If you hit up the front page of http://www.gamefaqs.com/ today, you’ll see they’ve a poll running asking people what their favourite Sega series of all time is. As you’d expect, Sonic is running away with 55% of the votes, and following him would be Phantasy Star on 12%, and Shenmue and Shining Force on about 7%.
Panzer Dragoon is dead last of the nine choices, with a meager 2.58%.
Well, all the other series have had games released within the past 5 years.
I’m glad PD is an option at all. And I’m surprised it’s doing only slightly worse than Virtua Fighter.
I’m with Nemoide in being surprised it was even an option at all.
Also kinda surprised that when I thought of it, series like Phantasy Star and Shining Force really haven’t had a game in the same vein as their originals in ages, either.
Shadow, you should know as well as anyone, Sonic is as mainstream as you can get. Of course he’s going to have the most votes. That’s like expecting people not to recognize Mario when it comes to anything Nintendo.
Panzer Dragoon takes a certain personality to appreciate, and it’s certainly not the average gamer. I confess, when I first saw the game in its original packaging, it didn’t exactly entice me to want to play it. The demos I saw are what impressed me. However, the common consumer truly takes appearances to heart more often than not, and the PD marketing department didn’t honestly do the title justice, in my opinion. The packaging wasn’t terribly exciting or enticing, which I feel played a role in the game’s limited exposure. Anyone who wasn’t familiar with the story or game was less likely to just pluck it off the shelf and take it home.
Just my thoughts.
You know, it’s shocking to see how incompetently designed much of Sega’s packaging was in the Saturn era. I feel like PD got off light compared to, say, Astal which just screams “URRRRR, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.” Or Clockwork Knight, which just shows a rendered image of the main character… standing. Without even a colored background.
Of course, it’s an improvement over Sega’s classic packaging which is so minimalistic, it’s absurd.
aw man i missed the poll
panzer dragoon is very underrated… especially because most people, at least where i live, have never even heard of a sega saturn… they’re like the sega what?!
Saturn was a bit more popular here in Brazil thanks to Tec Toy, but not as much as the PlayStation 1. Still, almost nobody ever heard of Panzer Dragoon. I do know a few guys who know about the game series on some brazilian gaming forums, but they make up like 0.1% of the community.
Sega’s overall marketing for the series couldn’t be any worse. 
I wasn’t expecting Sonic to not get the most votes.
