Panzer Dragoon

[The NZA]

 

 

been meaning to talk about this amazing series on here for years - Panzer Dragoon & it's amazing sequel Zwei are on-rails shooters (like Sin & Punishment) but work with recticle shooting (like Rez), meaning you hold the button down & highlight the things you want to shoot, rather than jamming the button constantly.  

 

They're beautiful games (moebius did the concept art & some designs), both visually and their soundtracks - what's also cool is how they were so well done for early 3D, and enemies could attack from front, back or both sides...in between combat, i'd use this ability to look around & observe the alien environments, because they were just so well done.  it's awesome to me that not only did they hold up so well, but so many countless games in the time since didn't do half as good a job creating such a foreign & interesting atmosphere about them.  cooler still, Zwei offered multiple paths & endings as you went.  

 

and then came Panzer Dragoon Saga, the long-lost (and expensive) RPG that showed up at the tail of the US saturn's life & got called their answer to FF VII.  what it is is something far better though - it takes the magic of the worlds the prior games built & gives you an even better soundtrack with a unique battle engine.  it's crazy ambitious too, as most encounters are fully voiced over, and while this makes the adventure span 4 discs, it's on the shorter end & bucks the RPG trend of dragging on, making a really memorable experience.  

 

as you level, you can work on your stats & how your dragoon grows 

 

 

here's some of that OST

 

 

 

we've an old thread for Orta, but it's still a gorgeous game: 

 

 

i didn't get to finally play these games until a few years back when i got a modded Saturn, so i can say without rose-tinted glasses that they hold up incredibly well, and there's all kinds of tricks going on to hide the saturn's limitations as well.  just a beautiful series & i hope it comes back one day, or at least gets a collection so more folks can experience it. 

[The NZA]

Panzer Dragoon Saga Retrospective: Gaming's Missing Masterpiece

Introduction

 

Like a lot of the 1998 titles whose 20th anniversaries we’ll be celebrating throughout 2018, Panzer Dragoon Saga is one of the greatest games of all time. Unlike most of the games scheduled for the rest of this retrospective series, very few people have played it. Its scarcity has conferred a cult-classic status that’s become part of its appeal: It’s The Goldfinch hidden behind the headboard. To play it is to enter an exclusive, clued-in club and join the sparse population that’s had the pleasure of seeing Saga’s equally sparse and lonely landscapes. But because the game is so good, its elusiveness, scant sales figures, and skyrocketing prices on the secondary market are also regrettable, echoing and amplifying the sense of loss and sadness that suffused its development, setting, and story.

 

Works that were influential in the creation of Panzer Dragoon

 

Part of Panzer Dragoon’s appeal had always been the games’ tantalizing looks at a larger mythology lurking on the periphery as the player soared past. The world of Panzer Dragoon was run-down, ruined, and yes, postapocalyptic, although that last adjective is so often applied in pop culture criticism that it undersells Panzer’s special stew of antecedents. The series owed debts to a smattering of sci-fi/fantasy works from Futatsugi’s formative years: Dune, Mad Max, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the French animated series Les Mondes Engloutis, Brian Aldiss’s novel The Long Afternoon of Earth, and Arzach and The Incal—comics by the French artist and writer Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), who created original artwork for Panzer Dragoon, including the first game’s Japanese cover art. Many of these influences contained common elements: hardscrabble societies scavenging amid the bones of bygone, advanced civilizations; devastated ecosystems; unnatural nature run amok.

 

Technical challenges during development, and a new approach to the JRPG

 

Everything about Saga was similarly ambitious, largely because the developers on Team Andromeda didn’t realize how huge a task they had taken on. “A fully 3-D RPG with beautiful visuals—that kind of game hardly existed anywhere in the world, which meant that no matter what aspect of the game we worked on, we had the challenge of making it entirely from whole cloth,” Futatsugi says. This was bad for Team Andromeda, but good for gamers. Because the developers were new to the genre, they reinvented everything rather than rely on any stale formulae of RPGs past.

