Blue Dragon, much like the first two Paper Mario games, is a solid, fun Japanese role-playing game with high production values with little to complain about, while having a handful of spectacular features. It’s also the most woefully underrated game of the year so far.

It’s producer Hironobu Sakaguchi’s - who’s credited in more good games than should be possible - first project released since leaving Square Enix in 2003, and his first with the Microsoft-backed Mistwalker Studios. Much thanks to him, the game is hugely entertaining, and has that special kind of feel, that charm, what many people call “it,” that few games developed outside of Nintendo do.

He’s also credited as the “scenario writer” for the game, and while the story and characters are nothing to write home about, they’re by no means bad for a JPRG, and on the game’s third and final disc, you’ll start to care about them if you haven’t already. Where this part of the game really shines, though, is in its cut scenes. They were made using in-game assets, but were pre-rendered to keep the frame rate up, and so addition effects could be added on. They’re absolutely beautiful and wonderfully choreographed, and will really keep you on the edge of your seat. With the voices set to English, they can be pretty painful, but the voice-acting on the Japanese track is much better, and cuts through much of the inanity of the dialogue.

The graphics throughout the vast majority of Blue Dragon really must be seen to be believed, and really steal the show, along with the excellent score by famed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. They’re both incredibly colorful and vibrant without being obnoxious, and they will melt your face off. The use of depth of field and motion blur are the best I have ever seen in a game, and the delicate use of cel-shading makes objects seem impossibly smooth. The frame rate does take a hit pretty often during the more elaborate attack sequences, but it’s never so bad that you’ll be turned off by it.

The character design for Blue Dragon was done by Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball fame. It’s not his best work - the human characters are especially bland in design, but they clearly let him make the monsters as weird as he wanted, and it paid off, as you’ll enjoy fighting everything from ghost crabs to giant moths with faces on their wings to “poo snakes.”

Blue Dragon is like a classic sports car with a new coat of paint. It’s very traditional, almost to the point of harming the game, but its refinements of JRPG gameplay mechanics - like the class system that easily lets you mix and match skills from different classes, and the battle system that lets you charge attacks for more power - while sacrificing time, hold it back from that point. It is disappointing to not see Sakaguchi, Uematsu, and Toriyama innovating like they did years ago, but it’s hard to hold that against them when the game is so enjoyable.

Like a piece of classical music, the game is moderately exciting in the beginning, kind of slogs through the middle, and climaxes at the end. Push through it, though, and it will be worth it.