To me, Blue Dragon beating Lair is a big accomplishment in the US. Lair was supposed to be PS3s ressurection in the US, and since we all *know* the X360 has no fans outside of FPS fans, then theres no way a hokey, kiddie JRPG could beat the great $20m+ uber blockbuster that Lair is/was.

Oh wait....Thats wrong.

I'm pretty impressed with the game so far. I'm about 3 hours in and while I have a few complaints, they are all relatively minor. If nothing changes significantly, BD is looking to slot in the 8 to 8.5 region in my review.

Not bad considering how I am definitely NOT a JRPG fan and how varied the game's reviews are. The game is extremely polished and there are few obvious weaknesses that I see in the first three hours (though I have to play at least 15 or more to accurately judge this game).

 Well if Sony gives some download numbers, then we can know.

 As for Lair, demographic or not, the game has been heavily hyped, and there have been much larger PS3 game openings.

 The point is that a week this good, even without little hype, shows that JRPGs can sell well on the 360 over here, which is likely to encourage even more support for it.

...Which is why it's great to be a JRPG fan in the US.

This year HASN'T been good to JRPGs. Rogue Galaxy, Rune Factory, Persona 3, Odin Sphere, and the 15 other DS RPGs have all done around the 50k area. For a new IP JRPG to come in and have the visual-steriotype of Dragon Quest (which doesn't do that well in the US), to come in and do 100k first week is VERY good on a system that has a much smaller userbase than the PS2 or DS.

Not the best by some, but it does dispel the idea that the X360 has no JRPG fanbase. Despite the mediocre reviews of Blue Dragon, a 100k first week is pretty good, and I think this means good things for the followup in Eternal Sonata (maybe 75k o/w) and Lost Odyssey (250k o/w).

i just hope LO can produce, it might be the savior for jrpgs on 360, comon LO!

As someone who soured on JRPGs several years ago (I've gotten angry at everything since FFVII, played VIII just for the kick-ass card game I loved), this game is seriously f***ing cool.

The battle system is incredibly fun and very different than anything I've seen before. The charged battle meter gets WAAAAYYY complicated later on as you consider "should I stun this guy here or there" or "when should I heal? in between the first or second MOB?" when your damage-dealers have already committed to attacks in other locations.

I'm a HUGE fan of this combat system and the powerups and jobs, while typical JRPG, seem acceptable.

I would also like to give a shout out to this game's AMAZING depth-of-field. Purely amazing and you'll have fun for at least 20 minutes exploring where the perfect camera focus point is and how it affects the rest of the environment. Kudos to Sakaguchi for making me love another badly written, overly teen-angst-ridden storyline. I never thought that would happen again.

Simply put, I think this is the most polished JRPG I've ever played and while I haven't beaten any recent FF games, I've played them all. And BD beats the hell out of them IMO. The combat system is the most intriguing I've seen since probably FFVI or so.

But, this game is still sitting at an 8.5 or so. I can't get over this writing and Shu's HORRIBLE voice-acting. But, an 8.5 from me is pretty amazing when I'm talking JRPGs.

If you dislike Shu's VA, then just switch over to Japanese voice acting with US subtitles.

I'm now at Jibral Town. Holy crap, it's huge. Not only that, I finally met the nothing man. Boy, what a sidequest he has for you!

When I met him, I had 310 nothings w/o searching the whole town.


...Spoliers.........







If you don't know who Nothing Man is, he's a perfectionist's dream. He gives you uber-accessories when you search a certain # of "nothings" from the thousands of locations in the game. At 200 nothings, the last thing I got, was an insanely overpowered acessory that raised half my stats up at some point. Very cool.

Again, Blue Dragon is a fantastic JRPG that everyone MUST play. This IS what everyone was hoping it'd be. It's not perfect, but it's vastly more polished than most any JRPG in awhile, and the game is truely next-gen in visuals and audio. The gameplay is similar to older games - but FFXIII will be too.

So how did everyone set their party up so far? I havent tweaked mine out alot yet, just been messing around.
I have ....
Shu - Sword Master / Assassin (hum, dont use steal much, will change this)
Jiro - Monk/ White magic (works like a backup healer for Kluke)
Kluke - White/Black magic (Ive relegated her to pretty much the 'back row' magic user role offense/healing)
Marumaro - Monk/Swordmaster (same as we found him)

Havent picked up the other girl yet. Anyone else tried some different combos? I know mine so far isnt the most efficient.

Crap I missed nothing man though not sure as I did get some rare accessories in jibral. I just finished disc 2 last night and have enjoyed every bit of it. By the way for those that are curious as to why it is 3 disk. It is all for the story or FMV as you won't be missing anything or be going back to an old disk. I know someone before had mentioned the multi disk being an issue since they thought they would have to swap back to go back to an old location etc. Again the only thing your "missing" is the story not locations,items or anything else. Once I figured out the shadow systems it ha become very easy so I am just focusing on the story and making myself as powerful as possible in case I do meet stronger foes or just in preparation for the hard mode and new game + as I heard is quite challenging. I would list what my stats are and how I developed my shadows etc but that might ruin some of the fun of figuring it our yourself and making mistakes etc plus the shadows give you plenty of flexibility to play how you like.

I purchased Blue Dragon this morning and will start the game tonight (unless I get caught up in Rapture and lose track of time!). The user reviews on this site convinced me to give this game a chance.