Panzer Dragoon Orta
Panzer Dragoon Orta is a 2002 rail shooter game developed by Smilebit and published by Sega for the Xbox. The fourth Panzer Dragoon game, it was released in Japan in 2002 and in North America and Europe in 2003. The story follows a girl, Orta, who is freed by a dragon and embarks on a quest to prevent the abuse of ancient technology. The gameplay features the player moving an aiming reticle and shooting enemies while the dragon flies through 3D environments on a predetermined track.
Production of Orta began in 2001. The previous Panzer Dragoon development team, Team Andromeda, had disbanded after the release of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Around a dozen staff returned to work on Orta, including the artists Takashi Iwade and Kentaro Yoshida, the composer Saori Kobayashi and the battle designer Akihiko Mukaiyama, who directed Orta. While the greater power of the Xbox allowed for more freedom in gameplay and graphical design, the production was troubled by a lack of art design direction and problems with the team's graphical and gameplay ambitions.
Panzer Dragoon Orta received positive reviews, with praise for its gameplay and art design. Several publications have named it one of the best Xbox games, and it is remembered favorably for its gameplay and technical achievements. Panzer Dragoon staff have voiced mixed feelings regarding Orta for its continuation of the story after Saga. Orta was the final Panzer Dragoon game until the 2020 remake of the original ''Panzer Dragoon.''
Gameplay
Panzer Dragoon Orta is a single-player rail shooter which spans ten levels of varying lengths and difficulty, covering a variety of environments and each housing a boss. Gameplay consists of the player controlling the protagonist Orta and her dragon, navigating levels through an aiming reticle that can be moved over the whole screen; while the player's path is predetermined, alternate routes can be opened based on in-game actions. The story is communicated though a combination of CGI and real-time cutscenes and dialogue during gameplay, with in-game speech using the fictional language of Panzer Dragoon with subtitles.The player has a 360-degree field of view and can look ahead, left, right, and behind the dragon. Enemies come from all directions, varying in size and health, and appear on an on-screen radar that monitors the dragon's surroundings. The player can fly around some enemies in 90-degree increments, allowing them to avoid enemy fire and target specific areas. The two forms of attack are Orta's blaster, which uses a free aim mode for continuous fire, and the dragon's lock-on attack, which fires at a limited number of targets at once. There is no ammunition limit, and both free-aiming and lock-on attacks can be used simultaneously. The "Berserk" attack, powered by a gauge that fills up when enemies are shot down, deals high damage to surrounding enemies while making the dragon invulnerable for its duration. Alongside standard flight, the dragon has a "Glide" function: limited by an automatically recharging gauge, the dragon can accelerate and decelerate around enemies, with acceleration dealing damage if it collides with an enemy.
Another element of combat is the dragon's ability to morph between three forms. These are Base Wing, the standard attack type which balances between offensive and defensive abilities; Heavy Wing, which is limited to the lock-on attack but has high defense; and Glide Wing, which has low defense and no lock-on but features an increased free aim attack. Fully destroying waves of enemies grants a resource called "Gene Base" that upgrades the current dragon form's attributes, such as health and attack power. At the end of each level, the player is scored on kill count, damage received, and the time taken to clear the stage boss. If the player is defeated, they receive a game over and must restart from the beginning of a level or the beginning of the boss stage.
Completing the main campaign unlocks an extras menu called "Pandora's Box", a feature which returns from Panzer Dragoon II Zwei. Content is unlocked by clearing various conditions, such as clearing the campaign on a certain difficulty or with a high kill ratio. The content includes a detailed encyclopedia of the game world, a bestiary of defeated enemies, an archive of concept art, story cutscenes for Orta, selected CGI sequences from earlier Panzer Dragoon games, and a port of the original Panzer Dragoon. The most prominent features are additional chapters focusing on different characters, playing out as short gameplay clips with some using visual novel-style story segments.
