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.
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.
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