Touya
Moogle Coffee
Even common enemies go through different phases that change which quadrants are safe and expose different weak points, often being vulnerable to either Edge's gun or the dragon's lasers but not both. Sometimes a pack of creatures will have a "queen" that's subtly different from the rest, and repositioning to snipe it with Edge's gun will cause the whole pack to disperse. Other enemies have shields that have to be lowered by going after the right target, and still others have counterattacks you need to put preemptive buffs against so you can counter their counters.
The bucking of convention continues all the way into the final dungeon, where the map you're accustomed to using as a bird's-eye view suddenly displays a vertical cross-section of the tower you're navigating. There is never a moment where you're not discovering or adjusting to something about Saga.
I was surprised to see how directly Saga tied into Panzer Dragoon II Zwei. An early example is Georgius, a perpetually-stormy zone that drops a major bombshell after you complete its puzzle and release Shelcoof, the antagonist that kicked off the plot of Zwei. Certain blanks are filled in for those coming in blind, so it's not exactly "required reading." Some endgame cutscenes replay scenes from both of the previous Panzer Dragoon games, this time from the antagonist's perspective, which unifies the narrative of the trilogy and puts the larger-scale plot in view.
Edge spends most of the story trying to kill Craymen for revenge, but when we actually meet the man face-to-face it becomes a lot harder to say his war isn't justified. The empire is out to use the tower as a continent-burning weapon, while Craymen wants to keep it out of human hands, and raided Edge's crew to get Azel before the emperor could.
The world would be in a dire place if the emperor reached Azel before Craymen, and Edge's captain expressed loyalty to the empire. If they didn't kill him immediately, he'd probably interfere and die anyway--which is a hard pill to swallow when we've read the captain's diary, pouring out all the love he had for Edge. (Particularly the lines "I don't want him to be ashamed of me when he grows up." and "Will Edge ever call me...father?")
Craymen himself never claims the moral high ground, only telling Edge that this is war. Was he actually in the right, killing all those people? Is he doing what's needed to bring down a tyrannical system, or is he just a different brand of crazy? The game doesn't firmly praise or denounce him. The question is left hanging.
For his part, Edge both says he hasn't forgiven Craymen and considers his eventual death a waste--despite wanting it for most of the story. At the point Edge enters the Tower and learns what Craymen intends to do, he seems to realize killing him won't make anything right. From that point on, Edge tries to do good by humanity as a whole rather than fulfill his personal desires. Losing his enemy ends up hurting him as much as losing his allies.
There's this masterful moment on disc 3 when Craymen articulates his philosophy to Edge. As he describes the balance the ancients created, Craymen recedes into shadow, and the camera lingers on Edge still standing in the light. Are we supposed to believe Craymen is correct about the world? Is the empire just a "waste of resources," and humanity really doomed to destroy itself without a higher power in charge? Craymen's beliefs are framed in darkness, as if we can't really know how much truth is behind his words.
I can't avoid pointing out that Craymen's philosophy ultimately loses. He dies unable to carry out his plans, and Gash starts directing Edge under an opposing view of what should be done about the Towers.
Gash wholly believes humanity should be freed from any exterior control. Craymen understands the Towers' purpose and wants to use them to complete the restoration of the environment, while keeping them out of human hands--or at least, out of any hands but his own. Gash wants to destroy the Towers and free humanity from the ancients' population control, allowing the mankind to grow unchecked.
Both of them raise important points. Humanity isn't really living under the ancients' system, only surviving in the ruins of it; but humanity attaining total dominance over the planet is how the world got to where it is in Saga. Gash "wins," but his victory may just doom the Panzer Dragoon world to repeating the ancients' mistakes.
However, if Craymen "won" would it be any better? Mankind would be living in a more lush and bountiful environment, but still subject to violent population control. Can we trust the man that saw both Edge's father and the entire imperial capital as necessary casualties to define the future of the human race?
Both of them raise important points. Humanity isn't really living under the ancients' system, only surviving in the ruins of it; but humanity attaining total dominance over the planet is how the world got to where it is in Saga. Gash "wins," but his victory may just doom the Panzer Dragoon world to repeating the ancients' mistakes.
