Trivia / Panzer Dragoon

• Acclaimed Flop: Saga received rave reviews when it released, but it got a very limited run due to the failure of the Saturn and sold extremely poorly overall.
• B-Team Sequel: In a sense, Orta. After the release of the acclaimed Saga, which was intended to bring the series to a close, series creator Yukio Futatsugi left Sega and Team Andromeda disbanded. Orta's announcement was an unexpected but welcome surprise to many, along with the news that the game would be developed by Smilebit (known best for the Jet Set Radio series), whose team was also comprised of former members of Team Andromeda. While the game was well-received by fans and critics alike, some do not consider it part of the original trilogy's canon, including Futatsugi, who maintains that the story ended with Saga and never intended for Edge and Azel to meet again, and expresses that the Orta team should have exercised more creative freedom.
• Creator's Favorite: Out of all of the dragons in the series, the blue dragon is Yukio Futatsugi's favorite.
• Doing It for the Art:
  • As a team filled with many young newcomers, the artists and programmers of Team Andromeda weren't interested in conforming to popular trends, avoided them whenever they could, and were more concerned with making unique games that stood out. When Sega tasked them with making a JRPG that would outsell Final Fantasy VII, which the team felt was geared toward the mass market, they refused to follow in its footsteps and were more concerned about making Saga the best game it could be rather than something that would bring in huge sales. Although many were disappointed that the game didn't sell as well as they hoped and regretted not being as concerned about the company's needs, they believed if they had completed the game sooner or appealed to the wider market, it might have sold even less and Saga would have just become another RPG, and were still proud of what they were able to accomplish.
  • Saga localizers Chris Lucich and Matt Underwood knew the game they were translating was probably going to receive little attention due to being on the effectively dead Saturn. Regardless, they loved the project so much that they overworked themselves to get the script done.
• Dueling Works: Saga was created specifically to go up against Final Fantasy VII and be a Killer App for the Sega Saturn, as Final Fantasy VII was expected to be for the PlayStation. While Saga succeeded in at least getting slightly higher review scores, it came too late in the Saturn's life to make much of a difference and sold poorly.
• Invisible Advertising: Saga had extremely limited marketing outside of Japan. Mainstream media didn't get much information about the game, with Sega more or less relying on niche blogs and word-of-mouth to sell the few copies they made.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Saga is one of the rarest and sought-after titles for the Sega Saturn. It was released at the tail-end of the console's short-lived lifespan and had an extremely limited run; only 20,000 copies were printed for North America while Europe received just 1,000. Second-hand copies are floating around, but will likely cost more than the system itself did back in 1995^note As of 2021, the going price is a whopping $500 for a loose copy, while complete in box copies go for over $1000. However, Japanese copies can be had for far less due to a higher print run. Worse yet, thanks to the game being copy protected (as in, special copy protection on top of the usual "wobble groove" copy protection found in a typical Saturn game), finding a clean rip of the game should you choose to go that route is needlessly overcomplicated.
• Promoted Fanboy: Katsumi Yokota was already a fan of Mœbius and dreamed of working on a Panzer Dragoon game. He later joined Sega and worked on the ending illustrations in Zwei and became the lead character designer in Saga.
• Referenced by...: A boss battle in Final Fantasy XVI plays out a lot like this game; it's an on-rail shooter complete with locking onto targets and firing laser beams.
• Swan Song: Saga was the Saturn's dying breath.
• Troubled Production: Both the original game and especially Saga were very difficult projects for Team Andromeda.
  • When developing the first game, not only did the team have to develop for brand new hardware, which was infamous for being difficult to work with, but the Saturn specs were not even finalized until a ways into development, meaning the team had to base all their work on educated guesses about how the final system would perform; this caused the game to miss its initial deadline.
  • While the team was more familiar with the Saturn hardware when it came time to develop Saga, the project as a whole ended up being far more strenuous. For one, making an RPG was a far more complex endeavor than the rail-shooters that were the previous two games, which required the team to expand significantly and made it more difficult to manage. Not only that, but the team had an absurdly ambitious vision for the title, with fully 3D environments and character models on a console that wasn't particularly good at doing 3D, full voice acting, and the desire to rework the rail shooter gameplay into a functional turn-based battle system. Figuring out all of this was extremely difficult and caused the game's development to take 3 years, all the while Sega was putting heavy pressure on the team to make an RPG that would rival Final Fantasy VII; sadly by the time the game was done, the Saturn was on its last legs and the game was essentially sent off to die, falling far short of the million copies Sega was hoping for.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Two popular ones spread shortly after Saga's release, after word spread that a member of Team Andromeda had committed suicide, and that the game suffered through Troubled Production as the team struggled to make the game work with the Sega Saturn's unique hardware. It was believed that the person in question poured his heart and soul into the game, only to take his life in response to the game's poor sales. In relation, the second rumor was that either the entire team had gone to a shrine to cleanse themselves of bad spirits in grief of their loss, or that they struggled with making the game work to the point where they thought they had been cursed and went to be cleansed. In an interview with the now-defunct 1up.com, Futatsugi claims that while someone above him had committed suicide during development, the rumored victim was instead likely another member that was killed in a motorcycle accident while under heavy stress.
• What Could Have Been: Early promo art for Orta revealed that upgrading the Base Wing form would also change its color and appearance, not unlike the Glide and Heavy Wing forms. For whatever reason, it was never implemented in the final game.