snake – I’ll leave that experience for you to enjoy for yourself.

Pluses
+ Gorgeous graphics on limited hardware
+ The occassional excellent musical composition
+ Challenging boss battles
+ Fans of Blue Dragon will eat up the experience

Minuses
- Slow, slow, slow with terrible pathfinding
- It’s Blue Dragon Light with the story stretched way too long
- Controls are a bit meh
- Won’t appeal to those new to Blue Dragon

Available now on Nintendo DS/DSi in all regions;
Rating: ESRB (E), PEGI (7+)
Players: 1
Played single player campaign to completion.