Panzer Dragoon Trilogy review

[Anayo]

Here I review the Panzer Dragoon trilogy.

PANZER DRAGOON ZWEI

This game opens with a movie showing a kid from the future. He lives in a village where his people raise giant lizards. One lizard has a glowing chest, which means the kid has to euthanize it. The kid can't bring himself to do it, so he secretly raises the lizard. The lizard grows into a dragon. Then, an airship appears over the kid's village and drops bombs. The dragon's chest starts to glow and he shoots lasers out of his face, damaging the air ship. The kid gets on the dragon's back and they run around fighting the air ship. Then level 1 begins and you take control of things. The game has 6 levels of traveling from place to place on your dragon to fight the people responsible for blowing up your village.


Dislike:

Your dragon is not very maneuverable. He can't boost, barrel roll, or get out of the way quickly. Plus, aiming targets and steering are mapped to the same buttons, so you can't aim at something while dodging it.

The cut scenes haven't aged well (bad CG) and they're just plain hard to follow as a story. I get the impression the developers didn't draw storyboards for them. The end scene in particular is comparable to Stanley Kubrick's “2001 Space Oddessey”; really trippy and hard to understand.

There aren't any power ups. (Although you can upgrade your dragon at the end of each level based on how you performed. But it's not as satisfying as real power ups.)


Like:

It is fun to fly and blow stuff up. Forward airborne movement, destroying targets. Simple pleasures, really. There's a bit of replay value from going back and trying to kill every single enemy.

The game's art style is mysterious and otherworldly. The Sega Saturn has terribly weak 3D graphics, but inspired design and good use of color and particle effects makes the game atmospheric and intriguing. In my opinion, this game isn't worth remembering because of the fun you're having while you play, it's cause of the things you see. The enemies look like robots made from floating, interlocking ceramic plates. I admire the job they did on the levels; especially the canyon where you combat enemy fighters while huge stone walls loom on either side of you, or the giant enemy airship where you actually travel inside and blow it up from the inside out. The grainy visuals give the game a surreal, mysterious quality that today's hyper-detailed games never have.


Bottom line:

For a 3D Saturn game from 1997 it looks great, but the actual gameplay hasn't aged as well (for instance NiGHTS into Dreams, Shining Force 3, Virtua Cop 2 are more appealing to play in 2010.) I personally enjoyed it, but most of the enjoyment came from the curiosity of playing something quaint and old. I doubt this would appeal to folks who are used to more modern stuff. The enemy designs and level environments are interesting. Recommended for people who are fascinated by the Sega Saturn.



PANZER DRAGOON

Panzer Dragoon begins with a nameless protagonist riding with his friends on a tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back. Suddenly an air ship flies overheard. “Woah!” nameless protag. and friends say. Suddenly a scorpion jumps out of the sand. Nameless takes out after it and tries to kill it with a cross bow. His chase leads him to a cave. He goes inside the cave and finds lots of old technology. Suddenly two dragons blast through the roof, shooting laser beams at each other. Nameless watches while dragon B kills the rider of dragon A. Dragon B rides away. Dragon A lands. Rider telepathically tells Nameless, “You have to stop Dragon B from reaching THE TOWER.” So, Nameless gets on Dragon A and flies away, leaving behind his nameless friends to stop Dragon B.

Aside from the fact that this cut scene has not aged well, things get a bit confusing here, cause Panzer Dragoon 2 is supposed to take place before the events of Panzer Dragoon, but PD1 was released in 1996 and PD2 was 1997. It's like the old vs. new Star Wars movies. In any case, you're still flying around on a dragon shooting stuff in PD1, but I noticed a lot of obvious differences compared to PD2.

DIFFERENCES

In Panzer Dragoon II, you have a “charge meter” and a “rage attack” that attacks everyone on the screen all at once. PD1 lacks this.
In PD2, you can save your game. Not in PD1.
PD2 had branching paths in the levels. PD1 lacks them.
Generally in PD2 the graphics are more detailed, the controls are more smooth, the levels are more grandiose and faster paced.

