I can.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear already that just because a system has more Power that does not mean that a game has more Beauty, better Gameplay, better Music, Atmosphere, Story etc. Orta for me lost on ALL counts when compared to the Saturn trilogy.
The Saturn trilogy for me was much more beautiful in every conceivable way.
[quote=“Al3xand3r”]
What makes you think that? I don’t think anyone here expressed a dislike about the rest games in the series… This thread compares the games of this series alone so inevitably some will rank ‘below’ others, it just so happens most people rank Saga higher than the rest. That in no way means that they did not enjoy the previous games… Far from it, I’m sure that for a lot of people here they are still some of their all time favorites. I know I still haven’t played a shooter that in my opinion ranks above PDZ for example.[/quote]
Guess I misinterpretted what I read. Sorry ;).
for gehn, lance, and your responses, it appears that i was the one that was unclear.
i was not talking about music, aesthetics, atmospheric, gameplay, or story. i just meant the graphics looked better. i value aesthetic design over technical graphics as well, but the graphics are the filter through which the visuals come to us so they still have to count for something, right?
in that, PDO was a much clearer - accurate representation of the designer’s view of the panzer dragoon world. you really can’t dispute that unless you want to say that team andromeda envisioned the PD world with pixelated textures and low poly counts.
[quote=“Megatherium”]
i just meant the graphics looked better.[/quote]
They’re 128-bit as opposed to 32-bit, yes, but who cares about number crunching; all I’m interested in is the game. I’m still saying the Saturn trilogy has a better graphic artistic aesthetic representation which produces a higher degree of beauty to my eye and mind. Again, Power means nothing, merely a technological progression.
Obviously, indeed.
Your saying the Saturn graphics were not clear or accurate enough for TA to get their vision across or for fans to appreciate the world? How far do graphics have to evolve before you can appreciate a game? They were gorgeous and I prefer them more over Orta. And you must realize that every game ever released is art to a certain extent and must be appreciated as such. It’s like your comparing a Picasso portait to a photograph portrait–one might be less detailed but artistically you can “lose yourself” into it more and find it a much truer representation of the person’s soul/essence that the clearer image itself.
And your falling into the technological debate again “More Power, Better Graphics = Way Cooler!”. It’s really a matter of preference. I prefer the more artistic PD over your more “realistic” PD.
so how about arguing a point that i disagree with?
after i say:
you say:
but just previous you said:
what am i to think!?
why do people always try to twist my words? i mean, really… that’s quite a stretch.
are YOU saying that the original trilogy benefitted from slowdown, low poly counts, short draw distance, and low res textures?
besides that, your analogy is faulty. a more accurate one would be me comparing a photo taken with old sepia film and magnesium flash versus cutting edge 3200x2400 pixel resolution digital imaging.
this is what i hate most in discussions, people that can’t argue against MY points so they try to attach me to an argument that i never supported.
Personally when the word “beauty” or “beautiful” is used I immediately think of aesthetics.And I’m not beeing hypocritical over this.You could have been more specific if wanted to say Orta had better graphics.
But then your line would be a bit rethorical woulnd’t it?
the funny thing is, it did. and the picasso/photograph analogy is not too bad as well.
in the saturn age textures were actually drawn by hand. in orta the developers stated in an interview that this time they decided to use “canned” textures. that shows.
one thing is also that todays graphics become too “photorealistic” in which they utterly fail. a hand drawn image will in most cases leave way more to the imagination than a photograph or CG rendering.
you can ask anyone who works in the field of design and/or advertising, if you want to sell a concept to a customer it’s always better to use hand drawn marker renderings than CG renderings. if you use too high quality pictures your client will think nothing can be changed and there is no room left fr his ideas. it is a way more powerful technique to have the customer imagine what HE wants to see. not what YOU want to show.
in my opinion this applies very much to animation, too. it’s better to hint things to actually show them. please read scott mccloud’s book “understanding comics”, especially the chapter that deals with how time and szene changes add to tension and story telling. in this chapter he shows a panel with fearful face and a screem. in the next panel he shows a bloddy axe and blood running into the drain. you get my point? the murder was not actually shown, you used your brain to think it up.
i’m currently working for a japanese company that specilaized in online games that run on java. these games have EXTREMELY low specs, they would even run smooth on gehn’s machine i think. the polygon count is extremely low, the texture resolution for a whole level INCLUDING buildings is 256x256 pixels.
it’s not how low your specs are, it’s about the style and quality you can make out of what you have, or even better to make things with it that have not been thought as possible before.
and my personal theory is* only in a very limited field you can reach true brilliance. if everything is possible, people will make anything, but not a really really brilliant title.
so actually all you’re saying is that you didn’t think orta benefitted from photorealism. hand drawn vs photorealism is a matter of the developer’s choice rather than the game’s graphical output.
i generally agree with the rest of what you said, though.
orta and photorealism???
sorry, but orta is certainly not photorealistic, let alone realistic. it tried to do the old 32 bit aera anime graphics of the 90s with more polygons and higher texture resolution, that’s all.
and about a developers choice…well it is a fact that japanese game development is totally different from western ways and that it can very well happen that the art direction changes right in the middle of development.
i agree that there were some nice things in ortas graphics, but there was an even higher amount that plain sucked (of course I mean “could have made better”), the statue beeing just the tip of the flagshi… uh iceberg.
it didn’t benefit from [the pursuit of] photorealism then, or whatever you said.
when all is said and done, i think the texture work on the creatures was amazing.
forgive and forget!
The things that were wrong with Orta:
-Cell Shaded Cutscenes and NPCs. (Sorry, but Panzer Dragoon was always meant to express a possible reality…not express that reality through cartoonish characters that look straight out of a Manga.)
