Panzer Dragoon  |  Panzer Dragoon Zwei  |  Panzer Dragoon Saga  |  Panzer Dragoon Orta

By Ricardo Torres
Design by James Cheung

Panzer Dragoon Zwei expanded on the original game's stylized look.

The second installment in the series, Panzer Dragoon Zwei, followed closely on the heels of the original game. Released in 1996, the game offered a host of refinements over its predecessor and continued Andromeda's experimental foray into the cinematic evolution of the rail shooter genre. While the gameplay essentially picked up where Panzer Dragoon left off, the story did not. Set prior to the events of the first game, Panzer Dragoon Zwei's story was based on some of the events alluded to in its predecessor, specifically offering some information on the origin of the dragons seen in the game. Panzer Dragoon Zwei focused on a boy named Lundi, who lived in a town on the frontier. His people had a tradition of killing pack animals called khourieats that displayed signs of mutation, which would cause the creatures to have a green glow around their throats, because these mutant creatures were viewed as bad omens. One day Lundi violated this tradition. He came across such a mutant khourieat that featured an additional mutation in the form of wings, and instead of killing it, he hid the animal and kept it as a pet, naming it Lagi. The game's action followed the events that took place shortly after the destruction of Lundi's village by an ancient weapon and Lundi's subsequent escape with Lagi.

Following the release of Panzer Dragoon for the Saturn, Team Andromeda was eager to return to the world it had created. Although everyone involved was satisfied with what had been accomplished in Panzer Dragoon, the experience had definitely stirred up everyone's imaginations. When work began on the follow-up, Andromeda split into two teams. One team worked on the immediate follow-up to Panzer Dragoon, while the other worked on the third game in the series. The team working on the second Panzer game, which would become Panzer Dragoon Zwei, was charged with building on what the original game had started.

Although the game was set before the original Panzer Dragoon, humans were still struggling to get by.

To realize its goals, the team revisited the graphics, gameplay, presentation, and story of the original and set out to improve them. The team refined the graphics libraries it had created in order to improve the game engine's performance. Scrolling textures, which had been used to create the water effects in the original game, were improved, resulting in significantly enhanced water, most notably in the fourth episode. The simple vertex coloring in the original game, which was displayed at 20 frames per second, was smoothed out as well, giving Panzer Dragoon Zwei slick shading and shadowing effects that ran at 30 frames per second. Although the difference may not sound like much these days, at the time, it all looked extremely impressive. The new effects allowed for improved detail throughout the whole game, which complemented the game's far more diverse visual experience. Locales such as a lush forest, a barren canyon, a flooded ruin, a misty landscape covered in snow, and the interior and exterior of an airship were all rendered impressively. In addition to the graphical improvement, the animation in the game was improved. The game's programmers actually kept segmented wooden figures of fish at their desks and used them constantly as reference items as they attempted to reproduce lifelike movement in the various creatures in the game. The enemies and creatures in Panzer Dragoon Zwei were much more diverse. This was especially true of the dragons in the game. As a result of the team's effort to expand gameplay, several new dragon designs were incorporated into the game. The new variety in the dragons allowed the team creative freedom to try different designs, while they tried to stay true to Panzer Dragoon's look. As Kentaro Yoshida, who handled character model production and effects, recalls, "We went through many dragon designs, and Kusuki-san, who is the designer of Panzer Dragoon 1, finalized the designs. We got inspiration for the fusion of creatures and weapons from various existing science fiction."

In terms of gameplay, the team was intent on building on the original game's mechanics. Yoshida recalls, "In order to provide much more fun to players, we introduced new systems that had never been used in existing console shooting games. I think it was inspired, in part, from computer games." The new additions to the standard shooter gameplay brought together a disparate assortment of elements from the RPG and shooting genres.