That's Blue Dragon down

A bit over 50 hours of playtime later, I've finally finished Blue Dragon.  The short verdict:  while it has its charms, I couldn't really recommend it to anyone on its merits.

To go into more detail, this game has a number of things working against it.  First, it appears that the game was designed to be released roughly in tandem with an accompanying anime (if the dates I saw on Wikipedia are right, at least).  As such, the story of the game itself is at the level of b-grade shounen anime.  In broad strokes, the story follows some kids from a village that attempt to interfere with an annual calamity that hits their village, resulting in them unintentionally getting transported elsewhere, meeting the hissably-bad lead villain, then escaping while gaining magic powers.  From there the story is three broad arcs:  making their way back to their families while collecting more companions and power; tracking down the main villain, only to find out the power they've acquired serves to empower the villain once it's stripped from them; and regaining their power on their own terms, then finding and facing the villain once again to finally defeat him.  Bog-standard stuff, really.

Second, the game itself has some technical challenges.  I believe this mostly revolves around the way they had to originally release the game, as a 3-disc set for a game system that included configurations without a hard drive.  As such, even in the current XBox One backwards-compatibility version, you still get prompts to change discs, for example.  You will also get weird freezes where even the background music stops if you try to use an unusual move for the first time in a while.  All in all, I only had the game actually lock up on me once, so it's not like it's unplayable, but it's definitely unnerving when it happens.

Third, there's some design choices and general lack of polish that weigh the game down.  The game can't seem to make up its mind as to whether it or you should be controlling the camera, and, when it lets you control it, sometimes it will throw the view out of focus if you try to put the camera somewhere it doesn't expect or care for.  Gameplay balance for challenge is almost non-existent, to the point where, just following the main quest line, there is little to no challenge at all in fights once you regain your powers in the third act.  Also, I won't be sad to never have to hear this particular song during a battle again.

Of course, like I said, the game does have its charms as well.  Having a viable (in game world terms at least) reason for a bunch of kids to be up to the task of beating up monsters is always a plus.  The designs of the monsters are reasonably varied as well (although there are the inevitable palette/skin swaps), including, strangely enough, animate piles of poo wielding spears and the like (Japan, go figure).  The class system is both straightforward enough for each class, and the effective multi-classing you can unlock through the Generalist class is something I'd like to see more games give a go.  On top of all that, there are occasional mini-games and the like, but they're used sparingly, and only where the "regular" game system wouldn't work well to carry the story.

So, on to the next game then... looking at my list, the next game would normally be Dark Souls, but I made the mistake of watching a speed-run on that game online once, and there's no way I could convince myself to spend the hours necessary to play the game "right" after that.  So, after that, looks like Dragon Age: Origins is the game to play.  I know that game's near and dear to the hearts of more than a few people, so I have high hopes.