Reviews from

in the past


(Would like to give a big thank you to @IronLuis for making this review possible. He let me borrow his Xbone just to play the game)

I can't with this shitty game anymore I'm done.

Panzer Dragoon is a series that had intrigued me and finally checking it out, I loved all of it.

Despite Mini, a game that was not only barely functional but also a game in between two fantastic games, the series, and overall Trilogy really, were all incredible and reasonably difficult. Deserving its status as the incredible landmark on the Sega Saturn. I had known the series did get another shot on Xbox but finally playing the games made me more intrigued regarding the entry that is Orta.

As a follow up to Saga I knew it couldn't top it, and all I had thought and expected was for it to just be a good game. A great game. The worthy continuation it dares to be to a very fulfilling trilogy that ended on a fair note.

It ended up being an arse to finally play the game however. Right after beating Saga, I checked it out off Xemu which didn't play the cutscenes. Then I ordered a og Xbox copy for 45 buckos then after some convincing got @IronLuis to let me borrow his Xbone just to play this game. And ALSO finally got the official rechargeable batteries for mine and his Xbox controller.

And so after all this work and effort, I finally played it.. and was remarkably disappointed. For starters I will still ponder why was the lock on nerfed so badly??? Saga introduced other forms for your Dragon but in this game you have to be switching all the fucking time if you wanna be doing any damage or any health resourcing when none of that bullshit was in the previous games. Playing it the old way, your damage just tickles them at most.

The game also has the most bullshittingly difficult difficulty to a point it made me genuinely mad in literal years. it's buttfuckingly unfair. Zwei is a game where it became harder by the paths you decided to choose. In Orta it's just fucking difficult because it said so, fuck you, you dare have fun? kiss that ass goodbye. BE SURE TO GET A NICE WHOPPING OF TWO BOSSES IN A FUCKING ROW!!!!!

I thought maybe I was delusional, I thought maybe I was wrong after simply beating Easy, but I ended up being right. I gave Normal another go and just could not. It's so fucking bullshit.. And not even fucking worth it. As all you need to know about the story is that it is LITERAL BULLSHIT!!! I don't like Mobo and his stupid fucking posse. Every time I see these imbeciles talk I miss the humanity of Paet, Gash, and Azel. They spoke with character. Growth. Personality. I miss it so much.. It was all in Saga. All dissipated in Orta.

Orta in general for me is a literal disappointment. I wasn't expecting or hyping up that it'd be the best of the series. Literally the minimum for me was just it simply be a fun time. A great time. A journey in a unique world.

But instead I get a game that can't fucking make up its mind on if it desires to be ambitious like Saga or have the simple storytelling of Zwei and the first one. It doesn't help either when you look into it even the Developers themselves feel mixed on if they should've even made a 4th one after Saga.

Which anymore is that I recognize the Pandora's Box which in fact is why my rating isn't any lower even if to be completely honest, I think alot of it is buttfucking padding. ESPECIALLY WHEN SOME OF THAT INFORMATION COULDVE BEEN TOLD WITHIN THE GAME.

What's that? You want to be told the story's details in the STORY!?? NAHHHHH!!!! GO READ ABOUT IT JERKWAD!!! STOP ASKING QUESTIONS!!!!

ideologia é o privilégio do não-desespero. o tempo necessário para tomar uma decisão teórica depende da ética que advém do desapego, de certa distância, do eterno "e se". o ethos não é um sobrevivente e sim um acadêmico. a ideologia se confunde com a política pois a política depende de um movimento em massa para acontecer, então ela se vende como um fator ideológico em que existe Informação a ser Interpretada: a normalização (criação de denominador comum) da heurística, um véu comunitário sob algo que é inerentemente solitário e solipsista. o pathos é a sobrevivência, a divisão definitiva entre o que é o Ser e do que é sua Ideia, pois embora um, claro, influencie o outro, corrija o outro, esse um nunca comanda o outro. há um abismo dificilmente cruzado entre a prática e a ideia quando não existe tempo de planejamento, quando a ideia já é um resultado de outros atributos ativos de antes. a única defesa contra a ideologia é o suicídio. o barulho de tiro é mais alto do que a música. não existem perigos universais pois eles não são necessários: o mundo está sempre acabando pra alguém.

