Blue Dragon Comments by Rob Fahey

Hmmm. I agree, it does sound rather run-of-the-mill, but I'm still quite looking forward to it (despite not owning a 360).

Should help fill a gap where the Xbox consoles have always been lacking.

@ Shinji

Yeah, I agree that the mass market will probably not be into this game. But I expect the typical EG comments section reader to be a bit more hardcore, hence my comment.

I must admit that personally I haven't played Dragon Quest VIII (or any other DQ for that matter). It's high on my list of games to get but as I haven't finished FFXII, Disgaea and SMT: Lucifer's Call yet, it'll have to wait a little longer... ;)

I'm currently playing Dragon Quest VIII and I'm really enjoying it despite having those constant random battles against invisible enemies that have plagued every major Japanese RPG since... well... forever! I understand from the videos I've seen that the enemies are visible in Blue Dragon, in the same way they were in games like the excellent Grandia II on the DC, so that alone should make the game even better than DQVIII so I'm pretty confident that I'll love the game.

orlyzomg!?

"The Console War which is claiming casualties among fanboys, loudmouths and idiots"


If only....

Les - you really should play DQVIII ASAP. It's a fantastic, charming game, and the platinum edition is currently £10 on Play.com.

Far better than the pretty but vapid FFXII, or so I think.

oh and technically, Bird Studio & Artoon should also get credit for making this game, Mistwalker only come up with the layouts, what it should look like etc.

>"Visually it's no match for final fantasy which M$ seem so eager to emulate. "

It's not trying to emulate FF, more like Dragon Quest.

It's Lost Odessey that's the FF7 emlator.

Hmmm, I'm definitely going to buy this but it seems to be taking a similar direction to DQVIII (i.e. very old fashioned) and I got bored of that very quickly. FFVI and Chrono Trigger changed RPGs for the better I think...

What a lot of negativity around this title. Are people upset it isn't a FPS or what? Come on. It's a JRPG, on 360, give it a break for trying to do something the machine lacks.

And the claim that this doesn't progress the genre like FFXII does only a good thing in my book. That game put me to sleep with it's boring plot (ooh politics) and lame combat (let's just let the game play itself with the gambits while I make a cup of tea).

Dragonquest VIII rocked though, so why wouldn't this? In a traditional RPG way this is very similar (and DQ8 got a 9 right here). I tend to follow more of Edge scores or GamesTM's (they gave this a 9, and said that it did evolve the RPG genre on whole different levels). At least they have solid reasoning which has gone down the drain lately here.

One thing though. No Japnaese voice. Fuck you MS. And listen to cahracters say "cool" or "awesome" all the time, I'm sure.

my 7 year old daughter wants this .... I may have to buy it for her. I'll check its suitable first of course...by playing it to death.

"One thing though. No Japnaese voice. Fuck you MS."

Would you have gotten a 360 if it had cost €600? If not, that's a bit of a hypocrite statement...

"although there's an utterly dreadful and misjudged rock track with English lyrics in there too

Would that be that absolutely terrible band Enter Shikari"


As far as I know they're referring to a song on the soundtrack with, for some unexplainable reason, Ian Gillan of Deep Purple doing the vocals. It's hilariously cheesy =P

I would absolutely love to get this game; the guys making it are responsible for some of my favourite games of all time and the game itself sounds along the lines of Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest VIII; two games I thought were amazing.

Les
27-Jun-07 20:24:18 "One thing though. No Japnaese voice. Fuck you MS."

Would you have gotten a 360 if it had cost €600? If not, that's a bit of a hypocrite statement...


Oh my god, Les, oh my god...

p.s. @menage

i totally agree with you, japanese voice gives this kind of game a totally different atmosphere. But to make the game enjoyable to the masses, MS had to translate it (i think only a minority of us prefere jap voice), so i cant really blame them

"Oh my god, Les, oh my god..."

Care to explain? Because I'm with you. As no-one in Europe (except for the Dutch) can stand foreign voices, releasing the game in Japanese would be commercial suicide. Which would be a bit ridiculous to ask from MS.

Let's first state that I am Dutch:P

And second, I really don't need German, Spanish and French on my disk. Why the hell would I. I need the original track because I want my product to be as it's supposed to be. To many RPG's are ruined by bad dubs. I understand the spaceissue and localization, but hey, I'm a purist so of course I'm a bit pissed. Disgaea 2 had English and Japanese tracks, for such a small European release that didn't seem to matter, why would it matter here?

