You can now speed up and slow down, a la Star Fox 64, which helps avoid certain enemies. There’s imagination bursting our of every stage, even the dark, empty wasteland levels.īut there’s more to Panzer Dragoon Orta than just inspiration, as the gameplay has improved significantly. At one point, you assault a gigantic airship, which has to be several dozen miles long, and destroy its megaweapon, a gigantic tower that indiscriminately causes destruction with a blazing laser. One of the later stages is a trip through some kind of living computer, complete with the trippiest visuals this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The second stage is filled with some inexplicably strange wildlife, including the boss creature, which looks like a gigantic flying manta ray with vicious flora growing on its back. The first stage is a journey through a series of canyons, much like the opening levels in Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, except under the cover of night during a fierce storm. The boss battles and enemies were fairly impressive in the previous games, but everything in Orta just blows them away.
It may lack some of the fancy effects found in later Xbox games, but artistically, it’s one of the most gorgeous games on the platform, and possibly the whole generation.
Panzer Dragoon Orta fixed this right up with incredibly crisp, colorful graphics and a near rock-steady 60 FPS framerate. But from a technical standpoint, the visuals hugely benefited from by the superior processing ability of Microsoft’s behemoth.Įven though the Panzer Dragoon games looked okay during the burgeoning days of the 32-bit era, time has not been particularly kind to them. It’s hard to say whether Panzer Dragoon Orta would’ve been more successful on a different platform – like the other Sega Xbox titles, it’s pretty much a niche genre, and possibly still would’ve been ignored. This didn’t quite work, because the system never shook off its stigma as a system for first person shooters and other Western-oriented games, and most of these games kinda flopped. However, Sega seemed to be offering its more hardcore offerings ( Gun Valkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta) on the Xbox, probably hoping to help establish Microsoft’s console as a successor to the Dreamcast. Most of the mainstream-targeted games went to the PlayStation 2 ( Virtua Fighter 4, Shinobi), and the kids titles ( Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Monkey Ball, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg) made headway on the GameCube. After the death of the Dreamcast, Sega went multi-platform and divided its efforts amongst the three remaining platforms.
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