…continued
Thanks to its score (penned by a Japanese composer who had produced a series of Krautrock-inspired albums during the Eighties) and its cinematic cut-scenes, Panzer Dragoon was able to make an early break into territory outside the confines of traditional games, and in the process an altogether un-game-like world was created. The classic shoot-’em-ups Kentaro mentions certainly helped to shape Panzer’s style of play, but he reveals that other factors played equally significant roles: “I think there were all sorts of things that had an influence on Panzer Dragoon: particularly anime and films. The concept is completely different, but I’d say the production style of Star Wars was definitely influential – you know, how it made an unearthly world appear so real… Also, we were determined to avoid going down the same path as the sci-fianime that was considered cool at the time – Gundam, for example, with its big robots – and we certainly didn’t want to follow Final Fantasy’s lead, where you’d have characters waving impossibly big swords. Kusunoki was adamant that he didn’t want any Final Fantasy-style unusual haircuts like [gestures a Cloudlike spike] or purple hair or anything like that,” Kentaro laughs. “We wanted to do something closer to reality… with just a normal-looking person as the protagonist.”

The Panzer Dragoon series’ protagonists certainly are quite ‘normallooking’, but the overall visual style of the games – the environments and the dragons, in particular – is distinctly odd, although according to Kentaro it wasn’t always like that: “The first presentation video we put together featured a classically European-style green dragon, a pretty typical kind of dragon. However, we later changed the look of the dragon completely because we wanted to make it more sci-fi. Kusunoki decided to push the art direction in a slightly Turkish-looking, Ottoman style, because everyone was already familiar with the more European aesthetics [and he wanted Panzer Dragoon to look different from other games].”

Ottoman and science-fiction influences accounted for, Panzer Dragoon’s cultural mélange is confused even further by the obviously German theme of the Panzer Dragoon games’ titles. “I think Futatsugi was a big fan of German names,” Kentaro explains. Yukio Futatsugi is also the Team Andromeda member credited with constructing the unique language heard in the Panzer Dragoon games – but why did he choose to develop an original language for the games in the first place? “If the games had used Japanese language,” Kentaro says, “well, Japanese people at the time didn’t really think of their language as a cool thing… And if the characters had been speaking English, the games would have seemed too American, too close to Hollywood. So Futatsugi wanted something completely different and decided to make his own language. Also, there was a famous anime film called Oneamis No Tsubasa [English title: Royal Space Force: The Wings Of Honneamise] that used its own language, and we all thought that was really excellent…”

Other artistic influences came to the fore in Panzer Dragoon, even though the same influences were scaled back in Zwei. Specifically, the first game’s on-rails, set-route nature of play enabled Team Andromeda to successfully commission a noted composer-producer to create a score that was perfectly in sync with the game’s own cadences. Yoshitaka Azuma had already produced half-a-dozen albums of soundtrack-style music during the Eighties, informed by ambient and Germany’s Krautrock movement – but Panzer Dragoon was his sensational videogame debut. “For the music in Panzer Dragoon, we gave Azuma a detailed explanation of the timing of the game’s levels,” Kentaro explains. “We’d write notes – things like, ‘The boss appears 30 seconds on from here’ or ‘Water appears at this point’ – to give him an impression of how each level progressed, from start to finish. That’s why the music matches the pace of the game so precisely. We didn’t do the same thing with Zwei, though; just with the first game. I seem to remember this was because we introduced branching levels in Zwei, which would have made that process impossible to replicate…”

Another factor adding to the mystique of Panzer Dragoon was its cover art, which was famously supplied by French artist Moebius: “Everyone at Team Andromeda was a fan of Moebius,” Kentaro says, “so we asked him to do the artwork for the packaging of Panzer Dragoon. For Panzer Dragoon Zwei, we just used some computergenerated images – probably because Moebius was too expensive to commission twice [laughs].”

… continued