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Panzer Dragoon Saga pivoted sharply from its predecessors, taking the unusual step of shifting from the on-rails shooter category.

However, given their fast-paced action setting, there was little time to dive deeper into the series’ fiction outside of their atmospheric CG cinematics.

Taken at face value, Panzer Dragoon and its much-improved successor, Panzer Dragoon 2 Zwei, offered just enough mythos to compel players to work through each game’s handful of beautifully realized stages to completion. While 2002’s Panzer Dragoon Orta (developed by ex-Team Andromeda members who later joined another studio, Smilebit) kept the series going later, it was the role-playing game Panzer Dragoon Saga that ended up becoming the standout.

Over the course of three initial games - Panzer Dragoon (1995), Panzer Dragoon 2 Zwei (1996) and Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998) - Team Andromeda continued to mine this simple yet compelling premise: that of a rider and his dragon facing off against a mysterious empire. Part Space Harrier, part Dune, part Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Panzer Dragoon filled Sega Saturns around the globe with evocative 3D shooting action featuring a blue dragon and its rider. Its debut game was the on-rails shooter Panzer Dragoon. Without a leaderboard or any means of memorializing your best runs, there’s little reason to go back more than once or twice.It was Team Andromeda - an internal R&D team at Sega of Japan - that first revealed the potential of the Sega Saturn. Then again, once you do finish it, there isn’t much more to do except replay it on hard mode, which is more taxing but not necessarily more satisfying. The campaign is short – I finished my first run on normal difficulty in about 70 minutes – but that doesn’t take the sting out of getting to the last level and losing all your progress. If you don’t, it’s game over and you’re back to the beginning. There’s no mid-level checkpointing, but if you have a credit you can restart the level you died on. You can earn extra lives or “credits” at the end of each level, depending on your performance specifically, your accuracy, how many enemies you shot down, and how many got away.

That’s because even though Panzer Dragoon was made for the Sega Saturn it’s built like an arcade game: you have two shots to fly and shoot your way through its seven levels. “But yes, I did say it’s less than two hours long.