There are wildly mutated animals and plants, gigantic floating creatures with human settlements riding on their backs, flying airships, and of course the biological weapon dragons such as the one your character rides. It takes place in a very unique far-future world, a bit reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa, in which humans are still dealing with the devastating effects of past war technology. For anyone who doesn't know, the French cartoonist Jean "Moebius" Giraud was very involved with the original world design and creature design for Panzer Dragoon. Menu screens and pre-rendered cutscenes of course are still at a lower resolution (although it kind of looks like there might be some kind of higher resolution dithering applied to them), but the gameplay is now HD and it looks fantastic. The short version is that, outside of Remake, they're all basically the same game with some relatively minor graphical changes between them - but you're still getting a very close experience.I finally popped my Panzer Dragoon Orta disc into the Series X to check out the higher resolution graphics, and was not disappointed! Wow, this game has always been something special, and it has really aged well. There are other PC versions as well, ports of the original, that don't have this issue. Steam version is just the Remake, which is a rebuilt game that's all well and good, depending on who you ask, but has a major gameplay flaw that is as-yet-unaddressed the aforementioned unreliable lock-on mechanic. The Saturn version, and all ports of it, have a lock-on function that works flawlessly. There's also the fact that the cursor simply doesn't function in the same way as the original game, but I'm willing to chalk that up to an intentional design choice, since the original way it worked gets funky once you're outside of the game's very specific intended original aspect ratio. This is up from the original launch of the Switch version, where it was a coin toss every time you moved the cursor over an enemy to get a lock. Pretty specifically, the lock-on function - which is a core gameplay mechanic central to every game in the series, including Saga - only works about 80% of the time. I don't want to espouse negativity on it, but it does have some pretty insurmountable flaws in core gameplay that prevent it from being a better experience than the original. The remake is probably worth getting on a heavy sale price. If you have a Saturn, or a means of properly emulating it. That aside, grabbing the original Saturn version will be the best gameplay experience. Orta is an incredible game on its own merits, and one of the best games in the genre. It has a port of the original Panzer Dragoon as an unlockable for beating the game, though if you're not already into rail shooters in general, and Panzer Dragoon specifically, it can be a bit challenging to get to that point. Some of the best money you can spend on the entire platform. It's $10 on Xbox, and occasionally goes on sale for half that, and was an outright beautiful game when it launched, continued to outclass a lot of Xbox 360 games for a while, and still looks fantastic on modern consoles in 4K. My personal recommendation is to grab Orta. They have patched the game a few times to address some of the latter issues and while it's hardly perfect, it was unplayable before, whereas now I can at least say it's worth playing if it's your only option. The Steam version is a complete remake by a studio out of Poland, and the contentions people have are about whether the new visuals accurately capture the aesthetic of the original, as well as a lot of technical & control issues that make it feel much worse to play. The unlockable version inside Orta for Xbox is a fairly straight port of the old PC version, and for some reason it doesn't run with any of the next-gen enhancements that Orta itself gets when you play on newer Xboxes. The PS2 version (ported by many of the original team) has some upgraded models here and there and is properly adjusted for 30FPS (the original runs at 20, basically), and it also has some near bonus unlockables, as well as a more authentic mode (based on the old PC version) if you want it. This version was directly ported to PC back in the day and it was a good port for its time, albeit not 1:1 visually. The Saturn version was a launch title and looks/runs as such, but it has a very austere aesthetic that the remake (and even Orta for Xbox, some might argue) doesn't have.
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