The result is an RPG for people who think they don’t like RPGs. While leveling up in Saga supplies the usual sense of empowerment and progression, the game eschews the slow starts, tedious travel, and copious fetch quests that typify the genre, skipping straight to the dragon riding and monster slaying. And although its four discs are intimidating, much of that storage space is absorbed by the video and dialogue. A playthrough lasts less than 20 hours—long enough to feel meaty, but not so bloated that it becomes a burden. In that sense, Saga is the antithesis of that 60- to 80-hour RPG odyssey that many gamers have heard such great things about but just haven’t found time to play.

 

Paying respect to one of the greatest video game finales of all time

 

As a first-time Panzer player, I’m unswayed by nostalgia when I say that the endgame inspires the same sort of reaction in 2018 that it did during the Clinton administration. “There were some big tough dudes in Sega Test at the time, and I’d ask them, ‘How did you like it?’ as they finished,” [Chris Lucich, former Sega of America employee] says. “Some of them had tears and said, ‘It…was…great…” in a choked-up voice. The PR group watched the final few scenes and cried. They didn’t even experience the whole story. When you can reach people on an emotional level, it means that the story worked.”

 

just get a load of this awesome boss battle

 

 

[Dag]

I oddly read that same piece and I don't normally read much on gaming. Do you happen to have a clean copy of the game that I can add to my Retropie?

[The NZA]

i can find one, but can that run Saturn games?  i know good emulators these days on windows, i'd have to look into that though 

[Lorelei]

Hailed as a great game but I doubt anyone's played it. Big investment to not only buy a Saturn but the game at a ridiculous price. No one wants to fiddle writing a good Saturn emulator either, because the rest of the games for it were garbage. I wonder how this game would hold up today - must be a reason why they've never made a remake either.

[The NZA]

 

...well, okay: Saturn is a really expensive library these days, though Panzer 1 & 2 imports are still fairly cheap

 

the source code for Saga is long gone though, SSF (best windows emulator for it) has actually been good for a while now, and you just reminded me i really should make a thread highlighting the many awesome gems in the saturn's library - it's pretty arcade heavy, so fighters, SMUP's, racing games and shooters abound, but there's no genre that it slouches on either when you dig through imports (the bulk of said library)

[Lorelei]

The majority of what was available on NTSC and PAL seemed awful. This is what my comment is based on.

You must be on about gems that were only in Japan. I'd be interested in seeing the SMUPs - great news to hear an emulator's decent for it. I know someone cracked the Saturn a while ago, brlliant video: 

 

[The NZA]

yeah, i'd wager a top 50 best saturn games list (which would be really good, again if you're into arcade type gameplay), a good 30-40 would prolly be JP imports.  the library's up there with the turbografx/PCE in terms of being japan release heavy. 

[The NZA]

 

remake (already listen on steam) is looking good - a little worried the graphic update stands to lose some of moebius' alien world magic, but ill wait to see more.

 

meanwhile, there's a new game coming as well, from another team!

 

“To the world of Panzer Dragoon in VR” Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record

Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record is a VR dramatic shooter. It relive each of the various episodes that appeared in the three works of Sega Saturn software "Panzer Dragoon", "Panzer Dragoon Zwei" and "Panzer Dragoon Saga".

This work is a completely new work to play the episodes of the series trilogy by a new graphics that the first person view optimized for VR headsets and a new input method that likens the VR controller to the handgun of the dragon rider. The recording episodes and the support platform to be announced later.

For the latest information, please check official Twitter account @PanzerDragoonVR

[ Specification ]
Product Name : Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record (tentative title)
Release Date : 2020 Japanese Fiscal Year (Until March 2021)
Genre : VR Dramatic Shooter
Players : Single person
Publish & Development : Wildman Inc.
Copyright : Original Game©SEGA／©Wildman

Panzer Dragoon is either registered trademark or trademark of SEGA Holding Co., Ltd. or its affiliates.

 

best classic Sega revival since the Wonder Boy one of the last few years!

 

 

[The NZA]

 

 

game's out for $25 on eshop right now!  getting mixed reviews, but i'm still in