Blue Dragon

Blue Dragon, the Japanese role-playing game that was supposed to endear Japan to Xbox 360, is now backwards compatible on Xbox One.

Lost Odyssey might be one of the most touching games I've ever played. I remember meeting that dying woman in the village who turned out to be my - lead character Kaim's - long-lost daughter, even though we looked roughly the same age. Then there was the gnarled old pirate your team meets (and recruits) who turns out to be the son of a lady in your party, who looks much younger than he does. This is possible because Kaim and a few others are immortals and have lived for hundreds of years.

It really is award season for expectation-exceeder Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which was last night crowned Game Developers Choice Awards Game of the Year.

UPDATE 01/07/2014: Hironobu Sakaguchi's next game is indeed Terra Battle and is indeed for smartphones.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, is already in the final stage of development on his latest game.

Every now and then, someone pops out of the woodwork to complain that the games industry isn't innovative any more. This is clearly nonsense. Certainly, publishers might have an ongoing love affair with barely distinguishable sequels and a herd mentality that makes sheep look strong-willed, but consider this - year after year, the industry invents new and previously unheard-of ways to make you part with your cash. If that's not innovation, what is?

Download Content (DLC) is a new arrival in the exciting field of wallet-stripping, and the Xbox 360 is on the vanguard. Many Xbox 360 games have content available for download sometime after launch, allowing you to hand over a few measly Microsoft points for access to new maps, models, missions and the likes. It's a great idea in theory, obviously - who doesn't want to extend the life of their favourite game a bit? In practice, though, there's some suspicion about it. Nobody wants to find themselves paying extra money for content that should have been in the game in the first place.

Hence these DLC roundup features, where we'll be looking at the bits and bobs that have made their way onto Xbox Live - and, soon, PSN - in the past few months, and checking out what's worth whipping your card out for, and what deserves to sit, dusty and unloved, in the digital dustbins out the back of the Marketplace.

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Microsoft has piped up this morning to tell us about some fresh downloadable content for role-playing game Blue Dragon.

We understand the rationale, we really do. The Xbox 360 is going down in Japan in a manner which makes lead balloons look like a sound investment, and Something Needs To Be Done. What does Japan like? It likes Final Fantasy, and it likes Dragon Quest. A lot.

Solution, then; hire the bloke who invented Final Fantasy, the bloke who did the music for Final Fantasy, and the chap who draws the characters in Dragon Quest, and get them to make a game.

Blue Dragon is the result - and perhaps, if you're Japanese and deeply attached to the creations of the three men involved with it, it might tick all the boxes for you. It's graphically stunning (tick), absolutely enormous (tick), and dripping with nostalgia for an earlier age of RPGs (tick - well, maybe).

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In all the furore of E3 you may have overlooked the release of four new demos for download from Xbox Live.

The Hironobu Sakaguchi-produced Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon will go on sale in Europe on 24th August, publisher Microsoft said today.

It's extraordinarily difficult to approach Blue Dragon without some kind of baggage in tow.

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi reckons the PlayStation 3 is too fiddly to develop for, and that Microsoft's advertising in Japan has been rubbish, GamesIndustry.biz is reporting.

Mistwalker producer Hironobu Sakaguchi has hinted that we could see an online sequel to Blue Dragon.

"We're in talks with Microsoft about development of a sequel," Sakaguchi told Japanese site Gpara.com. "Specifics aren't finalised, but there's a possibility that it will be produced as an online title."

It's not the first time he's expressed an interest in the genre, having previously revealed in a GDC conference that he'd like to talk to Microsoft about making an online role-playing game.

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Blue Dragon will be released across Europe this Autumn, Microsoft has confirmed this afternoon, with September looking the likely month of launch.

Japan's biggest-selling Xbox 360 title, Hironobu Sakaguchi/Mistwalker's Blue Dragon, is set to receive a burst of downloadable content tomorrow at 8pm local time.

Hironobu Sakaguchi has said that he's already looking toward a sequel for Xbox 360 exclusive RPG Blue Dragon, which is due out in Japan on 7th December.

Speaking to Famitsu, in an interview partly translated by IGN, Sakaguchi also said that Japanese RPG fans who buy Blue Dragon can look forward to free downloadable content in the first few months of next year.

The first game is now finished, he revealed, and will ship on three DVDs - uncompressed, it actually takes up a whopping 30GB of disk space.

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Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has announced that his new Xbox 360 titles, Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, are coming along very nicely, thank you - and will be in the shops next year.