james’ opinion

Panzer Dragoon Saga was released on the Sega Saturn in 1998 and sold (approximately) four copies. This was (approximately) only half of the amount of copies Sega printed for the European and North American markets in total, the Saturn living only via life support at that point. My own copy is the prize of my video game collection, and, never having been too into untranslated Japanese shooters released on formats even I’ve never heard of, it’s certainly the rarest game I own. Nowadays it goes for hundreds on eBay. What’s most important about all this is that the game is actually worth paying (approximately) that much for.

I don’t like RPGs. That’s sort of one of my rules. Like most of my rules, though, it’s flexible. (I don’t like racing games either, but love F-Zero; and I possibly only like Smash Bros so much because I don’t like fighting games.) The role-playing genre has long frustrated me because, with its emphasis on narrative, it should be the genre that most excites me, but instead I typically find RPGs impenetrably clunky and trite. Of all genres, the RPG seems the one most leaden with its own internal language of complex menus, battle systems and other nonsensical tropes that surely make it very difficult for non-gamers (or even non-RPG fans) to access.

Even as someone who grew up on games I was long mystified by the genre. It wasn’t until someone loaned me Grandia 2 in my mid-teens that I actually finished an RPG— unless you count the early Pokémon titles, which I suppose are like RPGs with training wheels— and even then it took me months, having ended up midway through the game chronically under-leveled, not realising you aren’t supposed to avoid every enemy you come across. (The same thing happened to me the first time I played through Pokémon, come to think of it. I only used one Pokémon the whole time, Blastoise, and got stuck on the ferry bit a few hours in.) It seems to me that a game where the player is expected to systematically do something basically not interesting or fun for hours on end is a flawed one, and appeals only to people somewhere low down on the autistic spectrum whose obsessive-compulsive need for order and certainty makes them susceptible to repetitive work-reward mechanisms. Luckily for Japan there are a lot of such people in the world (my mother calls them ‘men’) and so the genre remains popular.

I cannot continue writing this entry without mentioning the RPG behemoth that is the Final Fantasy franchise. With the exception of Final Fantasy IX (declared ‘the worst one’ by several FF fans I know), whose sumptuous art direction I found charming, and Final Fantasy XII (declared ‘the worst one’ by apparently most people on the internet), whose bravely revitalised battle system I found refreshing and utterly addictive in an autistic-spectrum kind of way, I have bitterly loathed every installment in the franchise, including the spin-offs.

I am sorry, internet, but I think Final Fantasy VII is an ugly, trite, backward game, with utterly naff character design and a graphics engine so dated as to be basically unplayable. Its enduring popularity with people who don’t really play games— who haven’t owned a console since the original PlayStation, and talk nostalgically about playing Sonic round their brother’s flat before wondering out loud what his little girlfriend was called (“oh yeah: Tails”)— is to me one of the biggest mysteries of the video game world. I can only assume that these people were bowled over at the time by what were once cutting-edge FMV sequences and exciting little Lego people in 3D. I would understand all this better if the game weren’t so fraught with impenetrable and counter-intuitive design elements; during the first boss fight, for example, an ally gives you a piece of advice that actually works against you due to a mistranslation. Considering the game was a huge success even in Europe, where Nintendo previously didn’t bother to release Super Mario RPG due to the territory’s notorious disinterest in the role-playing genre, I am amazed anyone managed to get through the first hour without specialised training beforehand and a lot of counseling afterwards. I suppose Square makes a lot of money from strategy guides.

There was an alternative available if one knew where to look. Kentaro Yoshida, an artist on Panzer Dragoon Saga, recalls that the game’s art director, Manabu Kusunoki, “was adamant that he didn’t want any Final Fantasy-style unusual haircuts like [gestures a Cloudlike spike] or purple hair or anything like that”. A lack of purple hair is only the beginning of PDS’ artistic triumphs, for it features, I think, one of the most strange and beautiful universes in all science fiction. This alien, frequently surreal post-apocalyptic world is a terrifically odd clash of fantasy and sci-fi influences— most clearly Nausicaä and Mobius (who contributed concept art to earlier Panzer games)— and whose concept art I have saved on my hard drive for those frequent moments when I need to remember what exciting, original character design looks like.