-The Music. (The Music was not panzerish at all and felt very generic. There are exceptions, of course…The Fallen Ground and Imperial City were very good tracks…however, the rest of the music was as stale as the final boss battle against Abadd. Bleh. The Panzer Dragoon series is known for its excellent music…unfortunately, Orta was a disappointment.)
-Stage 4; the return of the Empire from the foreign country; the statue boss; the crappy Imperial warship designs; and the Dragon 3 Stage Evolution were all bad concepts.
-The story (No Tower? WTF!?)
-The Ancient black and white, bone- like building designs are gone. (WTF!)
With this in mind, Panzer Dragoon Orta is definitely the redheaded bastard stepchild out of the series.
the music i won’t defend- ambient is not suited for a shooter.
your other complaints are just your opinion or factually incorrect (sometimes both).
One of the reasons I did enjoy the game so much…
In defense of Panzer Dragoon Orta:
I’m not sure what you mean by cell shaded here… it looks nothing like Jet Set Radio, for example. A less realistic style though.
It depends what you call Panzerish. I must admit, I prefer the music in Zwei and Saga, but if you look at the difference between those two games and the original game, you could also say their music isn’t Panzerish either, since the original Panzer Dragoon defines what is Panzerish surely? Yoshitaka Azuma’s style what a lot different from the music in the other two Saturn games, and yet it took place in the same era of the Panzer Dragoon world. Panzer Dragoon Orta was set in a different era, so it makes sense that the composers wanted to try something different to fit that time period, for better or worse…
I agree with your thoughts on the Statue boss, but I think the rest of the changes are justifed. What was wrong with the dragon having three different forms?
Wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of Panzer Dragoon Saga’s ending? Besides, Episode 6 might have been a tower for all we know.
There’s some in the sixth episode earlier on in the stage. We were simply shown different areas of the Ancients’ architecture. I don’t see a problem with that.
Because Smilebit had the guts to evolve the Panzer Dragoon world, even if some things weren’t as good as Team Andromeda?s designs?
Fact is that the remaining TA members at smilebit had no idea what the panzer story was about, so they just made something up. They had no time and even had to change the story 3 months prior the original release date.
So this can’t have helped with quality a lot, regardless if some peaople liked it or not. I highly doubt most of the changes were deliberate desctions or came from the brain of more than maybe 2 or 3 people.
There is no deliberate new art style that evolves the game, as well. 90% of the design is arbitrary or taken directly from the old games. There is “inspiration” and there is “to nick from your own work”, John Williams does that a lot lately, as he is clearly rehashing a lot of his famous themes from Indy or SW in his latest soundtracks.
I think it basically boils down where you can argue the quality of a game. “interactive art” is an extremely young field of art and I think we have no means of discussing about (now so called!) games in a scientific exact way (like you could discuss about a building from renaissance architecture for example).
It also depends on what you think what creativity and evolution is. Is just changing the art style creative and always better? is developing an idea inside a certain design style uncreative?
I think it could be interesting to find a theory that allows us to talk about these things more clearly. for example if someone speaks about the design of the game he might mean just the graphics, but it could be the gameplay or even what kind of game as well. it would be good if we could find objective terms to talk about this.
i don’t think we can judge that fairly. on the one hand smilebit had to work under certain constraints of the world established by TA, but within that they were free to evolve things. and of course if you didn’t like their evolution, you’ll say they were not creative and if you did, then they were.
think about it. why does orta gets all this scrutiny but zwei and saga are exempt? zwei strayed from the original but you don’t say anything about it, saga changed it up even more and still no mention of these changes?
orta is not THAT different from the rest, i think the biggest issue here is that orta is different from saga and that is predominantly what you all favor.
orta may not be what you wanted to follow saga, but it is a worthy successor to the series.
I really have to get a hold of Orta and see for myself what all the fuss is about. I’ve seen that it looks a bit different from the Saturn games, but I can’t form an opinion of its faithfulness to the series yet.
I wonder on which side of the argument I’ll stand? 
Megathedium : you could see the similarities of the world depicted in PD1 with the world depicted in PD2wei.
There were common ship designs (whereas Orta hasn’t got ONE old design), you could compare the bowls of PD1’s episode 4 with Shellcoof’s design for exmaple (whereas it’s difficuld to compare any of the architecture in Orta with old concepts),the music hadn’t got a beat expect for tracks like City in the Storm or Ancient Weapon 2,the Imperial officers’ clothes were completely different (where are the trench coats??) etc ect…
The hard thing about Orta is that I know it could be the gamethat I hoped for if only they hadn’t made such dramatic changes.There were a lot of cool new additions.I liek the Cradle concept,I liked Abadd,I loved the Seeker city at Yelico valley,I loved the ruin in Legacy, I loved the Catharp,I loved the Wormriders,I loved teh Sestren level,I loved Iva’s story, I loved the new Panzerense additions, I loved the new gameplay concepts,I loved the Episode 5 scenario…
But in the end the music and most of the visual design of enemies and the dragon design too allied with the fact that you don’t see much cameos from typical PD elements made it a dissappointment.
More things like the Lathum/Baldor cameos were needed for us to immediatelly eye-relate the game with the series.
The original Panzer Dragoon was medicore, and only that. The original game, by itself, will not make anyone a fan of the series. Zwei was a HUGE improvement over the original, and Saga was basically a 1up from Zwei. In the end, it was Saga that made most of us fans of the series…but if Saga didn’t compliment both Ein and Zwei in every way, then we probably wouldn’t love it as much as we do. Play Saga again…and pay attention to the detail…it’s amazing.
how many times must you be proven wrong before you stop acting like your opinion is law?
in comparison to what? Q-bert?
if you liked saga’s level of detail, orta should have killed you with pleasure.