Sakaguchi on Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, and his take on X360 marketing |
GameSpot News managed to sit down with Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame, and Hees Kyung, acting translator and Microsoft's global product manager for both Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey at the recent Game Developers Conference. Several amusing details concerning were revealed. The juicy bits include:- Sakaguchi satisfaction with Blue Dragon's platform driving performance in the Japanese market, and with Blue Dragon's success with the Japanese gaming community (Sakaguchi cites the positive welcome in the site 2channel)
- Other than the English translation, and a few fixed bugs (mechat shooting), they won't be making any changes to the localized English version.
- As for further downloadable content, we should expect downloadable random dungeons, and an "impossible" difficulty setting five to six months post-launch.
- There will be a playable demo on Xbox Live Marketplace around June or July.
With the game details done and over with, we'll end this with a snippet of their conversation regarding Xbox 360 marketing in Japan and the "Jump in" marketing drive that Xbox 360 had in other countries, and Sakaguchi's take on eventually confronting his former franchise. Here's the marketing bit:
Sakaguchi: [in English] If you say "jump in" in Japanese. Jump in. It's not so cool in Japanese.
GameSpot: It doesn't make sense.
Sakaguchi: [English] Yeah, makes no sense.
Microsoft PR rep: "Do, do, do." [the recent Xbox 360 slogan in Japan]
Sakaguchi: [English] "Do, do, do" is not so good either. [laughs]
GameSpot: So they need to try harder then.
Sakaguchi: [English] Yeah, it's not so cool. [laughs]
And here's Sakaguchi's take on Final Fantasy:
Sakaguchi: I feel that the Final Fantasy series should come to Xbox 360 as well. This is wise. It makes so much sense to me...it has so much potential in North America and in Europe. So there's a great chance for the series to succeed on 360 as well. [in English] And I heard they made the White Engine open platform as well.
GameSpot: So you wouldn't have any problems competing against a series that you helped create so many years ago?
Sakaguchi: I'm willing to break them into pieces, crush them at my feet.
That's that. The rest of the interview, and Sakaguchi's opinion on how to properly market Gears of War in Japan can be had via our "read" link below.
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Comments
They have sakaguchi, why the ***** don't they just ask him "what's cool", or some of the other japanese working for them. I have a feeling MS marketting is still made up of a bunch of westerners who try to do "market research" on the japanese and come up with *****ty slogans....instead of just asking a japanese person who is in the know....
I was right, it is a bunch of white boys who just change their slogans for japan...they don't even do market research....lame. Anyways, Good interview, nice read....
GameSpot: So you wouldn't have any problems competing against a series that you helped create so many years ago? Sakaguchi: I'm willing to break them into pieces, crush them at my feet. haha WOW saka kicks fkn ass!!!
he has a long way to go if he wants to break FF... that ***** is huge.
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