30 years of the Sega Saturn: Panzer Dragoon II Zwei

On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Understanding Panzer Dragoon II Zwei’s place in the timeline isn’t difficult, but it is necessary. While it’s got the “II” right in there letting you know that this is a sequel, it’s also a prequel to the original game, but one that was actually designed to lead in to its own sequel, Panzer Dragoon Saga by expanding on the story and lore of the world these titles take place in. The more “necessary” thing to understand here is that Zwei and Saga were made concurrently by developers Team Andromeda at Sega, in large part due to the low sales of the Saturn outside of Japan. Zwei would release in March of 1996, less than a year-and-a-half after the release of the Saturn itself as well as the original Panzer Dragoon — the fear from Team Andromeda was that the low sales of the platform would mean that they wouldn’t be able to finish the series they’d planned out, so, the titles were developed alongside each other to expedite the process.

Of course, Panzer Dragoon Saga — being a role-playing game made by a team whose employees had no experience in that space at all — was labor intensive and time-consuming and difficult to develop in a way that Zwei was not. Which ended up splitting the focus of the teams more than intended — the two games were meant to share team members more than ended up happening — and also caused a pause on Saga while Zwei was being finished up. One of the results of this split was that the director of the first game, Yukio Futatsugi, spent more of his time on Saga’s development. While Futatsugi, who was also the series originator and not just the director of the first game, started out handling writing duties for Zwei — ceding directorial control to another senior member of Team Andromeda, Tomohiro Kondo — over time more and more of those duties went instead to Katsuhiko Yamada, who had already been on the project as its main planner, as well as for design of the map and the enemy settings. Yamada’s credits are full of two things: shooters and dragons. In addition to his credits on the first three Panzer Dragoon titles — he was responsible for Planning on the Saga design team — his career also includes game design on Rez and Mistwalker’s Blue Dragon.

Zwei utilized the same engine as the original game, which cut down on development time and also allowed Team Andromeda to improve both the gameplay and visuals where possible — since Team Andromeda was using their own tools that they made for these projects, and not just relying on existing Sega development tools, that was a significant load off. One area of focus that’s hard to ignore in Zwei is just how good the water looks for being on a 32-bit system. One of the focuses of Panzer Dragoon from the start of the development of these games was to show off what the Saturn could do that the Playstation could not — use of the “infinite plane,” as Futatsugi called it, fit into that idea. Basically, the Playstation had to use up some of its limited polygons it could render on screen in order to replicate the Saturn’s ability to show off “massive 3D planes with textures all the way to the end of the horizon,” which the hardware was able to do thanks to a graphics chip. Designing an entire game around this ability let Team Andromeda showcase strengths of the Saturn’s hardware while downplaying its relative weaknesses: the Saturn could do 3D, and was built for 3D, but just like the Playstation struggled more with 2D than the Saturn did, Sega’s system couldn’t do exactly what the Playstation could on the 3D side.

And that ideology carried over into Panzer Dragoon’s follow-ups, as well, such as with the water in Zwei. As Futatsugi explained to 1Up in a 2007 interview, “The Saturn was much better for expressing water than PlayStation, because Saturn was a machine that was designed for 2D, and we were able to use scrolling bitmaps. You couldn't do that on PlayStation because it was built to use polygons specifically. But with Saturn we could use scrolling and sprites. The Sega Saturn couldn't do true 3D, but the scroll functions was good for drawing water. Do you know raster scrolling? We'd draw raster scrolling and layers, and it looked like water.”

The dragon itself could also be significantly different than in Panzer Dragoon, since that game had established a foundation that could now be built on, rather than Team Andromeda having to start from scratch. Different in various ways, as well. The dragon was now in the lower portion of the screen so that it would be easier to see the enemies around it, removing some of the frustration of the original game’s design in the process. It was also introduced to you as a baby dragon, who would then grow as you played, with the idea being that this would give the player more of a connection to the dragon itself.

To this end, the story begins with a villager, Lundi, hiding the baby dragon instead of killing it, as he was told to do per the tradition of his village. In short, unbeknownst to the villagers, the pack animals they ride can actually sometimes grow up to be dragons, but only those who exhibit some mutations at a young age. It’s those very creatures showing those very mutations that are supposed to be killed, but Lundi spares this one, and it continues to grow and grow. The game begins after the pair witness, from afar, the village being destroyed by an ancient airship — the dragon, named Lagi, fires lasers from its mouth at the airship, and the two then pursue it. They do so at the same time that the Empire chases the airship, as they want to take control of this ancient, destructive tech for themselves to further their war efforts.

