Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Played on Xbox
Classic shooters live!
And my thumb is sore ...
Anyway, Panzer Dragoon Orta is the third game in the Panzer Dragoon series that started back on the Sega Saturn. The original game is unlockable in this one, so I intend to try it eventually.
You are Orta, a strange girl who has spent her entire life locked up in a tower. Imprisonment comes to a sudden end when Imperial forces suddenly attack the village and tower where you're held. Just as you're about to be struck by one of the attacking dragonmares a blue dragon comes to your rescue. Orta mounts it, and the game begins with the pair escaping through the burning village.
Right away, you notice how fantastic things look. The menu system is rather grey and devoid of flare, but the game makes up for it easily. It's not just that the graphics engine is good, the game has a fantastic and coherent style all of its own that simply sucks you in. The levels you fly through have more details than you have time to notice, and the imaginative enemies show enormous variation, not the least in size. It reminds me a bit of Sacrifice, certain creatures could jump between the two games and look right at home, only less whimsical.
So, the looks are great. But come on, how do you play this thing? Easier than buying a pie. At heart, Panzer Dragoon Orta is a classic linear shoot-'em-up set in a 3d environment. Essentially you just point and shoot as enemies come at you from all directions and the landscape rolls by at varying speeds.
At heart, that's it, but Orta throws in a number of things to make it more interesting. First of all you can fire both "normal" shots with Orta's gun, by tapping the A button, and multiple homing lasers from your dragon by holding down the A button and moving your sights over enemies. Your dragon is also able to "glide", momentarily speed up or slow down to evade things, or change position relative to bosses. To top it all off, you can cycle at will between three different dragon shapes, called base wing, heavy wing and glide wing respectively, using the Y button. Each wing has different agility and weapons, including a "berserker" super attack that is charged as you kill enemies, and you'll gradually learn to use them all for best effect.
The sound and music mostly stays out of your mind. The sound of incoming and outgoing fire is always there of course, but you don't think much about it and it feels pretty generic to me. The music is nicer though, I wish I heard more of it. All spoken dialogue is in the language of the world (thought it was Japanese first, but other sources seem to indicate otherwise) and it seems to be a very expressive language because speaking the subtitles would take much longer than the things the characters say.
As you play you unlock various bonuses, accessible from a menu option descriptively called Pandora's Box. Bonuses include an encyclopaedia of background information (complete with rotatable and zoomable models of enemies), the mandatory cutscene viewer, a port of the first game in the series and also quite a few bonus missions. I've only unlocked 17% or something like that so far, so there's plenty to find. The game also keeps track of statistics and your ranking for each level on each of the three difficulty levels so there's more than enough motivation to go through the game multiple times or go back to a certain level to improve (especially since you've got more unlockable goodies to fight for).
I'm not even through once yet, but I think that this is a game one can keep coming back to for a long time to polish scores and waste half an hour. Shooters make it more fun than most gametypes to memorise levels and try to do even better next time, and Orta's levels are also short enough to make replays fun even if you happen to die close to the end.
There's no Live support, or any other kind of multiplayer either, but that would probably feel bolted on in the best of cases. Panzer Dragoon Orta is a pure old-school shooter with modern production values, and it's absolutely great at that.
It's now March 1st, 2005. It seems IBM wants it all My predictions about replayability were pretty much correct. I still put Orta in the box every now and then and blast away for half an hour or so. By now I've unlocked ninety-five point something percent of all the bonuses and clocked up 16 hours and 40 minutes or so of playtime, and it's been fun every second. The playtime may not sound like all that much, but the game is quite strict when calculating it, only actual active playing through levels count. Not menus, not cutscenes, just actual gameplay. When I reach 20 hours I'm told all secrets will unlock themselves, so that's where my final goal lies. Not that I push too hard toward it ... Twenty minutes every now and then and I'll get there with no effort at all, and keep having fun.
My thumb keeps getting sore.
I'm just not hardcore ...