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.
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.