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.
Another problem (this will affect all you achievement whores), is that the game has a lot of mini games. While this isn't a problem in itself, the way the game handles them is. Many of these little snippets of game play will be sandwiched between speech or cutscenes, and sometimes you won't notice that you're supposed to be playing until it's too late. To add insult to injury, many of the mini games don't have checkpoints before them, so if you don't realise you're supposed to be playing, you might not be able to reload the checkpoint to try it again. I've missed a couple of achievements this way, and it's very annoying to know that something as simple as a checkpoint or even a "get ready" message could have avoided this.
Article comments
1 - Michael
I love these in depth reviews. makes my decision whether to buy the game or not that much easier & this looks like one game I'll be paying out for. many thanks.
2 - Andrew Ogier
Thanks Michael, I try to cover all the important aspects (both good and bad) in my reviews, and with a game as expansive as BD, then that means the reviews can get a little lengthy.
Some people like the long ones, and some prefer more of a "snapshot" review...but I always try to write about what I would think is important as a consumer, and that means covering some of the little details, as well as the big picture. I'm glad you agree.
Happy Holidays, and I hope you enjoy BD as much as I did.