The Xbox 360 is rather infamous for its comparative dearth of role-playing games (RPGs). There've been a couple good ones, a few bad ones, and now: Blue Dragon, the first half-baked, over-ambitious, under-achieving, excessively-hyped, consternatingly-plodding, hopelessly-long, consistently-shallow, perplexingly passé RPG for Xbox 360. Crowd goes wild.

Though Blue Dragon certainly looks ready for prime time with its highly stylized artistic rendering of a fantasy world chock full of decidedly Anime trappings, its gameplay is, ultimately, a hackneyed throwback to RPG-wonder circa 1998. The story is shallow and hopeless cliché as a clutch of pre-teens decide only they have the gumption to take on the requisite super evil, over-lording, bad guy and foil his plot to destroy/conquer/consume the fine fantasy land in which they live while said evil guy happens to be superstitiously using the 10-year-olds for just that purpose, unbeknownst to them but clearly, unimpressively known to you, the player. It doesn't help that cookie-cutter boss of badness commands a "Land Shark," because it's not the Land Shark from the classic SNL, skit, which would be funny in the "poke fun" sort of way, but a totally different, non-funny mechanized one waxing at doomsday as effectively as a fish in the sand.

Meanwhile, each of the characters in your world-saving party are decidedly unlikable -- and not just because of their grating "personalities," but because for all their anime charm, they look creepy, like animated china dolls who's near-frozen facial expressions are offset but overworked body articulation. The voice-over work of each is generally good, yet, inexplicably, complete missing on occasion; sometimes you're reading what they're saying, sometimes they speak aloud with no rhyme or reason except that maybe they rushed this game out the door before the voice actors could finish reading the phonebook-sized script out loud. Too, when they do speak, it's with the faux earnestness of an adolescent trying on big adult words like "you bastard," which rounds out the list of character annoyances quite nicely.

Oh sure, everyone gets to command a dragon eventually -- a blue one and everything -- but man, "commanding" is not "playing" with dragons. They grow out of your shoes. No joke. Shoe Dragons. Still not playing. It's "ooh, look at the pretty interludes with dragons and creepy china dolls." This is just old-school RPG gaming at heart, and that school closed due to lack of attendance a long time ago (well, it did in North America, but Microsoft feels compelled to grasp at the last remaining vestige of RPG game buyers known as Final Fantasy fans.)

Ultimately, playing through a "classic" RPG like Blue Dragon only serves to remind you of why you don't play RPGs from 1998 anymore. Move around a bit, cut to a scene of a treasure chest opening and coughing up a coin or magical hairclip, cut back to moving around for a few more steps, talk to some people and read what they say, take a few steps back to where you came from, kick a rock to see if there's any gold in it, randomly encounter a minion of some sort (many minions, eventually) whereupon you and it take turns doing grade 2 math by subtracting from each other's hit points (HP) with a meaningful mash on the button that makes you attack with the meanest HP-subtractor in your arsenal while magical buddy A uses his/her turn to lay some magical addition on your dwindling HP. Then collect the baubles the minion coughs up and gain experience points (more math) to great fanfare but no confetti. Then do it all again. Every few seconds. For 2 freakin' discs. While swapping from disc 1 to disc 2, say "you bastard" like you mean it and you'll feel better. Or you'll run out and buy Oblivion, a real, modern RPG from Bethesda with a firm grasp on another type of game buying demographic: Gamers.