New Blue Dragon info

I' m surprised no one else put this up earlier.

Link

I' ll just breeze through a few highlights:

Late August release date in North America

Purists will be happy to know that the Japanese vocal track has been left in for the North America release. Due to issues with the disc already containing numerous vocal tracks in Europe, it doesn' t look like this will be the case for our accented friends across the pond. The quality of the voice acting is on par with standard top-tier RPG translations. With the primary characters being children, higher pitched voices are the norm, though the stereotypical gruff villain voice also made an appearance during our demo.

Good for America, once again Europe gets the short end of the stick. Not sure whether the Australian disc will have the Japanese voices or not. Probably not. While I would have preferred the Japanese voice track to be standard, at least the dubbing appears to be on par with that of other RPG' s like FF. Heck as long as it' s better than N3 I' ll be happy.

Once the demo was done, Sakaguchi opened the floor to questions. The discussion first centered on changes being made for the US release. The download made available in Japan that adds two extra difficulty levels will be incorporated into the disc for the North American and European releases. Going one step further, three downloadable packs will be made available to add to a game that already spans multiple DVDs. The translated game is still a work in progress and more work is going to be done on improving the framerate and general look of the game. We were also told that we could expect to see some retail promotions similar to, although not identical, the Blue Dragon faceplates that were released in Japan.

Extra content is always welcome. Difficulty levels also add that extra bit of longevity for what is already a lengthy RPG. The rest of the article covers what has already been said before. Nothing is worse than a stellar game marred by poor localization, and all in all, it looks like localization has had at least some thought put into it. Kudos to Sakaguchi for keeping a close eye on the quality of his games in other regions. Seems to be a rare trait these days.

wait. So i have to read subtitles?

No, you won' t. With the North American version, both the Japanese voice track (with subtitles obviously) and the dubbed English voice track will be available. Whichever one you choose is up to you. European versions of the game don' t have that luxury. They only get the dubbed voice track.

No, you won' t. With the North American version, both the Japanese voice track (with subtitles obviously) and the dubbed English voice track will be available. Whichever one you choose is up to you. European versions of the game don' t have that luxury. They only get the dubbed voice track.

Sucks for Europe.... as usual , but now that i know i wont have to read subtitles i just might buy it

..Couldnt Europeans import an american copy? Wouldnt it still work on their 360' s?

Unfortunately no. Europe/Australia uses PAL as well as a different region code. America uses NTSC. You' d have to buy an NTSC 360 for the North American version to work.

Aaargh! Surely one more vocal track wouldn' t make much difference to the PAL version, would it? Just add another disc if necessary! :P

It would have been much cheaper just to create subtitles in different languages, than to rerecord voice overs for every country. Maybe, they just got one clever guy who knew all the languages to do all the high pitched and low pitched voices, heh. [:' (]

Dam nit.. I bet we' ll get screwed on the release date too, seeing as they haven' t mentioned that.

Europe doesn' t deserve japanese voices.