I've been very wary of this game since day one, it just looks "off." the edge lighting makes everything look like a toy, the cursor movement is strange, the sound effects are juicy and gross, I dunnooooooooo.
But somebody's got to check it out and see what they've done to it. I guess I'll take the plunge, sooner or later, but if anyone else is getting in there, well, let's hear some thoughts. I hope it's secretly good?
Limited Run streamed the game for 2 hours today. Aestheticly it looks and sounds great. Patterns seem to be roughly the same. Obviously gotta see how it feels in the hands, but much more excited than I was before. Will grab the physical tomorrow.
Yeah, with a physical copy coming up, I don‘t know that I can justify grabbing it digitally right now. I think I’ll just play a ton of the original series so that when the physical arrives I can either really love it (since it‘s not like there’s a part 5) or be disappointed (since I'll have the original set fresh in my brain).
Panzer is one of my darlings, so I've been anxious about how this was going to turn out. Agree that it looks a bit Glad/saran-wrappy, but otherwise I quite like how vivid it is. Looks like the dragon is still quite responsive, too. Cautiously optimistic!
crossing all my stuff - I am thinking I might go digital since physical on switch is not so nice. but if I were gonna get anything physical it'd be something like this, so… I dunno!!!
i really really dislike how this looks, everything is both too bright and too dull… i wish they would just port them, the design principles behind the originals are so aesthetically dependent on the contours, capacities and restrictions of the saturn and it doesn't make sense to treat them as abstractions to recreate.
Agreed! Saturn games are real difficult ports though, and emulation only got good in the last… 8 years? And there‘s no license-able emulator either. So I don’t know how they'd feasibly do it. But I sure do agree that they should try!
@exodus#575 the pc port version was ported to ps2 and xbox though, which though not 100% ideal is vastly preferable as a version to have on current gen consoles imo! either way i hope an emulator solution of some sort is a priority if they end up doing saga (and i hope they do!), which would be really poorly served by something like this…
@formulasofsexuation#578 even if they just had the ability to cut back and forth between the original graphics and still had the new gameplay engine (see also NiGHTS HD), it would be nice. There‘s something about Saturn graphics that nothing outside of emulation seems to mimic.
And wow, would I love to see Sega embrace a Sega CD and/or Saturn emulator and get some of those titles back out there for folks to enjoy. There’s so much good stuff that there's no way proper channel to play.
Really excited to play this one. I have always felt inadequate for not playing Panzer Dragoon, particularly since I've had friends and acquaintances in the past who worked on projects they said were influenced or inspired by it, leaving me unable to give them the feedback they wanted, haha.
Agreed on the visuals. There‘s a certain soapy iridescent palette that I strongly associate with the Saturn, which Astal and the Panzers were the poster children for. This one feels too warm. That and the Panzers really made the hardware’s quirks integral to the art direction. They could always get away with an infinity plane of water because Panzer water is hypnotic. This one doesn't feel desolate enough, not Moebius enough.
But then if it were faithful to the original then I wouldn't have any reason to play it ANYWAY, Doesn't need to be better, just different. I'm down, might be cool
It‘s cool that someone is trying something with old Saturn games and it’s nice to see games like Grandia, Panzer Dragoon, YU-NO and Langrisser I&II be officially licensed (and in some cases translated for the first time) for a new and wider audience. So kudos to the people behind this remake for the attempt. I believe it's a French production team with the support of Polish programmers.
Now, I am also rather skeptical about this remake from the perspective of someone who played the original. Furthermore, I suspect a Panzer Dragoon or Panzer Dragon Zwei remake in 2020 only really makes sense as a VR project, to take advantage of the on-rail experience and head tracking / 360° enemy pattern. But the nice thing is we now live in an era of patches (and easily accessible mods) so I hope the team gathers the feedback from early adopters to improve stuff such as the responsiveness of target locking. It seems they already have a new patch ready for early April.
For those not into the remake‘s aesthetic, do you think Orta maintained the aesthetic of the Saturn games? Not asking for the sake of argument, just genuinely curious. In fact I’ve almost completely ignored the remake and don't even have a sense of what it looks like. But Orta is somewhere in the middle of my to-play list.
@Lacquerware#624 I think Orta is definitely in the same vein as the originals - they all blend together in my mind.
A few musings on the Remake having watched a friend play through it yesterday:
- The bright colors and look of everything makes it really difficult to keep track of where the enemies are.
- The shadows in the forest flicker nonstop. It's a thing.
- The lockon is really rough. I'm glad they're already on it.
- None of the quality of life improvements from PD2 are in it. Specifically, I think the lack of incorporating the burst shot from 2 goes beyond being faithful and actively chooses to keep in something that's kind of an accessibility issue. There's some spots where you have to mash for an entire boss fight, and it's brutal.
- Overally, I like it. It sticks faithfully enough to the source that it still nails the same experience (which is pretty nice - Saturn isn't exactly accessible to modern audiences).
I'm hoping this thing gets some real traction, the team learns and grows, and we can see a Zwei remake that really nails it.
I think Orta looks fine, basically, but I do not like how it plays, and I don‘t like the fiddly nature of switching dragons to do different attacks, which was an entirely superfluous addition. I’ll have to get back in there to see how I feel about the visuals, but the overwhelming memory I have is of darkness… No blue sky in games here.
And Chaz it's a German production team supported by polish devs, I believe. It's forever entertainment, the company whose games are discounted to 99 cents in perpetuity on the eshop.
[edit] I meant to say, evoking the grandia remaster as a way to play an otherwise inaccessible Saturn game is mostly true, but the purist in me dislikes that the remaster is based on the ps1 version which is visually inferior to the Saturn version, missing a lot of sprite layers and etc. It's more the true experience of an okay port than the experience of the saturn game.
[edit 2] crossed posts with @James-#631 so replying here - a lot of what you complain about there is the stuff I saw in the trailer, so... Yeah, my concerns seem to have been realized! As long as they were changing things, why not change a few for the better, with quality of life improvements and better cursor movement (that's what looks the worst to me, but it could possibly be framerate related). It feels like they just slathered butter over the whole thing.
@exodus#632 out of curiosity, how did you feel about the boosting/braking to maneuver? I thought that was a good evolution and tied in the PDS positioning element.
The shot type switching was definitely a bit much. Especially since you had to cycle - you couldn't go straight to a specific form.
Combined with the shot switching it felt like they were trying to turn the dragon into a car, and a manual at that. I drive stick but I don‘t need that from my fantasy dragon. For me it didn’t work, but I don't like anything I perceive as unnecessary complexity, which is down to personal taste!