0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - B.L.U.E. Legend of Water

         

B.L.U.E. Legend of Water is a 3^rd person adventure puzzle and exploration game developed by CAProduction and published by Hudson Soft, it released exclusively on the Playstation, and also released exclusively in Japan on the 9^th of July 1998. The game would receive a Playstation Network release on the 10^th anniversary of the original release date on both the PS3 and PSP, again exclusively in Japan.

The game is divided into two parts the non exploration part where you interact with NPC’s which are the Researchers and Maya’s father, this is done at the underwater marine research facility. Interactions with NPC’s reveals clues about the surrounding ruins.

 

Once outside of the research facility Maya along with her dolphin companion Luka can explore the seabed, where the pair solve puzzles and try to uncover the mystery surrounding the underwater ruins. Many of the underwater puzzles require Luka to complete them, this is done my a few simple commands such as push, swim away and stay. Also Maya does not use scuba equipment so pockets of air underwater must be found to stop her from drowning.

The player plays as 17 year old Maya (Voiced by Yuko Miyamura), with the game opening with Maya in a helicopter on her way to see her father Halbert at a marine research station. During the journey to the research station Maya falls asleep and has a weird dream.

When she arrives at the research station she is excited and wanting to go swimming with the dolphins, or is it just one dolphin in particular. This is where she meets Luka after swimming around in the ocean depths with her dolphin companion the pair stumble across some unusual underwater ruins and so beings the pairs quest to find out what these ruins are

Reviews for this Japanese exclusive release are impossible to find to we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings, with this game currently sitting at an average user rating of 3.79.5 from a total of 7 user ratings. With a good spread of user ratings for the game, with none falling below 2.5/5.

One user rated the game at a highly impressive 5/5 with another finding the game almost as good with a 4.5/5, two users rated the game at a highly respectable 4/5, while another one user each rated the game at a 3.5/5, a 3/5 or a 2.5/5.

Moving on to the games difficulty next where we find just 4 users rating this category with a 3 to one split in favour of the game having just the right difficulty level, the remaining user finding the game on the tough side, lastly we have the games lifespan.

Again a poor showing in user numbers with just 2 rating this category with an even split for the games lifespan with one user each rating the game at either 20 hours or 40 hours, even a politician could do the maths here that averages out a 30 hours lifespan for the game.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese exclusive release, same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com, so our last hope rests with Amazon.com in out search for a copy of this game.

Where sadly we are out of luck, not even a hint of the game on Amazon.com, decided to head over to the co.uk version of Amazon just in case, and stumbled across a handful of copies available. The four used copies that are currently on the market have no conformation on the completeness of them, ignoring the acceptable copies we have a good and a very good available, the good copy is priced at £5.92 which is $7.92 in the US this copy comes with free shipping, while the very good copy is priced at £14.47 or $19.35 once shipping is added in.

A couple of new copies of the game are also available, the first is priced at £19.33 bur the shipping costs will bump that up to £25.26, the remaining new copy of the game is significantly higher than that, this copy will set you back a steep £63.20 which converts to 84.53 in the US.

Written by

P J Gibbon