By the title alone you probably already guessed what happened. I beat Panzer Dragoon Saga! Me, the guy with the short attention span, jRPG hater, just spent 15 hours with this game. And I loved it! It was a blast to the very end, although at some points near the end of the 3rd cd/beginning of the 4th it can get somewhat...I wouldn't say boring, but the pace slows down a bit and it can get a bit confusing at times, with the player not knowing what to do. I admit it, I had to use a guide from time to time, and throughout most of the 4th disc where things really get complicated. There's a whole area (won't say exactly what it is to prevent spoilers) that's just like a giant maze, and the boss fights can be somewhat unforgiving. After you understand the enemy patterns and realize what attacks to use, it's easy, but once you figure that out your life bar is probably already so low that you can't turn the tide of battle and have to do it all over again.
Still, this game is an experience like no other, which I guess makes the Saturn über relevant even in this era of HD and online gaming, achievements, and gamerscores, and casual shit. So, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is simply that I can't recommend this game enough, to any kind of player. No matter what are your favourite genres, if you like the Saturn you gotta play this game. It instantly became my favourite Saturn game of all time, even surpassing my childhood favourites, and is probably also one of, if not the, best jRPG I've ever played. That is, if you even consider it a jRPG, because its style of progression and combat system are so far ahead, so wildly different from everything else I've seen, so much better than even those in current, recent games, that I'm not sure you can, or you should, put it next to such boring, stagnated, repetitious games.
By the way, while browsing the interwebs I found some interesting articles about this game in particular or the whole series. Check them out:
A look back to PDS by Game Informer - here
Retrospective of the series by Gamasutra - here
Retrospective by 1UP - here
IGN's top 100 games of all time (44th place) - here
1UP's top ten cult classics (1st place!) - here
EGM review
Game Informer review
GamePro review
*Kudos to Panzer Dragoon Saga Oasis (link) for most of the links.
5 comments:
Allow me to disagree, dear anon, but there's only a handful of PD-related posts on the blog. Maybe you just happened to spot two or three in a short time, and got that impression.
Anyway, I was about to write a post about PD Zwei, but now I got discouraged, don't want to overload our esteemed readers with the same subject... :(
You can never have too many PDS articles, it's a fantastic game. I usually replay it a couple of times a year myself.
My last run wasn't very good, I didn't level my dragon up enough to be able to get the baby dragon or evolve into the dragon's final form.
I still get a bit lost in the maze bits myself, thankfully there aren't too many random battles to make things difficult!
Would Anon rather have every other article be about Sonic? Like it or not, Saturn's strongest franchise was Panzer Dragoon and thus you'll be seeing a lot of posts about it.
By the way, NiGHTS contest is still going on! Read the previous post to enter!
Oh great. I still have to play this game. But at the moment I am not playing anything at all. But the day, when I'll start PDS will come eventually. :D
I'll play through it this winter when I have some time....I can't wait though...got the real deal US release on the shelf staring at me.
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