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Hironobu Sakaguchi Has “No Interest” in Bringing Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon to New Platforms

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In a new interview with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the legendary game developer and father of Final Fantasy, sat down to discuss the recent announcement of Fantasian Neo Dimension. The interview itself is a fascinating read, with many insights into his current life and upcoming ventures. However, one of the major new reveals from Sakaguchi is that he has “no interest” in porting or bringing Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon to modern platforms.

Lost Odyssey was released exclusively for the Xbox 360 in 2007. Mistwalker planned and wrote the game, with Feelplus developing it. Many fans have eagerly waited over the years for the game to see a second life, but that has yet to happen – and it looks like Sakaguchi has no plans to do so.
Mistwalker will release Fantasian onto new platforms later this year as Fantasian Neo Dimension, which features new voiceovers, a new difficulty option, and improved visuals. The game will be published by Square Enix, acting as a return for Sakaguchi since departing many years ago.

As for what Mistwalker is working on beyond Neo Dimension, it seems that a sequel to Fantasian could be in the works. Recently, a trademark for Fantasian Dark Edge was filed in Japan, leading to speculation that this could be a sequel. We’ll have to wait and see, but it seems that Mistwalker and Hironobu Sakaguchi are working hard on another project that many will once again love.
 

Woopah

Member
Guy is completely addicted to FFXIV

On Friday night, when I apologized for interrupting his time with the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail, he confessed that he was playing it up until just a few minutes before our interview.

"On a rare occasion — I want to stress 'rare occasion' — sometimes one of the Mistwalker team members will hop on Final Fantasy XIV, and I'll see a message saying, 'Hey, the meeting's started,'" Sakaguchi told me.
 
As long as Emulation and Xbox backwards compatibility is a thing, that's fine...

I would have payed for a port Lost Odyssey on other platforms.
Not even a remaster or remake, a cheap ass port.

I'm a cheap whore for JRPGs, and I can take it cheap like a champ.
 
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efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
The man, the legend.
Showing the middle finger to remakes and remasters and only looking forward.


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What would you call Fantasian Neo Dimension?

Mistwalker will release Fantasian onto new platforms later this year as Fantasian Neo Dimension, which features new voiceovers, a new difficulty option, and improved visuals. The game will be published by Square Enix, acting as a return for Sakaguchi since departing many years ago.
 
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Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
Championing console exclusives sure works wonder once the paltform is dead and fantastic games are left to just fester on it while idiots who were laughing about the games skipping PC are now crying for a remake/remaster. Little did they know that this puts the game entirely at the mercy of the publisher.
 

UltimaKilo

Gold Member
How hard would it be to remaster those two and bring them to gamepass, they'd get 2 great JRPG with little work.

It seems like a no brainer, but he wouldn’t really need to be involved just to slap some higher textures, resolution and frame rate to Blue Dragon.

I could swear I had read that he was semi-retired a while back, and only focusing on mobile games. It’s a shame since it seems to be true.
 

anthony2690

Member
I was personally hoping they would port Lost odyssey to everything in the future to bring it to a new audience, I honestly believe it's probably one of the most underrated jrpgs ever.

And I think being on playstation, switch as well as Xbox could help it find an audience, but even if that did happen, it sounds like Sakaguchi sadly isn't interested. :(
 

BennyBlanco

aka IMurRIVAL69
Lost Odyssey was so incredibly good. I think Sakaguchi knows whatever happens with it now is completely out of his hands so what is he supposed to say?
 
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Pelao

Member
Lost Odyssey is the real Final Fantasy XIII and it's a true gem. The little stories they tell you about the protagonist's past are also sometimes depressing as fuck.
Blue Dragon is a fun adventure elevated by Toriyama's character designs.
It would be a bummer if they never ported them to modern platforms, but I'm glad to still have them playable on my Series X.
I have to imagine you can also emulate them on PC at this point.
 
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March Climber

Gold Member
I don’t know why we are linking some random third party website discuss the Jason Schreier bloomberg article, unless people here dislike Jason that much to where they’d rather play telephone lol.


