The plot is hardly a shocker: a band of youngsters rise up against a threat that’s terrorizing their home village, only for it to result in them embarking on an adventure which sees them saving the world. But once the game’s slightly plodding intro is out of the way, and each of the game’s heroes (initially it’s just Shu, Jiro and Kluke, who are later joined by the slightly mental short-ass Marumaro and royal vixen Zola) have received their iconic shadow-creature forms, you’re off, and Blue Dragon starts to unfurl nicely. While fights are underpinned by age-old turn-based mechanics, there’s more to it all than first appearances suggest.

For starters, while exploring the world, you can see your enemies, and so can usually choose whether or not to start fights with them, instead of simply having to roam and grit your teeth, being flung randomly into a scrap. There’s more, too - you can even attack, paralyze or scare away enemies before they’re even close enough to try and lunge for you. You can attack more than one nearby group at a time, if you like, pausing the game and selecting just who and how many of them you’d like to attack at the same time. The benefits of this are  that the more fights you chain at once, the more temporary stat bonuses your team get between each confrontation, and there’s even the chance that, brilliantly, the monsters themselves will start in-fighting.

On top of that, each character’s shadow can be assigned a skill category that unlocks new powers as you level it up, and you can swap between any of the categories as much and as often as you like while keeping those unlocked powers. So there’s some satisfyingly roomy customization to be had, as you select just who gets equipped with what, to best suit how you want to fight.