**a)**Level design.Orta’s level desigs are worthy of other Panzer games.Episode 1 was just a kickass setting.Specillay in the intro FMV.Other cool scenarios were Ep3 (if you can forget it’s theme :P) ,Ep4,Ep5,Ep6.Ep7,Ep9,Ep 10.All of them were done soo well.They made me want be there just to wonder at things.
**b)**Abadd.Great adittion to the PanDra world.Really insightful.Nice voice acting too.
**c)**Wormriders.Another great addition to the world of Panzer Dragoon.I liked pretty much everything about them except for the thongs
Mobo even had a cool headset
**d)**Iva’s Story - subtle way to strech things story wise.Really loved it.
**e)**Gameplay.The best in a PD agme so far.The only thing i would really add to it was two more dragon morphs and some crazy way to be able to do 30 berserk attacks
Everything Gehn mentioned + the graphics and animation, Pandora’s Box, Evren, the music (perhaps different from Saga and Zwei but it’s still great), …
I was really happy with the gameplay in PDO; I thought that Smilebit did a great job of addressing the shortcomings of PD1 and PDZ whilst still remaining true to the essence of those games. The morph and boost / slow down abilities made things more varied whilst still making sense, and I liked the way they’d incorporated elements of the PDS battle system into the bosses.
Smilebit really seemed to pay attention to the game’s lifespan, too; there were just more routes and more Episodes than in PDZ, the grading system cared about much more things than in the previous games, and the truckloads of unlockables in Pandora’s Box really made it last longer than the previous PD shooters for me. The difficulty curve was nice too, as the game wasn’t exactly harsh to finish but it was quite challenging to get the 100% and S grades.
There were quite a lot of superficial things that I really liked, too; I thought Episode 3 had an excellent setting and atmosphere, and Episodes 1, 5, 6 and 8 struck me as being really good mergings of old and new style elements. The way that the ending to PDS was finally explained a little more was a really nice touch too, and the game had an interesting story of its own that didn’t just re-hash the events of the previous games.
Panzer Dragoon Orta was really profound. The ramblings of Abadd really made you think. Plus it had a more cohesive story than the first two shooters. Orta met and tangled with other secondary characters that just felt alive. And it was the only shooter that engaged me emotionally. The first two never did that, and no other shooter in the other franchises has done that as well.
And this game MOVED! I’ve never felt such pure sense of speed and motion since stage 3 of Panzer Dragoon Zwei.
This game was also very artistic. It’s not enough just for a game to have pretty graphics. It must have style. The architecture and designs of the creatures and the implementation of the genes and the different dragon types really elevate this game above other typical shooters.
In-game dialogue. The fact that other characters in the game would talk to Orta while the game was being played added to the fast pace of the game yet still allowed room for character development.
The storyline didn’t ignore the events of the Saturn trilogy.
Real time morphing and circling around enemies. I never expected Smilebit to use so many of Panzer Dragoon Saga’s features.
Iva’s side quest. The gameplay itself was a bit rough, but the insight into the lifestyle of the Empire was excellent.
Abadd’s mission. It was interesting to learn that the Ancients planned to return and it added a whole knew twist to the existing story.
The wealth of information in Pandora’s Box. Smilebit didn’t have to include any of it, but they went the extra mile. You’re not going to find that amount of detail in many other shooters. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Encyclopedia.
It all looked so pretty! And I liked some of the dragon designs (especially Heavy Wing Lv. 3. Never figured out why though. Maybe the color.). The gameplay was good (I know this was mention five or six times already, but…) and I like Pandora’s Box… Especially Box Game. It has Panzerwing, so why not?
(Also, I like the way they done the Blue Dragon for the PDO Box Game. Seeing him re-done like that was just cool.)
EDIT: I left out a few key things in the first thing of this, and didn’t realize it until I re-read it. Sorry if you read it and got confused…
Notice how most of the “good things” are things that have been preserved from the previous games (even in the storyline the good stuff are the parts that connect to the previous games and/or have characters from them) while all the “bad things” are the new stuff? >_>
i’d just like to add that the immense level of detail outshines the older ones
seriously, go into the encyclopedia and look at a creature. the attention to detail you can see in these things that you barely get a glimpse of before you blast them to pieces or fly on by is ridiculous. i mean even things like some simple bullets will have the image of the emporer on them. or the very high res textures used in any of the creature models… it really looks like you can see the systems they are running across their surface.
and this feature also transcends the levels. they just do some amazing things as far as visual effects and level dynamics. remember the path through legacy that has the walls close in around you? not the security walls, i mean the part where everything starts shrinking- trying to squeeze you out. or the way they actually built a city, a whole city for the 8th episode. it may look like just a bunch of tunnels and exploding debris you fly through, but if you pay attention, you can see all the intricasies such as plumbing lines, paths for people to walk on, even incomplete construction work.
i also love the mysterious sights they show us. look at the hulking, hollowed structure in the fallen ground. we’ll never know what it was used for, but we can still tell the scale and importance of it. or look at the way the snow plains just go on to the horizon in eternal glacies… so peaceful and beautiful, yet so desolate and dangerous.
or the strange visions of the sestren… the burning scenes of the background which clear up for only an instant to reveal themselves to you, the distant image of shelcoof, and abadd’s ethereal form.
Uhh, that’s a mute point… We aren’t living in 1998 now are we… The visuals were ofcourse going to be hundreds of times more detailed, one should expect no less… So, yes it’s one of the good things in the game, and it fits in this thread as such, however giving it as a point that makes it better than the Saturn games (outshines them as you say) is just plain wrong since those games had pretty much the same effect back then… You just can’t compare graphics between games that are seprated by years and years… Not when we are talking about 3D games atleast since 2D hasn’t evolved as much (And it’s only natural ofcourse since around that time 2D kind of stopped being compromised by hardware limitations, for example look at Metal Slug 3, one of the most amazing 2D games and it’s running on the 10+ year old Neo Geo hardware) while 3D keeps advancing all the time with better hardware and new technologies and so on and so forth…
what you say is true, but i meant that they are putting more effort into it. it’s not just that it looks nicer; that would be a moot point, it’s that there is more to it.
