With a big-name design team including Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), Akira Toriyama (Dragon Quest) and Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Blue Dragon was Microsoft's attempt to break into the Japanese games market with a traditional JRPG. The move was modestly successful, with a total of 80,348 units sold on the first four days of release in Japan, making Blue Dragon the fastest selling Xbox 360 game in the region.
Each year for the past ten years, purple clouds have mysteriously appeared in the sky, signalling misfortune and disaster for people across the world.
After years of torment at the hands of a "land shark" which ravages their village each time the clouds appear, youths Shu, Kluke, and Jiro hatch a plan to fight back against the monstrous fiend. However, in the course of attempting to stop it, they discover it is not a creature at all, but rather a strange machine. After scuffling with the trio, it leaves the village and eventually takes flight, returning to a mother ship high in the purple clouds, taking the three youngsters with it.