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A lot of your enjoyment of Blue Dragon Plus is going to rest on whether you already like strategy-RPGs. As a genre, strategy-RPGs show up so dense and meaty, packed with menus upon menus and options upon options… that they often present themselves poorly. Once you wrap your arms around the system, you may find a rewarding and challenging experience; but getting there requires climbing a steep learning curve. Blue Dragon Plus, being a DS sequel to 360-exclusive RPG Blue Dragon, adds its own layer of impenetrability as it hits the ground running whether you’ve played the first game or not.

I have not. And I imagine quite a few Nintendo DS owners are in the same dual-screened boat. So I was more than a little surprised to see BDP kick off with only the barest of backstory about the characters and the world of Blue Dragon. Within the first half hour of gameplay, one of your team members is re-absorbed by the forces of evil… and that is apparently a big deal coming out of the 360 game. It wasn’t to me.

Maybe that’s why I thought the initial plot setup was nothing to write home about. Hero Shu and the cast are kicking back enjoying the year of peace since the original Blue Dragon. Suddenly a three-headed dragon shadow named Balaur appears to threaten the world, and the adventurers head out to bring it down. Along the way, they run into Nene – the Big Bad from the 360 game – and they are surprised to find him alive. Not long after, the team runs into Himiko, a new character who is revealed as Nene’s beloved… and maybe Nene isn’t as evil as they all suspected. It’s all fairly typical.

On the whole, I’m not sure Blue Dragon fans will cotton to the liberties that BDP takes with the BlueDragoVerse. For one thing, everybody has a Shadow – the powerful spirits that act as the delivery system for magical spells and attacks. Previously, only the core party members had this ability. In a tactics game where you have a dozen pieces to move around the board, this makes sense. It makes every piece powerful. Unfortunately it now means that every person Shu meets now has a Shadow, and Shu has to say something along the lines of “YOU can control a Shadow TOO?!?” These characters were NPCs back on the 360, but now they are all empowered team members with unique skills and roles.

And of course, there is the sticky issue of exactly why the evil dude they killed in the first game is back again for the sequel. Kind of takes some of the punch out of the 360 game’s impact. Although that sort of thing is part and parcel of the franchise experience, unfortunately, so I guess you can’t knock BDP too much for that. But I will say that I have certainly played games that did much better work with such an obvious storyline macguffin.

Happily, Blue Dragon Plus helps inch you into these characters’ struggles with some seriously nice cutscenes. These CG clips are just about the best video I’ve seen on the DS, smartly using one screen or both screens as needed for dramatic cinematography. The press materials say the game has over an hour of video, but I did not put a stopwatch to it! To be sure, any attachment I felt to my party members was entirely due to the FMVs, not so much to the screen after screen of wordy, overbaked text dialogue. Seriously, hire an editor next time.

The world of Blue Dragon Plus is a map of cubes broken into discrete isometric levels. You move your teams across this map, almost like a board game, shifting characters between parties as you need them (except for the key leaders who form their parties according to the demands of the storyline.) The map is reminiscent of a giant flowchart, with options to search, pause, equip, and sometimes shop before initiating combat. As the game develops, it becomes critical to ensure you have a balance of characters in your parties – tanks, healers, magic-wielders, status-affecters, etc – or some boards will be incredibly difficult. Key team members notwithstanding, you can form and re-form parties with abandon, even if you’re literally transporting secondary support characters all across the map.

The levels themselves are 3D, populated with 2D sprites. And although camera rotation is very smooth, the nature of 2D sprites means you get an obvious visual disconnect with the rest of the level as it moves. Getting past that, the graphics are very nice. The sprites and levels are detailed and pretty, overall it seems like a mashup of the best visuals we ever saw during both the N64 and SNES eras. Developer Brownie Brown, known for 2D spritework, does not disappoint.

The coolest visual is the Shadows themselves, who arrive in full 3D with the funniest and most intriguing designs in the game. Sure, there’s the Blue Dragon himself, but there’s also a great Jack O’Lantern, a comically fat cat genie, a writhing octopus, and my favorite, the giant rafflesia flower.

Your sprite squad will attack automatically when they get near an enemy; Shadow attacks must be manually triggered by you (assuming the character has the requisite available mana.) There is a nice rock-paper-scissors balance to your attacks versus the enemies. Certain baddies will be weak or resistant to specific elemental-based magicks, and you will become much more effective once you learn who is weak to what. Naturally, this becomes a game of position and strength almost immediately. Tanks in front. Healers in back. Know your spell elements.

Unfortunately, weak pathfinding means you are constantly micromanaging your team. They will often get in each other’s way… particularly the speedier healers who have a habit of arriving to the battle before the tanks. The grid-based system means that characters can’t all bunch up around an enemy to get their licks in. They have to remain in the grid blocks, and they will not re-organize themselves so that everybody can fight. If an underpowered healer gets beside an enemy, he will not move out of the way once the tank shows up. That is for you to do. Even if the tank was told to attack the baddie, he will just park his ass on the sidelines until the healer is moved or killed.

However, it can be a bear to select solo units, since you must click on characters individually (unless you use the Select All button, or the nifty draw-circle-to-select feature). If you have one guy stuck in a swarm of enemies, it is easy for him or her to become lost in the mob. Particularly the smaller sprites. Why is there no alternate means to select units?

Overall, it just gets so tedious. Dialogue screens are slow, navigating menus and the world map is slow, even walking across the level is slow. Once I got to a battle, then it became a real-time race to select spells, heal the wounded and complete the mission… but getting there was like molasses in winter.

The final nagging doubt I had about this game covers the mission variety. Although Blue Dragon Plus has plenty of quests (both required and optional), most of the levels are the same walk in/kill enemies thing over and over again. “Over 30 hours of gameplay!” is a popular bullet point, but I would like to have something else to do during those 30 hours. As it stands, the only differentiating factor to the levels is the enemies within and the party you field.

The good news is that if you’re an OCD RTS player, you’re going to find a lot to do. Choosing quests, equipping items for maximum benefit, adjusting parties, plus a robot-customization thing that echoes the bizarre ancillary RPG sidegames of yore (yeah, blitzball!) But outside of that niche audience, Blue Dragon Plus really should not be your first exposure to the genre. I’d even hesitate to recommend it as your second exposure, simply because the storytelling and controls just aren’t as enjoyable as they could be.

For wonderful CG cutscenes and comprehensive core gameplay… but dragged down with lousy pathfinding and a tedious, repetitive structure… Blue Dragon Plus for DS gets 2 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Blue Dragon Plus was released February 2009 (NA) for DS.
Rated E