I remember playing it in '98 and enjoying it so much, so much, that it is still my favorite game of all time. I remember friends of mine playing FF VII or Zelda OoT, and I made them play this masterpiece so that they could see with their own eyes that Panzer Dragoon Saga was on the same level as their favorite games. Nowadays I feel a little proud to have created a couple of people who are fans of this game and who have it among the best games in history.
Imagined if there was a final fantasy 7 and Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time crossover. That would have made a huge impact for the anime/video game community in the 90s/early 2000s.
Correction: "Panzer Dragoon Saga" is quite a ways BEYOND anything that Zelda OoT or Final Fantasy 7 had done. I was a bonafide Sony fanboy at that period of time and I was super jealous when I had played Panzer Dragoon Saga on my friend's Sega Saturn. It was so much better than anything I had played on my Playstation even up to the end of the Playstation's life cycle. It really showed that with the right developers the Sega Saturn could indeed have visuals WAY beyond what the PlayStation was capable of. Smooth frame rate and very little polygon breakup, which plagued every single 3D polygonal PS1 game ever made.
Lost my copy for the Saturn for 5 years and turns out my friend had it the whole time. Glad to say he gave it back and now I've got a rare gem that'll I'm planning to keep forever......now I just have to play it 😅
I let my friend's brother borrow it then he and his crazy mom donated it and my Saturn to their church. Needless to say, I don't lend things out anymore.
This game has my favorite battle system of any JRPG I've ever played, ever. If anyone knows of a battle system similar to this in another game, PLEASE let me know
I hope they do a remake of this after they do Zwei’s, and when they do make a Saturn Mini one day they HAVE to have this game. God I love the Panzer Dragoon series
I was lucky enough to pick this game up circa 2001 before the prices went through the roof, and even then, it wasn't cheap, setting me back £100 (I'm in the UK), but I was prepared to bite the bullet, and given that it costs more than 10 times as much now, I'm glad I did. Like you, I found this to be an exemplary game and unlike anything else I'd ever played before or since. I'd even go as far as to say it was better than FF7 was at the time. Hopefully, as emulators improve, more people will get to experience this. The word "underrated" gets grossly misused all the time on the internet, by Panzer Dragoon Saga is truly underrated.
I loved playing Saga. I'm glad that I was able to go to another state to pick it up when it came out because they were sold out at my local stores. I must have beaten this at least 4 times in the 90s.
I really identify with the comment about bits of the soundtrack strongly evoking the associated visuals. “Pure blood seed” will always summon the image of Lazara skimmers skating and undulating across the moonlit water at uru against a backdrop of freakishly shaped ancient ruins
To me the greatest game ever made,there’ll be never one like this again unfortunately, but I’m glad to have it in my collection and play it every couple of years,brought it in 2014 for £91.00 off amazon,absolute bargain for a legendary game!laters
I've thought the same about the combat system - I am amazed no one has have copied it. I once thought it would make a great system for specific spaceship combat in a sci-fi RPG like KoToR. I don't know if you ever played Shining Force III, if not, it is another classic from the Saturn's dying days. Those two games completely changed the way I thought about games after that.
Been wanting to play this game for ages. And watching your love of this game makes me want to figure out Saturn emulation on my Mac. I love how you talked about this game giving tons of info, but still leaving me out of the plot so I can discover it for myself. In the meantime, I'm off to track down the soundtrack because damn that track at the end was so good.
saturn emulation has thankfully come a long way, even if it can still be such a hassle. i wish you good luck because this game deserves to be played! if anything, the ost deserves a listen, it's so good. although that last song i used is easily the best one, you can see why i saved it for last :P
I really wish they would rerelease this thing. It’s an incredible and imaginative world and story that is so much fun to explore and battle and manage. That’s it’s greatest asset, imo; the fact that it is so god damn fun.
I finally found a copy today.... best deal ive seen in years, CIB. I cant wait to play it, this is a legend that need to be preserve and discovered. One of Sega real gem, proving that their studio and talent did not deserve the faith the mismanagement from the direction of the company gave them.
Man, if any game deserves a remake it is this one. In my unpopular opinion I thought this was better than FFVII at the time when the originally released. It truly is a masterpiece and one of my favorites of all time.
thanks for tuning in ace, always great to see you around here - my break was alright! been hanging in there, and had to rediscover my passion for youtube a bit. not sure how much longer i'm planning on going with it, but i have a decent amount of ideas before i really consider peacing out from the platform so i gotta go out with a bang and master the craft before anything, you know what i mean?
thanks to do this omage review to this master piece. me personally I liked it more than ff7 but just as always the FF name carries more than quality and panzer dragon saga got affected by that along with the poor Sega manegement.
98 was both the best and worst year to be a Saturn owner, Shining Force 3, PDS, Burning Rangers....I mean, it died early, but it left with some serious bangers.
