You take turns attacking with your party members, cast magic, defend, use items or change formation. Figuring out enemy weaknesses and exploiting them will give you an edge, giving you a real sense of accomplishment as you take quickly down monsters with the best elemental spells. Your magic comes from shadow-like phantoms you control that are like mini-summons. Your phantom retains all of the abilities you learn even as you switch jobs, like using healing magic even when you're no longer a white mage. You can pick and choose the skills you want to customize your phantom with, making them more powerful alongside you as you grow stronger.

The Xbox 360 version of Blue Dragon suffered from a fluctuating framerate and other performance issues like screen tearing. With backward compatibility on Xbox One, the framerate is much better, remaining at a steady 30 FPS save for a few rare exceptions.

The characters in Blue Dragon all have a charming anime art style that sets them apart from most games. Their wide eyes, spiky hair and colorful clothes give them much more personality. You'll feel like you're playing through an anime series in a video game as your characters fight in battle and interact in cutscenes. Anime and manga artist Akira Toriyama from the Dragon Ball series designed the characters and monsters, giving them his trademark style.

You'll find monsters out in the open instead of in random encounters, and you get to control how to fight them or avoid them with special skills. If you select nearby groups of enemies with a cursor, you can take them on one after the other for better rewards. If you sneak up on monsters, you can stun them and launch a surprise attack to deal more damage to them. Or if you're in a hurry, you can execute enemies and take them out of your way. You won't earn any experience points if you do this, but it's great for those times when you return to older areas and you don't want the hassle of weaker enemies slowing you down.