Hi everyone, this is my first post. I got Panzer Dragoon (Saturn PAL version) for the first time last week, loving it so far, seams like a great series. I like the forum/site as well.
But something strange has happened, usually when you play on normal mode you start out with 3 continues (as it says you should do in the manual), and that was working fine until yesterday. But now the game is giving me just 1 continue on normal mode, and only 5 (instead of unlimited) on easy mode. There seams to be no reason for this at all, and it still happens even after I turn off my Saturn for a while. I was wondering if I have activated some kind of cheat, or set it to some kind of harder level. But it shouldn’t happen, I know the content on the CD can’t just change, I know Panzer Dragoon dosn’t create any save files (I’ve even checked to see).
The only thing I can think of is that yesterday I bought Panzer Dragoon Zwei, ran it and created a save file. Thats all that I’ve done differently. Thinking that the save file might in some way be affecting it, I deleted it but this dosn’t fix the problem.
So you must be the PD experts here; any ideas?
Heh, I hadn’t noticed this before, but what the PAL (and US) manuals say about continues is actually incorrect, though in a slightly odd way…
The manual says that you get infinite credits on Easy mode, three credits on Normal mode and no credits on Hard mode; and this is true, but only for the original Japanese version of the game. When Panzer Dragoon was being localized for the West, the game was made more difficult in some ways, one of which was changing the amount of credits you start with; so in the PAL and US versions of the game, you definitely should be starting with five credits on Easy, one on Normal and none on Hard (I just had a check to make sure). It looks like this change was overlooked (or was yet to be made) when the English manual was written though, so I expect its wrongness has been confusing you unnecessarily. 
Anyhow, welcome to the forums.
Hm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that his problem is that, when he first started the game, he received the number of credits indicated in the manual. But upon further playing, the number of credits was reduced. Well, what Lance says is probably right about them reducing the number of credits. But it seems to me that, if it started you off with 3 on Normal mode on your first try, but then 1 upon going back to play it later, that it might be a glitch on their part… Perhaps they forgot to update it on the disc, and it relies on the save file to reduce the starting credits. Try going into the Memory feature of your Saturn and deleting your Panzer Dragoon save file, and see if it gives you 3 credits upon starting it again.
But, I may be wrong about what his problem was. Still something worth trying, I guess. 
What I meant is that I though SEGAfan may have been mistaken about starting with three credits, as that was the number expected to be normal after reading the manual; it’d be quite easy to misjudge how many credits you had at the start of PD1 because it’s very rare for anyone to die on the first level (and thus see the continue / credits screen straight away), and by the time you reach the second level, you’ll already have earned some extra credits - either one, two or three, depending on how well you’ve done up to that point - so when you first die during any given playthrough and first see the continue screen, you’ll probably have at least three credits, possibly many more depending on how far you’ve got, so the starting amount’ll no longer be obvious.
As SEGAfan also said, the first Panzer Dragoon game doesn’t create a save-game file, so that couldn’t be a cause… the only other possibility would be a very obscure glitch that made the PAL version of the game behave like the Japanese version temporarily, though it doesn’t seem very probable that a glitch of that kind would exist; when Sega of America modified the game they’ll likely have just changed the default credit values to different ones rather than adding in any additional game code for them, so I doubt that the original values would still be there on the PAL disc. On the other hand, if a glitch like that did exist and could be triggered easily while playing the game normally, it’d probably have been noticed before now…
Thanks for that, maybe I just didn’t notice I was getting 2 continues from the first level or something, I wasn’t really looking that hard.
