The Blue Dragon demo has two levels available that you can play for an hour each. I was able to beat the first level of the demo with a couple minutes to spare, and I made it a good way into the second level before I got mad and had to stop. While I do like RPGs I prefer ones along the lines of Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, or the to-be-released Mass Effect. Japanese style RPGs are not ones I find myself interested in, but with all the hype over Blue Dragon I decided to check out the demo. The graphics remind me a lot of Dragon Ball Z, but then I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full episode. So if you’re a fan of Dragon Ball Z don’t judge me to harshly on the comparison. While the graphics are not a style I prefer they still look really nice. After playing the demo for Eternal Sonata recently it took a few minutes to get use to the full featured RPG system with items, skills, spells, and classes. Once I got use to it and remembered how a real RPG is played I was able to breeze through the first level pretty easily.

There are some unique elements to the game which I really liked. First, when you’re wondering around the world you can pause at any time and pull up a Field view that shows you all of the enemies in range of you to attack (if there are any). This gives you the opportunity to attack one or all of the enemies in range. At first I was ignoring this option, but once I got use to it fighting got a lot easier. The other unique feature that helped get through the demo quicker was the Field Barrier. When activated you don’t have to fight any weaker enemies that you have defeated before. So, once you beat a specific type of enemy you never have to fight them again if you don’t want to. Other than the boss fights I was able to take out whole parties of enemies in one turn for the most part. During the boss fights the tension meter is the key to winning. Basically, the more damage done, both by you and to you, increases the tension meter and once it is maxed out you can do really powerful attacks that can pretty much defeat anybody.

The regular combat system took a little getting use to, but once I figure it out I was slaughtering guys. Any attack can be powered up, but the more you power them up the longer you have to wait before the attack occurs. Since combat is turn based you want to try and get the most power out of your attack while still getting the attack in before the enemy gets another turn. It took me about half of the first level to start getting the hang of the turn based power up attacking style, but now that I have it figured out I really like it.

There were a couple things besides the graphical style I did not really like. First, some of the powerful attacks have their own animations and for some reason it would not let me skip some of them. The weird thing was that other animations could be skipped. The same thing would happen with some of the cut scenes. I could skip some of them, but not all of them. Since the demo is only 60 minutes I wanted to skip these after I saw them the first time since the same attack has the same cut scene every time. The other complaint I have is that the music during battles seemed like it was always the same. After a while it gets old. The music itself is pretty good, but after hearing it over and over again for almost 2 hours I was getting pretty tied of it. Hopefully the full game has more music that it switches between.

I never made it past the Gorgon Hydrattler in the second level. I had all of the other areas cleared out, but every time I’d fight the Gorgon Hydrattler it would turn all (or most) of my team to stone with its first attack so I could never get an attack in. If anyone knows how to keep from getting turned to stone please let me know. I’d like to finish the second level, but I can’t get past this part.

If you’re into RPGs I’d absolutely recommend giving this one a try. Despites is cartoon appearance it has a lot of depth to it. After playing it for a couple hours I was still finding great new spells, skills, and items that I did not know about. Before playing this demo I had written this game off, but now I’m thinking I’ll have to play the full version.