For a certain type of person, Blue Dragon was one of the most exciting releases of 2007. The first game from Final Fantasy-creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s new studio, Mistwalker, would be his first collaboration with Akira Toriyama since 1995’s Chrono Trigger, as well as featuring music from FF mainstay Nobuo Uematsu.
It also faced the burden of being one of the first big JRPG’s for the Xbox 360 (a console with virtually no presence in Japan), showcasing what wondrous new things could be done with the genre with all of this bleeding-edge technology.
The result was, basically, a Solid Six Out of Ten that everyone moved on from very quickly in pursuit of the flashier things on the horizon. Ostensibly billing itself as a big new Dragon Quest, the game was thuddingly traditional, even compared to that franchise’s first foray into fully 3D open worlds with 2004’s Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King. It was every bit a PS2 JRPG that just so happened to be on a console with a HDMI port.
About Author
