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Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was always going to make three 360 games. Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and action RPG Cry On. Now, according to 1UP, he'll only be releasing two.
Hope you're looking for some Blue Dragon DS footage. Hope you weren't, at the same time, looking for gameplay footage, because you won't find any here. What you will find is proof that Mistwalker, Feelplus and Brownie Brown (who all teamed up on the game) know full well that the DS can do JRPG pre-rendered scenes just fine, thank you very much.
The follow up to Mistwalker's Xbox 360 role-playing game Blue Dragon was released in Japan earlier this month for the Nintendo DS to so-so sales. Today, publisher Ignition Entertainment announced that it has picked up the title, hoping for greater success with its release of Blue Dragon Plus in North America and Europe in March of 2009. Wait, the press release actually says the DS title will "breathe fire" across the two continents, a disheartening announcement that spells certain doom.
In the short amount of time until we have left we're all burned to a crisp by Blue Dragon Plus' western release, you can enjoy the attached press release, which highlights the creative superteam of Sakaguchi, Toriyama and Uematsu, as well as "exciting RPG elements" like "item collection" and "character progression." What, no mention of menu navigation?
Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey developer Mistwalker, Hironobu Sakaguchi's current outfit, is teaming with Majesco and AQ Interactive for Away Shuffle Dungeon, an RPG for the DS slated for a fall release. It casts players as the creatively-named young hero "Sword", who must rescue townsfolk from a "mysterious unknown". Sounds traditional!
Majesco knows its stuff, commenting that working with Sakaguchi, Sonic character designer Naoto Oshima and Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu will make the game "well-positioned for success when it hits retail this fall".
Full announcement follows the jump.
Some Lost Odyssey DLC was released in Japan last month. For 400 MS Points, they got a new dungeon with one new boss and one new item. Nothing to really set your goodness gracious great balls on fire, then, but it's better than nothing. Good for them. So when do we get it? Yeah, the headline gave it away. It'll be available this Friday, May 23. Same stuff, same price.
We may not, officially, know about any of Nintendo's post Wii Fit releases for 2008—the company is keeping quiet, presumably until E3—but the ESRB has rated ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat for release on the Nintendo DS, all but assuring a North American localisation this year. Nintendo of America hasn't announced that the Mistwalker developed role-playing game will come stateside, but that E10+ rating is a very good indication that it will.
While many in the United States are just finishing their first play-through of Lost Odyssey, the third piece of DLC is now available in Japan. The new dungeon, Seeker of the Abyss, is available to those on the fourth disc. Battling in this underwater tunnel will eventually reward you with the Eternal Magic Engine, an accessory that allows immortals to cast unlimited amounts of spells at the price of exactly 0 MP.
So...Thursday, then. Oh, and sadly only in Japan, at least for now. For 400 points, on offer is a single (very familiar-looking) dungeon, which promises a single rare item and a single boss encounter, though you'd expect a fair bit of random-bad-guy-pop-ups to hassle you during your exploration as well. One more thing: the Famitsu report's a little unclear on where you need to be in the game to access this stuff, so keep that in mind if you're going to try and get around the region locks on XBL and pick this up.
『ロストオデッセイ』ダウンロードコンテンツ第3弾が2008年4月10日から配信[Famitsu]
While Microsoft snagging Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi may not have set the Japanese market on fire, we're still interested to see the games that he's creating for the platform. Lost Odyssey is his studio Mistwalker's latest attempt to make the Xbox 360 an RPG system as classic as predecessors from Nintendo or Sony.
So how did the critics like Lost Odyssey? Hit the jump for our Frankenreview to find out—an edition so good you may never need to read another review again.
