Blue Dragon, the 2006 Xbox 360 role-playing game from Hironobu Sakaguchi's studio Mistwalker, is now playable on PC. The release did not come from its rights holders: re:Blue is a fan-built static recompilation, and its 1.0 version went up on GitHub on Friday, August 28, timed to the 19th anniversary of the game's US release.
PC Gamer reported that the game had been stuck on the Xbox 360 since launch. Since Sakaguchi left Square Enix in the early 2000s to found Mistwalker, every one of his games except Fantasian has remained on a defunct console, never ported or re-released.
How a recompilation differs from emulation
A static recompilation translates the original game code so that it runs natively on a modern PC, and ships without any of the original assets to avoid copyright problems. re:Blue follows the unofficial Sonic Unleashed PC port and a recent Zelda: Twilight Princess project. It was built with ReXGlue, a toolset released earlier this year by its author, a programmer who goes by Tom, to help developers recompile Xbox 360 games; Blue Dragon was intended as a showcase for what those tools can do.
Earlier ReXGlue ports leaned on a hybrid approach, with CPU code recompiled to run natively while graphics ran through an implementation of the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia. Much of the Blue Dragon work went into a native renderer written against the game's own engine, which had never been documented. Tom told PC Gamer that presentation work is game-specific rather than generalisable, and that the value of a port over a standalone emulator lies in the quality-of-life features built on top of it.
What the port adds
- Resolutions up to 4K, windowed or fullscreen, with 16:9, 4:3, 16:10, 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios
- An unlocked frame rate, with optional caps at 30, 60, 90 or 120
- MSAA up to 8x or SSAA up to 4x, anisotropic filtering, and adjustable shadow quality and draw distance
- Field of view between 45 and 120 degrees, and a field HUD that can fade out or stay off entirely
- Native keyboard and mouse support, device-matched button glyphs, and a mod manager
- Eight new achievements alongside the original list, viewable in game
The port also merges the game's three original DVDs into a single executable and reworks graphical effects that did not scale beyond the Xbox 360's 720p output. Because Blue Dragon was designed in 2006 with CRT televisions in mind, the team had to correct bloom, gamma and overscan for modern displays. The game's logic is locked to 30Hz, so frame interpolation is used to keep animation smooth at higher frame rates. PC Gamer reported that a GPU with at least 1GB of VRAM is enough, and that the game runs at 1080p and 60fps on the Steam Deck.
Work continues after the 1.0 release. Tom plans to fold some of the Blue Dragon work back into ReXGlue, and his team has further updates and mods planned, including one that inserts characters from the Nintendo DS sequel into the original game.