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#panzer dragoon saga
lowpolyanimals · 8 months
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Dragon from Panzer Dragoon Saga
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posthumanwanderings · 10 months
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Panzer Dragoon Saga (Team Andromeda - Sega Saturn - 1998)
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admiral-craymen · 1 year
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Official Panzer Dragoon Saga art. Upscaled, cleaned, and slightly retouched.
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comfortfoodcontent · 3 months
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1998 Panzer Dragoon Saga for Sega Saturn Magazine Ad
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june2734 · 1 year
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Panzer Dragoon Saga
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mecha-omega · 1 year
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Had to think about this one for a while, 2 1/2 weeks max.
Many games go under the radar from many fans and companies. Many just become forgotten. But thanks to a friend, I’ve experienced a game that I’ve never thought I would enjoy fully. That game is Panzer Dragoon Saga, a game released on the Sega Saturn in 1998. It had a rough development cycle, being made while the Sega Saturn and Sega themselves were spiraling down due to the commercial failure of the Saturn. But thanks to people on the internet, the Sega Saturns Emulation is fully stable as the games rom can be found online.
Panzer Dragoon Saga starts at a dig site in the mountains, while mercenaries are guarding the area. In it they find a Girl surrounded by stone, but not long after they get attacked by their employers while they all get picked off one by one. All but one are alive, a young adult named Edge, after being shot off a cliff, Edge is awoken in ruins surrounded by gray ancient plates. He gets attacked by creatures of a by-gone age but a strange dragon saved you as you escape the ruins, venturing out to get your revenge and save the girl they took.
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Right of the bat, you go straight into the gameplay, clean and simple. The only things you have to focus on is your dragon’s HP, SP, and any Status effects it has. There is no equipment like armor and the like, just whatever attachments Edge’s gun you’d like to put on it. To attack you have to use an action gauge (3 bars) to attack with your gun or the dragons’ many attacks. At one point in the game you will have access to many moves that does different kinds of effect to buffing, debuffing, Healing, AOE attacks, Shields, ect. At a certain point in the game the Dragon will be able to transform into 4 other forms, Attack, Agility, Spiritual, and Defense, each form can be chosen by via a slider so you can go either a balance Dragon or go one sided with your dragon.
There are items & intractable objects in the world of PDS so it’s best to explore as much as you can. Honestly it’s recommended due to this games length, it’s only 12 hours long minimum, I’ve personally hit 13 hours due to me just wondering around areas & looking for certain items that can help me with later fights. I recommend looking for items called “D Units”, there are 12 of them in total. I won’t say what they do but it’s a neat bonus for finding them all.
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The story and look of Panzer Dragoon Saga are amazing especially its world. The Sega Saturns from what I heard wasn’t the best with 3D compared to N64 & PSX1, but ultimately these environments were amazing to look at. Nothing honestly compared to other games around the time, the detail in certain landscapes were impressive, Granted there are some pop in but it might just has to due to the emulation since it isn’t running on OG hardware. Final Fantasy never did 3D fully mainline till FFX, and Xenogears only did 3D for the environments rather than the character models. PDS does both and it’s insane how a console that can’t do 3D very well processes all of what’s going on screen. Yah, other games like MGS1 & Mario 64 are full 3D but idk for this game it feels different.
The Story isn’t the most ground breaking I’ve witnessed but it’s has some twists that I’ve would’ve not predicted. I won’t say what they were but there were moments where my jaw dropped and I just sat there like “DAWG WHAT!?” Till I went back to processing what I’ve seen. With the story being so short, it’s plot is way more focused than other games after it’s released, which is super refreshing in certain cases. For Edge and Azel being the main characters, they are pretty endearing, they aren’t to crazy as characters but their interactions all the way up to the end of the game fits the game’s end with a nice bow.
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Overall, Panzer Dragoon Saga became one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve never had an experience quite like it, but sadly I don’t believe we’ll have something quite like it again. After it’s release, Sega was already setting its sights on the Dreamcast as their financial situation gets worse. While PDS isn’t the sole reason for it, it was non the less not very favorable sales wise. While it’s JP version only produced 100K copies, its US versions only produced 25k and worse its EU version? Only 1,000 copies making it extremely rare in said region. It can sit around for 1,000$ to 2,000$ minimum compleat as parts of it go for 200$ to 300$ and that’s only for the US. Due to the restructuring Sega was doing they disbanded Team Andromeda and folded them into Smilebit. Thankfully the game did get a sequel in the form of Panzer Dragoon Orta, taking place after PDS.
If you want to play the game in full I highly recommend getting an emulator for it (Mainly Retro Arc) since Saturn emulation has been smoother the past few years, there is a guild on the Wiki iirc. And if you are one of the few that are waiting for it to come to current Gen home consoles, tough shit. We don’t know the full story but due to the restructuring for the Dreamcast release and after the company restructured again after the Dreamcast died and moved onto game making. The source code is most likely lost or destroyed since there has been no attempts to rerelease it in some shape or form.