Incredible experience. I got pretty far until I got stuck on a boss. When I finally beat it, I turned off the console not realizing the game didn't save for some reason. I was super demotivated since I spent like 30 minutes or more trying to get past that boss and I don't want to do it again.

Don’t cry for me. I’m already dead. Sega Forever.

i technically didn't finish bc my xbox emulator will no longer load my save for this game for whatever reason but wow i found this really disappointing.
following up on saga's ending is a fool's errand by nature, but the way they do it feels like it just totally spits on what that game was trying to say, and it gives me a terrible taste in my mouth. going from a game that is all about how history shouldn't rule us, a game that provides a very definitive and satisfying end, and just... resetting the world to be even worse than when we last saw it is so uninspired and lazy. it's not even worse in a way that's interesting. what was the point of anything i did in saga if this is how the world is supposed to turn out? i can appreciate that they tried at all here, because the easy thing to do would have been to just make a reboot or a prequel or even just ignore the story entirely, but the story here doesn't justify it's own existence and takes up far more time than the story in the original 2 rail shooter games.
the soundtrack isn't anything special compared to the saturn trilogy, and by default the sound effects are about 3 times as loud as the music, so i think they might have been aware of this, lmao. on the subject of atmosphere, this game's environments are very lush and detailed, but feel lacking in art design compared to the saturn trilogy. orta feels like it's focus is more on providing the audience with as much stuff to look at as possible, so these environments are extremely dense and lifelike, but don't feel as though they have the melancholic tone that i loved so much in zwei and saga especially. the lack of pastel tones in favor of a lot of browns is especially noticeable, to me. it's a shame because the concept art for this game is wonderful, especially all of the art of orta's design, but it doesn't translate in-game.
to me, PD's appeal as a franchise is heavily rooted in it's lore and atmosphere, so we're already not off to a great start, but the real issue to me with orta is the gameplay. first off, orta is a very, very hard game. i'd say i'm an average level video game player, and i did fine in PD1 and 2, but orta outright kicked my ass, and not in a way that made me want to keep coming back. as i mentioned earlier, orta feels as though it's designed to overwhelm the player with visual noise, which leads to a lot of points when i lost health to things i couldn't even identify, or boss mechanics that I still don't really know how to counter. i could not fucking tell you what the second phase of the episode 8 boss actually does, to this day, man. bosses also feel like they had at least twice as much health than what was normal in the previous games, even mid-bosses for some reason. normal mode here feels more on par with the hard modes in previous panzer dragoons, whereas easy is maybe the easiest game in the franchise apart from saga, solely because you sponge hits easier. an actual middle ground would be greatly preferable to what we have here. the big issue with orta's gameplay, though, is that it's new mechanics feel like they crush the game and make the weaknesses of this genre more apparent than ever before. orta introduces two new mechanics, gliding/braking and transforming your dragon. both of these mechanics are clearly inspired by saga's battle system, which is a cute idea and feels like it should be the natural evolution of panzer dragoon's gameplay, but to me it doesn't feel that they work in tandem. gliding and braking is used to imitate saga's quadrant-based positioning system in boss fights, but these boss fights don't allow you to freely maneuver around the quadrants, instead making some quadrants only available through braking and some only available through gliding. you also can ONLY move to a quadrant by doing these moves, and the energetic nature of the bosses means that you're occasionally blocked off from moving at all, leading to the player feeling trapped and crushed. this is made worse by the fact that the dragon transformation only has glide/brake bars on two of the three dragons, and you cannot freely cycle through transformations, you have to go in a set order. the heavy dragon is the dragon the player is encouraged to use against bosses for dps, and it's also the dragon that cannot glide or brake at all. the glide dragon is much more maneuverable, but does very little damage, cannot lock on, and is recommended to use for the purpose of defense. if you were switching between just these forms, i could see the boss fights being an engaging mix of defensive maneuvering and taking advantage of burst windows, but there's also the normal dragon, which can do a little bit of everything, just not as well as either of the other two. this means you're generally going through at least 2 button presses to get where you're wanting to be in boss fights, and switching on the fly tends to feel clunky and unrefined. all of these limitations imposed on the way the game is played, in addition to the extremely chaotic sensory-overload level design, makes orta feel more blatantly on-rails than either of the previous games did. i found myself struggling against the game very often, which is never a feeling you want the player to have in a franchise that had previously sold itself on the exhilarating feeling of being free in flight. it's a real shame, because the game shows off the promise a true sequel to zwei has in it's 5th level, but it never realizes that promise.
there are two good games here, but those games don't want to play nice with each other.


