Akira Toriyama, meanwhile, is the character designer behind the massive Dragon Quest franchise, and Square's cult classic Chrono Trigger. Nobuo Uematsu composed all the music for Final Fantasy until the most recent games. Hironobu Sakaguchi, whose Mist Walker studio is responsible for the design of the game, is the creator of the Final Fantasy series. Secondly, the first three names to appear in Blue Dragon's understated credits sequence when you start a new game are all legends in the world of Japanese RPGs. Even before it appeared in Japan, long before anyone without a working knowledge of kanji could get their chops around it, it was being hailed by fanboys as evidence that the Xbox 360 could win over even the notoriously suspicious Japanese developers who had all but ignored the previous Xbox.
There are two key reasons for this firstly, this game has been hyped by its publisher, Microsoft, as the first Great White Hope (great blue hope, perhaps?) for Japanese style games on the Xbox 360. It's extraordinarily difficult to approach Blue Dragon without some kind of baggage in tow.
