impresiones de 1UP sobre Blue Dragon

1UP.com escribió:In a rare visit to the Mistwalker studios in an opulent sector of Tokyo's Shibuya district, Mistwalker president and former Squaresoft founder, Hironobu Sakaguchi gave us a personal demonstration of one his new company's highly-anticipated new Xbox 360 projects, Blue Dragon, while also giving us a sneak peek at his studio's other work in progress, Lost Odyssey.

Blue Dragon is an RPG created by the titans of the game industry, bringing together Final Fantasy creator Sakaguchi with Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama on board providing character designs, and Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu firing up the virtual orchestras on the game's soundtrack. Handling actual coding duties are the Blinx-masterminds at Artoon, the development team comprised of ex-Sonic Team members, among others. The tag line for Blue Dragon is "Inner light manifested in shadow." Five characters with phantom powers (Shu, Jiro, Kluke, Marumaro, and Zora) form the crux of the gameplay. If main character Shu, for example, throws a punch, then so too will his enormous shadow dragon throw a punch. In their path is an antiquated human race, the "Nene," which command an ancient magic power thought to have perished long ago. That's the game in a nutshell, albeit a game that takes place in gorgeous, luxuriant environment only the Xbox 360 could provide.

Since Mistwalker handles the production and direction side of things, putting the actual game development in the hands of external studios like Artoon, it's no surprise that the Mistwalker offices are rather compact. In essentially a small apartment duplex on the top floor of a building, myself along with a handful of other journalists huddled in what appeared to be Mistwalker's living room, with Sakaguchi-san manning a small VAIO laptop (to show us various still images) and a remote-control for their enormous high-definition widescreen television. While he sifted through a variety of hi-res character models, before-and-after environmental demonstrations (with lighting effects and without), and other Blue Dragon-related images, one of Mistwalker's employees put multiple characters through their paces, showing off a wealth of new, Xbox 360-enabled special effects. Here's a recap of our inaugural meeting with Mistwalker.

Sakaguchi: I'd like to show you mainly Blue Dragon -- not only these pictures, but also the motion and movies, operating on the development kit and production 360 -- and also later show you some pictures of Lost Odyssey.

[Motions to the Xbox 360 sitting on the table, and the one closer to the widescreen TV.]

This is the final version of the 360, and this is the Beta kit, for development. First I'd like to show you some shadows. This time we're using shadow-maps, and the main feature of the shadow-maps is that you can see lights in the middle of the shadows, and we produce a space between the multiplying leaves in the tree. And as you know, in a natural environment you can see some lights even when you're underneath a tree that can be reproduced by using this shadow-map.

Now I want to show you some water effects. Please take a look at the water, for example below the bridge, and also the flow of the water changes.

[At this point Sakaguchi demonstrates running water under a bridge, which ripples realistically, particularly around solid objects like rocks in the river. Next he loads up some environments and zooms in to reveal the quality of the surface-textures.]

Now we are using normal-maps, and it shows more detailed information on the surface, and the condition of the surface. This next area is still under development [Sakaguchi loads up another area, an indoor cave-like zone with phosphorescent blue boulders], but we'll synchronize the atmosphere and taste to the character, and add volume-lighting. First of all, we know set goals from a technical perspective, so in order to set a creative bar and to be able to set our goals we first create still images and after that we add new volume lighting and more. And now we're going to show you some characters.

This model of Shu is from the previous build, which was created on June 30th, so this is not the latest version. This is still in an intermission stage, so after I'll show you still pictures of the latest version. This is motion-blur.

[Sakaguchi shows the main character Shu running. After Shu gains a certain speed, he begins to blur from the side, but as the Mistwalker demo rep freezes the character in place and turns the camera to the front, the blur effect disappears.]

So here we're using 3D motion blur, which only appears in the direction Shu is running. And we're producing smooth transitions from walking condition to running condition. We're writing new programs. You'll also notice when Shu bends his body, his eyes move first, then after that he turns his waist into the direction he'd like to move, and then his body bends. So this is not done by motion-capture. We're using a program that produces very smooth moves.

1UP: It's very natural.

Sakaguchi: Yeah, yeah. Now, this next character is Zora. Please look at the movement of her hair and clothes. This is done using 'physical simulation' to produce those movements.

[At this point Sakaguchi points out Zora's "natural" breast bounce, which elicits laughs from the attended media.]

1UP: Is that physical simulation?

Sakaguchi: [Laughs] Yes! Not too much.