While playing through Panzer Dragoon Saga I thought, "This gameplay would be better if it was a rail shooter like the first two games." Orta did exactly that, taking mechanics directly from Saga and fitting them in perfectly to really add to the formula established by 1 and Zwei. Very cool game that's fairly challenging.

The only rail shooter that earns the right to call itself 3D

The best rail shooter of all time.

Pretty much panzer dragoon but with more powerful hardware, tries to wrap up all the lore of panzer dragoon but i never understood any of that shit in the first place. Game is short and sweet and looks fantastic both graphically and artistically. Its even on xbox backwards compatibility so you can even play it officially in HD which is kickass. Comes with the first game as well so it works pretty well as a beginners panzer dragoon. Absolutely worth a play if you have any system with "Xbox" in its name lying around.

Certified Shlork Slept-On Game™: Nothing too crazy from a gameplay perspective but the vibes are immaculate.

Something about the visual style of early 6th gen games is so hauntingly beautiful to me. The textures, lighting, models, fog are all very distinct to the time and feel almost alien. Panzer Dragoon Orta is the game that I had been picturing in my mind every time I thought about that aesthetic, but I just didn't know it yet. The atmosphere and vibes of this game are just off the charts, and I fell in love with this world despite only seeing a small chunk of it.

On a gameplay front Orta is also fantastic. The bones of a good, basic rail shooter are here of course - the shooting feels solid, attacks are telegraphed enough you can dodge them on your first time through a level, the encounter design feels fair. All that is great, but it's elevated by the different dragon forms and the 360° camera. Those elements added just enough complexity to keep me constantly engaged and thinking about what the optimal way through any encounter is in a way that most other rail shooters can't do.

Incredibly difficult but also has some of the most unique atmosphere and world design I've seen in a game despite just being an on-rails shooter. Story's not all that great, tending to fall under being way too vague for its own good despite boatloads of exposition and literal slideshows of text, but I still think works fine as more of a tonal piece than anything else.

Very hard 3D shmup with an incredible soundtrack and an amazing set of FMVs for the very simple but interesting story

Panzer Dragoon Orta is another one of those games I mostly remember hearing about in magazines. It received a lot of praise at the time, but being as it was an Xbox exclusive, it was forever out of reach like other well-regarded classics of that generation, like Jet Set Radio Future and Blinx the Time Sweeper. You have no idea how much I longed to play Azurik: Rise of Perathia, there was a whole universe of games just beyond my grasp!

Unlike JSRF and its own predecessors, Orta is actually fairly accessible today thanks to the Xbox marketplace, and used copies are still reasonably priced. I've been thinking of grabbing one as recent delistings has inverted my prior (psychotic) belief that I need digital backups of all my physical games. Gotta cover all my bases, I need to be able to play this grungy-ass port of the PC version of Panzer Dragoon whenever I'd like, that's important.

In any case, it's nice that I finally got to check this game off my list after 20+ years of thinking "I really should play Panzer Dragoon Orta," and I'm happy that it lived up to years of continued hype. Orta feels like a culmination of Panzer Dragoon's narrative and mechanical ideas, borrowing from all three previous games in one way or another to create what I think is the most fully realized entry in the series.

