Having never played Blue Dragon for the Xbox 360, I assumed both it and its DS sequel would be your typical Japanese RPG: slow, turn-based, and grind-heavy. For better or for worse, Blue Dragon Plus is not that; it’s more of an RTS/RPG hybrid. Your characters are controlled in real-time and they will level up with individual stats for attack, defense, etc. Fans of Heroes of Mana and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings will feel right at home with Blue Dragon Plus and actually enjoy it because the gameplay is almost exactly the same. For the rest of us, Blue Dragon Plus will be enjoyable if you are willing to put up with the frustrating gameplay and the rather annoying cutscenes.

The game does a decent job of explaining the characters and basic plot, even if you never played the previous game. There is a dragon named Balaur that the heroes must defeat, but on the way their nemesis Nene is reborn, so they have to fight him too. The plot is your typical fare of saving the world, and apparently most of the characters from the predecessor appear in the game. There’s nothing particularly interesting about it, and it has the same amount of lame humor and cheesiness as you would expect in most other Japanese RPG. There are no characters that you will grow to love, but you may find a few quite irritating.

To enhance the presentation of the plot, a ridiculous amount of FMVs have been included. These FMVs take up both screens and are surprisingly decent to watch, although a bit dated. They aren’t long either; you’re only going to find yourself with perhaps an hour or less of FMV footage total. The main problem with these FMVs is that they’re too random and too frequent; the game feels like it’s trudging along at a slow pace because of the constant switching between FMVs and in-game cutscenes.

Blue Dragon Plus works like this: you control several parties with four characters each that are moving around in this cube world. Certain characters may be locked into their parties, but most characters will be swappable among them. During your adventure, you will earn gold to purchase items for your characters, allowing for a bit of customization and enhancement. Enemies are visible in the game world, so battles are somewhat avoidable, but you don’t have much freedom in your navigation. Once you encounter an enemy in the same location, a battle begins.

In battle, you select your characters using the stylus and send them to a certain location or send them to attack an enemy. You can choose your units individually, in a group by circling the ones you want, or by selecting all of them. The map is grid-based so your characters will not be able to directly move to your instructed point. This unfortunate mechanic, coupled with terrible pathfinding AI, will make for a rather frustrating time of monitoring your characters in hopes that they will quickly move to your desired location. The characters attack enemies with a simple click on an enemy. Their special abilities are activated by selecting an individual character and choosing from one of his or her skills in the bottom left corner of the bottom screen. Accidental skill selections are thankfully prevented because the game asks you to confirm or cancel it.

The game has a few notable, among many, flaws. First of all, selecting an individual unit may prove to be difficult when its surrounded by several other characters. You may have to type quite a few times in order for the game to recognize your actions. Secondly, when an enemy unit is right next to your units and you have not specifically instructed them to attack, they will simply stand there. If this is an RTS, units shouldn’t be unaware of the enemies adjacent to them. Thirdly, after you perform a command, that unit(s) is deselected, which absolutely makes no sense from a design perspective. Lastly, the game is indeed repetitive and slow-paced. “Shadow Fights” break up the monotony once in a while, but for the most part it’s going to be the same old fighting. It doesn’t help that your characters move slowly in a battle. The maps can be quite large and when an enemy is all the way across the map, it can be aggravating to watch your units crawl to that location.

Verdict: D+

For fans of the series and for fans of Heroes of Mana and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, Blue Dragon Plus will be a blast. Everyone else must deal with a 20+ hour game that doesn’t excite in its story, gameplay, or presentation. If you can ignore or withstand its faults, Blue Dragon Plus will be a decent strategy addition to your library. Otherwise, it’s a boring game that’s passable for several hours but difficult to play for much longer.

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