Blue Dragon

Playing Blue Dragon is like watching old Nicktoons.

Yeah you've seen it all before, but it's so fucking solid and well designed that it's still enjoyable if (and this is the important part) you like the kind of game it is in the first place.

I'm having a better time with this than I've had with any RPG since DQ8 and honestly I'm having a hard time understanding why nobody else enjoyed it so far.

I picked it up today at lunch. I should be able to play for an hour or so when I get home late tonight. I'm excited.

p.s. God, Gamestop is so sucky. They refused to sell me MHF2 PSP because I didn't pre-order it. Do they really think they'll scare me into pre-ordering in the future instead of just going to another store, or buying online? I guess I shouldn't expect anything else from them at this point. My fault for going in there in the first place, but their location is just so convenient sometimes.

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Originally Posted by Opaque

I'm having a better time with this than I've had with any RPG since DQ8 and honestly I'm having a hard time understanding why nobody else enjoyed it so far.

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If you're enjoying this more than DQ8, I'll most likely hate it more than DQ8. God did that game bore me to tears, I wish I could have that 30 hours of my life back after I quit playing halfway through.

Yeah, I was actually abnormally bored with that game, too. It really doesn't make sense since I loved all the other DQs I played, and all of Level 5's other games.

The first 2 hours of DQ8 bored the hell out of me and I stopped playing, good thing I hadn't bought it.

I'm pretty sure Yuji Horii is on record as saying he was influenced by both Ultima and Wizardry.

Edit: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3133890

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Originally Posted by 1up article

Of course, until Dragon Warrior premiered in Japan in 1986 (under the name Dragon Quest), this definition was far too abstract for all but a select group of computer gamers. Starting with Wizardry in the early 80s, RPGs made the jump from a bunch of college kids sitting around a table at the student union to a wireframe 3D display on your 8-inch Apple II monitor at a fairly early point in game history. Wizardry, along with Richard Garriott's Ultima (which didn't follow too long afterwards), were primarily dungeon hacks -- the story was mere decoration, a little something to divert your attention while you spent hours bashing monsters and hoping against hope that some tiny bit of dust didn't destroy your save-game disk. The Ultima series did not begin to seriously concentrate on story until the fourth installment in 1985, so up to that time, computer RPGs were often hack-'em-ups done in the classic Dungeons & Dragons tradition -- the fun was all in character building.

Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura loved these RPGs. So much, in fact, that after seeing Wizardry for the first time at a computer show in San Francisco, the two programmers went right back to Japan and bought a Macintosh so he could play it himself. Both had just won a game-design contest held by software publisher Enix, and both were about to see their first published games (a tennis sim for Horii, a puzzle game for Nakamura) enter the marketplace. They would spend the next few years writing arcade and adventure games for computers, but they never thought about making an RPG of their own -- it took too much time, and besides, the Americans already had the tiny Japanese market cornered with Wizardry and Ultima.

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Originally Posted by Compass

Akalabeth came before Ultima, Mr. History. And nobody in Japan cared about those games anyway. If they're all stuck in a cycle of imitation, it started with Dragon Quest (which could have had sprites in the overworld, even if it was imitating Ultima [not confirmed]).

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lol ur dumb

I don't know what it is about RPGs that make them fun or even playable. I loved DQVIII, but looking back on it, all I really did was spam the same three or four skills for 100+ hours. The story was palatable, but not especially gripping. Oh well, you have to waste your youth on something, yes?

I loved DQ8 because of the boomerang. That shit was badass.

This game is sugoi.

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Originally Posted by Brand X

If you're enjoying this more than DQ8, I'll most likely hate it more than DQ8. God did that game bore me to tears, I wish I could have that 30 hours of my life back after I quit playing halfway through.

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DQ8 is better than Blue Dragon. DQ8 was the best RPG last generation.

It just took 5 or 6 hours to start up, but after that it was fucking awesome. Please believe.

EDIT: wait, you played for thirty hours and still didn't like where it was going? The fuck? Did you start catching monsters and shit?