Obviously, Orta models itself after the on-rails entries rather than continuing down the turn-based RPG path laid out by Saga. That's not to say it jettisons all of that game's identity, of course. Orta is similarly narrative heavy and makes good on Saga's world building and storyline by focusing on Azel and (presumably) Edge's daughter. Look, it's a little hard to say, Azel just downloaded some DNA and I'm not about to check the file properties on that. Orta also borrows from Saga's positional combat in a way that feels very naturalistic, so much so that I had to question if it was present in Zwei.

Speaking of Zwei, the dragon yet again has the ability to grow over time, but no longer does so based on end-of-level scores. Rather, it changes shape in real-time when enough power-ups are collected in a given form to advance it to the next stage of its evolution. This feels like a natural progression from Zwei, and though the effect might seem quaint today, that level of skeletal deformation and changes to texture mapping is one of Orta's most impressive features. Being able to swap between different attack types also adds a layer of depth, and the deeper into the game you progress, the more rapidly you'll find yourself flicking between forms in order to manage different enemy types. Though I found this a bit overwhelming initially, once you find the right flow and develop an eye for what enemy types you need to counter, it feels pretty good.

Unfortunately, I live in an imperfect, shitty, fucked up world where a sequel to Saga and the overall health of the franchise was solely dependent on how well Orta performed. Since then, we've gotten a remake of the first game that released 18 years after Sega put the series on ice, and people tore it apart for reasons I still can't quite wrap my head around. I think it's safe to say the book is closed on Panzer Dragoon, and that's a shame, but I do think Orta is a good note to go out on. There's no cliffhanger ending here to weigh down on me, though Orta's story is left open, and the gameplay is so tight and refined that I'm not left with a sense that they needed one more game to get things right.

Sometimes you just gotta be grateful for the Panzer Dragoons you got.

This review contains spoilers

when i had first beaten panzer dragoon on retroarch, i was hooked and deeply in love with the series. zwei kept me coming back, made me feeling like i was high on crack, and saga... my god no other game has left me THAT stunned and emotional by its ending, to say i was blown away would be an understatement. i was spacing out the games between 1-2 months so the time was right for each, and the wait for orta was incredibly anxious.

after my weekend trip i punched my light out, smashed my ass on the chair and was ready to engage with this. it started with the haunting and epic prologue, i hadnt felt this engaged in a while, almost as if i had been participating in a series (duh). the difficulty of the game quickly ramped up, the imperial ship put up the fucking fight of the century, my blood was rushing and my heart was PUMPING. i was gunning through this, not only was it a mental and physical workout but i was also having an absolute blast. after it was all said and done, i realized... holy shit THIS WAS THE FIRST BOSS?!?!? goddamn this game was pretty hard ngl but I actually loved that it was incredibly challenging, enhanced the feeling of reaping the skies. another thing that had me loving the game was the ost sounding like shpongle (which is probably my favorite band. gaining a huge bias in the process). i was in complete awe by the games imagination and scope.

a while before i played orta i was spoiled by the fact that she was azel's daughter. i was less confused and more curious how they would pull this off, in fact i was kinda stoked that i could potentially unlock her, but what they did with her was miles better than what i expected. her vague appearance and message was so sad yet wholesome i wanted to fucking cry ;_; azel is such an amazing character. my favorite part of the game was the imperial city, especially paired with its song. visually its bombastic, soaring through the top of the caves and blowing shit up, i sound like a dummy but yeah thats how i feel, a lad talking about the coolest shit hes experienced. my journey through panzer dragoon was coming to an end, but yet it wasn’t so sad, more optimistic than anything. i was finally closing the chapters, nearing the end of this chaotic and strangely beautiful world, needless to say it will forever hold a special place in my heart. i want these games injected into my blood stream

XEMU doesn't play the FMVs but the audio so I can't play this game for shite. I really would love to play this game but I GOT NOT XBOX!!!!! OR A COPY!!!! SO FIX XEMU PLSSSSSS!!!!!!!

