When you bring together two acclaimed industry giants such as Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama, you'd expect them to bring their full legacies to the table and create a shining example of the endless possibilities that can happen in the RPG genre. Though the two didn't create a genre changer, they have pretty much nailed the Japanese RPG formula, and delivered a very solid, fun, and wonderful game to the Xbox 360.

THE STORY SO FAR
Surprisingly, the story starts off as quick as you can snap your fingers, as we find our initial trio of heroes fighting not a lone bunny here or there, but thrust right into a battle with a giant land shark that swims under the ground and has wrecked their village homes for years. We get to meet here Shu (a lovingly do or die headstrong boy), Jiro (the intelligent and reserved one), and Kluke (the cute orphan with a heart of gold). If the ol' Japanese RPG (JRPG) standby of little kids saving the day is your most dreaded cliché, nothing about Blue Dragon will change your mind.

After the encounter with the land shark, you soon find yourself trying to make your way back to your village, but not before first running across the mastermind behind the land shark – Nene. Nene is an old, purple, elf-ear villain who travels around in a floating city and spouting a violet mist everywhere that signals destruction. Unable to beat Nene and his mysterious power, Shu and company soon find themselves on the run, but not before first swallowing orbs of light, granting them magical abilities that manifest themselves in blue shadows that protrude from their bodies.

With magical shadows in hand and a villain in view, off our heroes go, ultimately meeting up with two other heroes – Marumaro and Zola – and off they go to bring down and stop Nene once and for all.

The story isn't anything new for a JRPG, but it still does things so very well despite the fact that many of these elements have been done before. It's a little silly to beat players over the head with Shu's headstrong nature so early in the game, but other characters are allowed to develop a bit slower. Parts of the story will take place in the dialogue you'll get from simply approaching someone and talking to them, but the best elements and the main narrative points of the story unfold through cutscenes. Much like the Metal Gear Solid series, cutscenes make up a huge portion of the game, because there are so many there are three game discs to cycle through. However, the cutscenes never hang around for too long, and they are so well-done in terms of animation and style that it's hard not to admire the work and just sit there and enjoy the show.

GAMEPLAY
Much like Final Fantasy and other JRPGs of old, Blue Dragon's gameplay is fairly basic, as in it's been done so many times before that it's one that should be almost immediately familiar to longtime fans of the genre. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does a good job smoothing out the ride. If you've played your share of JRPGs you'll be able to fire the game up and immediately get playing, as things are presented in such a way that you should learn and understand all the gameplay mechanics and styles without having to open the pages of your manual once.

At its core Blue Dragon is like all other RPGs – you roam around environments, fighting enemies with the same list of attack, defend, and use item options as always, you get experience, level up, get stronger, and then keep moving forward down the narrative path. Blue Dragon doesn't change that up, but it does incorporate some fairly new mechanics to the genre, such as letting you see enemies and choose to attack them or run away if you wish, and a power meter on some moves that can increase their attack power or diminish the amount of magic points it would've taken to cast it.

Once nice thing about the game is how you go about shaping your characters to fit your own gameplan style and opinions. With a maximum of five characters ever out on the battlefield at once, you can switch them up in many ways, such as putting three warriors on the front lines to take the most damage while a black mage attacks and a white mage heals and supports. However, thanks to your shadows, you can change classes and ultimately craft your character how you want.

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