ReXGlue SDK debut sparks Xbox 360-to-PC ports for Blue Dragon & more

Great strides in Xbox 360 game preservation have been made since the debut of Sonic Unleashed Recompiled—and now, Blue Dragon, Ninja Gaiden 2, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD, and Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast 2 are being recompiled for PC. In the face of an uncertain future for the Xbox brand spurred by middling hardware sales and the retirement of Phil Spencer, it's interesting to see how dedicated fans are to preserving the history of Xbox. Compared to emulation, recompiled games offer much higher levels of performance and are far easier to develop transformative mods for, but lots of manual work is required to recompile a game compared to "simply" emulating it.

Both recompilations are based on ReXGlue, a static recompilation runtime SDK for Xbox 360 games. Unleashed Recompiled was based on earlier XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp recompilation tools, which were integral to the creation of ReXGlue but required runtimes to be developed and troubleshooted on a per-game basis. By providing a Xenia-based runtime, ReXGlue effectively streamlines the recompilation process by making testing and troubleshooting for a final executable much easier. There's also a greater focus on community development, with fixes no longer being locked per-game/engine and being easily shared across projects and developers.

While working on this article, I actually reached out to the developer of ReXGlue, Tom Clay, who is also behind the Blue Dragon recompilation. In his words: "The broader vision ties all of this together. The expectation isn't that the SDK ships fully solved—that would be impossible, and frankly the wrong approach. Instead, the model is a community feedback loop. A developer builds a recompilation, hits a problem, writes a solution for their specific game, and if that solution is general enough, it gets pulled back into the SDK as a reusable component for everyone who comes after. The goal is to give people powerful enough tools to build their own creations, and then harvest the best of those creations back into the platform. Over time, the SDK grows richer not just through core development, but through the collective output of everyone building on top of it. That's what makes this more than a toolkit—it's a platform."

The Ninja Gaiden 2 recompilation is very noteworthy from a game preservation angle since modern releases of Sigma 2 and 2 Black substantially alter combat and enemy encounter design versus the high-adrenaline, limit-pushing extremes of the original Ninja Gaiden 2 release. Players wanting that experience are forced to rely on original hardware, Xbox Backward Compatibility, or modding the releases currently available on PC to approximate the design of the original. Notably, it's also the last Ninja Gaiden game developed by the deceased Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki, who had no involvement in the "nerfed" Sigma 2 and was responsible for reviving the NES Ninja Gaiden franchise for Xbox to begin with.

Despite being very different games, Blue Dragon and Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast 2 share one common thread—both use characters designed by Dragon Ball creator and artist Akira Toriyama. Dragon Ball Z: Raging Blast 2 is a 3D arena fighter inspired by the Budokai Tenkaichi/Sparking! line of Dragon Ball fighting games and truthfully the less newsworthy of the two games. These days, Budokai Tenkaichi has been revived on modern platforms via Sparking! Zero and series purists trend toward Budokai Tenkaichi 3 netplay rather than the Raging Blast series viewed by fans as a stopgap between Tenkaichi and Xenoverse. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD is arguably more interesting, though, since the Budokai series of more traditional Virtua Fighter-style 3D fighters has long laid dormant.

Blue Dragon is the most interesting of the "Dragon" bunch, though—namely because the JRPG is a result of an active collaboration between Akira Toriyama and Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame. In a way, it's a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger, the classic SNES RPG spawned from those two collaborating. The Dragon Quest JRPG series is also known for being driven by Toriyama's designs, but doesn't involve Sakaguchi like the Chrono games and Blue Dragon does. 

Rather unusually for a JRPG or Japanese games in general, Blue Dragon was an Xbox platform exclusive developed by Mistwalker, made as part of a drive by Microsoft to ensure that Japanese developers supported the launch of the Xbox 360 and Japanese gamers would have more incentive to invest in the American-made console. The game's critical reception in The Land of The Rising Sun was positive, breaking sales records for Xbox 360 games in Japan...but sales and reception in the West were more lukewarm, pointing toward the game's mostly-standard JRPG design and story. Graphics and music were near universally-praised, but the story and underlying game design weren't considered particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary.

Even so, Blue Dragon marks a key point in the history of the Xbox console brand, Akira Toriyama's legacy as an artist, and Hironobu Sakaguchi's legacy as a game designer. Despite overall mixed reception for the time, the game's historical relevance, lack of modern ports, and spawned franchise of manga and anime adaptations are noteworthy. For modern players and gaming who may have missed the game or feel a deep nostalgia for it, this recompilation effort—all of these efforts, really—are huge.