Knowing a bit about the troubled life cycle of the Sega Saturn and it's limited 3D capabilities, one definitely gets the vibe from Panzer Dragoon Saga that people died to make this game happen.

It's hard to separate the history of PDS and the context of its enduring prestige from the actual game itself. Playing PDS for the first time in 2020 feels like playing a forbidden game, an experience that only a selected few had the pleasure of having and that you would never have the chance to, only hearing about it on the internet like it's some urban legend. It's fascinating to see how much juice the team managed to squeeze out of the Saturn, and to think of all the programming tricks and shortcuts they had to come up with to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem.

In some regards, PDS is highly impressive, boasting a big number of FMVs throughout the game during it's most important setpieces, having good and competent VA for all its dialogue that makes the characters shine beyond just being NPCs, and massive boss battles that fill the entire screen. The combat alone is worthy of praise, having you on the back of your dragon flying around the enemies to gain better position and locking on to them to release your dragon's homing laser. The transition from the rail shooter games to this one couldn't have been done better, and it really gives a sense of action and dynamism that wasn't present in most of the JRPGs of that time.

On the other hand, the console limitations do present themselves from time to time. Despite the game being 4 discs long, it's a relatively short JRPG, lasting about 15 hours. You spend the whole game waiting for the world map to expand, and it never does. There's barely any hub areas and sidequests to explore and do, with the game only having one major town. The pixelization does tend to leave a lot to the imagination in some instances, more so than what a PS1 game would, and the draw distance is very poor.

But nowadays, these aspects that would be considered negative, only end up giving a lot of charm and personality to the game. The short runtime removes a lot of fat and filler that plagues so many other JRPGS, instead giving a bigger sense of adventure and urgency to the story, and the design of the world of PDS alongside the outstanding and unique soundtrack creates the occasional beautiful and contemplative moment, despite the low fidelity graphics. The Saturn might be inferior to the PS1 in the 3D graphics department, but the team managed to take advantage of every single component and technicality of the console to make PDS uniquely impressive.

As far as the story goes, it's surprisingly nuanced and subtle, opting to let the players decide for themselves the meaning of it's message and outcome. The characters were intentionally designed to be counter-culture to the videogame landscape at the time, with heroes that didn't present the "anime" look and personality, and villains with much more ambiguous intentions and goals. The story has a plethora of noticeable inspirations, with Star Wars, Evangelion, Dune, and Miyazaki being some of the ones more apparent, creating a very solid and compelling story dealing with ideas of environmentalism, evolution, free will, power and human interference on the course of nature.

Is it worth 400 bucks? No. You would be hard pressed to find any game that would be worth that amount. Is it worth emulating it if you have no other option (like I did)? Yes. It's a part of videogame history, a time where hardware limitations brought the best out of developers, and paved the way for more auteur styled development and artistic expression in the medium, preceding the works of people like Fumito Ueda and Yoko Taro.