mistwalker

April 17, 2015

Retrospective Reviews – Blue Dragon

Nathan Gibson blue dragon, consoles, Hironobu Sakaguchi, jrpg, mistwalker, retrospective reviews, Xbox 0

Retrospective Reviews is a new regular series at PopGeeks that looks back at great games that you may have missed when they first released. The idea is to introduce you to the titles in an honest and frank way with the hope that you go back and play them if they sound appealing to you. We’ll be looking at a vast variety of genres over the coming months so there should be something for everyone. We’d also love to hear your thoughts about the games in the comments, so if you played the featured title then please share your experience with it. First Released: December 7, 2006 (Japan) / August, 2007 (Rest of the world) Platforms: Xbox 360 Developer: Mistwalker and Artoon Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Blue Dragon was something of an experiment for Microsoft when it released for the Xbox 360. The console was struggling to gain any sort of momentum in Japan and executives believed that part of the reason was the lack of available titles that are

December 30, 2014

Cry On: Sakaguchi’s abandoned game

Peter Paltridge cry on, giant, mistwalker, sakaguchi, Xbox, xbox, xbox 360 0

You may remember that in the mid-2000’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man behind the greatest Final Fantasy titles the series ever had, was inexplicably stuck making games for XBox. Only one game of his came out for the system before his contract was cancelled, and he went on to make The Last Story for Wii. But if Blue Dragon hadn’t been the lone JRPG fish in the bro-dude shooter market and sold more copies, he might have made Cry On instead. The project was cancelled in 2008, but Sakaguchi uploaded the trailer to his own YouTube account this week. No actual gameplay footage is shown, because development never really got that far. Half of the trailer is concept art and the other half is a cutscene created by the game engine. We can see it would have used the nifty seventh-gen cel-shading technique. And for once, the title is not abstract: everything really cries. The drawing of the girl cries, the Japanese letters cry, the English letters cry, EVERYTHING cries. Compare

August 5, 2012

Developer Spotlight: Mistwalker

Daniel Flatt blue dragon, Blue Dragon Awakened Shadow, Blue Dragon Plus, daniel flatt, dont-miss, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Lost Odyssey, mistwalker, Nobuo Uematsu, The Last Story, theparanoidgamer.com, Wii, xbox 360, xbox360 2

Hironobu Sakaguchi; if you’re a fan of RPG’s chances are you’ll know this name. The creator of a series that was to be his last foray into video games if it didn’t succeed which also shared the gambits name: Final Fantasy. Arguably some of the greatest RPG’s of a span of console generations sprung from this man’s creative mind as he worked at the venerable Square Enix.

March 25, 2012

Review: The Last Story

Andy Whitefield andy whitefield, AQ Interactive, Hironobu Sakaguchi, jrpg, mistwalker, Operation Rainfall, Reviews, reviews, rpg, The Last Story, theparanoidgamer.com, Wii, xbox 360 2

The Last Story has garnered much attention over the past few years, with the original reveal that Mistwalker, fronted by JRPG mastermind Hironobo Sakaguchi, was working on a Wii-exclusive, followed by the furore of Operation: Rainfall to get it released in the west. Has all the hassle been worth it?