This game released 5 years before I was born, yet when I recently played it, I fell in love with it. I consider it one of my favourite games of all time and will continue to replay it from time to time. The graphics and sound design pass my bar for not being bothersome, so I can focus on the creative and unique work put in this masterpiece. It's a wonderful short experience that leaves a strong impression and sticks with you after having played it, similar to the first game but to a much greater degree. The game is very easy, but also unforgiving and punishing, keeping it engaging. And it has the fantastic storyline too. I'm not aware of any other game that has a similar battle system, if I ever do develop one myself I'll take inspiration from it. This is one of the examples where piracy is obviously and inarguably the moral thing to do. It plays amazingly well, especially on the Steam Deck, where the desaturated smaller and taller screen perfectly suits the game. But on any new computer, it's one of the first things I set up, as this is a game I want to have with me. I hated your pronunciation of the names though and as my native Dutch is close to the German inspiration of Panzerese. I feel that this is one of the rare cases where my intuiting of pronunciation is closer, especially as the spoken lines sound similar.
You really showed your passion. Even it would still be a different game,I do wonder how much work it would take for them to recreate the game almost 1 to 1.
Damn 13 hours! I was thinking it was at least 30. I was gonna play this game eventually but I may have to hop on a lot sooner. It’s a shame that this game didn’t get the attention it deserved when it came out. I only knew about the game when it became impossible to get. Seems like a game that you should play by any means necessary.
yeah i've been really appreciative of sega knowing when to let a game end lol. the time absolutely flew by on this one and i'm definitely gonna be replaying it over and over again
@@ZaffreRevolution I've tend to play a lot of shorter games & even go back to a lot of them. Its a lot easier picking a shorter game than a 70+ game that might feel repetitive overtime.
Everyone says it takes less than 20 hours but damn, it takes me well over 30 hours! Maybe I just suck at video games, but this game if you wanna explore all its aspects of find all the secret items takes quite a while. Assuming of course you’re not using a strategy guide.
This game is so unbelievably good and it’s such a shame that it wasn’t played because it means we never got any kind of iteration on its gameplay. To this day if I want to play a game with a system like PDS I just have to play PDS.
Bought the game about five years ago (was still a lot) and it immediately inserted itself into my top three games of all time after finishing it. I love worlds where the past is ambiguous but you can see remnants of it just begging questions to be asked. The dragon transformation system was so impressive and the soundtrack was phenomenal. This was a great video shining a light on maybe the biggest forgotten masterpiece in the history of gaming.
Well said. I scored a copy on eBay long ago, and it was cheap compared to the prices now. I also have the complete 'Earthbound' set and GC 'Fire Emblem.' Never knew how valuable they'd become.
Absolutely agree about the phenomenal soundtrack. It was amazing but not particularly memorable and that's because the songs are so unique your brain struggles to recall it all because its so different
God I want to play this game. I a kid when the first game came out, and I played and loved the first two. But I never got around to this one. Another in a long line of regrets. Your closing remarks hit home too.
The game didn't actually sell poorly, or was ignored, the reviewers statements and his sources are incredibly false. By the time this game was rolling around, this game along with Shining Force and burning rangers was actually given adds in the most popular VG magazines at the time. And despite Sega not pulling record-breaking sales with the Saturn, by this time it did have enough of an established fan base to over shadow the the limited release of this game 10-fold. Also opposing what the video reviewer said, this game was quickly in high demand and sought out for, it never hit a bargain bin and was easily brought up. A lot of us were on that hunt, me being one of them. I wouldn't get my copy until many months later when the value already started to go up, I paid 75, which at the time was unheard of, for a game of that year to start going up months after its release in used form. Lets talk about how this game aged? Final Fantasy VII feels like something that was made for young teens, PDS feels like something that was made for young to full adults. Only the real ones know, this was the GOAT of 1998.
I've never met a game that deserves to be shown to the masses more than this one. Luckily even nintendo uses old emulators to put their games on switch hardware, so by no means is this game lost to time or would ever have to be built from the ground up again for it to be on a major console.
Thanks for your passion, it was communicative and I am sure I would have obsessed with this game if I had it back then, I am sure I would enjoy playing it as I too have a thing for 32 bits 3D games that still had to try many things and were very original in their approach to fight against and with limitation but also fight about how to convey a new story or emotions with these graphics. I enjoyed plenty playing with Gunnm martian memory as to me it has this charm I was taking about with small sets of the city that are supposed to represent a larger world.
the 32 bit generation is a favorite of mine, i love the low-poly 3d look with the next generation's early 3d being just as good imo, minus the oversaturation of browns and greens that started to rear their ugly heads haha. this game still looks good because of that and it's nice to see others feel the same way
@@ZaffreRevolution for me, the constrains of the 32 generation made developers think out if the box and they had to find a point of view that would be clever for their game : Fixed camera for final fantasy thus having beautifull environments shown at their n'est angles, A far away parallax for fighting games Following camera for crash bandicoot 3d rail shooter for time crisis. > That diversity of game play and point of view in itself was marvelous to see.
glad you've been enjoying my stuff! i don't see myself ever going back to tales, i think too many of my subscribers only care about me when talking about that series and i just feel that my worth as a content creator is more than one franchise. i'm much more passionate talking about the wide variety sega's catalogue has been providing so i'm sticking with them for the unforeseeable future and appreciate people like you watching all of my stuff, genuinely enjoying my content rather than just the topics :)
It was NEVER underrated for those who played it...for those who knew. I played on saturn...I played on emulation...and still hearing tracks from PDS on my phone. P.S. water ruins is my favorite sinse I always remember me flying with my dragon over the orange sea during the sunset...what a memories of mix emotion.
