Oritental Blue was originally slated for release on the Nintendo 64. After months of planning however the project was adapted to Nintendo's 64DD peripheral. Before any significant development continued Hudson decided to mothball the game due to disappointing 64DD sales and exorbitant development costs.
While Oriental Blue remained in limbo for nearly a year, Hudson Soft producer Ouji Hiroi decided to amend his development plans and target the GameBoy Advance. Many of the features originally planned for the game such as spoken dialogue and network-compatible diary system were scrapped due to hardware limitations. After more than five years of planning however, Oriental Blue was finally released for the GameBoy Advance on October, 24th 2003 in Japan.