This is arcade design transformed into aesthetic experience. This is a shooter made into a poem. And that sounds absurd— but, in some sense, it seems true every time I play through this one more time. This is a flight through ancient places held together by the beauty of their images and songs; modern settings torn apart by machines, humanity, ambition; all punctuated by struggle, death, and dragonfire. The pacing establishes a rhythm between the gripping and the tranquil. And the sheer artfulness of every element sometimes allows a meditative calm to emerge inside moments of intensity. There are perfect moments made from cutting through a blue sky threading a dragon’s flight through bright twisting barrages of laser fire.

And for all its poignance—which has stayed with me for twenty years now— this is as much of a video game as it is anything else. The shooting and movement is fast but graceful. The game can be demanding enough to be rewarding. And
the mechanics have enough depth to make moment to moment tactical decisions feel significant. Shooting incoming missiles out of the sky, dashing out of danger at just the right time, building up your meter and making the best use of it to survive —all that feels great. And then there are the the three dragon forms your dragon can swap between on the fly. Each embodies a trade-off between speed and damage. Any form is capable enough to clear the game, but they provide a flexibility to the play that wouldn’t be there without them. The way you bring about destruction and vengeance with a continual stream of orbs and homing lasers can be strategically satisfying and kinetically elegant and beautiful— but the explosions dotting the sky and across the earth still add up to something more than arcade gratification. The designers have, at points, somehow woven regret into the gratification. The stunning world in the background is shot through with a kind of quiet sadness.

Panzer Dragoon proved that the rail shooter could become a work of art. Zwei was the perfection of that ideal—pure, simple, strange, beautiful. And with Orta they retained the same strange magic and made it all just a little more sophisticated than they had before.

The MO for Sega at this time was refining the formulas for many of their classic franchises. We got the ideal version of their arcade racing franchises (OutRun 2 and Crazy Taxi 3) and this represents the absolute refinement of the Panzer Dragoon formula.

The production in this game is pretty stunning. It looks and runs fantastic on the original hardware. The frame rate remains smooth and consistent even when there's a ton of shit happening on screen. My mind was blown playing this at a demo kiosk back in the day and it's still impressive today. No doubt it looks even better running on the Series X. The music is pretty fantastic too and there's an occasional appearance of tracks from previous games which is great.

The gameplay is also very satisfying. There's a high skill ceiling to it and it's one of those games that feels good to get better at. Managing the different dragon forms can be tricky at first, but once you get into the zone on this game zapping between forms to defend and attack feels incredible. Even when you know the trick to beating the bosses they still feel fun to fight. This is one of the few score attack style games that I enjoy to play.

In addition there's a ton of unlockables in the Pandora's Box. These include some bonus missions and scenarios which are nice (especially the entirety of the original Panzer Dragoon). The world encyclopedia is especially cool to browse through.

I only have a few complaints for this game. Leveling up your dragon forms can be tricky as they occur by collecting power ups mid gameplay. I felt like sometimes these power ups were very hard to see and as someone who has played this game multiple times I still find myself powering up the wrong form all the time. I wish you could just bank all of the power ups and then distribute them the way you want at the end of the level.

It also feels like there are portions of the game with mandatory damage. I've played this game multiple times and have it pretty well mapped out but there are certain segments where I get hit and I don't know why. I've always struggled a little bit with dodging in Panzer Dragoon games - attacks don't feel as telegraphed as they do in a game like Starfox 64 - and I feel like it is really noticeable in this game given the expanded offensive and defensive vocabulary you have access to compared to the older games.

Panzer Dragoon Orta is a great swan song to the Panzer Dragoon franchise. It's a cinematic and technical spectacle that feels incredible to master and play.


This review contains spoilers

After completing Panzer Dragoon Saga, I had reservations about how this game would continue the story. I think Saga had as good of an ending as it gets. It ties the first two games into itself so elegantly. It also introduces some wild and cool concepts into the universe that recontextualize the whole thing. I really loved how hopeful yet sad it was. You and Edge save the world, but Azel is left wandering in search of the person who loved her and made her understand her humanity. It was left open, but it wasnt something I really needed answers for. Unfortunately, upon finishing Panzer Dragoon Orta, my worries were realized.