However, if Craymen "won" would it be any better? Mankind would be living in a more lush and bountiful environment, but still subject to violent population control. Can we trust the man that saw both Edge's father and the entire imperial capital as necessary casualties to define the future of the human race?
There is one element of the story that feels undercooked:
The final boss, Sestren.
It's introduced with plenty of time to spare, we get significant exposition on its role and why it's been out of focus until now--it's the intelligence running the Towers--but Sestren itself lacks a personality of its own and just looks like a really big bug. The final battle is made up of these fantastic setpieces where Sestren throws replicas of the ships you've traversed and fought at you, like Shelcoof, Mel-Kava, and Grig Orig, and the build-up fighting replicas of the player's dragon forms is great...
...but as a final boss, Sestren itself feels like a formality. He just shows up and attacks you for going against the ancients.
Having started production in 1995 and launched in January '98, Saga predated a lot of the conventions on how to do things "right." It launched in Japan just two months after Mega Man Legends, and arrived ten months before Ocarina of Time. During production, Team Andromeda would have had a fairly narrow pool of precedents to reference from--notably Tomb Raider, Super Mario 64, Quake, King's Field, and Jumping Flash!
Despite having limited references for 3D level design, the zones show remarkable foresight. Save points are placed at intersections of different rooms, so you'll wrap around from one part of a dungeon and end up back at the save point right before moving on to the next branch. Particularly long dungeons have unlockable routes at the end that rocket you back to the start, and any open-air areas let you exit to the world map freely. One of my favorite moments was returning to Uru after regaining your dragon, and seeing once-insurmountable obstacles trivialized now that you can ascend and descend freely. There's also incentives to revisit old areas, as they contain optional treasures you can't access until your dragon undergoes a form change later in the story.
One last big technical achievement is that Panzer Dragoon Saga dropped in January 1998 with full voice acting. Every NPC, every cutscene, anything that would require a character's mouth to move is voiced. (So not menus, item descriptions, or Edge thinking silently, but if he thinks out loud he talks.) The only RPG of a similar vintage I can recall with the same dedication to voice acting is Septerra Core, from 1999. It certainly feels like a statement for '98, and in-game you can see how all of the dialogue had to be more direct to avoid dragging things out. (Juba the barkeeper's quips stand out: "A Holy District is for holy folks. We got no business in there." and "I figure only the High Priest gets to see it. He's got his Guardian Fire, I've got my illuminating drinks.")
In part because of the dire circumstances at the time of Saga's development, none of it is dubbed into English. The opening and ending are in a (rather flatly-delivered) fictional language, while all of the remaining dialogue is in (more strongly emoted) Japanese. The effect is interesting because, as far as I can tell, the use of Japanese is a necessary concession not many English speakers caught on to when the game was new. The previous Panzer Dragoons both used a fictional language for all spoken dialogue, so we weren't supposed to understand the speech of this world in the first place.
The frustrating thing about this brilliant, haunting game is that it is completely inseparable from the console it started on. They made the perfect Saturn game, and it cannot be anything but the perfect Saturn game. As soon as you try to mess with the internal resolution or filter the textures, you're losing a bit of what makes it beautiful; every facet down to the mesh transparencies and pixel-perfect prerendered menus defies your ability to update, improve on, or modify it in any capacity.
This is one of its many prerendered FMVs:
This is that same FMV at 720p:
This is that FMV run through a CRT shader:
Around 2016 Saturn emulation suddenly became much less intensive thanks to Mednafen. Its libretro fork, Beetle Saturn, made it easy to play Saga on a huge range of machines. Today the game even runs on Android devices with Yaba Sanshiro 2, but those shouldn't be the most accessible ways to play it. These applications were spun up by a handful of bedroom coders working on open-source passion projects for free, and they demonstrate that it's possible for Saturn games to be widely available on standard consumer hardware. Sega with all its resources could easily package Saga's disk images in an official emulator, and distribute it on digital storefronts. Put it on Switch, put it on Xbox, put it on any machine that can get this wonderful RPG in a few more hands.