While playing PD1, I noticed Pac Man is better than Panzer Dragoon. “Why?”, you ask?

In Pac Man, you eat dots in a maze. Ghosts chase you. When you eat a power pill, all the ghosts get goofy grins and you can eat them for tons of points. I get a “rush” from waiting for all the ghosts to cluster in one place, making it really dangerous for me, but then I grab the power pill and gobble them all up and score really big. This risk/reward dynamic is one of the reasons I like video games so much.

Panzer Dragoon 1 and 2 lack any risk/reward dynamic. The only challenge in PD is reflexes; zap bad guys before they zap you. The reward is that you keep moving and finish the level. And since your dragon flies at a languid pace and your health bar is generous, the challenge is minimal.

However, like before, the scenery and bizarre creatures you see along the ride are a saving grace. The imaginary world in which the game takes place is unique. My favorite part is when you're in a vast desert and sand worms the size of sky scrapers start diving in and out of the dunes like dolphins in water. The music and sound effects add to the mood of the game. I particularly love the sweeping, orchestrated theme at the title screen and level 1. Panzer Dragoon is an ambitious game and it's obvious whoever was in charge of it really wanted to do something significant instead of just go through the motions. I can't say it's aged gracefully, but it's interesting.



PANZER DRAGOON SAGA



PDS falls short of greatness for three reasons.

1 Graphical limitations

When it comes to 3D Saturn games, PDS is as good as it gets. There aren't many Saturn games where you can freely explore 3D environments or stroll around 3D towns populated with detailed humans walking up and down the street. It's depressing that the very best the Saturn can do still isn't as good as the Playstation or Nintendo 64.

PDS has a lot of pop-up. If I got a dollar for every time a mountain disconcertingly materialized into existence, I might make back the money I spent on the game in the first place. The frame rate is unsteady. Textures frequently “warp”, defying the laws of perspective by bending away from the vanishing point of the screen when you get too close to them.

For a game that tries to create a living, breathing world with a Zelda: Ocarina of Time level of ambition, PDS sure doesn't have many towns for you to walk around in. PDS has 4 towns. I'll say that again: PDS HAS FOUR TOWNS. That's not very many.

The dungeons in PDS lend themselves to two kinds; big fields inexplicably flooded with water with a few pieces of rubble jutting out, and formulaic mazes of identical hallways with the textures swapped. It feels less like liberating dragon flight and more like the blind claustrophobia of a submarine. Furthermore, the 'goals' in these dungeons amount to chore-like lock-key puzzles of opening gates and progressing to the next floor to do it again. They aren't fun at all.



2 Lack of challenge

To carry along with the Pac Man comparison from earlier, you could say Pokemon is better than Panzer Dragoon Saga. “Why?”, you ask?

In Pokemon, every species has a “type”. For example, Bulbasaur is grass, Squirtle is water, Charmander is fire type. Rock, paper, scissors.

PDS has no such type system. Every battle boils down to finding the enemy's weak point and blasting the crap out of it. There is no strategy in the battles of PDS; no rock paper scissors, no risk/reward. Never did I feel pressured to play my cards right or to really think things through.

Chrono Trigger and Fire Emblem had elemental/class systems with a rock/paper/scissors quality to them. Shining Force III pressured you to recruit as many characters as possible throughout the course of the game, since the final battle required you to utilize all of them in an ultimate showdown. Golden Sun had similar stakes with its Djinn system. Dragon Force required you to carefully manage your resources and manpower in the wars and sieges waged therein. Heck, even Paper Mario: Thousand Year door is deeper than PDS, with its badge system and wacky “mini games” you play in battle to inflict more damage. PDS didn't even have any other “members” in your party, further restricting the strategy – it's just you and your dragon fighting everyone.

