The original Panzer Dragoon was a revelation in 1995. It was the videogame that made me get a Sega Saturn during those summer months when Sega had the next-gen field all to itself. Like many gamers, I was very lukewarm on the system, which received nothing but negative press and endless slagging for the past year. Everybody was gunning for Sony Playstation, especially after the E3 show. But Panzer Dragoon was sheer brilliance, and that opening CGI movie alone was worth the trip.
The visual design of the game is pretty simple, when you think about it. Team Andromeda knew when to push the polygons and knew when to back off and let the open landscapes shine. There's a stage that begins above a vast autumnal forest that always gave me chills. It looked so glorious. The first stage with its broken columns, shattered ruins and rolling water was a sight to behold. The pop-up was a bit tacky, but relatively minor (we were already conditioned to believe Saturn "couldn't do 3D" and that pop-up was the worst thing to happen since FMV). I loved the cinematic flair of flying over a flooded city, into a mansion, inside its submerged corrodors, only to have the roof cave in suddenly, revealing an enormous ceramic airship flying above you. The music swells just as you fly inside the building and it's all so glorious. You felt like you were on a great quest, a romantic adventure.
The only real criticism of the game was its high difficulty, but there were only six or seven stages, and you were basically playing a three-dimensional Space Harrier, so that was to be expected. If the game was too easy, we would have felt robbed, and we probably would have put down our controllers and went back to playing Super Mario Kart and NHL 95 on the 16-bit systems.
The Saturn launch period was really quite good, despite all the rough edges. Virtua Fighter (VF Remix was such a rush when it arrived in my mailbox for free), Daytona USA (ugly, schmugly, the gameplay was fantastic and everybody loved it), Worldwide Soccer (killer sports game with excellent graphics and "Sega Rock"), Bug (visually amazing if wildly repetitive), Pebble Beach Golf Links (this was the big surprise, very fun in multiplayer). Panzer Dragoon was the best of the bunch, and it was the only one to really withstand that first atomic blast of the Playstation launch.
After Sega's miraculous Christmas turnaround with Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Cop, Panzer Dragoon Zwei arrived in early 1996 to prove that Saturn wasn't just a fluke. It still looks amazing today. Honestly, I wouldn't change a thing. There are so many amazing additions, like the growing dragon who grows and evolves a dozen different ways (and alternating between running and flying), the multiple pathways, the brilliant stage designs, the wonderful sense of scale, the rock-solid 30fps frame rate (it's crazy how Sega never got credit for their high frame rates in that era, when 15-20fps was considered normal).
The best moment: the first stage, where the dragon runs off a cliff and flies for the first time. Another miraculous cinematic moment. Next best moment: running through a dense forest and battling monsters that attack from all sides. Next best moment: walking onto a platform that rises up a cavern, revealing a pathway into a hidden lake with an enormous creature inside.
It's a terrible tragedy that so few developers were able to push the Saturn as effectively as Team Andromeda. I had hoped there would be scores of games that looked as solid and polished as Panzer Zwei. Sadly, that wasn't the case, especially among third-party software. If you were one of the five or six best programmers in the world, you could make Saturn sing like a soprano. If you were everyone else, you bumbled and stumbled about until Playstation's success was large enough to no longer care. Such is the way of things. Nintendo 64 and Sony PSX had vast software libraries, but Sega had a dozen masterpieces that could never be topped. Years later, we're still playing Saturn. I never would have guessed that would happen back in '96.
P.S. This only leaves us with Panzer Dragoon Saga, the towering masterpiece, the greatest Role-Playing Game of the last 20 years. But that's another discussion and that game really deserves its own "official" thread. It's only knocks: the game is too short, and the price tag is too expensive. Massively, criminally, reality-dissolving expensive. What-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you expensive.
Can somebody tell the bosses at Sega-Sammy to kindly wake the eff up? Remake this trilogy. Put them all on Nintendo Switch, whose motion controls would be perfect for aiming. Then apologize for not releasing these games on the Wii a decade ago, like you should have done.
