New Blue Dragon DS RPG: Details & Video

New details of the Bandai Namco-developed Blue Dragon RPG for DS have been revealed at this year's Jump Festa event. Following on from the Brownie Brown-developed (Magical Starsign, Mother 3, Heroes of Mana) Strategy RPG 'Blue Dragon Plus', which will be hitting the US and Europe in Spring 2009 thanks to Ignition Entertainment, Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker and Akira Toriyama's Bird Studio are teaming up once more to bring Blue Dragon to DS, this time working with Hideo Baba-san of Namco's Tales Studio (Brand Manager for the Tales series in general) to create a more traditional 3D RPG experience and achieve higher sales that the comparatively average performance of Blue Dragon Plus (200,000 units shipped on the userbase of the Xbox 360 in Japan, yet less than 100,000 units on the massively popular DS so far...).

Bandai Namco promoted the game towards the end of its lengthy Tales of Hearts presentation at the Jump Festa event over in Japan. Baba-san is working as Producer on the new game, along with Hironobu Sakaguchi, whilst Toriyama, well-known for this work on Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, is back in the character design role as the regulars from previous Blue Dragon games make a return. It also seems that former Final Fantasy veteran composer Nobuo Uematsu is credited for at least one of the tracks shown during the early trailer, but whether or not he is fully on-board for the entire soundtrack is as yet unconfirmed.

Single players are not being neglected, though, with parties still in threes, but the computer merely taking control of the other two characters. In terms of storyline, the game is set two years after the events of the original Xbox 360 version, but the message for newcomers is that the first game does not have to be played in order to appreciate this.

Are you looking forward to Blue Dragon Plus, or would you rather wait for the inevitable Western release of this new version in 2009?