Once you've decided what you're going to fight and how you're going to fight it, you're led into the Battle System. Like the rest of the game, at first glance it seems like it's been ripped out of every other game, but there are neat little features added in to evolve the mechanics. You can either attack normally or charge up an attack for more damage. The longer you charge, the longer it takes for you to get your next turn, and actually changes the turn order.

This give-and-take can totally change how battles are fought and won. You can also assign formations across your five characters, placing your fighters in the front line, and your support characters in the back, reducing their damage, but also reducing their strength and range. Also, your characters aren't restricted to gaining experience in any particular class, so you can teach fighters to use white magic, or assassins to learn barrier attacks, or anything else that your current battle requires - another great feature, which really opens up your options.

When your battle is done, and you've come out the other side of it relatively unscathed, if you jump into another battle, you can get a combo bonus! The more battles you fight in consecutively, the more chance you have of getting a random bonus. This could be restoring your health and magic, increasing an attribute, or learning a new spell. Also, your experience is multiplied by the amount of consecutive battles you fought. 

But that's not all. I've saved the best for last... Don't you hate it when you're spending a good block of time in an RPG searching the scenery for items, and end up getting "Nothing" pop up time and time again? Without spoiling the story too much, I'll just say that time taken getting "Nothing" is time well spent.

Blue Dragon certainly has a lot going for it, and certainly has enough in the way of new features to make it stand out from the crowd, but that's not to say it's not without it's faults.

The prime problem is it's cutscenes - not only are a lot of them totally unnecessary, they are too long and take up too much space on the discs, and once they are finished, you're set back in control in illogical places. Let's say for example you kill a boss, You'll get the cutscene, the game will load and drop you back in control. You then walk through the door directly in front of you, the game will load again, and then you walk a few steps, and another cutscene will kick in. Why not just make the whole thing into a single cutscene before dropping you in control? It's illogical, and annoying.

While the game may be spanned across three discs, they seem to be mostly filled with speech and cutscenes. You can select speech in three languages — English, Japanese with English subtitles or French — so all speech in the game and all cutscenes are in triplicate to cater for the different languages. Basically it's unnecessarily inflated, and if it wasn't for all these languages, the game would likely fit on a single double layer disc. Next time, I hope that Sakaguchi-san will make up his mind and either release it in Japanese with English subtitles, or in plain English language - not both.