Panzer Dragoon Orta's narrative is easily the most disappointing part of it. It continues the story in the most boring way possible. The empire messes with ancient technology, they make new weapons, you have to take down a tower, and there is a rival dragon that you fight along the way. Saga left things open for big change and the game does none of that really. Some of the aesthetics are different, but its the same kind of thing. It felt like the journey that Edge and Azel went through was for nothing. Even beyond that, the new ideas are just not that interesting. Orta is such a boring character. I think they were trying to do like the silent protagonist mixed with the more active roles in Saga, but she just doesnt have any of the drive that the other characters do. She seems to move around aimlessly and the chain of events all feel really vague. The villain seems kind interesting at first, but his motivations end up being really boring. The friends she meets are really annoying and dont do much either. Orta being Azels daughter is really uninspired and pointless to me. I thought exploring the Sestern in a rail shooter context was really cool and probably the highlight of the whole thing, but it didnt really last. I dislike how each level has an opening monologue, I wish it took more of a hands off approach. The games writing isnt great overall in my opinion, and I was left just kinda scratching my head afterward.

I wanted to like the gameplay more than I did, but I was left annyoed. This could just be me being bad at the game and not taking the time to really learn it like other people probably did. It has a lot of great ideas, taking the form change and box system of Saga and injecting it into the rail shooter gameplay. Having three dragon types as well as level ups, boosts, breaks and control over the direction you face the boss makes the game feel incredibly technical and execution heavy. I havent seen rail shooter give this kind of control over the pace to the player before. With this alone, I understand why people really love the gameplay. But I did end up having some issues with it that held me back from really liking it. I think the systems are clunky. Shifting dragon types is weird and the game expects you do it in quick succession most of the time. The boosting and breaking system makes certain enemy attacks really hard to predict. Sometimes you are supposed to boost away or break behind enemies, but the game doesnt really make this clear at all. It lead to multiple deaths where I just didnt understand what I was supposed to do. This makes the box system in the boss fights really confusing since it uses the break button to go backwards and the boost button to go forward. I would have much prefered if the dpad was used like in Saga. I think the absolute worst part of it all is that the bosses take FOREVER. The game seems inspired by Treasure Games because it ends up feeling like a boss rush at times with multiple layered phases. Some of them are really excellent, I really enjoyed the last two bosses in particular. But most of them just go on for so long with little way to bring the pace up. They are also really challenging, so when you die, having to start all the way back from an (at least) five minute boss fight in a rail shooter is kind of exhausting. I do find this game interesting, but it just doesnt really have the simple arcade appeal of the first game, or the well rounded ideas and pacing of the second. Its a bit messy.

I think this game is a great example of the franchise problem. When one team makes a rather complete set of games on a console and then it finally comes back, it puts the franchise in a tight spot. You could build off of the incredible intrigue of Saga and really open up the worlds potential, but then there is the danger of it not feeling like Panzer Dragoon. So now we are just back to the same old stuff, just prettier and more technical. And while I can appreciate the tough as nails gameplay and all the systems that come with it, it felt a bit disappointing as a fan of the Saturn trilogy. The music is really good at least.

No momento consegui só terminar o primeiro level por causa da emulação/meu pc ruim.

Ainda pretendo jogar ate o fim algum dia o/

Beautiful game and would probably warrant a higher rating were I a fan of rail shooters.

While this game might not technically be the best by any measure, it features such an intriguing and bizarre world/story that it is impossible to forget.

Really fun boss fights, but pacing and story are a step down from the first two games and it goes a little too long. Visuals have not aged as well as the Saturn games.