PDS was a masterpiece. Hell I bought a Saturn just to play it when I found it for a whopping £40 in a jumble sale. the only game that mirrored this was thePS1s Soul Reaver, humm world building awesome voice acting great story ... yeh noticing a pattern here
Oh dang straight to Saga. But yeah i always love hearing folks talk about this one and the series in general despite not being able to play.... Any of them... I do love this series lol. Wanna play Orta the most someday. Least i can get the first game's remake
honestly i was thinking of talking about them each in their own videos but idk, i didn't think i had enough to say to warrant them being their own topics. i love all 4, just thought that saga was the one worth discussing in greater detail,. that said, for more all-encompassing sega videos like my favorite ip's of theirs and whatnot, i'm gonna take every excuse i can to talk about the rest because they're all so damn good. orta especially is a close second to saga and by far the best of the rail-shooters, not because the first two are bad but because orta's just that good. also, i'd recommend picking up the panzer dragoon remake! i never really got the hate for it, i think it's a great way to experience the original game - especially if you have no way to play the original
I remember seeing this game displayed at a used game store here in Oregon. Metal jesus was there, asian lady owner. So i asked her how much, she says "Not foe sayoh!". So i said, fuck it. Ill just bite the big one and and order a copy from ebay.
Wow, you make this game sound really amazing. And I love the impassioned speech you made at the end. So sad whenever a true work of art is inhibited by the business of distribution, in this case the console war. I never knew about the lost source code, that breaks my heart. Guess I’ll have to sharpen my emulating skills.
oh dude it's so worth the effort. and i'm glad you liked my ending haha i've been trying to get out of my comfort zone and allow myself to be more vulnerable in these videos so thankfully it's not coming off as cringe lol
Still have my original game at my parents house. Mom threw away the box of the game😢. There were like 10,000 copies made for the USA market, I read somewhere. Whenever I have the chance, and the conversation comes around; Insay to my sons that I have such a valuable piece of gaming history. For me this game was way better than FF7, I finished Saga...not FF7. Saga had the perfect lenght and was such a joy to play. The language, the cinemas, the soundtrack...Sega did an excellent job creating the Panzer Dragoon world. I believe back in the day, Saga had great reviews, so sad it ended there. Once you play saga, you didn't wanted to go back to the other games. Heck, I even remember when I bought the game new. Reserved it at Electronics Boutique, I'm glad I did. This game has place in videogame history, and anyone who played it, back in the day will surely have fond memories of it. And about the source code missing, I believe there was a talk a few years back....That made people believe that the source code was found. Don't know if it really was, who knows....maybe one day Sega does something and surprises us.
Man hearing about everything this game has to offer and seeing it in action fully really makes me want to play it. I had heard whispers of Panzer Dragoon Saga years ago and how it was Saturn's crown jewel but then quickly forgot about it because do I look like someone who was not a toddler during Saturn's hay day? (if you can even call it that) I didn't hear about it until years later in some rarest video games videos and once again, saying that it was incredible. So naturally my curiousity grew, buuut then I heard Saturn emulation is kinda fucky so that was that. BUT I did get PDS working on RetroArch and it *seemed* to work fine from what little I tested it out, so fingers crossed! And I'm also a sucker for the baby 3D graphics so I will eat that shit up if and when I finally play it Anyway, this is definitely another one of my favs from you, Zaffre; I think I prefer the Phantasy Star 2 video still just a little bit, but this just exuded passion and you were clearly happy about getting to play this game and sharing your love for it with us. Great stuff! :D Also on a lighter note I am glad a peak game like Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia continues to carry on this game's legacy (literally the only similarities are the battle ranking and both having somewhat unique combat systems)
glad to hear you've been liking my recent videos as much as you have! and even gladder that you got the game up and running, fingers crossed you can play it all the way through no problem! been trying to pop off with vids and it looks like it's paying off mwahahaha
lol thank you for that, i'll try to be mindful of that sorta thing in the future, especially since i plan on talking about these games more with time. appreciate ya
talking about a game that's underrated but not giving extremely detailed instructions on how to play it on emulators is kind of scummy. seriously copyright law is garbage and sega and the scalpers who sell sega saturn and its games for 10000000000 dollars deserve nothing. fight against copyright law.
@@SonofSethoitae your opinion means nothing to me. I'm always objectively right. everyone hates copyright laws and your just a corporate bootlicker if you care about them