Lagi can’t fly at first, so the game begins on foot. The transition to flying is a memorable one, as Lagi straight-up runs off of a cliff after giving no indication whatsoever that he can fly… until he does. While the music in Zwei is no longer prerecorded and tied directly to the gameplay, and is instead generated by the Saturn hardware itself, this specific scene has the soundtrack cut out to raise the dramatic impact of it. It’s an excellent bit of storytelling without the use of words or text, just visuals and a vibe. And it helps to connect you to the young dragon as much as anything else the designers did in the game.

You are supposed to want to protect this young dragon, and help it to grow, which is accomplished in a couple of ways. One of those is very literal: your dragon will grow and take on new, stronger forms depending on your own performance in the game. The more enemies you successfully shoot, the more the dragon can change and grow. You earn points for evolving your dragon at the end of every level, and if you earn enough, it can change form.

There’s also the use of audio cues, however:

This whole design of the dragon being younger and needing to grow also allows for improvements in how the player sees the world around them, since it’s all taking up a little bit less of the screen’s real estate. Considering how busy Panzer Dragoon II Zwei gets with enemies and bullets to dodge from all directions, that’s no small thing even if it might seem like it.

When you start out as a hatchling, you can’t fly, and you can lock on to four enemies (or targets — some massive enemies can be locked onto in multiple places simultaneously) at once. You’ll see the dragon evolve, as part of the story, into a Glideling following stage 2, granting you a boost to six lock-ons at once, as well. The next evolution, Windrider, is guaranteed as well, but whether it happens after stage 3 or 4 depends on your performance: you’ll need six evolution points for this one, and it’ll bump your lock-on total to eight. At 13 points, you’ll reach 10 simultaneous lock ons, and also the first class of dragon where you aren’t guaranteed to eventually get there simply by playing. Next is the Skydart, which requires another two evolution points, but you must have picked them all up by the end of the fourth stage. This dragon form has 12 locks ons, which is the most you can get. However, there are two additional forms: the Brigadewing, which requires 18 points but without a specific stage attached to its acquisition, and the Solo Wing, which is the blue dragon from the first game, and for use during the final boss fight. It’s the most powerful dragon, but it also requires that you collect every evolution point in the game.

These evolution points come in three forms. There are clear points for finishing up stages, and there are 10 of these, meaning that you can level up to at least a Windrider and a maximum of 8 target lock ons at a time even if you fail to pick up a single other evolution point. There are four route points as well, which is where those alternate paths come in: whether you get route points or not is related to the difficulty of the route that you take in stages 2, 3, and 4. You’ll have to discover these paths for yourself as you play — you have some control over where your on-rails dragon is pointed and headed, and you’ll occasionally find that this level of control goes off the rails, as it were, allowing you to actually turn into or away from a path and toward a different one. Last are technical points, which are the most performance-based of the bunch: like with Star Fox 64, you can complete Panzer Dragoon II Zwei without being very good at it, but you’ll get more from the game if you are. In this case, shooting down between 80-89 percent of the enemies in a stage will earn you one technical point, while 90 percent and up gets you two. There are 10 maximum technical points, meaning they’re the second-best source of these for you. The more points you score early, the faster you evolve, and the easier the back-half of the game will be for you because of all of those extra lock ons and additional dragon strength.

The game also adjusts to your own playing, outside of all of these points and upgrades. The ADEC — automatic difficulty enemy control — is a rank system that modifies enemy spawn and fire rates based on your own performance and how often you’re dying. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei doesn’t have to be completed on one life, and you now have infinite continues rather than a limited number, but you do still have to restart a level after dying rather than there being any kind of checkpoint system. Since you have the route and technical points to worry about as well, that’s not the worst thing, as it gives you another chance at securing the maximum of those per stage, or trying to find an alternate path, or playing through the stage itself on an adjusted lower difficulty courtesy the rank controls. Or, if you’re absolutely crushing it, the game will make things more difficult for you, in turn making it harder to continue to thrive and unlock that final dragon form. There’s challenge for you regardless, basically, but challenge to your own level, and the game, like with its dragon, will grow with you as you familiarize yourself with it.