With all said and done, with it being one of my favorite games I’ve played this year, I give it unironically a 9.5/10 to a 10/10. I don’t think I’ll have the same experience that I had with this game with any other game moving forwards, but I’m glad to say that this game found a home in my head and heart. And I’ll fight for it whenever Sega tries to remake it or remaster it if they ever find the source code or have another studio help them create it from the ground up.
Ty Team Amdromeda and Sega for creating such an amazing experience…
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miloscat · 2 months
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[Review] Panzer Dragoon Saga (Sat)
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Maybe they should have stuck to rail shooters...
My perfectly sensible journey through the Panzer Dragoon series: Mini, then Orta and the OG, then Gamera 2000, Remake, Zwei, and now finally this, the one that's not actually a rail shooter. Apparently development on Zwei and Saga both started at the same time but being an RPG spread over four Saturn discs, Saga took a few more years to cook. It's also one of the more pricey games in existence due to its release right when the Saturn was imploding and overall poor sales; its reputation as a rare and expensive title comes with a vaunted hidden gem status, but the reality... well...
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Saga (or as it's known in Japan, Azel: Panzer Dragoon RPG) certainly is experimental. Like the monsters that populate the world's wastelands and forests, it's a mutant creation, a strange hybrid of Panzer Dragoon mechanics in an RPG framework. Or if not mechanics then surface trappings: four-quadrant perspectives in battle, aiming a lock-on cursor, three-dimensional dragon flight... but the gameplay experience is nothing at all like the arcadey rail-shooters that constitute the rest of the series. Saga is very much a departure, and I don't think that works in its favour.
The world of Panzer Dragoon was always so evocative, the unknowable but hostile technology of a lost era (with its cool techno-organic designs) littering a devastated landscape, folk struggling to eke out an existence while empires battle overhead. Digging into the setting seems like something the series was crying out for... yet somehow, by nailing things down in Saga you do end up losing some of the mystique. Sure I understood the lore more clearly from in-game texts and characters pontificating, but is that what the series really needed? Maybe they explain too much, and since this is a Japanese RPG you of course end up travelling through space and time to kill God. Ho hum.
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Panzer Dragoon has always had cinematic moments, but again Saga goes to excess by having all dialogue be fully voiced, with mocapped cutscenes and long conversations. (The VA is all in Japanese as well, even in the international releases, with the series' trademark made-up language only used for the intro and outro cutscenes; another choice that removes a layer of mystery from this world.) It really slows the pace down, which is a theme for the on-foot sections, battle animations, and the speed of the overall plot.
After the inciting incident where Edge the bland protag-kun meets the dragon who befriends him for no reason, almost nothing happens to advance the plot for two whole discs. Although Edge is a defined character with a voice and backstory, he was designed to take a backseat to the eponymous Azel in story terms. Congratulations Team Andromeda, you created another boring RPG protagonist. Azel herself has potential to be interesting and has her moments but ends up underdeveloped, as often a plot device as a character, and literally not present for maybe half the game.
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Although four discs sounds big, each one has just a handful of areas, and there's only two and a half towns in the game world. As an RPG and a story the scale is relatively small which works just fine for Panzer Dragoon, and the inhabited areas you do explore are dense and lively, with a day/night cycle and lots of interaction with the blocky Saturn people who live there. Controlling Edge in these areas is kind of clunky and slow, with the lock-on cursor being an odd way to interact and observe the world, but it results in lots of flavour text for background details even if a lot of it feels like filler.
When on the dragon, the world is understandably scaled back. An overworld map takes you between discrete zones, which are usually big open spaces broken up by tight corridors, or dungeons absolutely riddled with repetitive hallways and lifts. The dragon movement mechanics seem impressive but feel ultimately shallow and limiting, the technology and dev realities clearly not fulfilling the ambitions of open-roaming dragon-flying exploration. There's only a couple of occasions like the assault on a flying warship or the stealthy infiltration of an Imperial facility where these sections actually approach compelling gameplay; most of the time it's just busywork flying around and locking onto things to interact with them.
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Finally, the battles. There are random and set encounters in the flying zones which take you to the battle screen, your dragon occupying one of four cardinal positions around the enemy. You or they can choose to move, which affects the ATB gauges that determine your actions but more importantly your relative positions put you in safe or danger zones from enemy attacks, and likewise enemy weak points are only revealed in certain spots. This positioning mechanic gives battles a unique feel, and turns most encounters into puzzle battles as you figure out how to respond to certain enemies. Your actions include the traditional PD single-target gun shot, a multi-target homing laser, and Zwei's Berserk technique is now the magic spell system. It's an amusing way to convert PD conventions into RPG ideas but it works well enough in theory. The problem is it felt to me that battles eventually became just slow and punishing until you learn the trick to them, at which point they're easy and time-wasting.