Orta stands out from its predecessors, not just because many of Team Andromeda's original members had already left before the start of its development, but also due to the series success being much intertwined with the Saturn's ambitions and limitations. The low poly fidelity of the Saturn funneled the devs creativity into the presentation of the world of Panzer Dragoon, buildinga unique universe of bright and strong colors, exotic soundscapes and sci fi fantasy backdrops that forced the players to fill in the blanks with their imagination. But that's not to say that Orta doesn't have the craft to make it a worthy successor to the Saturn lineage.

Now a child of the tech powerhouse that was the Xbox, Orta had the opportunity to fully realize the potential of Panzer Dragoon's world without having to take shortcuts in its visual fidelity. For an early Xbox game, Orta is still an impressive display of vast mountain, forest and open sky landscapes, filled with swirling ships, monsters and gigantic bosses that the console just shrugs off as you shoot homing missiles at eveything on sight. Complemented by a serene and subdued soundtrack, Orta is able to turn a genre known for its bombastic action into a somber and introspective adventure.

It is also the most accomplished and fully realized rail shooting experience in the franchise. Not settling with being a simple callback to the series, it builds upon the ideas of the previous entries, like the evolution mechanic of Zweii and the dragon morphing ability of Saga, to give a highly replayable challenging campaign with a plethora of maneuvourability and combat options to the player that make aerial skirmishes engaging and never frustrating to master. Orta was one of the last hurrahs of a company who rarely sacrificed fun for its artistic endeavours, a feat which the Panzer Dragoon series most exemplified and which Orta continued on.

While not being able to significantly expand on the story and concepts of Panzer Dragoon beyond what Saga had already achieved, Orta still manages to effectively embrace the themes of land ravaging warfare, the folly of playing God with nature and the price that comes with forgetting the past. The unwillingness to learn from the mistakes that were practiced by the Ancestors and that fuel much of the conflict that happens in these games has been a major throughline of the series, shackling is inhabitants to a war they dont understand against forces they do not comprehend, and I think it's fitting that the franchise's ending note is one where the character Orta, the legacy of the two main opposing forces of Panzer Dragoon, bears the torch into an uncertain but possibly brighter future.

Ultimately, what you should get out of this is that it is now possible to play the whole Panzer Dragoon series from start to finish from the comfort of your PC without much hassle or hiccups. The world is finally healing.


Works great in Xbox One compatibility mode. I think I saw two small stutters through my entire playthrough. Quite short, but the right length. I thought there were a few too many things that were hard to evade with the controls, but after playing Crimson Dragon I definitely think the essence of the game is to keep that tied with the aiming, to keep the player only in direct control of the aiming reticle.

Great soundtrack - great audio overall in fact - gives the whole thing an extra punch (again, CD has weak lockon and fire sounds which completely ruins the impact), and there is loads of extra stuff there to fill in the story. It's the kind of package you'd expect from a remaster, rather than an original release. I'd say to anyone who's even remotely interested to give it a go, whether from a place of curiosity about the Xbox compatibility, people curious as to how it's held up or people who've never tried this kind of rail shooter.

Poor Panzer Dragoon.
I only got into the series recently, and I've seen it has a dedicated fanbase, but between Saga and Orta, the Panzer Dragoon series is a strong contender for the most underrated game franchise ever. Orta alone puts rail-shooter classics like Star Fox 64 to shame, delivering both incredible gameplay and a universe to get lost in.

Even better than Zwei, Orta retains the fantastic setting, visuals and music from the prior games while developing the gameplay in a fun and natural way. The dragon forms make the gameplay more involved and complex with just a simple button press and the gliding is a great way to make the movement and positioning feel less restrictive which is nice in a rail-shooter. The levels are all distinct and difficult while rarely feeling unfair and even the story was more developed this time around. While the story still wasn't particularly impactful, it at least gave me some characters to recognize and care about this time around and I quite like the designs of both Orta and the antagonist. Too bad panzer dragoon's dead.

Great on rails shooting action with serious depth to get better on repeat playthroughs. Initially dissapointed to see how short the game was until I saw that it contained tons of side content. Plus having a port of the first Panzer is incredible.