Let's be honest; owners of Microsoft consoles have always gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to Japanese Role-Playing Games. The original Xbox had practically none whatsoever, and to date, the Xbox 360 has had Enchanted Arms and, if you include MMORPG's, Final Fantasy XI. When the 360 launched, Microsoft was adamant this situation was going to change, citing a veritable pantheon of Japanese gaming big-wigs like Hironobu Sakaguchi(Final Fantasy), Akira Toriyama(Dragon Ball Z) and Nobuo Uematsu(Final Fantasy). The opening salvo in this impending firestorm of JRPG goodness was to be Blue Dragon, and with all those huge names attached to the game, many gamers expected something special. So does Blue Dragon live up to the hype now that it has finally found its way to the English-speaking world?

Blue Dragon tells what must be an age-old story in Japan: a bunch of kids who look a whole lot younger than they are find themselves thrust into an epic series of events against a powerful evil, but thankfully, they've also been gifted with supernatural powers and abilities with which to confront the impending Armageddon. Veterans of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest et al, please wake up now. There are actually a few surprises along the epic adventure, but by and large, the story is a bit cliche. More than anything, the issue here is pacing: the game takes at least ten hours to actually get started, and it's only towards the end of disc one (out of three!) that the plot really starts to pick up a bit...only to slow right back down again as you find yourself grinding for levels so you can tackle enemies. But let's not get ahead of ourselves!

The world of Blue Dragon is absolutely huge, and will take hours to just walk from one end to the other. Many games claim this sort of feature of course, but you really need to sit down and play Blue Dragon just to get a real handle on how staggeringly massive the world here is. Thankfully, you will receive a warp device pretty early on that allows you to teleport between previously discovered warp-points with ease, although you'll still need to find these points, so there's a lot of walking to be had.

For those that want it, there is plenty of backtracking to be done if you want to explore or quest for goodies, which makes the warp devices an even more welcome addition. There are plenty of treasures to find around the world, with some of the best equipment and loot being protected by coloured barriers that you will first encounter in the opening hour of the game, but remain unable to dispel the barriers until about halfway through the second disc. You will also notice plenty of treasure chests in out of the way, seemingly inaccessible places, but will have to wait until the third disc to get those. Besides the tradition treasure chests, in every town or dungeon, you can kick or search pretty much everything from rocks, to air vents, occasionally finding useful items, but some of the best item rewards are from finding lots of "nothings".

So Blue Dragon has checked the Epic World, Epic Story and Exploration/Loot boxes, but half the fun in a good RPG comes from not only equipping your characters with the best armour and weapons, but also developing their core abilities and gaining levels. And like any good RPG, Blue Dragon answers the call to level-up by providing not only levels for your main characters, but also their magical shadows who do most of the fighting. Shu, the protagonist has the titular blue dragon, but there is also a phoenix and minotaur, amongst others. Gaining levels will improve your team's core abilities automatically, but using your shadows in battle will allow them to specialise into a certain class, and this is where the real detail of the game takes place.

You see your characters not only gain experience, but also shadow points from winning a battle, which are used to level up individual shadow classes. There are nine classes in all, with each having a fairly varied skill and stat specialities, from melee attack, to white magic, to equipping more skills and accessories. Each class has a basic skill that you can't unequip, but once you unlock a skill with a certain class, you can equip that skill no matter what class you change to. Although it sounds cool in practice, inevitably all your characters eventually end up being a jack-of-all-trades, and play fairly similarly. Of course how similar or different they wind up is entirely up to you as the player, and the classes all max out at 99, so there's plenty of levelling up to be done. That said, the final skill for all the classes is learnt somewhere between level 30 and 50, which makes the last half of the levels feels like a bit of a chore, even if it does continue to bolster your character's attributes when using that class.

So with all the talk of levelling-up and doing battle, you're probably wondering just how the combat works. Well, as is becoming a trend in recent RPGs, random battles have been done away with, and enemies are visible on the field before you enter a fight with them. For many, this is a very welcome change to the gameplay, especially if you managed to slog your way through Enchanted Arms. Plus, it opens up a few extra possibilities for engaging battles...you can surprise enemies by attacking them from behind, and also be surprised when attacked from behind, but more importantly,

Blue Dragon adds a new feature called the encounter circle. By pulling the right trigger, the action is paused and a circle appears around your main character. Any enemies inside the circle are listed on the right hand side of the screen, and you may choose to fight a specific enemy, or even all of them at once. When fighting multiple enemies, you are granted bonuses in between each set of enemies, with the ability to restore your health and mana, increase attack power, and other useful bonuses, it can really turn the tide of battle and it's actually possible to leave these conflicts with more health and mana than you went in with!

There are also several "Field Skills" to unlock that you can use outside of battle, which have a number of nifty abilities like being invisible to enemies, making them charge you more fervently, or simply defeating low-level trash mobs you've already crushed a hundred times before. At heart, the actual battles are a fairly standard turn-based affair, but Blue Dragon attempts to mix it up a bit by adding a charge-meter to add new tactical options. Charging can delay what otherwise would have been an instant attack, but it can also dramatically increase the damage you deal or even allow you to hit more targets than usual. You can move your characters between the front and back row, which decreases the physical damage they give and receive, which is handy if you have specialised magic-users and melee attackers.

While this all sounds good on paper, it has to be said that in practice Blue Dragon is a pretty easy game for the most part. The only real obstacles to your finishing the game are the overall length of the game and the limited save options, the latter of which can be overcome by warping to a location where you can save. The combat is enjoyable though, and the boss battles, while tough, feature some of the greatest (if a little misplaced) hair-metal musical stylings in any RPG. Outside of battle the music is a more subdued orchestral score that fits the game nicely, but isn't anything to write home about. Likewise the English voice acting is alright, it gets the job done, although you'll want to wring the necks of some of the characters. Thankfully you can change this at any time if you'd rather go with subtitles and authentic Japanese voiceovers.

Visually, Blue Dragon is a marvellous looking game. The cartoony, animation style graphics are very fitting to the anime design of the characters, and is extremely well done. Some of the areas are quite large and impressive, but can sometimes suffer from a bit of slowdown or character pop-in. The camera works well in battle and while moving around, and features some nice focusing effects to add a cinematic flair to the presentation. Speaking of, like a typical Japanese RPG, Blue Dragon is filled with pre-rendered cinematics, which here is a little unnecessary, since the standard graphics look so good that sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two.

The large amount of pre-rendered video content is likely what pushed the game onto three DVDs, although to Mistwalker's credit, it's split up fairly well. Each disc ends with a relatively climactic battle, and each disc contains all the areas from previous discs, so there's no need to change discs when you want to explore older areas. While the first two discs are mostly linear, the third disc opens up vastly with more side-quests than you'll know what to do with. Of course, if you don't want to bother with any of these, it will probably make the last disc relatively short. But even without doing any of the side-quests, Blue Dragon will likely keep you busy for at least 50 hours.

Stop for a second and take that number in, because that equates to over two whole days of your life, and that doesn't encompass ALL of the game. Between Achievement hunting and Downloadable Content, Blue Dragon is one of the best value packages available for your hard-earned gaming dollar, particularly if you really love the turn-based JRPG experience. So far, free DLC has added new difficulties, and premium DLC adds new items to find or buy, and offers a random dungeon generator that contains over 30 new items, monsters and bosses, so spending a few MS Points on DLC and you'll extend Blue Dragon's replayability even more.