Blue Dragon is based on a design by Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, who also supervised development and wrote the plot.

Taking place in a fictional open-world environment, the story of Blue Dragon focuses on five friends (Shu, Jiro, Kluke, Zola, and Marumaro) as they travel across the world to confront Nene, the evil ruler of the Grand Kingdom.

[citation needed] The player is able to cast magic outside of combat situations based on each character's respective abilities.

[citation needed] In some cases, specific foes will block a path or desired treasure chest and must be defeated to proceed.

Overall, deciding on the correct amount of charge and letting go of the button at precisely that time can greatly influence the effectiveness of each character's attacks during combat.

For years, a terrifying beast dubbed the "Land Shark", and other lost technologies, such as the "sea cube" came with the purple clouds, killing thousands of people and destroying a number of villages.

[9][10] The world is split up into climate regions, each containing multiple kingdoms and villages, a few of which are not on the main path, but hold small stories, such as the giants, and the sheep, as well as hidden dungeons.

[9] On an unnamed world, the legendary purple clouds arrive in Talta Village which is the home of Shu, Kluke, and Jiro.

The party arrives at a giant Mechat base in the clouds and are tossed into the throne room of Nene, the apparent leader.

When the battle seems it will never end, and with the unseen voice promising them knowledge of how to pilot the Mechat, the party members eat the spheres.

As they consume the spheres, a strange transformation occurs to each, changing the forms of their shadows into powerful beings that are able to destroy the robot army.

[15] Blue Dragon was first revealed in February 2005, as one of two unnamed role-playing games in development by Hawaii-based studio Mistwalker for the console which later came to be known as the Xbox 360.

[16] In an IGN interview following the unveiling, Peter Moore stressed the importance to Microsoft of having Japanese games available on the system, commenting "...

[20] Near the end of November 2005, roughly a year before the title was released in Japan, Artoon's Naoto Ohshima indicated that the game was around 40% complete.

He also pointed out that Artoon had previously been known primarily for action titles, so that responsibility for Blue Dragon was originally somewhat frightening.

[21] Following this, a relative lack of media information for most of 2006 resulted in speculation that the title would be delayed until 2007, but Microsoft Japan's Takashi Sensui confirmed in August 2006 that the game would indeed see a year-end 2006 release.

[2] In a November 2006 interview with IGN, Sakaguchi confirmed that the sequel, Blue Dragon 2, was in the planning stages, and would presumably start development shortly thereafter.

[24] It is a real-time simulation RPG, featuring 2D sprite graphics, and was released in September 2008 in Japan and in February 2009 in North America.

One of the boss themes, "Eternity", was composed by Uematsu, with lyrics by Hironobu Sakaguchi himself, and includes vocals by English singer Ian Gillan.

[26][27] Blue Dragon Original Soundtrack was released on December 13, 2006, and was arranged by Satoshi Henmi and Hiroyuki Nakayama.

[30][31] Pre-orders of the game bundled with a limited edition Xbox 360 Core system were sold out in Japan well before the December 7, 2006, release date.

[36] Microsoft and Mistwalker initially hoped to sell over 200,000 units,[49] which would break their record for sales of an Xbox 360 game in Japan.

The story also came under scrutiny from some reviewers for being too generic and too similar to existing Japanese RPGs, with slow pacing during the beginning of the game.

[5] Eurogamer commented that the apparent lack of effort put into the facial animations for each character resulted in a limited ability to express emotion.

[35] Game Informer said that Blue Dragon lacked "jaw dropping" moments and that there was a "hard-to-define spark" missing from the story and events.

[37] 1Up.com also picked up on this, adding that Blue Dragon was missing "strong characters, gripping storytelling, and excellent pacing".

Specifically, Game Informer remarked that "the characters look like sculpted figurines wandering around a world built to scale".