I despise Japanese RPGs, don't you? Identikit stories, Identikit characters, and identikit battle systems. Playing RPGs made by our Eastern friends can be so repetitive. Once you've played one, you've played them all.

All except Blue Dragon that is.

While at first glance Hironobu Sakaguchi's new title may seem like his previous games (eg. The Final Fantasy Series), there is much more hidden away in this epic than meets the eye.

Oh, and when I say "Epic", I mean "EPIC!" Blue Dragon is the first Xbox 360 game to be shipped on more than one disc... It's on a whopping three discs with roughly 80 hours of game play, and the great thing is that Blue Dragon costs the same price as all other 360 titles.

The story is your standard RPG fare - an ancient civilisation held the power of magic, ancient civilisation disappears, years go by, violent clouds appear over the sky, ancient machines attack friendly villages, little boy from one of the villages goes on a quest to stop it and discover the true story behind the ancients, finding friends to join his quest on the way, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing out of the ordinary there, it's all standard RPG crap that we've all seen a million times before in different guises.

In the first hour of game play, you feel deja vu in many respects, and the only thing that seems to be different from other RPGs is the beautiful graphics that fill your screen with light and colour. Even the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack penned by Nobuo Uematsu, sounds like it would fit into any other RPG, including the Final Fantasy games that Uematsu-san is famous for scoring.

So far in, I'm not impressed. the graphics are admittedly jaw dropping in places, but everything else feels so staid that it really feels as if I've played this game before. Everything is so traditional, it was like the developers were afraid of adapting the barriers of the traditional Japanese RPG incase they alienated their audience (which, of course, is the Japanese market, which Microsoft created this game for in the hopes that it'd help shift a couple of systems over there), and decided to go for a "hey, me too! PS2 isn't the only machine with these kinda games ya know!" approach to the title. The controls, searching for items in boxes, lengthy cutscenese, and even the turn based battle system seem to be lifted from every other RPG under the sun.

Then, all of a sudden, the differences between Blue Dragon and other games start floating subtly into play.

I can't help but give a tiny spoiler here, but after around an hour of play, and are trapped in a flying fortress, your party is forced to swallow a ball of light, and then this once staid and identikit game evolves along with it's characters. Shu, Kluke, and Jiro — the childhood friends from Talta Village — swallow the light, and their shadows transform into beasts that help them on their quest. Shu gets the Blue Dragon, hence the name of the game, Jiro gets a Minotaur, and Kluke gets a Phoenix.