Panzer Dragoon

PEW PEW PEW PEW ROOOAAAAR

I summon white armor blue dragon!

Here’s a game where you fly around on everyone’s favorite non-existent giant lizard: the elusive dragon, or in this case dragoon. According to my top sources, panzer is a German word for armor, or a tank. Meanwhile dragoon refers to mounted infantry. Generally soldiers ride horses, but in the world of VIDEO GAMES who has time for stupid HORSES–here there be DRAGONS. And not any regular old dragon, this is a crazy-cool dragon with bone armor, complete with a giant horn. PREPARE FOR RAMMING SPEED!

Panzer Dragoon is a great game, but in my case it was a really tough game too. I've never played many rail shooters before, so it might just be me--but regardless it feels very much like a brutal arcade game, and I had to use cheat codes to make it through the later levels of the game. I don't think it's bad for being this difficult though; I think that sort of thing was more natural back then, and I didn't feel the deaths came cheap. You just have to get really good at it.

It's interesting to play through all these Saturn games and notice how the general "video game experience" compares to the average modern-day game. Old consoles were essentially for playing arcade (or arcade-like) games--games that you just pick up and start playing. You run right, you jump, you try to get a high score. You aim, you fire, you try to get a high score. You accelerate, you turn, you try to get a high score. Of course some games had more depth than this--RPGs, point-and-click adventures, and roguelikes all existed--but they were the exceptions to the rule. Around the time of Saturn and Playstation, graphics were good enough (for people back then anyways) for 3D gaming to attempt mimicking aspects of cinematic storytelling--i.e. immersing the player in an atmospheric setting, giving the characters depth, and focusing more on things like tone, pacing, dialogue, themes, and all those other things that encourage players to sit in front of a game for more than four Angry Bird minutes.

Where does Panzer Dragoon fit in all this? My casual gamer line of thinking is that this game more or less represents the transition between these two periods of gaming experiences. Panzer Dragoon is very much "arcade" in terms of gameplay--you don't need a tutorial or any background knowledge whatsoever to jump into the dragon saddle and start FIRIN' YO LAZAHS (BWAAAAAAH) at everything that moves on-screen. But in my experience, I hardly cared about the score. I was too busy getting into the thoroughly fleshed-out and expansive world of the story (all of which is very much shown, not told). This is one of those cases where I started wondering what all the fuss was about for a game, and then came out of it wondering why in the world the game isn't a hundred times more popular than it is. (Well, in this case the reason is obvious--it's a Saturn game.)

But truly, everything about Panzer Dragoon seems to make it clear that the team behind the game really put their hearts into it. With each progressing level, you discover more and more of an intricate post-apocalyptic setting that blends sci-fi and fantasy elements seamlessly. The various machinery and structures you encounter all feels plausible, in that everything shares aesthetic elements that imply specific materials and methods used in their construction. The characters all act like regular human beings, and interact with monsters and dragons the way you would generally expect. And to add to the sense of being in a completely new setting, characters speak in an entirely made-up language (one that sounds a bit like Russian, rather than just random gibberish).

In fact they got so into the world-building, they hired Moebius himself to draw the cover for the game! (Of course, since it captures the atmosphere of the game perfectly, the North America version scrapped it for a bland CG model in front of a black background.) For those who don’t know, Moebius is the French word for The Artistic Inspiration of All Your Favorite Sci-Fi Stories. French is an amazing language you’ve hopefully noticed; all you Internet haters can go DO A BARREL ROLL right out the door! At any rate, here’s some more of his Panzer Dragoon art just to make it extra clear this game wasn’t slapped together just for a few quick yen-coins.

The story for the game is a simple one, but I thought it worked quite well. The rather well-organized opening cinematic gets across all the main points quickly enough: You are hunting monsters in a canyon and come across some ancient high-tech ruins–where you discover a battle between two dragon riders. The pilot of the dark dragon manages to kill the hero and flies off victorious… That’s right, the hero dies. You are not the hero–you’re just some guy who happened to be nearby when the hero got killed, so now the dragon (via telepathic link) asks you to continue the mission. Stop the enemies from getting their hands on all the ancient high tech weapons at a distant tower in the middle of the ocean, because the world will be completely screwed at that point.

There are seven levels to the game, and though they're pretty short in terms of length, you just have to keep in mind this is still arcade era of gameplay. You control the dragon along the rails of the stage, you shoot enemies, you lock on for your dragon to blast its lasers, you reposition yourself to face different directions as you go along, and you survive long enough to defeat each boss. The story is experienced primarily through the atmosphere of the gameplay, and it's up to you to glean what you will from it all. Nights and Burning Rangers play out the exact same way, and all in all the game developers of Sega's various departments seemed to know what they were doing with this sort of thing back in the day:

• Short but enticingly replayable games
• Less-is-more storytelling
• Satisfying gameplay
• Unique and imaginative settings
• A real sense of taking part in a fun or exciting adventure

From what I’ve heard, the next game for this series (a prequel titled Panzer Dragoon Zwei) is even better than this one, and then the RPG Panzer Dragoon Saga cranks everything up to 11. And then there’s Panzer Dragoon Orta (on XBox), which apparently was another spectacular installment in the series. I’ll start with Zwei of course and see where I go from there. I suppose that everyone who has a Saturn probably picked up at least one of the Panzer Dragoon games, but I’ll go ahead and suggest this one anyways. Perhaps the sequels are much better, but the original is still a solid experience. Even in the post-apocalyptic gaming world of 2013! ;P

If you liked this, you can find more of my gaming bloggery at Reset Tears.