Blue Dragon Plus for the DS coming soon...

MangaHelpers has been given the chance to do a review of the game Blue Dragon Plus for the DS, coming out February 24th! Before I go into the details of the game, I'd like to bring you up to date with the Blue Dragon series.

A few of you manga fans might or might not remember a certain manga that ran in December of 2006, called Blue Dragon Ral Grad drawn by the renown artist Takeshi Obata (known for his art in Hikaru no Go, Death Note and Bakuman). It involved a character named Ral using his shadow, a blue dragon, to battle evil shadows plaguing the land.

A few weeks before the manga was released in Jump, Blue Dragon was released for the Xbox 360 created by the company Mistwalker (started by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series) with character designs by Akira Toriyama (DragonBall Universe, Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger), and music composed by Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy). Like the manga, it also involved a character using his blue dragon to defeat evil plaguing the land. The game's story, matching that of the manga, ended about there. The rest of the game involved many different characters and their shadows fighting an evil menace that comes whenever purple clouds appear.

While the manga series wasn't that huge of a success, the game hit it off quite well, and as such Hironobu Sakaguchi announced that there was a sequel in the works. That sequel just so happens to be Blue Dragon Plus for the DS! Here's the game's overview:

One year has passed since Shu and his companions defeated the tyrannical remnant of the Ancients, Nene. In the midst of the battle, the world split in two and now consists of a myriad of “cubes” that exploded from its depths. In one of these cubes, King Jibral stands on the balcony of Neo Jibral Castle and surveys the scene before him. He notices a mysterious cube in the distance suddenly start to move violently, and from it he sees the Shadow of a Balaur, a three-headed dragon, emerge. The enormous and sinister Shadow is just the beginning of the new turmoil and devastation to come.

The game's genre fits under TRPG (Tactical Role Playing Game), like that of the Final Fantasy Tactics series. While the main game play uses 2D graphics, the cut-scenes are all rendered beautifully in 3D. But don't take my word for it, check out the trailer and official site. As well as these screens:






Like its Xbox prequel, the same people are still working hard on it to bring it up to the high standards put in place by Mistwalker. Just so you can get an idea of how high, here are the studios working behind the scenes:

• Mistwalker
  
• Artoon (Yoshi’s Island)
  
• Brownie Brown (Heroes of Mana)
  
• Feelplus (Lost Odyssey)
  

With that much muscle backing it, each studio tried to get as much out of the DS and give it enough content to make it worth your buck. Here is what you can expect to see:

• Single Player Campaign With Over 30 Hours of Game Play
  
• Legion vs. Legion
  * Control up to 16 humans and Mecha Robos to fight against a horde of enemies
  * Equip your units with items and alter their composition to bolster their strength
  
• Take Advantage of Your DS Features Through Exciting Real-Time Battles and Shadow Fights!
  
• High Quality Dual Screen FMV’s Showcasing More Than an Hour of Story Events!
  
• Exciting RPG Elements Such As Item Collection, Character Progression and Robot Customizations
  

Once we get our copy we'll write up a review and let you know how we feel about it! So take this chance to either get a copy of the Xbox release and play it through before the 24th, or sit back, relax, and wait until our review is done with it before you go and buy it :D.