Blue Dragon
So while I was without Internet for a couple weeks I had to find a way to keep sane. First I rewatched Gundam Wing but then I realized that watching anime and stuff would not last nearly long enough. Wing isn’t the longest anime or anything but the fact I finished it in two days made it pretty clear I’d blitz through everything else I already had. So the answer was pretty obvious; I should play one of the many games I have lying around that I haven’t already completed. A good, new RPG can last a week or even weeks. Well I had Lightning Returns which I just bought but the problem with me is my interests are incredibly temperamental and my “XIII mood” is long gone. I also tried to play a bit of Tales of Symphonia but after an hour or so into it I realized I wasn’t in the mood for an action RPG. That meant Tales of Vesperia was also ut. That left Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga and Blue Dragon. I had already played an hour or two of BD several months ago and so I decided to finish it.
I was surprised to learn it plays a bit like Final Fantasy V, which is the last new RPG I played. Well, maybe there are a lot of games like this but FFV and BD are the only ones I have played with the Class System where you level up different Classes for everyone and then mix and match. I have to say, out of the 4 JRPG’s I have now completed from last gen, Blue Dragon is probably my favorite in terms of combat. I had a lot of fun. I ended up making Shu a Guardian, Marumaro was left as a Monk all game, Zola became a Sword Master and while I left Jiro and Kluke as White Mage and Black Mage respectively, I made Jiro a Barrier Mage and Kluke a Support Mage as well. This seemed like a natural “expansion” on their primary role. After all, Shield and Shell are typical White Mage abilities and stuff like Slow and Poison are Black Magic.
That’s another thing I gotta comment on - a five-person team. I haven’t played a JRPG with five party members since FFIV. I thought damn near every game used three these days and maybe four. I’m really grateful Zola showed up too because holy trout, Marumaro. He belongs in that special Hell reserved for Chu-Chu. Main difference is that Chu-Chu was “canceled out” by how great the rest of the cast were. The same can’t be said for Marumaro. Shu alone is everything I detest about shounen battle heroes. Shu is straight out of some troutty shounen fighting manga but he’s in a game and his only saving grace is I like the lady who did his voice. She isn’t in much that I’ve seen. Anyway, if Shu and Marumaro are weighing down the Awful Scale, then Jiro and Kluke are just kinda there being inoffensively generic. That means the scales are still tipped towards Awful. In comes Zola who has the decency to not say that much. I realize the “cool older chick” character is just as stock as the rest of the main group but Zola not going on and on about “I’M NOT GIVING UP” still makes me her my favorite. The only character I really liked was Nene because he was just fun. I don’t agree with the crowd who are like “sympathetic villains are overdone” because anything can be good or bad. It’s all down to how it’s done. Nene was a great asshole villain who was just an asshole. Doing stuff like freezing everyone in atown or trapping another town in a barrier because they wanted to be left alone is just the kind of fun troll behavior I can get behind in my villain. Plus I also liked his design .That smug smirk he always wore was great. Shame he went all King Piccolo and got his youth back, I liked him as an old man more.
No, Blue Dragon is not a game I’d play again because of the riveting story or character development. It was just fun and I think at the end of the day that is all it was meant to be. While most JRPGs are probably meant for young teens or maybe mid-teens, I got the feeling BD was meant for a younger audience. Younger Japanese audience to be precise. The game was very Japanese. Maybe I would have found some of the stuff more interesting or amusing if I was a nine-year-old Japanese boy but alas, I am not. I did not expect it to be this way though. Didn’t Sakaguchi make this? The older FF games had a lot of Western influences and it’s one reason I always felt FFX stood out because it felt like it was the most…”Eastern” of the titles. But BD was up to its ears in Japanese humor and stuff that probably went way over my head. Like when Shu names the two robots. Yesato was one and the other one was something else and this was to reflect how one was nice and one was a jerk. I didn’t get it. Then there was also the four robot minions you meat on Nene’s Flying Fortress with weird Japanese names. Those all probably meant something, too.
Speaking of which, the game was a bit too easy. It had its moments of difficulty, like those tiger enemies you have to fight on the way to Jibral. Nene’s Fortress was pretty tough, too. I think it was after that when the difficulty plummeted. It wasn’t hard again until you get the Mechat at which point I got my ass handed to me by a new, stronger Man-Eating Tree and also…King Poo, which appears to be the game’s superboss. He kinda gave me a false impression of just how tough future battles would be but still, I was grossly under leveled and under prepared. Luckily, the Sea Cube will fix all that in a hurry. Fight every enemy on your way down there and you will come out with more Gold, EXP and SP then you know what to do with, not to mention some great new Accessories and Spells. The Five Evil Dragons were mostly pretty tough and they taught me the value of Curse. You stand no chance against them or King Poo without it. Makes me wonder if a “Class Challenge” like the Four Jobs Fiesta is possible. Black Mage is very OP because elemental weaknesses are the name of the game for the most part. Without it, the game would be a lot more annoying and perhaps impossible.
So in conclusion, the boss theme was great and the haters are crazy. I was actually disappointed at how the final boss theme was not nearly as good. Actually, Destroy’s theme was decent, it was Nene’s music I didn’t care for. That was a shame. His plain normal theme was better than the boss themes. Although, on the topic of Destroy, he was a refreshingly challenging boss fight. Nene was also disappointingly easy but Destroy could put on the hurt. He even managed to KO Marumaro and nearly killed Shu several times. His problem was his lack of HP. The other bosses on Disk 3 made me think they recognized how crazy strong Corporeal was. Corporeal means you will always d 2000-3000 in one shot and you can get it pretty fast if you try. As such, the dragons having a ton of health made sense and I expected the same for story bosses. Sadly, no. I was very happy when I was just fighting random enemies and Kluke ranked up and got Doublecast. But it meant that she could now do about 4000 damage a turn to most things and even when I kept myself limited to the second-best speed spell, she still did way too much damage and we killed everything very quickly. I guess we were over leveled - everyone was 52 to 54 - and we had the best Accessories in the game but even still. As I said, Destroy could hurt us, he just needed more health and the fight would have been better.
So as someone who prefers story and characters over everything else, I can’t really recommend Blue Dragon. On the other hand, I had fun just so long as I didn’t really think outside of battles.
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He's one hell of an artist to work on Blue Dragon!
