Panzer Dragoon aims to impress. It's hard not be awed as you start the game and find yourself on top of a dragon flying over the ruins of an ancient Rome looking city scattered across an ocean of pristine blue water while a beautiful orchestral track plays in the background. For a launch title, Panzer Dragoon represented the promise of what the Sega Saturn could accomplish, and how it wouldn't stay behind the likes of the PS1 and the N64 in the leap to the 3rd dimension.
Panzer Dragoon represents an awkward transition period for SEGA, when the arcade experience was rapidly being ditched on the home console market for more contemplative and slow paced videogames that didn't focuse excusively on challenging the players.
Nintendo in that department was already ahead of SEGA, having it's most prestigious selection of games on SNES be works such as FFVI, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid and Link to the Past, while the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis was still marketing itself to the arcade audience for most of it's lifespan.
And for me that's where the charm lies in Panzer Dragoon. Panzer Dragoon is a rail shooter, following the footsteps of many of it's arcade predecessors, and it doesn't really try to innovate on the shooter genre in any meaningful way. What elevates it above those previous arcade games, is the presentation that covers the core gameplay. Despite the poor 3D capabilities of the Saturn, the dev team managed to squeeze enough juice from it to give Panzer Dragoon it's epic scale aesthetic, having you fly vast landscapes filled with diverse ships and monsters as you watch your dragon flap his wings with detailed animation and constantly change perspectives to shoot what's around you.
There's also a much bigger effort in trying to contextualize the gameplay through the story. With a unique aesthetic influenced by Moebius, worldbuilding that grounds the story in some sense of realism, a much more grandiose soundtrack, and FMV cutscenes that bookend the game, Panzer Dragoon put's itself into the hands of the player as a more serious videogame than the cartoony ones SEGA was known for.
Despite all this, Panzer Dragoon doesn't come across as a pretentious artsy game, it feels rather humble, actually. With every stage lasting around 5 minutes, you can beat this game in less than 2 hours if you know how everything will play out. The sequels would later on increase the scope of the series, but as it's stands, Panzer Dragoon was a great beginning to an era that unfortunately never got a chance to happen. Maybe in another timeline the Sega Saturn won the console war and Panzer Dragoon games are still a thing.
Panzer Dragoon represents an awkward transition period for SEGA, when the arcade experience was rapidly being ditched on the home console market for more contemplative and slow paced videogames that didn't focuse excusively on challenging the players.
Nintendo in that department was already ahead of SEGA, having it's most prestigious selection of games on SNES be works such as FFVI, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid and Link to the Past, while the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis was still marketing itself to the arcade audience for most of it's lifespan.
And for me that's where the charm lies in Panzer Dragoon. Panzer Dragoon is a rail shooter, following the footsteps of many of it's arcade predecessors, and it doesn't really try to innovate on the shooter genre in any meaningful way. What elevates it above those previous arcade games, is the presentation that covers the core gameplay. Despite the poor 3D capabilities of the Saturn, the dev team managed to squeeze enough juice from it to give Panzer Dragoon it's epic scale aesthetic, having you fly vast landscapes filled with diverse ships and monsters as you watch your dragon flap his wings with detailed animation and constantly change perspectives to shoot what's around you.
There's also a much bigger effort in trying to contextualize the gameplay through the story. With a unique aesthetic influenced by Moebius, worldbuilding that grounds the story in some sense of realism, a much more grandiose soundtrack, and FMV cutscenes that bookend the game, Panzer Dragoon put's itself into the hands of the player as a more serious videogame than the cartoony ones SEGA was known for.
Despite all this, Panzer Dragoon doesn't come across as a pretentious artsy game, it feels rather humble, actually. With every stage lasting around 5 minutes, you can beat this game in less than 2 hours if you know how everything will play out. The sequels would later on increase the scope of the series, but as it's stands, Panzer Dragoon was a great beginning to an era that unfortunately never got a chance to happen. Maybe in another timeline the Sega Saturn won the console war and Panzer Dragoon games are still a thing.
HylianBran
2 years ago