Another meaningful change from the original is in the Berserk attack. In the first Panzer Dragoon, you had two attacks: a rapid-fire shot from the dragoon’s pistol that you aim directionally, and a charged homing attack from the dragon that requires you to lock-on to targets. Those are still here in Zwei, but in addition, you get a meter that fills up as you deliver damage to your foes. It’s basically a screen-clearing bomb, though, it might not always clear the screen depending on the strength of your enemies, and using it sooner will make for a weaker attack than if you fill the entire bar. As it can even damage bosses, it’s useful to hold onto, but consider again that to score the maximum technical points, you need to be defeating at least 80 percent of the enemies in a stage, which come at you in numbers designed to keep you from doing that very thing. Don’t just hold onto the bomb for the bosses, but use it liberally to keep those numbers up, which will in turn make later bosses easier to defeat, anyway. And you’ll want bosses to be a bit easier for you, anyway, since some of them are extended, multi-stage affairs that’ll require you to use every possible lock-on you’ve got in order to take them out before they can do the same to you.

Overall, Zwei is just far more comfortable and less frustrating to play than the original, which remains a good game, of course, but as I wrote back in 2023, “It’s just pretty clear to see why later Panzer Dragoon titles expanded on the gameplay: there was plenty of room to do so, and the initial wow factor of Panzer Dragoon’s graphics and cinematics would only last for so long. Panzer Dragoon might feel like a bit of a letdown, either because your memories of it suggested something greater, or you’ve heard so much more about it than what you’ll get.” Rather than the game’s duration being extended by its pure difficulty that was sometimes intentional design and sometimes not, in Zwei, there are branching paths that change not just the scenery, but also the enemy types you’ll face. These branching paths, by the way, are also why the way the music works in Zwei is different from the original game, since the sound and gameplay could no longer by easily synced when the player is capable of changing the latter.

Panzer Dragoon II Zwei also runs exceptionally well compared to its predecessor, which was plagued by slowdown until its remake for modern systems. (Well, until its remake patched in a fix to remove the slowdown in that version, anyway.) Zwei is a much smoother experience, all the more impressive because there’s more going on and more to do. The main disappointments with Zwei have little to do with Zwei itself. It has never seen a re-release — outside of its brief availability on the GameTap download service — and the remake that was announced back in 2018 has yet to materialize in any form. It was supposed to come out in 2021, but we’re four years past that now — the Forever Entertainment remake of the original was a failure that was widely criticized, and it took updates and patches and time for that to get into a form where it was worth experiencing, to the point that it’s almost always sold at a ridiculous discounted rate in the present to entice people to try it despite its reputation. How much that hurt the development of the Zwei remake, and how much of it is simply Forever Entertainment moving on to many other projects that, similarly, seem to be released in a half-baked state that cause more problems than they solve, is unclear. But either way, it’s meant no remake of Zwei in the present.

Whether it’ll ever actually come out or not remains unknown. The first remake was eventually enjoyable, and it’d be a shame to have to see Zwei take a similar long road, especially since it’s an even better title than the game it’s a sequel/prequel to. At this point, if Forever Entertainment can’t handle it, Sega needs to revoke that license and get it into the hands of a studio that can get this done: Zwei is a title that nowhere near enough people have experienced, owing to the fact that practically no one outside of Japan had a Sega Saturn in the first place, and having it stuck in remake development hell or not being outright re-released doesn’t help fix that one bit.

Of course, nothing is stopping you from experiencing Panzer Dragoon II Zwei in the present, outside of your own reticence to emulate it. If you have actual Saturn hardware, you’re likely already aware of the various methods that would allow you to play the game, whether through a secondhand purchase — buy the Japanese version of the game if you want to save a few bucks — or through either an optical drive emulator or soft mod that bypasses region locking and disc protection. And Saturn emulation is better in the present than it used to be, as well, if you prefer that route or don’t have an actual Saturn to play on. Regardless of the how, Zwei is worth experiencing, and given the lack of urgency and news surrounding a remake announced seven years ago and delayed just under four years back now, you’re probably going to have to accept taking that experience into your own hands.

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