Blue Dragon

[Kaden]

I just hope that the characters start to grow on me more.

That's exactly what happened to me. Progress in the story is based on you caring what happens to your characters. I didn't. At the end of one of the dungeons, one of your characters gets kidnapped. I literally just put down my controller and said "I don't even care" and turned off the game.

It killed me, too, since that was after putting something like 30 hours into the game. I just had no desire to continue playing, though. I think the game would have benefited greatly from a DQ8-esque level of seriousness. Everything about the game is very cartoony, except for how serious everyone is. It just never meshed for me.

There were a couple of really great scenes for the characters (the ring-making scene between Jiro and Shu comes to mind), but they were way too few and way too far between. They either needed to add more reasons to care about the character ("because you're playing the game" seems to be what they were banking on) or the game should have been shorter.

Still a solid RPG. Just not anything nearly as spectacular as what people were expecting from them. I was also a little disappointed that the demo gave each character completely maxed classes for all of the classes and all of the characters. I was kind of hoping that they would have left out a few. It was useful for loading up the demo and figuring out how well certain configurations worked.