I recently received Blue Dragon Plus for the Nintendo DS to review. Blue Dragon Plus is a real time strategy role-playing video game that was created much in the spirit of Final Fantasy. Blue Dragon Plus takes quite a few pages from the Final Fantasy Tactics playbook to setup their game. Having spent countless hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics, I could definitely see the similarities between the two.

Initially, I had issues with the game once I started playing. It strictly used the stylus, which I personally do not like to use unless I have to. But once I resigned myself to that, I started tapping away and controlling my characters. You bounce from battle to battle, much like Final Fantasy Tactics, killing different sets of monsters and furthering the storyline. In the beginning, I can honestly say it was dull and monotonous. It seemed like I was always having to babysit my characters because their A.I. seemed somewhat funky to me.

I was just about to give up on the game when I turned it over to my friend to play. We started trading off in-between battles learning how to use the powers and different strategies for each fight. Honestly, after a couple hours the game started to grow on us both a little.

We figured out that the best strategy for most fights was to clump up your characters and let the monsters come to you. Once they got close enough, you’d unleash your shadow powers on them and let your characters automatically enter attack mode. Then just make sure your healer character throws up the area of effect heals and heal over times, and you’re good to go. Pretty soon we were flying through battles, leveling up characters, and growing our party. It really started to feel like a strategy role-playing video game then.