Maybe I'm alone in thinking this but I think this remake would've been better off as a much larger expansion and reimagining of the concepts of the original game.
Panzer Dragoon's greatest strength is that all of it is built around hints and impressions of something larger. Not only the art style, but the stage design, cutscenes, and even the music evoke the imagination into filling out landscapes, ancient cultures, lost species, large battles over swaths of territory, grandiosity of flight, and a legend of some forgotten, unnamed hero.
Each stage made up of mini challenge ideas that represent larger chapters in the scheme of a chase, each musical crescendo and descent an emotional peak for a physical experience beyond self.
The cutscenes as well hint at personal and political relationships between people, factions, and environments and history. Not enough to make any kind of conclusion but it's all made of these light brush strokes of deforming quad-sprite fake polygon meshes and scrolling textures and tells your mind to do all the rendering work.
There's a moment in the game when you blow up the ship of floating white pillars that's been teased in cutscenes only instead of exploding it disintegrates into a flock of pink birds. A gift from the game, I can think about that image for weeks.
The remake adds a lot of small details on models and more set design and I think a pretty cool art style. I think the issue is it doesn't do enough. Since it wasn't just the art style that worked by hinting from the margins, but π¦π·π¦π³πΊπ΅π©πͺπ―π¨, I would've liked to see longer or more stages, fleshing out the previous ideas for encounters into longer, more memorable setpieces, more cutscenes that don't necessarily explain the magic away but add more hints at the people, landscapes, factions, and relationships.
Panzer Dragoon is designed to speak volumes in sparseness (even if those volumes are different for every person's imagination), but Saturn sparseness doesn't quite work in a game that already looks like a reimagining, but doesn't play or read like one.
Panzer Dragoon's greatest strength is that all of it is built around hints and impressions of something larger. Not only the art style, but the stage design, cutscenes, and even the music evoke the imagination into filling out landscapes, ancient cultures, lost species, large battles over swaths of territory, grandiosity of flight, and a legend of some forgotten, unnamed hero.
Each stage made up of mini challenge ideas that represent larger chapters in the scheme of a chase, each musical crescendo and descent an emotional peak for a physical experience beyond self.
The cutscenes as well hint at personal and political relationships between people, factions, and environments and history. Not enough to make any kind of conclusion but it's all made of these light brush strokes of deforming quad-sprite fake polygon meshes and scrolling textures and tells your mind to do all the rendering work.
There's a moment in the game when you blow up the ship of floating white pillars that's been teased in cutscenes only instead of exploding it disintegrates into a flock of pink birds. A gift from the game, I can think about that image for weeks.
The remake adds a lot of small details on models and more set design and I think a pretty cool art style. I think the issue is it doesn't do enough. Since it wasn't just the art style that worked by hinting from the margins, but π¦π·π¦π³πΊπ΅π©πͺπ―π¨, I would've liked to see longer or more stages, fleshing out the previous ideas for encounters into longer, more memorable setpieces, more cutscenes that don't necessarily explain the magic away but add more hints at the people, landscapes, factions, and relationships.
Panzer Dragoon is designed to speak volumes in sparseness (even if those volumes are different for every person's imagination), but Saturn sparseness doesn't quite work in a game that already looks like a reimagining, but doesn't play or read like one.