The DS is quite well known for it's rich catalogue of RPGs and is the console for any fan of the genre to enjoy spend countless hours leveling up and saving the world from it's destruction. Now we have Blue Dragon Plus from Mistwalker, a hybrid RTS and RPG game and a direct sequel to the original game on the Xbox 360. A sequel it may be, but in terms of gameplay, it is vastly different.

Blue Dragon Plus takes place one year after the events of it's predecessor in which Shu and his friends live in a world where they are threatened by a being known as the Land Shark. This mechanical monster in turn, leads the gang to an ancient king known as Nene who brings destruction upon the world from his fortress among the clouds. Once Shu and the gang are dragged to this fortress after confronting the Land Shark, they find a series of floating orbs of light along with a voice telling them each to swallow one. Doing so leads to each of the characters' shadows being transformed into a creature granting it's bearer new powers. After an epic journey, Shu and his friends defeat the evil Nene and in turn, the battle causes the world to split up into a series of floating cubes and after a short time of peace, Blue Dragon Plus begins.

One of the first things you will notice when playing Blue Dragon Plus is the amount of well rendered FMV sequences that take place to help convey the story to the player, something you will be seeing a lot throughout the game and this is in no way a bad thing. Also, many will recognize the lovely artwork by Akira Toriyama along with music composer Nobuo Uematsu who created some addictive tunes for the game. After the introduction FMV in which a giant 3 headed shadow dragon appears from one of the many floating cubes, Shu and his friends set out to find the meaning of this. Though why is it that it seems like everyone, right down to the poo slimes, seem to have a shadow creature of their own all of a sudden? And who is behind Nene being reborn, even though it is vastly weakened? Along with these questions players of the original Blue Dragon will instantly realize that they will not be playing the same game. Instead of the traditional turn based combat that the original offered, Blue Dragon Plus is a real time strategy game mixed in with many RPG elements.

The gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings in which the player controls a number of characters through the touch screen in order to make their way through a stage filled with enemies to defeat and vast amounts of treasure to loot. Although there won't be hordes of units to control like traditional RTS games, you control up to 16 characters from the Blue Dragon universe, each with their own unique set of abilities. The RPG features Blue Dragon Plus retains gives a strong emphasis on each individual character since a successful strategy and character build can help make each mission that much easier and make all the difference. Every character will level up at the end of each mission when the experience points you gained from each enemy defeated gets tallied up, allowing you to become stronger and gain new abilities for your shadow creatures. As well as this, you will equip items to increase your stats or add healing items to the attack interface of each character. Your 'capacity' will also increase allowing you to equip another shadow to expand that character's abilities. The game also offers a short tutorial for beginners to get them to understand how Blue Dragon Plus plays and teaches players the basics to get them started. This teaches you basic game operations such as moving each unit by clicking on that character, then moving the camera across the stage to the designated location via the D-Pad. However, if you choose to attack or use an item, again you click on the character you wish to use then at the bottom left of the touch screen, a short interface will appear showing the attacks and items available to use at your disposal.

And they fight dirty!

After the first few missions where you get to grips with the gameplay and introduced to most of the main characters, the game's hub will appear. When out of battle it will appear on the top screen showing all available paths you've come across during your investigation of the cube, which is under attack by robots using highly destructive bombs to try and destroy it, as well as the other mysteries that are taking place as previously mentioned. In a turn based fashion, when in this hub, you can select to equip items and change your party members around or advance deeper into the cube and take part in missions. Slightly later in the game you'll be able to buy items from robot stores as well as constructing your own battle robots with pieces of metal you find throughout each mission to help ease the burden your characters carry. Eventually you'll also be able take part in side quests to get some nice rewards. It will really help out in tight situations if you take advantage of these options to help plan for your next mission.

Now to get on the main focus of the game; the gameplay. After selecting what party each character is in (there are initially two parties but that expands as more characters are introduced) you begin the mission. You have the choice of moving each character individually in the stage, moving them all at once, or draw a connecting bubble around which members you wish to choose to use. Then by moving the camera you can select where you want to move to or what enemies to attack. Each character has a set of unique shadow abilities; ranging from attacking to defending, healing or using magic, increasing or decreasing friendly or enemy targets stats. There's an ability for everything among the various characters available to you, so making a strategy to take down that pesky boss, or a horde of enemies at once, will be found with enough planning. You soon learn that there's a solution to everything if you look for it. If by chance you select to use your shadow and the enemy chooses to do the same at the same time (yeah, even the robots have a shadow), a Shadow Battle commences, which makes you move the stylus quickly over the touch screen to see who can bring out their shadow first. If you win you can get the hefty reward of dealing a fair bit extra damage which can really help out in the heat of battle. If you time your own shadow moves to coincide with the enemies, this can save you some damage to your party members, assuming you win of course!

As fun as the game makes controlling the various characters at once, problems will no doubt occur. These occur especially when you try to deal with a lot at once, which can hinder the enjoyable experience Blue Dragon Plus has to offer. As easy as using the touch screen is you can't help but notice that the characters seem a bit hard to control. When you have characters selected and make them move, you'll notice that the AI seems somewhat stupid and the path they take to get to the designated location certainly becomes questionable.

There'll be times that a party member will walk through enemies or a hazardous area destroying your plans or making your character stop behind to attack an enemy. This might not sound much, but it becomes increasingly annoying when playing the game and will build up a little tension. Other instances of some broken gameplay include when you tap a character to attack, they just stand there waiting for one of their friends to move, and will continue to do so until someone moves. Also due to the amount going on at one location, things can become rather clustered making it hard to select a certain unit. There is an arrow on the touch screen that goes through each character with a tap, but when time is of the essence and someone is near death, you won't be able to move them away from danger or be able to get healed. These little hindrances could potentially ruin the experience, but thankfully the good outweighs the bad and shouldn't be used as an excuse to not purchase the game if you have some interest in it. Another thing that gamers may nitpick about is during a mission combat will automatically stop where something may happen to a part of the stage or someone decides to say something. This would be far more convenient if this happened on the top screen away from combat. The camera angle can be rotated using either of the shoulder buttons to get a different view of each 3-D stage which aides the gameplay, especially when there are some obstacles in the way of your vision.

Overall, Blue Dragon Plus is quite an enjoyable RTS game and will reveal itself to be quite a deep title after you spend some time with it. You can tell that the gameplay was certainly well-done but some little flaws didn't make it what it quite what it could have been. It's quite an addicting title and when playing you'll end up wondering where the time went, so it's easy to see that this will last you the quoted time of around 30 hours to complete the main story and the 30 side quests. Along with the length of the game and the amount of beautiful FMVs to show off the good story, it's a title for any RTS fan along with RPG gamers looking for something a little different to pick up making this RTS/RPG game a worthy addition.