1UP: Mo-cap?

Sakaguchi: [Laughs] No no! This next character is Marumaro. [Editor's note: A small, rotund character with a cape and funny hat, Marumaro is a personal favorite.]

1UP: Each of these characters is playable?

Sakaguchi: Yes, five in total. As you know this game is an RPG, so the main characters get together and are sometimes separated through the main storyline. And now I'll show you two monsters.

[Here, Sakaguchi's demo rep fires up a rather furry, half gopher/half rat creature, to demonstrate the graphics engine's fur-shading abilities.]

Here's the next one. You can see the environments around this character on the surface of his body.

[This time the monster that is loaded up is a robot, designed in the classic Toriyama style, with round body, and spindly, stick-like legs and arms. The feature of note is that it is exceptionally reflective, which leads to a few more inquiries.]

1UP: Is this real-time environment-mapping?

Sakaguchi: Not perfectly.

1UP: Simulated?

Sakaguchi: Yes.

[Sakaguchi now loads up a wireframe environment with the main character Shu and his dragon-shadow controlled by the Mistwalker demonstrator in real-time.]

And this is a movie that shows the motion of the dragon who is the main character's shadow. The player characters are supposed to reveal and supposed to know these secrets about these shadows and why they have these shadows. It's the main theme of the story. In some places, the shadow can become this very long, stretched creature.

[Here, Sakaguchi shows us some still images of various airships, some of which resemble fish.]

So in this world these machines exits, and were created by older people who died in an ancient age. So the people living in this age don't know how to create them. In this world there are many ruins. They can find many machines, but they don't know how to use them.

1UP: I notice that the airships, or some of them, are designed based on fish. Is this consistent throughout the game?

Sakaguchi: Not only from fish, although certainly we have some essence in the creatures, robots and machines, but not all of them.

[Sakaguchi pulls out a small toy of Shu and his dragon shadow looming above him and places it on the table in front of us.]

1UP: Was this made by Bandai?

Sakaguchi: Yes! Bandai. They will be making the toys.

1UP: This is the first time you've been involved with Akira Toriyama since the days of Chrono Trigger. What made you decide to work with him again on this project?

Sakaguchi: I'm a big fan of Toriyama-san! [Laughs] If I can work with Toriyama-san, of course I'd like to approach him every year, but as you know Toriyama-san is very busy. That is why we had so many long years apart after Chrono Trigger.

1UP: In July, I spent an afternoon with Yoshitaka Amano and he mentioned that you, Nobuo Uematsu and he still hang out together, and go drinking together. I asked him if he would like to create something new with you, as you had in those beginning years together on Final Fantasy. What do you think about this?

Sakaguchi: I'm really glad to hear that. There's a plan in which I collaborate with Amano-san, and I'm not starting any project [based on] it, but in that plan Amano-san will create the world itself, and I will direct it and convert it into a game. So I hope that I can accomplish that project in the future.

1UP: Mistwalker is like starting fresh for you. How is it to create a new company in this era, when videogames are so much bigger than when you first founded Square all those years ago?

Sakaguchi: As you know, in a big company sometimes you must place a situation in which you have to create a game just to run the company. So as an individual creator I'm very much enjoying Mistwalker because I can spend most of my time and most of my ability to create a new game. So I'm enjoying Mistwalker very much. But sometimes you cannot enjoy the creation of a game in a big company, and personally and I have no intention of neglecting the kind of management style I'm enjoying at Mistwalker right now.

[Now Sakaguchi loads up some Lost Odyssey images for us to see.]

Sakaguchi: So we're using the Unreal 3 engine for Lost Odyssey.

1UP: But not for Blue Dragon?

Sakaguchi: For Blue Dragon we're using an original engine. And we will add more visual effects to Lost Odyssey than you see here.

1UP: Who is the character designer for Lost Odyssey?

Sakaguchi: Takehiko Inoue. He is a cartoonist who created the manga Slam Dunk, as well as Vagabond, which is the story of the most famous samurai in Japan.

1UP: What is the development studio on Lost Odyssey?

Sakaguchi: A new development studio called FeelPLUS+.

[And with that, our demo session ended and we stepped out onto Mistwalker's patio to grab a couple pictures of Sakaguchi-san, who looked fit and trim in the glow of his current projects, clearly enjoying his newfound status as a developer reborn. Considering his legacy, we have every reason to be excited about Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, although you can be certain we won't see either of them in 2005.]