Hands On with DS tactical RPG Blue Dragon Plus

Everyone's favourite dragon is Puff the Magic, but since his retirement down by the sea there's been a vacancy in the mythical winged beast department. Maybe Shu and his eponymous Blue Dragon can fill the gap?

The lead characters in the Blue Dragon animated series on which this DS role-playing game is based, the pair have cemented their reputation with a certain section of the sub-teen boys demographic thanks to their recent appearance on the Cartoon Network.

Of course, there was also the Xbox 360 Blue Dragon game, which at one time was famous for being the first title to ship on three HD-DVDs, such was the voluminous quality of the cutscenes.

In keeping with the DS audience however, Blue Dragon Plus takes more of the kidult anime approach. Indeed, with Japanese studio Brownie Brown (love that name) in charge of development, it looks and plays very similar to the previous Heroes of Mana DS game.

Thankfully though, as more of a role-playing than strategy game Blue Dragon Plus doesn't fall so foul of the terrible pathfinding that crippled Heroes of Mana, although on occasions characters do seem to wander off on their own.

First impressions of Blue Dragon Plus concern the graphics - neat 2D sprites moving on an isometric 3D grid background - and the presentation.

In keeping with its animated origins, there’s a lot of dialogue, character development, backplot and cutscenes to enjoy/skip through. Most of these are generated within the game, but big set pieces do get the full CG-treatment. The audio is also typically big budget.

As a squad-based game, the opening scenes move fast in introducing the characters you'll be playing with through the 30-odd hours of promised gameplay. As the movement and combat system (of which more later) is fairly simple - touch and go - much of the game's complexity comes from how you use these characters.

Each has their own special skills: Zola is a speeder explorer, useful for leading enemies into traps and collecting power ups, while the dragons (actually called shadow summons) each of them use to attack operate on an elemental Fire, Water, Earth system.

In addition, how you group your characters is important. For example, Jiro is a healer who can ensure the health of nearby friends is topped up, while melee expert Fushira works as a support unit for physically weak characters.

Things can get a bit tricky during battles. These occur in real-time, and you'll have to move fast with your stylus to keep everything on track.

Touchscreen icons such as 'Select All' and an option that lets you draw a loop around characters to select them helps stop things getting too out-of-hand, but it'll be interesting to see how the system scales up with more characters. Things were pretty active with just four, and sometimes the character you wanted to select was hidden behind a large enemy sprite.

For that reason, Blue Dragon Plus is best described as a tactical RPG lite experience. You can't micro-manage what each of your characters is doing all the time, as in the Final Fantasy games. Instead you have a god's eye view of the overall action, and have to rely more on your melee characters' automatic physical attacks while you fire off dragon summons on particularly troublesome enemies.

The other thing that will be interesting to see as the game progresses is the level of customisation that's available.

Despite each character having nine attributes, it seems as if levelling up after a successful battle is an automatic process. Although apparently you will be able to buy accessories, which should provide some more typical role-playing elements to get your teeth into.

So will a mixture of genres, together with high-quality presentation and a solid backstory, combine for a worthwhile gaming experience? At the moment, we're not sure how it will pan out over dozens of hours, but at least we don't have too long to wait to find out. Blue Dragon Plus is due for its European release on 28 March.

And in the meantime, you can always spend some time checking out the official Blue Dragon Plus website.