Successful games platforms carry momentum. People carry on wanting to play more games on their computer or console for a while before they get bored and move on, or move away. There’s a reason why we kept seeing Amiga hits past the point where new Amigas were even being made. On the other hand, at the very start of a platform’s life there’s an opportunity as well. No one is going to buy a new console without wanting at least one game to play on it, and without many games around yet the chances of your game being that one game are higher. There are two platforms for which I am going to cover just a single game for Super Chart Island where that game is one which launched alongside the machine. That isn’t quite the case for the Sega Saturn, the Mega Drive’s successor, but it came close.
After the Mega Drive was the leading console in the UK in part thanks to Nintendo’s many mis-steps, Sega managed to follow it up with a good deal of unforced errors of their own. Their various add-ons to the Mega Drive mangled goodwill. They got undercut badly on price. And while the release of the Saturn was rushed to get ahead of the PlayStation, it didn’t have the games to go with that outside of Japan. A strip Mahjong game wasn’t going to cut it here.
Nonetheless, the mega success of the Mega Drive meant people did buy the Saturn early (I knew just such a person) and wanted to play games on it. That was enough to put one of its marquee titles made by Sega themselves to the top of the charts, even if it wasn’t the typical kind of game to succeed in the UK. The result is Panzer Dragoon, which is a joyfully distinctive.
Panzer Dragoon is our most narrative-heavy Japanese #1 in Super Chart Island so far (and gave rise to an RPG sequel that was even more so), with a lengthy epic intro to show off the Saturn’s capabilities and introduce the game’s key features. Lasers! Dragons! Its aesthetic draws at least as much from from French cartoonist Mœbius (who also provided some end-game artwork) as from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and other Japanese antecedents, and there are definitely similarities to Star Wars: Rebel Assault, but the feel is distinctive. Panzer Dragoon is a game about armoured, missile-firing dragons in a decaying desolate land, and it tackles the business of armoured, missile-firing dragons with sincerity and mystery.
The similarities to Rebel Assault aren’t just through recognisably similar models of storytelling, but because Panzer Dragoon plays in roughly the same way as some of Rebel Assault’s stages. You are carried through a space with no control over your overall path and a little room to maneuver within it, and you have to dodge and shoot at things. The technology of the Saturn means it’s capable of producing a three-dimensional looking space without it having to be pre-rendered, and so it isn’t, and the design is a thousand times more interesting, brightly coloured and full of odd structures.
Panzer Dragoon also lets you move your view around and look behind you (with a radar to let you know when you need to). Flailing to react to a massive snake-beast-thing rearing up behind you as you fly through the air on your dragon is a far more exhilarating moment than any other game’s on-rails shooting experience has offered so far. It didn’t lead to any wider British love for similar gameplay (although we’ll encounter games in similar space to other elements of the Panzer Dragoon experience) but it remains a delightful oddity.
