"Your room will turn into an endless horizon.
Ride a pterosaur and fly through a beautiful and magnificent fantasy world! Shoot down giant creatures and Imperial flying weapons to become the ruler of the skies! All characters are processed using 3D polygons. Realistic flapping wings, eternal beauty of the earth, 360-degree attack by switching viewpoints... Exciting and exhilarating Another dimension fantastic STG is here! A dreamy, floating sensation. This extrasensory game is addictive." ~Ad Caption [BMT🤖]
Other Games in Ad (bottom-left to right):
Daytona USA
デイトナUSA
Magic Knight Rayearth
魔法騎士レイアース
Blue Seed
ブルーシード
Ki Suishou Densetsu Astal
輝水晶伝説アスタル
Daedalus
ダイダロス
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Source: Sega Saturn Magazine, April 1995 || RetroCDN; Akane
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While the vast majority of gameplay in Panzer Dragoon Saga focuses on the dragon riding and combat sections, there are excursions between each core portion of play that have the player character of Edge off their dragon and traveling smaller locations on foot. During these, the player can talk to other characters, purchase items, and apply upgrades, but these sections are brief and intentionally don’t allow for a great deal of side exploration, as the game maintains its focus on the larger narrative by keeping things moving in a linear fashion.
