Platforms: Stadia, Switch (reviewed), and Windows
Panzer Dragoon is one of those imperfect perfect games. When it came out for the Saturn, it was used as ammunition in the console wars. It was a game that bolstered the arcade expertise of Sega’s developers to make a game of pure spectacle. The game’s desolate world overrun with weird flora and fauna was partway between Dune and the any number of 80’s post-apocalypse manga series.
There was then, and there is now, a cohesiveness to Panzer Dragoon that many games struggle to achieve all these years later. Forget that it was a couple of hours long, forget that the character models look as though they’re held together by string, chewing gum and prayers, and forget that Panzer Dragoon Zwei is the perfect, perfect version of this halfway perfect game, because for the sake of this piece, the first Panzer Dragoon is and was and will continue to be a lightning in a bottle video game.
There’s been a lot of scepticism around MegaPixel Studio’s remake of Panzer Dragoon, appropriately titled Panzer Dragoon: Remake, early footage showed a game that looked decent enough but lacked that certain something, that imperfect perfection or cohesiveness, that PD fans remember and cling to. Panzer Dragoon is one of those rare cases where people maybe don’t want a remake, Clockwork Knight might have been a better contender.
For me, booting up the game on my Switch and dinner for one-ing it while my kid took a nap didn’t leave much of an impression. I’ll say this, the people at MegaPixel Studio obviously have a great deal of admiration for the original game. The new art and assets are very sharp. They’re not an exact recreation of the original’s assets, but they get the feeling down well enough. It’s sort of a mind’s eye thing. When playing through the game you think ‘of course this is how it always looked.’ Checking it later you are, of course, very much mistaken.
The rub though, is in how the game plays. This being a remake rather than a remaster the movement, gunplay, lock-on, etc. is built again from scratch to approximate the feeling of the original game. The thing is the shooting, particularly the rapid-fire shot, feels too slow. The time from button press to shot is off in a way that’s almost imperceptible, but look at the first line of this piece, “imperfect perfection”, remember?
What we have here, what MegaPixel Studio will have to contend with through patches, is perfect imperfection, that niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right. It throws everything off. Although the game is playable, just as much a spectacle as you remember, it doesn’t feel like it should, which is a pity because the passion is there to see.
It’s not all doom and gloom though – patches are coming along with versions for other consoles and computers in the future, so I may be eating mutated crow in the days, weeks or months to come. But, for now, I can recommend this remake to those that don’t know or can’t remember that magic feeling of squeezing that weird blue pistol.