As far as I could tell, the upgrade path in PDS is totally rigid, without any strategic considerations that go much further than “have higher stats than your enemy and shoot them a lot.” Granted, you can buy more powerful gear sometimes. You can change your dragon's “mode” so he focuses more on a particular battle method (magic mode, attack mode, defense mode, speed mode.) Some enemies are immune to your laser, so shoot them with shot. Others are immune to your shot, so shoot them with laser. Sometimes, you have to shoot an enemy on weak point A before you can damage weak point B. That's as deep as it ever got for me.

There's one more problem with PDS that basically breaks the game. In the region of Uru, there's a pair of trees, and if you fly through them, you'll battle a swarm of creatures called “Volba.” You can kill them in one hit with a high level magic attack. When you do, you get an absurd amount of experience points. It's possible to fight these guys over and over and over again to the effect of grinding from level 25 to 40 in an hour. Was I supposed to do this? Or, should the designers have put them there? It's like playing an arcade game with unlimited continues; fun, maybe, but when it's possible to completely remove the game's only source of challenge without actually cheating, the game's underlying design is called to question.


3 Lack of endearment

For a game with at least an hour of CG animated cutscenes, I felt a disturbing lack of attachment to any of the characters. When everything was said and done I personally warmed up to only one character (Gash), but he didn't even have as much screen time as I wished. It hurts to compare this to something like Chrono Trigger, where the characters were memorable, fun, and colorful. Or Zelda Ocarina of Time. PDS's cast falls hurtfully short in this respect.

Worsening the character problems in PDS's story were situations where the characters actions didn't make any sense. At the beginning of the game, a villain kills Edge's friends and tries to kill Edge himself. Then later in the game, this villain explains that his motives were good all along, and asks Edge to help him with something. As a player I just couldn't go along with it, but Edge agreed so I had to go through the motions of playing while feeling really weird about helping out a murderer.

Another time Edge acts heartbroken and dramatic that he has to part ways with a girl, but I didn't feel like they had been through enough together to warrant any feelings of attachment. At another point in the game, the exact opposite of this happens; namely that Edge kills this girl's dragon, but she just shrugs it off and never acts upset or distressed. Dunno about you, but I'd be pretty messed up if someone killed my dragon. Furthermore, the game has no self-deprecating or funny moments; it expects the player to take it all seriously.

Video games don't need strong characters to have a good plot or play experience; in Shining Force III, for instance, I never warmed up to any of the characters, but the plot had me on the edge of my seat. PDS had its moments where I wanted to know what came next, but the dénouement fell flat since the game changed the ultimate adversary a few times. I felt no steady progression toward a common goal; not like the planet-eating parasite in Chrono Trigger, the pursuit of Saturos and Menardi in Golden Sun, or Ganondorf in Zelda. PDS starts out as sort of an Eragon thing where you're a kid with a dragon fighting the evil Empire. Toward the end of disc 3, the empire doesn't matter anymore and matters focus on a dilemma over whether or not to destroy a tower that's somehow crucial to the ecosystem of a bunch of genetically engineered beasts.

The quickest way to express the weirdness of PDS's story is through a spoiler: In the end of PDS, when you beat the last boss, there's a cut scene where a supernatural being explains that you, the player, are God, and Edge looks right into the camera and thanks you for supernaturally guiding him on the right path to save the world. Then he disappears. The end.

For a $200 game with only 10,000 or so copies in circulation, there's only one thing PDS does better than anything else: it's the most high budget and ambitious Sega Saturn game ever made. In almost every other respect it falls short. As an RPG experience it doesn't even measure up to Chrono Trigger, a Super Nintendo game from 1995. As a 3D game it looks deplorable compared to Playstation or Nintendo 64 titles from 1998 (don't even get me started about 1998 PC games). It can't even compare to other Sega Saturn RPG's, namely Shining Force III and Dragon Force, either of which have much deeper game play.

I bought this game because I've been a Sega Saturn fanatic for six years or so and I was really, really curious. Now my curiosity is satisfied. And I don't recommend it to anyone else.