I always switych directly to Japanese if the tracks there.

Anyone know if the US version is region free? I'll be getting that one then.

Straw man argument:
Person A: I don't think children should run into the busy streets.
Person B: I think that it would be foolish to lock children up all day.
By insinuating that Person A's argument is far more draconian than it is, Person B has side-stepped the issue. Here the "straw man" that person B has set up is the premise that "The only way to stop children running into the busy streets is to keep them inside all day".
From wikipedia.

So, by saying "Would you have gotten a 360 if it had cost €600? If not, that's a bit of a hypocrite statement... " you clearly suggest the ps3, i suppose because of the blu ray. Hence the straw man argument. :P

@enzima

I've got no idea what you just said:)

Sidenote, having a blue-ray disk and acctually adding the Japanese voice are 2 different things.

@enzima

+3

The strawman is catching on! Yay, and verily it did clean out of the internet forums of subterfuge, deception and shite. Verily.

@ enzima

Don't think the straw man argument is valid here. Let me explain. Including the Japanese voices on the game disk would have increased production and distribution cost for MS while it'll only impact a very small subset of the market (so increasing the retail price for everyone wouldn't have been a very fair option either). So saying "fuck you MS" is a bit of a harsh and unfair reaction IMO. As far as I know, the only way to include the original Japanese voices at no extra cost for MS would have been if the 360 had been using a disk format with enough storage space to also store the Japanese language track. But as we all know that would have driven up the price of the console to a level that most people wouldn't pay and so isn't a commercially viable option either.

You suppose too much. :p

What's really funny is that I'm not a huge fan of j-rpgs, but this is interesting me simply because it sounds easier to get into like old rpgs, but without the random battle (which stopped me within 15 mins of playing FF7).

But I hate the art style, even as a (former) big fan of dragonballz.

If Lost Odossey is easy like this, then I'll try that.

+1, except for the art style part. I like it ;_;

I was really looking forward to this until the idocy around the dubbing came to light. If the US version is region locked, then I'll be giving this a miss. I've played many JRPGs with godawful ear-piercing english dubs and I don't particularly want to repeat the experience. Especially when the Euro release will be 20-30% more than the US price as it is.

@Les

Blue Dragon already comes on three discs. Japanese audio tracks would be a drop in the bucket compared to all that FMV.\

Also, not sure if you realize this but MS isn't exactly strapped for cash, nor would adding Japanese language tracks impact the localization costs since those tracks already exist.

Btw, is a demo coming anytime soon?

looks pretty but very bland(and I hate toriyama's art style with a terrible passion). I won't be buying it, though I wouldn't mind hearing more classic uematsu :3

I don't understand why everyone's so down on cheesy-ass English songs/dubbing being in this game... to me that just makes the game sound more appealing, as a throwback to the Dreamcast heyday of over-earnest, trapped-in-the-Eighties atmospherics, as in Shenmue, Sonic Adventure and the like. Sure, it's probably a huge contravention of the creators' original vision, but what you lose in authenticity you make up for in kitsch value, I say. :)

Then again, maybe I'm just biased because I know that the English cast includes the voice actress Tara Strong, who is the single greatest person in the world.

"Btw, is a demo coming anytime soon? "

i remember sakaguchi promising one before the NA's release date.
Hopefully @ E3 there is one :)

"Also, not sure if you realize this but MS isn't exactly strapped for cash, nor would adding Japanese language tracks impact the localization costs since those tracks already exist"

As I understand it the disks are already filled to the max with all the European localisation soundtracks on them. If there's still enough room left for the Japanese tracks, than you're right, there's no reason to not include the Japanese soundtrack.

MS as a whole might not be strapped for cash but the games division is. This time they have to create a profitable platform otherwise shareholders will like MS even less. Their shareprice has been pretty much flat over the past 5 years while other tech companies have shown sharp increases.

If adding the Japanese track can only be done at the expense of one of the European tracks, it'll increase production and distribution costs for MS. Instead of having to print and ship a single version for the whole of Europe there would be at least two. That's simply more expensive.

These two factors, combined with the fact that the actual group of people interested in the Japanese track will be quite limited, make that there's little business sense to include the Japanese track and MS (like any other commercial enterprise) is no charity.

