DAY 29 / GAME 29 Panzer Dragoon

DAY 29 / GAME 29

Panzer Dragoon


             Panzer Dragoon was one of those gems that I picked up for my Sega Saturn back in the day, based purely on concept.  In fact, in the days before youtube videos, proper game trailers and downloadable demos, paying good money for a game was so often a crapshoot.  But this turned out well, Panzer Dragoon was pretty much exactly how I had imagined it.  

            You see, right around this time, ReBoot had started to air.  ReBoot had all these great concepts for games that you wouldn't have really been able to create until these new systems came along.  In one clip, they are riding these dragons, shooting fireballs.  All of me thought that was the coolest idea ever, right down to my socks.  So naturally, when I first saw a screenshot of Panzer Dragoon, I was already mentally prepared for this kind of awesome.
            Panzer Dragoon, for those who haven't played it, is a shooter along the lines of StarFox.  It's 3D, and it appears to be free-roam, but it's all on rails.  You have enough control to move about the screen and dodge oncoming attacks while shooting the enemy, but your travel is all predetermined.  Now, just like in StarFox, this really didn't take away from the game at all.  In retrospect, I've realized this is technically the next step in the evolution of the classic shoot-em-up game, (Gradius, R-Type, etc).  The principles are the same, you take on waves of enemies, upgrade your weapons and fight huge bosses at the end.

           Like a lot of games at the time, Panzer Dragoon benefited from the fact that it really was a blank slate out there in terms of game development.  Systems that could run these full 3D games had just come out and so game ideas were really just limited to the imagination of the developer.  And so the gamers as well were seeing all these great ideas that they had only ever imagined.  I mean, it's gotta be harder to impress people now than it was back then with game designs.  And yet, Panzer Dragoon, with it's simple controls and easy to drop into game design is quite timeless.  The soundtrack was another one of these absolute gems that really took advantage of this game being on a CD.  A full orchestral  soundtrack that was available to play in your cd player if you popped the game disc into it.  And even though I do adore the old 8 and 16-bit chip-tune soundtracks now, having this kind of soundtrack back then was just incredible.

             Since Panzer Dragoon came out in 1995, there have been two sequels released on the Sega Saturn, one on the original Xbox, and one just recently released on the windows phone platform and (just the other day) one of the new Xbox One.  They've all been great (Except the phone version, which is a pay to play game, which just kills the fun.) and really kept the style and design true to the original.

 I just loaded up the soundtrack again as I was finishing writing this and man, it's absolutely epic.