Monday, April 9, 2007

1up's James Mielke: Blue Dragon isn't so hot...

In his latest 1up blog, James "Milkman" Mielke relates watching a Famitsu-editor-friend play through Blue Dragon in it's entirety over the last month. Their consensus? That it's "fucking boring".

With all the hype surrounding Blue Dragon over the last year or so I've kind of had this feeling that I should be more excited about it than I am. Now I'm thinking maybe what little excitement I have might be too much. I can suffer through archaic turn based gameplay if a game has a cool story or well designed characters. When gameplay is essentially nonexistent, a good story is pretty important. I already thought the characters were pretty lame, even for Toriyama whose designs all look exactly the same. Now hearing the story is boring too is pretty much the icing on the cake. What's amusing about the whole thing is that despite being bored to death by the game Milkman's Famitsu friend Endo still said he'd give the game an 8 if he was reviewing it for Famitsu:

"When Endo had put the finishing touches on beating the game, I asked him what he'd give it. In typical Famitsu-esque manner, he said he'd give it an 8 out of 10. I was aghast, after listening to how bored he was the whole time. He asked me if that wasn't a good score. I said "No, it's a very good score, but that's the problem!" In Japan, even if the game sucks, they'll still give a game like Blue Dragon a 10, 10, 9, and 9 in Famitsu either because they want to support Mistwalker's efforts, or don't want to offend their friends."

Nice. Definitely makes you realize you've got to take Japanese review scores with a grain of salt. Then again, I don't think inflated review scores are exclusive to the Far East...

With Bioshock coming out only a couple weeks after Blue Dragon I'll have to be pretty friggin' bored to waste 50 hours of my life on the game.

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