Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

Bad Design – Blue Dragon

I started playing Blue Dragon for the 360 by Mistwalker today. I've played it just a bit over four hours and right now I'm not sure I'll ever dedicate enough time to finish it. I've encountered two major problems.

1. Absence of story

After four hours I've still only encountered one "story part" of the game and that was right in the beginning. It set things in motion but didn't deliver more than it absolutely had to. I've yet to find any long term goal for the characters in the game. Just to clarify, I'm a fan of JRPG-games and I don't demand constant narrative but after over three hours just running around in dull and empty environments killing foes, I get bored and question my motives.

2. Constant

Here's the big one. See, almost everywhere in the environment there are rocks and threes and you can interact with pretty much everyone of them, searching for treasures such as items, XP, gold, attritube points like Agility and "Nothing". Yes, the player CAN ignore this but I, as many other I assume, run around and search almost all of them. Almost all of them got something of value inside too, so it's not a waste of time.

This is BORING. There is no joy whatsoever in running around, pressing A and getting another "Medecine". It halts the games flow, forcing me to run around along every edge of the terrain and makes me wait for the "searching animation" to finish.

It's just like destroying every single barrel, searching every chest and turning over every stone in Diablo (Blizzard) but much, much, much slower.

Personally I think this feature should be cut completely and limit finding stuff to treasure chests and such.

I heard from someone, sometime, somewhere that in Fable 2 (Lionhead) you can destroy barrels etc. in search of items but the game explicitly tells the player "Go ahead, but you won't find anything of value there". I can't say for sure that this is true, but if it is; I applaude them! That way I won't bother when I play Fable 2.

The shadows are quite dull to look at to be honest.

These two things might very well be deciding factors on whether to try and finish the game or not. Silly of me? Perhaps. But if a game hasn't got me hooked after four hours, we have a problem.