Blue Dragon Gold, Anime, Manga, And Now Sequel!

Blue Dragon is shaping up to be not only Microsoft's biggest push on the Japanese gaming market to date, but also the biggest game the Xbox 360 has ever seen. Work on the Japanese version is now finished, and Mistwalker's first RPG will be released over there on December 7... on no less than 3 DVDs! And that includes compressing the game as much as possible, or else it would have taken over 30 GB of space, according to the game's creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. In return for such a massive project, players can expect around 40 to 50 hours of gameplay in Blue Dragon, plus whatever additional content they're planning to release through Xbox Live early next year (at least in Japan).

IGN picked up on a Famitsu interview with Sakaguchi, in which the father of the Final Fantasy series also revealed that a Blue Dragon sequel is currently being planned, most likely for Microsoft's console once again - although a final platform was not confirmed at the time. Hopefully the next one will take shorter to develop because, speaking about the first Blue Dragon, Sakaguchi mentioned that it took three years to make it happen, including initial planning and two years of actual development on the Xbox 360.

But Gold as it may be in Japan, Blue Dragon is still missing a definitive release date in the Western world. All the while, Sakaguchi is currently working on something like... seven games at once! He's collaborating with Cavia on their Cry On RPG, he's half done with ASH for the Nintendo DS, then there's Lost Odyssey, and aside from Blue Dragon 2 (tentative title), he's also keeping busy with tree more games. Two are in development already, and the third one will follow soon, according to his statements in the Famitsu interview.

Earlier this month, there was also more news about Mistwalker's first RPG, in that Blue Dragon is being adapted into a manga, called "Blue Dragon ST", and an anime series was recently announced as well.

After all this, if Microsoft's Xbox 360 is still not going to seriously take off in Japan, they might as well pull out from there. For good.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)