Here is the full context:

What’s next, then? Sakaguchi said that despite the newfound partnership, he has no interest in revisiting Final Fantasyor any of his old franchises — in part because he’s “switched to a consumer rather than a creator” and doesn’t want a glimpse at how the sausage is made. “If I take on the Final Fantasy brand again, I don’t know if I’ll be able to genuinely enjoy Final Fantasy XIV as much,” he said.

Sakaguchi also said he has no interest in bringing older games such as Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon to modern platforms, despite recent rumorssuggesting otherwise. He does want to find a way to revive the strategy game Terra Battle, which was released for phones in 2014 but is no longer playable.

Here are his feelings towards Square Enix helping him:

“I was a little bit concerned about how people would feel about working with me — perhaps they’ll have mixed feelings,” Sakaguchi said. “It was actually quite a warm welcome. Once the news was announced, I got tweets from a lot of current Square staff saying, ‘Welcome back, Sakaguchi-san.’ Some people I know, some I don’t. Everyone’s working hard toward a common goal.”

Also he has really been into Final Fantasy 14 and was playing it minutes before the interview.
 

Skelterz

Member
The man, the legend.
Showing the middle finger to remakes and remasters and only looking forward.


sakaguchi.0.0.jpg

See typically I agree when it comes to remakes for example last of us part one was remade and I just didn’t think it was necessary but a game like lost odyssey is deserved of a remake it’s been like 2 generations and it’s trapped on Xbox where JRPG’s go to die.

Let’s be honest here if Microsoft remade it and made it a multiplat for PC and PS5 it would sell 10x the amount it sold originally on 360, Sakaguchi needs to lay of the crack.
 

Saiyan-Rox

Member
I still remember that battle theme in blue dragon

Lost odyssey didn't gel with me at all tbh and I feel like if it were to release today people would raged about an ugly male main character
 
Lost odyssey didn't gel with me at all tbh and I feel like if it were to release today people would raged about an ugly male main character
vvZBblM.jpeg


I think that the main cast would be even more celebrated today considering Vagabond is EXTREMELY popular these days second only to Berserk as the most popular Seinen.



It would be a shame for the Gooch to leave Lost Odyssey behind. I haven't played it since 2011 but I've played it twice and it really is that amazing turn based experience people always ask for.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
I'm pretty sure his words has ZERO weight over what MS decides if they want to make Xbox 360 library everywhere else. Same for The Last Story and Nintendo.

He has zero weight over anything MS does. Even if he wanted to port it to new systems, he would need to have MS allow it, release the IP, and allow htem to work on it. Sakaguchi has already stated numerous times that he doesn't really want to do anything he doesn't want to do. There are many other studios under MS that could work on ports for Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey if they truly wanted to do it. People shouldn't blame Sakaguchi for something that is entirely on MS.
 

Shake Your Rump

Gold Member
I don't see the problem.

You can easily buy and play either of these on any Xbox since the Xbox 360. I am currently playing Blue Dragon, from disc, on an Xbox 360, and it plays perfectly fine. Looks good even! I'm about 40 hours in and it's been fun the entire time. I've also played on it an Xbox One S, and it runs at a solid 60fps with no tearing.

There is no excuse for not playing these games as-is.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Just collab with Nintendo or whoever for a successor to The Last Story already, however limited it was by the Wii and the budget it had amazing core ideas for the gameplay that need to be revisited while Square fumbles with retro remakes and DMC wannabes and few other studios try new things...
 
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Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
I don't see the problem.

You can easily buy and play either of these on any Xbox since the Xbox 360. I am currently playing Blue Dragon, from disc, on an Xbox 360, and it plays perfectly fine. Looks good even! I'm about 40 hours in and it's been fun the entire time. I've also played on it an Xbox One S, and it runs at a solid 60fps with no tearing.

There is no excuse for not playing these games as-is.

I would rather play it on my Playstation, Switch, or hell even my PC - Legally. Why would you go out of your way to buy a dead system to play one game?
 
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Shake Your Rump

Gold Member
I would rather play it on my Playstation, Switch, or hell even my PC - Legally. Why would you go out of your way to buy a dead system to play one game?
You can't play everything. There are hundreds of awesome games that you have not played and will never play. It's okay to not play a game.

PS: Xbox 360 S or One S are really cheap used and open up a flood of 360 games to play (especially all the multi-platform games that ran poorly on PS3).
 
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