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Saga is full of little secrets and such, the sort that compelled me to follow a guide so I didn't miss any obscure sidequest or missable treasures. One interaction requires you to talk to an NPC twenty-six times for crying out loud! Many of these rewards are relatively inconsequential but if you want your dragon to reach its final form there's a few hoops to jump through. By the end I found my inventory full of unused items and unspent money, so maybe I was too thorough. I also followed the guide's advice to seek out rare enemies to grind levels on, which may have reduced the difficulty but I'd rather that than the tedium of getting destroyed in late-game battles and having to replay sections. Saga is old-school in that way but it is from 1998 after all.
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Panzer Dragoon Saga is such an unconventional RPG that I can't help but admire it, but at the same time it's clearly held back by the technology of the time and development pressures that result in it feeling messy and clumsy. There's no denying it has atmosphere and ideas and ambition, but it just didn't translate to the transcendent masterpiece that it's been built up as for me. Moreover, as a Panzer Dragoon game, it has almost nothing of what I really want out of a series that is otherwise stylish and inventive rail shooters. If telling a deeper story is what you want, then Orta was much more successful at it just by having a little more cutscene between levels! Even the rich world and visual design of the series is compromised rather than enhanced here as a result of the combination of gameplay styles/scales. I'm glad I played it but it's firmly the black sheep of the series as far as I'm concerned.
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fuchinobe · 2 years
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(1999, Nite Grooves, KNG 107)
Remix by Ron Trent. Released promote Panzer Dragoon Saga(1998) for the Sega Saturn
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o-m-e-g-a-5-3-6 · 1 year
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-Panzer Dragoon Saga-
-Edge Vs Azel-
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inkedbantam · 3 months
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It's 2024 and I'm still waiting for SEGA to actually fucking remake Panzer Dragoon Saga
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ryunumber · 1 year
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Does Azel, the deuteragonist of Panzer Dragoon Saga, have a Ryu number?
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Azel has a Ryu Number of 4/3/does not have a Ryu Number.
(explanation below)
Yeah, it's a whole thing.
I've identified one point of crossover for Panzer Dragoon, which is the Dragon Canyon track for Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which prominently features the series' iconic Blue Dragon.
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Now, which Blue Dragon that is, and if that's a meaningful question in the first place either way is an entirely different matter, and from what I've gleaned, it's muddy. (Something about a program responsible for all the dragons the protagonists ride?) I can state with confidence that I feel entirely unqualified to settle on an answer to those questions, so I will leave that to the Dragoonheads to litigate. Maybe they have thoughts about these theories of dragon identity.
At any rate, I've identified three possible answers with a corresponding Ryu Number to cover the spread, so take your pick:
The Blue Dragon as a form is not unique to the dragons the protagonists ride. Therefore, the Blue Dragon in Dragon Canyon is not uniquely identifiable, and Azel does not have a Ryu Number.
The Blue Dragon is the same dragon the protagonists ride throughout all Panzer Dragoon games. Therefore, the Blue Dragon in Dragon Canyon is the same dragon Edge rides in Saga, and Azel has a Ryu Number of 3.
The Blue Dragon is unique to the protagonists' dragons, but are not the same between games. (Excepting possibly Saga and Orta.) Therefore, the active presence of Shelcoof in Dragon Canyon identifies the Blue Dragon in question as Lagi from Zwei, and through the Guardian Dragon, Azel has a Ryu Number of 4.
(This is all assuming that Shelcoof itself does not qualify as a character on account of being a nonsentient(?) ship controlled(?) in some capacity by Sestren. If this is incorrect and Shelcoof could be considered a character in its own right, which is definitely possible, Azel's Ryu Number of 3 could instead go through Shelcoof via the ruins in Saga.)
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In conclusion: I dunno, take your pick.
On a (potentially) simpler note, Azel could have an Extended Ryu Number through the Worlds Unite Archie Comics crossover, which includes Keil/Kyle Fluge and Ryu. What that Extended Ryu Number would be is left as an exercise for the reader.
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jlsoryu · 8 months
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Yesterday I got brave and tried my first ever console mod. It wasn't the most complicated mod in the world, just swapping the CD Reader in the SEGA Saturn out for a Fenrir Duo but what it means is I can now just use a MicroSD Card loaded up with games rather then the discs themselves.
I do already have a few legit Saturn titles, but was using a Psuedo Saturn Kai for the ones that were a little bit rarer, including Panzer Dragoon Saga which unfortunately I just couldn't get working, so opted for this instead.
Very glad I have done, because it means I can finally play Panzer Dragoon Saga and make that video about it I've been wanting to make for ages!
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posthumanwanderings · 9 months
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Panzer Dragoon Saga (Team Andromeda - Sega Saturn - 1998)
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admiral-craymen · 1 year
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Panzer Dragoon Saga official art.
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james5-doe · 1 year
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Gaming Stuff
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I don't play video games much these days, but, apparently, I've got some pretty valuable stuff. Some of these titles and box sets go for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay.com -- which sounds ridiculous to me too. I heard that there was a DoE game, but I certainly never played it.
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nintenwhoa64 · 7 months
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He would have you believe that he is an expert Panzer Dragoon Saga player; however, he hasn't even found all of the D units yet.
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