Blue Dragon (Xbox 360)

For the past ten years, mysterious purple clouds have been appearing in the sky, bringing destruction with them. On one fateful day, a creature known as the Land Shark attacked the Talta Village. Three friends – Shu, Kluke, and Jiro – tried to capture it, and found out in the process that the Land Shark was in fact a machine, commanded by an evil person named Nene, who apparently possessed the knowledge of an ancient and powerful technology. The three friends leave the village in search for Nene, determined to stop him at all costs.

Blue Dragon is a traditional turn-based Japanese role-playing game, designed, written and supervised by Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame. There are no random encounters in the game, and the player can always see the enemies, perform back attacks on them, or run away and avoid the battle. All battles take place at separate screens, and it is not possible to move on the battle field. The main game combat element is that each member of the party has their own shadow monster. Kluke has a blue phoenix, Jiro has a blue minotaur, Shu has a blue dragon, etc. Each of those shadows has a variety of skills, spells and attacks available, and as they level up, additional skills are unlocked.