BOTTOM LINE:

Panzer Dragoon Zwei is the coolest in the trilogy. It's nice enough to work as an XBOX Live arcade title today. Panzer Dragoon hasn't aged as well and I don't like it as much. Panzer Dragoon Saga is a super ambitious RPG that fails to combine its pretty outer coat with enough underlying significance to justify the huge budget Sega must have spent making it.

[alienjesus]

When you said Panzer Dragoon Trilogy, I expected Orta instead of Saga being reviewed.


I would like to mention that there arent THAT many towns in Ocarina of Town either. I can think of Kakariko, castle town, goron village, zora's domain, kokiri forest and gerudo fortress. Thats only 6. That said,I haven't played any of the panzer dragoon games, so i cant comment.

[Frizz.Meister]

Truely excellent review there. However that might just be because i agree with it so much. PDS was a huge let down to me as whilst it may be ambitious its just so rigid, and the freeroaming looses its charm after an hor or two.

Panzar dragoon 1 has aged so badly that when i got a friend of mine to play it (only played on ps3 for the last few years), he honestly didnt know what was happening EVER. Zwei is far clearer with its graphics and whilst the story is still 'dodgy' you do know what you can and cant shoot and the branching paths while simple make it alot more fun.

[AppleQueso]

No Orta?

[env963]

I enjoyed reading your review as well. I myself own all the panzer dragoon games including orta. (Orta is the best out of the shooters) One thing i would like to add is the musical scores of these games. I think they are incredible. Anytime i can hum the score in my head, even after not playing the game in 1 years time, is pretty impressive IMO. Especially for the first panzer dragoon. While im not a huge RPG gamer, I can't comment alot on comparing Orcania of time, or crono trigger. I still found this game quite fun. Ive accuatly beaten it twice. The only RPG game that I can say that about. (its quite short, so maybe that has something to do with it, 20 hours ish). I totally enjoy the panzer dragoon worlds though, so I am forgiving of a few hiccups through the games, although I agree with you I wish there were more towns and characters in PDS. But I dont let it totally distract me from the overall game. I still love this game.

[Breetai]

PD1 was released in 1996

No. SRPING 1995. I can distinctly remember playing it then.

PDS falls short of greatness for three reasons.

1 Graphical limitations

I barf everytime I read something like this. Of course this sort of games looks much better on a new system, but still... I'm a guy who grew up on the 2600 and then NES. I can't take these sort of comments!

For a game that tries to create a living, breathing world with a Zelda: Ocarina of Time level of ambition, PDS sure doesn't have many towns for you to walk around in. PDS has 4 towns. I'll say that again: PDS HAS FOUR TOWNS. That's not very many.

I can name dozens of great RPGs with four towns or less. How many real towns does OoT have?

Sorry, but I just find this sort of stuff incredibly annoying.


Hopefully you don't mind my criticism too much.

[env963]

PDS is always on some pedistal and everyone expects it to be the top RPG, ever made. The reason its worth so darn much is that its rare more so then its the best RPG ever made. (while its a awesome game)

[AppleQueso]

PD1 was released in 1996

No. SRPING 2005. I can distinctly remember playing it then.

I don't know, it seems pretty unlikely that a game would be released for a console that stopped being in production over 5 years earlier.

[Pabstblueribbon]

The only panzer dragoon I don't own is Zwei so I cant speak for it, but I love PD1, PDS and Orta. One of the reasons I really like them is they are not over complicated and have an extremely different and unique feel to them. PD1 is pretty basic but I love the battle system in PDS. Orta is the same idea as one just expanded and with really good graphics.

These games might not have very much depth but if you are a fan of shooting and trying to get the highest score, these games are great.

Great review. There are people who really like this series and those who really do not like it, and its usually for the same reasons. Cool to get a different point of view on the game.

[dedalusdedalus]

I've really got to respect you for that honest appraisal of "Panzer Dragoon Saga" and its flaws.

For the most part, I agree with your criticisms, but PDS is one of those games that's put on such a pedestal that you're probably going to get a lot of strong reactions.