Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy and Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball Z's famed artist, fail to live up to the lofty expectations associated with their work. Instead, the Xbox 360 gets a cookie cutter RPG littered with cutscenes and voiceovers for characters that players have little vested interest in. The gameplay is slow, even plodding, and the time spent beating Blue Dragon would probably be better served playing Oblivion a few more times.

The story is equally generic and boring, spanning fifty hours and three DVD's with cutscenes meant to induce sleep. It revolves around Shu, Kluke and Jiro, whose village has been destroyed by a land shark. On their quest they must fight Nene, the very person responsible for their town's destruction. If the basic plot sounds tired to you, you'd be right. The characters seem to care about as much as the players eventually will, which is barely at all. The additional party members, Zola and Marumaro add a bit of life, but when the best main characters are only half as interesting as a fighting cactus in a Final Fantasy game (pick which one you like, it makes no difference) there are obviously huge problems afoot. In all seriousness, the weakest aspect of the game probably lies in its story, or lack thereof. This might be the first modern RPG that can't even compete with games from fifteen years ago story-wise.

The game is just as stagnant as the visuals.

In the game, players carry no weapons, with the specter of a blue dragon fighting in their stead. The dragon casts spells and fights for you, taking the player characters even further away from the game. They play almost like summoned creatures and are at least entertaining to watch. But the class system shatters what seems like the first positive in Blue Dragon. "Borrowed" from Final Fantasy V, players are given the choice of what class to designate for each character. As they level, so does their ability in that class. Moving through the game unlocks more classes and you are given the chance to freely move in between them at will. Spells and skills can generally be used in multiple classes, which although seemingly positive is actually quite the opposite. Obviously, it makes leveling that skill easier, and gives incentive to move around as the game progresses. In reality, this ends up being one of the game's biggest pitfalls, as to gain some of the difficult achievements, your players must switch back and forth between classes constantly. What starts as a novel idea ends up being far more work than it's worth, especially as the game forces already unlikable and unoriginal characters into being even less independent of each other.

Another huge problem lies in the pacing. Far too often it seems as though the developers just threw in segments to extend the game. Not until disc three does the story really grow interesting, and that's mainly because of the influx of tough enemies and a faster pace. There are no random battles as enemies appear on the battlefield, which gives the player the choice to attack them or not. Furthermore, multiple groups of enemies can be roped together for one large battle, sometimes resulting in different groups of monsters attacking each other. One nice wrinkle in the gameplay is the battle system, where a timeline is displayed on the screen, and you can time your attacks to occur strategically during the fight. But the battles still grow tiring with all of the class jumping you are forced to do. Thankfully, there are some minigames that liven the adventure, but they are between the sections you would rather avoid, such as the actual game.

The blue dragons are one of the few entertaining aspects of the game.

Graphically, the best aspect of Blue Dragon lies in the actual method of attack: the dragons themselves. Their animations are entertaining and sometimes awe-inspiring to watch. However, they can grow boring due to the repetitive nature of the game. The main characters themselves are obviously inspired by traditional anime, but painfully so. There is little depth to any of them graphically and although they do not look terrible, they could easily be interchanged into any standard anime inspired bargain bin RPG without noticeable differences. Also, for reasons unbeknownst, the field of the depth of is blurred in some of the larger landscapes. It seems to have been made to give some kind of perspective, but it ends up just blurring the already uninteresting areas. Starkly bare, these sections have few landmarks, leaving one to wonder why they made it look even worse. The battles themselves are sort of sluggish as well. The camera in these sequences is actually a high point, as it moves in and out dramatically. But at no point are the graphical capabilities of the 360 pushed. In fact, this game may very well run on the original Xbox just as easily, making its limitations flummoxing. The sound design by Nobuo Uematsu, also of Final Fantasy fame, is not horrible, but repeats far too often. The battle music is actually quite good, but its constant musical replays grow irritating after the hundredth fight.

Blue Dragon ends up being a game where there are not only no guilty pleasures, but you feel bad for having spent your money on it. Even fans of Japanese-specific RPGs won't want to spend their time moving through the plodding storyline and lumbering gameplay. This game fails on many levels, with the minigames being one of the few enjoyable aspects of play. Needless to say, it's probably best to avoid this game, even as a rental. Blue Dragon has the distinct pleasure of constantly irritating a player while simultaneously never living up to any of its hype.