Plot
Orta takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans struggle to survive amidst an ecosystem of bio-engineered mutants, remnants of a devastating war. One faction, the Empire, had unearthed weapons from the pre-war Ancient Age, only to be brought low by the appearance of the Dragon of Destruction. The dragon and its previous riders destroyed the Towers, centers of the Ancients' technology, and broke the Ancients' hold on the world during the events of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Since then, the Empire has rebuilt itself, breeding dragon-like creatures called "dragonmares" as an aerial army with the help of an Ancient ruin called the Cradle. A girl named Orta, thought by some to be the daughter of Saga protagonists Edge and Azel, is kept prisoner in a tower by a tribe called the Seekers, as they fear she is a harbinger of doom. Orta is freed when the Empire attacks the Seekers' city with their dragonmares in search of Orta, due to her potential heritage, and she escapes by riding on the current incarnation of the Dragon of Destruction.During her escape, Orta encounters Abadd, an Ancient Age android known as a "drone", who is also fleeing the Empire and offers to help her find her origins in exchange for access to Ancient Age technology. She is befriended by a tribe called the Worm Riders, who are taming the land's mutants. After an Imperial fleet attacks the Worm Riders, Abbad leads Orta to a ruin linked to the Ancients' Sestren Network, where Orta receives a posthumous message from Azel asking her to help restore the world. Abadd reveals that he plans to wipe out humanity and hoped to use Orta's DNA to breed a new drone army; when she refuses to cooperate, he attacks her and is fought off. Orta goes to the Empire's capital and destroys the Cradle; Abadd turns the dragonmares against their human controllers, but they are destroyed with the Worm Riders' aid. Orta then defeats Abadd and his dragon born from the Cradle. The Dragon of Destruction succumbs to its wounds, but post-credits scenes reveal that the dragon left a child, with the final scene showing Orta and the newborn dragon traveling through a rejuvenated landscape.
A side story unlocked during the campaign follows Iva Demilcol, the son of an Imperial soldier who was killed during Orta's escape. Iva is given his father's necklace and learns that his father worked on dragonmare production as a means of crafting medicine to treat Iva's chronic illness. The declining Iva is taken in by Seekers, forming a close bond with one of their number called Emid, who helps him find a final message from his father in the necklace. When the Empire attacks again, Emid helps Iva locate a supposed Seeker weapon. Iva activates it, revealing it to be a non-lethal repellent against mutants, with it also prompting the Seeker and Imperial soldiers to stop fighting.
Development
The Panzer Dragoon series saw moderate commercial success on the Sega Saturn. After the release of Panzer Dragoon Saga, Sega restructured its departments, and the Panzer Dragoon studio, Team Andromeda, disbanded. Several Team Andromeda members left Sega, including the series creator Yukio Futatsugi and the artists Manabu Kusunoki and Kentaro Yoshida. A new Panzer Dragoon was pitched for Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, but the console did not meet the technical requirements. There was also a feeling that the original trilogy for the Saturn had reached its logical conclusion.Following the commercial failure of the Dreamcast, Sega left the console market and began developing and publishing games for other platforms, including extensively supporting Microsoft's Xbox. Discussions about a new Panzer Dragoon began in 2000. Takayuki Kawagoe, who became the producer, felt the Xbox was powerful enough to fulfil his vision for a new game in the series. It was originally proposed as Panzer Dragoon Vier, with "Vier" being German for "Four", but was given a different title to distance it from the other games.
Akihiko Mukaiyama, who had worked on Saga as battle planner, made his debut as a director with Orta. Kawagoe approached Mukaiyama first about the project. Mukaiyama initially declined, but he was repeatedly approached and told that the game would not be made if he were not involved. Not wanting that responsibility on him, Mukaiyama agreed to direct. Once the project was approved, the team pitched it to Microsoft, who agreed due to Sega's previous Xbox support.
Development began in early 2001 at Sega's new studio Smilebit and lasted eighteen months. Kawagoe said that ten members of Team Andromeda worked on the game, with other members advising them while working on other projects. In a different interview, Mukaiyama said there were seven development and five sound staff carried over from Team Andromeda, comprising twelve of the thirty staff at the time. Several members joined because of their love for the series. Takashi Atsu, a series newcomer, was a lead programmer. Takashi Iwade was both the lead designer and a lead programmer alongside Atsu. At its peak, the team comprised fifty people.