Blech! :( This seems very ho hum... http://www.eurogamer.net/view_screenshot...

Now, it seems rubbish. The kids can keep it. There's just no connection with these things, which would decimate the effect (minimal in reach and ambition as EG report it to be) of any story attempting to be told. It seems mechanical. Horribly calculated.
The art style's horrible. It reminds me of something from early Playstation, (it's so basic and the characters lifeless) discarding the HD look, for a minute - which I'm not disputing. It also reminds me of something from Playstation, in terms of gameplay, from the vids I've seen of it. Not Final Fantasy though. That always (no, I'm not wearing rose-tinted specs here) had more quality in design and flow, to it; even then.

This is more like...The name escapes me - agh! :( (You can throw items at monsters to affect outcomes, there's a radius circle that fights operate within, and you use action points even to move within battle, of which none are random..) Breath Of Fire V: Dragon Quarter! Anyway, it's like that one that largely takes place underground. Similarly awkward. It wasn't a BAD game, but it wasn't compelling either. I think Blue Dragon falls below this mark though, because it's almost IMITATING a PS RPG.

In barely related, Atlus are already confirmed on IGN's E3 attendees list - so all hope in this genre, moving forward, isn't lost.

edit: better reasoned opinions ftw!
edit 2: I knew I'd remember. :)

@Mache

Well, it's just a matter of taste I guess. I love how this game looks. And in reference I thought the charas from Gears looked liked the movie Army Men. That's not to hate, but just to show that how it looks is really subjective. A lot of people hate Toriyama's art. I think it's amazing that the guy created a own style in the overcluded world of manga and anime. You can pick his designs out right away.

The look of the game has actually sold it to me and I'll most likely be picking it up, I'm not usually someone who plays RPG's but it reminded me of Earthbound in a few of the early videos.

It's nice to have something a bit more quirky on 360.

>"IMITATING a PS RPG. "

How's it imitating a PS RPG? When it's made by the people who made some of those PS rpgs?

“I think Blue Dragon falls below this mark though, because it's almost IMITATING a PS RPG.”

Even if it would be the case, why exactly is it a bad thing?

@menage: I enjoyed Toriyama's work in Dragon Quest VIII a lot, the characters, certainly; but also the monsters, with their exaggerated quirky facial commentary on how a battle's going. I'm not familiar with DB/Z at all, but the visuals of DQ encouraged me to check that out.

@The Bodybuilder: Those comments were based on video footage I've seen of the game, at places like Gamespot, and similar. Particularly: traveling the general world map reminded me of FF7, except you can see all the monsters. It looked tedious, because for all they showed, there were solitary monsters (maybe more a rep. of one battle ) then you moved on into the expanse. Negotiating the dungeons also looked really simplistic - What I saw didn't seem interesting. Partly to you, I guess, but also...

@Les: The reason that's a bad thing, is that I've pretty much had my fill of them! Additionally, do you think that a 360 RPG ought to be content imitating past efforts
- perhaps it'll arrive replete with innovation, and I can only go on what I've read and watched. Also, by "PS" I was referring to one and two, not the Network as a whole; but that's not to suggest I'd dismiss future PS RPGs off the bat, at all.

It seems to me that Microsoft's taken segments of blueprint of several past RPGs spliced them together, and polished up the result with its graphical wizardry; but what's there beneath remains a targeted, analytic Frankenstein's monster. And, I fear a soulless one - because it's Japanese, but HAS to appeal to a Western audience. I think it's being requested to fill too many roles by MS. That's why I currently think it mechanical. If all else fails though, WHAT I'VE WATCHED, AND READ OF THIS GAME, I JUST DO NOT LIKE.

This has got to be one of the best looking titles on the XBOX 360 to date (graphically and in terms of the actual game).

All of this is of course opinion but as others have said a game that looks like it could be of the same ilk as Dragon Quest 8 cannot be a bad thing since that game, whilst "basic" was truely epic in its own right.

On a side note if GAMES(TM) gave it a 9 then instantly I'd say its pretty damn good (there reviewers score pretty toughly)....alas thats just my 2 cents on the matter

All gone very quiet on this thread - the Demo is on Xbox Live now.....it's not bad in a 'standard Jap-RPG' way.

Lots of reading and not alot of voice acting though :/