22/30 A thirty years journey 
All caught up, in the nick of time! It is the 22nd post, which means it is (roughly for most of you) the 22nd of November, and the Sega Saturn is now three decades young.
Rather than celebrate with a specific topic or game, I wanted to tell you a personal anecdote about one of my first direct contacts with the Saturn. Quite honestly, I can’t guarantee that the dates or specific games are 100% accurate, but the gist of the anecdote is correct. It also concerns Panzer Dragoon, and that’s what gave me the idea of telling you first about the OVA based on the game.
At the beginning of 1995, after reading articles and previews in games magazines, I had initially chosen the PlayStation as my next generation console pick. Clearly, I was either the least or the most discerning preteen at the time, because it was the unlikely trio of Crime Crackers, Arc The Lad and King’s Field - as well as (I think) one of the first articles on GensōSuikoden and its 108 characters - that had convinced me.
But after a summer of 1995 spent losing an absurd amount of 5-franc coins on Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally, and the recent announcement of Shining Wisdom, which foreshadowed the inevitability of Shining Force III, I finally came to my senses. (Well, I did not expect that Shining Force III would take almost three years, but…)
Since many of my buddies seemed to be moving towards the PlayStation, and since we were used to hanging out at each other’s houses and lending each other our consoles to play everything under the sun, a rebalancing of our hardware responsibilities was kinda convenient for everyone.
The fact remains that preteen me was still too young (or immature) and economically dependent to buy a console with my own money in 1995, let alone at import prices. The end goal was to convince my parents to buy one.
A few weeks later, I found myself in Hong Kong with my parents (who frequently worked in the region at the time), and my memory swears that this is where I first touched the console. It was the Japanese gray model; it must have been shortly after the release of Shin Shinobi Den and the MPEG card necessary for playing Video CDs, because those, along with Clockwork Knight, are the three demos I remember in the store.
So, I tried to convince my mother that we absolutely had to bring this thing back. It was a golden opportunity! It hadn’t even been released in France yet! (Non-contractual comment.) It was going to cost more in France! (Again.) It’s not just a console! It plays movies and audio CDs! Of course Video CD will replace the VHS!
Anyway, I must have worn her down, or made untenable election promises such as “I’ll get good grades in algebra next year”, because she at least agreed to progress to the next stage of the negotiation: “OK, but if we bring one back to Paris now, what do you want to buy with it? We’re not going to bring back one of those Chinese-language films, are we?”
That’s when I saw close to me, like a divine intervention…
… My esteemed compatriot Moebius’ incredible illustration. It wasn’t an actual copy of the game, just a SAMPLE piece of cardboard with the cover printed on it. I don’t think I’d ever seen Panzer Dragoon running in stores in Paris by that point, but the game looked absolutely brilliant according to magazine impressions. And so I explained to the poor woman who’d given birth to me that we absolutely had to return from Hong Kong with a Saturn and Panzer Dragoon - a future-proof and indelible souvenir, in the living room, of our successful trip to Hong Kong.
And then, so close to the goal, I committed my own Kolo Muani all alone in front of the Argentinian keeper moment. My mother asked one last question: OK, but what kind of game is Panzer Dragoon? A shooting game? A role-playing game? Is there a story at all?
My calculation was as follows: if I tell the truth, that it’s a shooting game on the verge of a technical demo that can be cleaned up in a few hours, she’ll think that the console will be used for a weekend and will then rot in the living room until someone comes back (at the cash register) in Hong Kong or Japan. So I replied that it was a role-playing game, oh la la, oui oui, huge world! No kidding, I pretty much described Panzer Dragoon as if it was Daggerfall.
And she snapped back something like: “Oh hell no, you spent all your vacations in the dark with your bloody game [Shining Force II], I’m sick and tired of your role-playing games… Let’s go back to the hotel” (without the Saturn). Betrayed by Shining Force II, damn it, there’s no justice in this world!
I’d hoped to do something not too complicated and involving for this anniversary, but in the end, this series of little daily posts (started quite frankly at the worst possible moment work-wise) was more a handful to manage than any more in-depth subject I could have prepared for one day… Well, I guess this is a nice (unintentional) tribute to the many false good ideas found in the stupid planet that runs all these great games. I love it anyway.