The game is relatively short, coming in at only about fifteen hours, twenty if you do the (mercifully scant) side-quest stuff. Some people cite this as a criticism, but I can count on one hand the number of games longer than thirty hours that justify their running time. Unlike the sprawling and ultimately superficial stuff of Final Fantasy, PDS’ plot is tight, focused and to-the-point, with relatively few locations and a small cast (and only one playable character). It manages to achieve both a sophisticated political subplot (the game opening with a coup on an Imperial base) and, almost unheard of in video games, characters that actually develop through the story. Azel, the mysterious, inhuman-looking girl who functions as the story’s principal MacGuffin, begins a fierce antagonist but by the credits has revealed both a humane pragmatism and sympathetic vulnerability.

The main character, Edge, has his own unusual vulnerability. Like most RPGs, our hero is a teenager, but has none of the idealized shampoo-model looks or trite never-give-up attitude of the typical RPG protagonist — or even the frequent alternative, that of angsty aloof cool. Edge is instead a young man with a sensible haircut who is understandably angry when he is shot and dropped down a cavernous shaft in the opening FMV; that he survives this is an apparent plot hole that explains itself via a creepy postmodern twist in the end sequence. (I might return to this particular postmodern twist if I ever write an entry about Bioshock, i.e., how it doesn’t have one. It’s a thorny issue, so give me a while.)

Importantly, Edge has no particular powers or fighting skill of his own: instead he traverses the world map and fights enemies on the back of a dragon. Like everything else in PDS, the dragon subverts the clichés of its type, and contrary to what you might have expected of a dragon it is in fact a sleek armoured horned thing that breathes lasers instead of fire and roars like a synthesiser in pain. (Trust me, it’s cool.) In what I take and admire to be a tacit declaration of Edge as his own character (and not some personification of the player), you cannot name the player avatar, but you can name the dragon; he is, after all, Edge’s pet in some frightening capacity. I usually call him Pongo.

Pongo, it turns out, is a particularly powerful dragon and most of the human enemies in the game are quite scared of him. It’s a smart explanation as to how our hero could possibly go about taking down a corrupt empire without a large army behind him (most RPGs have its heroes manage with a sword and a few mates). More importantly, the dragon facilitates what remains in my book the most visually dramatic and exciting battle system of any RPG (and more than compensates for the game’s disappointing reliance on a traditional random encounter system). All battles are fought in the air, sometimes above the clouds, with the dragon and its target flying alongside one another; much of the strategy is derived from circling the enemy, trying to find its weak spots whilst concealing your own. Unlike the slow and static battlefields of FFVII only a year before, PDS’ battles are possessed of a sense of movement and sweeping drama that is still unusual. Though combat is not exactly turn-based, it nonetheless uses a (clear and visual) menu-based system whose instant accessibility slowly reveals a rich and surprising depth. Importantly, there is never a hurdle between deciding on an action and having your dragon do it— the sense of immediate control is sustained by shortcuts mapped to the main buttons and the ease with which the player moves around the battlefield— and, though the action waits for your input before proceeding, the feeling of urgency never slips.

By the time the player reaches the end of game’s first act, the player– and Edge– has adjusted to the idea of the dragon as a feared and uniquely powerful creature, having laid waste to hundreds of monsters and a small rebel fleet by this point. The disc climaxes with the first confrontation with the girl Azel. In what is probably my favourite boss battle of all time– and one of my favourite twists of any fantasy story– Azel turns out to have a bloody great dragon of her own, Atolm. And just look at the size of the bastard:

The neat visual contrast between the dragons– Edge’s svelte and dragonfly-like, Azel’s like a flying blue whale, complete with something resembling a dorsal fin– emphasises the hidden similarities of both riders. (I like to think of Edge’s dragon as female and Azel’s as male, just because they somehow seem to me gendered in that way and for the notion’s pleasing symmetry.) When the player finally lasers Atolm into submission, Azel is clearly distressed and laments having rushed him into battle too early, mirroring Edge’s growing bond with his own dragon; and the tiny form of Azel perched on Atolm’s mighty brow reminds us that, even moreso than Edge, she is a small and fragile figure in command of something big and very dangerous. It also visually dramatises Azel’s fierce-but-vulnerable character, and makes her something worth caring about.

