Way back during the 1990s, one of the game series that really helped shape the transition from 2D to 3D for home consoles was Sega's Panzer Dragoon. It's a criminally underrated game series, but new reports are indicating that it will make a return through remakes.
Gematsu is reporting that two Panzer Dragoon games will be getting the remake treatment, which has been a popular thing this last generation. Forever Entertainment, the developer behind the release of Fear Effect Sedna, will be partnering up with Sega as co-creators to recreate Panzer Dragoon: Remake and Panzer Dragon II Zwei: Remake. The first remake will be available before the end of 2019, while the second game will come out at some point after that, likely in 2020.
As pointed out in the news piece, the Panzer Dragoon games have had an odd history in gaming, given that certain games get remastered or the series gets rebooted, but it rarely ever sticks. For instance, at the start of the eighth generation of gaming, the Xbox One received the game Crimson Dragon in the fall of 2013 five years ago. The Unreal Engine-powered game was a spiritual successor to the original Panzer Dragoon series that was published by Microsoft, but the game didn't quite catch on with gamers and it was quickly forgotten about shortly after its release.
Earlier this year, however, Microsoft tried reviving the series again by making Panzer Dragon Orta backwards compatible for the Xbox One. The game originally came out way back in 2002 for the OG Xbox, and it was one of the more original games for the system. It also featured some breathtaking visuals for its time, and really helped define the visual fidelity of the sixth generation of gaming. It wasn't much of a sales beast, but it did give the OG Xbox's hardware some good graphical flexing.
The game was also made available as a backwards compatible for the Xbox 360 more than a decade ago, back in 2007. However, the backwards compatibility of Panzer Dragon Orta back then pales in comparison to the newest iteration of backwards compatibility given that those who own an Xbox One X are capable of playing the game in native 4K resolution, which is quite a feat for a home console.
Forever Entertainment won't be pumping out two new games that are just paying lip service to the franchise. The two games will be remade from the ground up with completely new graphics that are going to be "compatible" with today's standard of graphical technology.
The remake won't be a complete divergence from the originals, though. So don't expect completely altered storylines like with Capcom's upcoming remake of Resident Evil 2. The story and characters from the first two Panzer Dragoon games will stay intact.
There are no new images or trailers to sift through, pore over, or pick apart at the moment. The media assets for the remakes will be made available in the coming months to give gamers a firsthand look at what the new games will be like.
I'm curious if Sega will partner with Microsoft for an exclusivity deal or if the games will be multiplatform releases? I suppose we'll find out in a couple of months.
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