A different take on Blue Dragon that doesn't quite hit home on the DS.
Blue Dragon Plus is the follow-up title to the Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon from Mistwalker Studios, made up from a few of the key staff members of the popular Final Fantasy series over at Square. However, Blue Dragon Plus doesn't quite resemble that title, in fact, it's not really a traditional RPG. For DS owners, the easiest thing to compare this title to would be Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, not only because of how the combat plays or the overall look of the game, but because it follows that almost side-story format that builds upon the events of the first game without really feeling like a full-fledged sequel.
The events in Plus occur about one year after the original game, and almost all of the original cast will show up again. Players will take control of just about everyone from the original cast, including a few of the NPC's from Blue Dragon that have now gained control of their own shadows and can actually contribute to the combat. That's probably my first issue with the game story wise, is that a lot of people seem to gain shadows in this game. Two of Marumaro's kin gain a shadow, Fushira, Shu's grandfather from the first title has gained one, and a few other characters just seem to conveniently pop out shadows so they can join the game. It's a lot to see happen all at once (and it does happen pretty much all within the first couple hours), and it just seems odd story wise that these guys can develop shadows so soon.
Fans of the original will be happy to see so many characters pop up, both good and bad, and I will say that the story puts a lot more depth into a few characters from the original, along with introducing a couple of new ones that are actually really good additions to the universe. Not having seen the anime I can't say for sure that anyone from the show pops up here or not, so if you're expecting to see any I can't honestly tell you.
When it comes to gameplay though, I think Blue Dragon Plus is a bit of a mess. When the game begins you'll be tossed into a few story events before moving on to the main "dungeon", mostly used to get you acclimated to the controls and different attacks. The game is presented as a 3D isometric view that you can pan around with the shoulder buttons on the DS. Stylus controls are mainly what you'll be using, tapping spots on the map to move your characters around, and the fighting is pretty much done automatically when your characters get close enough to an enemy, though you can select a unit for them to focus their attacks on. Along with their basic sword swings and punches, you can bring up a small menu on the touch screen that will display any special abilities or magic the characters can use, along with their shadow based powers. Shadows are generally pretty powerful, especially in early fights, but instead of using a MP system like in a typical RPG, everything in the game has a cool down timer, something similar to using abilities in an MMO.
This all sounds simple enough, but the path finding abilities of your characters is really, really poor. Also, they can't move thru each other, so if you're trying to surround an enemy, you literally have to have a character walk around the group to whichever side is open. Same goes for smaller corridors or stairs in the game, you have to make sure that you've cleared enough room to allow your other characters to get by, otherwise they'll get stuck until a spot clears out. It's really frustrating to have to baby-sit characters later on when there's more and more enemies that pop up on the screen, especially considering the large size of some of the maps you get to play on. Along with that, I'd occasionally have a character that would just refuse to move more than a few steps, and they would then circle back to their original position and try again. I'm assuming this is some kind of bug, but it did happen enough that I began to get pretty annoyed with it. I know on paper this sounds like a fairly minor complaint at best, but when you're actually playing the game you'll get a better idea of how aggravating it is to have to direct your units to open spots instead of having them just draw a direct line to an open place on the map. The other frustrating aspect is that the character movement itself is pretty slow. You can opt to move each character one at a time by simply selecting them and pointing your stylus, or you can circle everyone into a group and move them at once. However, when you do move them as a group they don't fall into any kind of formation or maintain the same walking speed, and since a couple characters are a little on the speedy side you still need to keep a close eye on them so they don't get caught in a fight without backup.
Thankfully there's a small map that'll display enemies for you, and you scroll around and get a look at the environment easily enough. There's no "fog of war" scenario where sections of the map are blocked off from view until you walk a character over, so that makes the going a little easier. However, the game does like to toss new enemies into the mix every so often, so if you feel like a certain area is going a bit too smoothly, be prepared to face a surprise or two. A few of these instances border on being ridiculous, but for the most part they're not too troublesome.
I do think the difficulty of Blue Dragon Plus is a little all over the place. As the story progresses and you gain more and more characters, you'll be forced to divide them into teams, with each team being led by a particular group member (often story related). However, you don't really have a great balance when it comes to the non-physical characters, you really only have one solid healer, one magic user, one status effect guy and so on. So when you're going in and moving a group from one floor of the dungeon to the next, it's hard to tell whom you'll need to balance out a group until you're already in the fight. This leads to a little more trial and error than I'd like to see, and until you're able to really fill out all the groups you're often left with some undermanned teams that can really get trounced if you're not careful. Compare this to the earlier parts of the game that only have you dealing with a group of 4 or so, in which case you'll often walk all over the enemies, including any bosses, which can really throw you for a loop later in the game when the difficulty goes uphill.
Visually, it's not the best looking sprite DS game out there, but it's still completely recognizable as something coming from the Blue Dragon universe. The Toriyama designs are a bit lost on the smaller characters, but there's quite a few CGI cutscenes in the game that display some of that high caliber visual quality the 360 game had. The music, likewise, borrows most of its cues from the 360 game from what I can remember, but there's definitely some original tracks tossed into the mix, along with some updated and remixed versions of other songs as well. Sadly, the battle music from the boss fights doesn't make it over intact.
All together, Blue Dragon Plus isn't a great title for the DS, but it's certainly passable. For players that enjoyed Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings, I imagine you'll end up enjoying Blue Dragon Plus since they feel really similar, but for those of you that are coming over from Blue Dragon on 360, keep in mind that this is a completely different experience. It does build upon the story of the 360 game, and I imagine it'll stay in place continuity wise if we ever see a literal Blue Dragon 2, but this isn't nearly as fun for me as the Dragon Quest style game I had originally played on the 360. Still, it's worth a rental at least, and worth giving a shot to if you're an RPG fan.