And I do care about Azel. Practical, matter-of-fact and quietly composed, she is the reverse of the typical Japanese RPG female’s frail, giddily emotional hostage-bait. She is fiercely loyal to her master– Craymen, the man Edge is chasing– and tells Edge: “If you interfere with him again, I’ll kill you.” When Azel and Edge end up trapped together in an underground ruin, she allies with him to escape, but there is none of the usual rivals-forced-to-work-together comic banter. Azel tells Edge frankly that “I would have escaped [on my own] if I could”: she is calm when Edge is not. Azel begins to soften to him after this encounter, but she still tells him to stay out of Craymen’s way when it’s over. A tough cookie.

It’s nearly a shame, then, that in the penultimate act Azel falls unconscious, almost recasting her in a typical damsel-in-distress role– but I can’t deny that this classic storytelling tactic of moving a powerful character into a position of vulnerability is one I always fall for. Without Craymen’s military jacket her strange artificial form is revealed fully, its puppet-like joints and asymmetrical black-and-white colour scheme making her look like a cross between Pinocchio and Pierrot, and the hidden vulnerability behind all her determination is again visually illustrated.

When she recovers, however, Azel has lost none of this determination. By the time the story ends, she is determined to find Edge, who has vanished into the ether. His chances of return seem slim– especially if we interpret that aforementioned creepy postmodern twist to mean it is the player who has invested Edge with new life after he is shot in the opening sequence, only to snatch it away once the game is completed– but Azel remains hopeful. With Craymen dead, she has nothing more to live for, and the sadness that has been lurking in her character all along now comes to the fore. The Panzer Dragoon game that came next, Orta, told us that Azel eventually conceives a half-machine-half-human child using Edge’s DNA she found floating in Sestren (a sort of sentient computer dimension– it’s complicated). I think this cheapens what I find a poignant and unexpected ending, and damages the pleasing ambiguity of Azel’s surprisingly maternal response to a child who trips near her: she dusts him off and watches him join his playmates. Besides, I frankly love the bleakly romantic image of Azel, who has been the story’s real focus all along, embarking on a surely hopeless journey out of love. Her question is one that is better left answered.

So, two thousand words later I now confess what you may have presumed already: Panzer Dragoon Saga is the only RPG I’ve ever truly loved. Eleven years on, it still far surpasses every other RPG in nearly every important field: plot, characterisation, art direction, world design, enemy design, battle engine. Yet no Final Fantasy fan I’ve met has heard of it. (One of them told me she had, but she is lying. She is a girl and therefore has likely never even touched a Saturn.) Like most of Sega’s best creations, PDS was doomed from birth to a life of obscurity— Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games has sold millions, luckily— and it remains a tragically overlooked title. Modern-day gamers can be forgiven for not wanting to splash out for an eBay copy (tight gits don’t know what’s good for them), and admittedly at the time it was tough to look past Half-Life, Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid, the other critical releases in 1998.

But I will never forgive GamesMaster for the dismissive TV review that surely sealed the game’s fate for good. “It’s not Final Fantasy VII,” disapproves one reviewer. “Or Zelda. But it’s a good attempt.” 87%. In the wonky logic of game journalism, that’s the percentage equivalent of six out of ten, or three out of five, or a patronising smile and a lollipop. It’s also only two percent better than Postal, apparently, so save your cash and download that instead.

In an interview with 1up not too long ago, Yukio Fatatsugi, Panzer Dragoon Saga’s director, said of his career ambition: “I just want to create something that will make no money.” That quote was on my Facebook page for a while. I find it inspiring, and it induces in me a nostalgia for a company of creative madmen before the inescapable demands of capitalism finally caught up and forced them to make Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games instead. Rest assured that not a single penny you might spend on procuring a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga will find its way back to Sega now. It’s what they would have wanted, once.

(Images for this entry were sourced from the wonderful Art of Panzer Dragoon website. Have a look, it’s got nice pictures.)