Fast, tough, polished and beautiful. Why you should play the best game of 2002.
You play as Orta, a young girl who has been imprisoned by the empire for her entire life. One day the prison is attacked by dragonmares (the empire's new weapon made using cutting-edge pure-type ancient's technology) and the Dark Dragon of Destruction (or Edge's Dragon if you want) rescues her and destroys the fleet as well as seriously damaging an airship. Orta, under the watchful eye of a drone named Abadd, finds out about her past, raids enemy facilities and essentially does all the things you would expect from a game from a Japanese developer.
Despite being ever so slightly cliched, PDO delivers a surprisingly well told story. As you would expect from the series, the story is told using drop-dead gorgeous FMVs and pretty cutscenes using the in-game engine. The normal cutscenes are well directed and make full use of the Xbox's power, but the FMVs look entirely next gen. Even with the seventh generation upon us, no game has matched the beauty of Orta's FMVs.
The in game graphics are stunning as well, quite possibly the best on Xbox. Particles dance across the screen and the art style stands out even today. It is a fantasy world and that is reflected in the color palette, but the world honestly has more to do with science fiction. The large mechanical beasts that inhabit the world are complex and beautiful and even the smaller mutated beasts look good enough.
The gameplay will see familiar to anyone who's the played the original Panzer Dragoon or it's first sequel, Zwei. Your main attack are the arrows of light, holding down A just swipe your crosshairs over all the enemies you want to target then release and watch the destruction. Your other is Orta's pistol, though it is not quite clear where she got it, the gun is an integral part of the game. Though not as powerful as the arrows of light, the gun can shoot down projectiles headed for Orta and her dragon and don't have the cooldown time of the arrows, you'll release a rapid burst in base wing, a single, powerful shot in heavy wing and a machine gun like lock-on in glide wing (more on wing forms later).
What may not be familiar to fans is the new gliding and form change systems. While Zwei had your dragon become more powerful as the game went on, it didn't give you a lot of freedom and Saga gave you an infinite amount of freedom but was slow moving and could only be used outside of battle. Orta however gives three forms to your dragon that level up individually and can be switched to with the Y button at any time. This lets you choose your own play style and guide your dragon's progress through the game though it is nowhere near the depth of Saga.
The other is the glide system. You can immediately slow your dragon down or give it a short boost of speed a la Star Fox 64. Charging is a quick way to take out clusters of enemies and in boss battles you can go to different sides of the boss using gliding.
The main quest has 10 chapters. They start off with a slightly harder than average difficulty and quickly get very, very hard. Orta is a throwback to the old days where not getting hit was a higher priority than killing simply due to the amount of damage every shot did. You'll need to constantly be aware of your surroundings (this is Panzer Dragoon so enemies will attack from all sides, you rotate your view with the triggers) and constantly have enemies to lock on to and projectiles to dodge and/or shoot down. There are no checkpoints except when you are entering the end level bosses. If you don't have good reflexes be prepared to have to repeat levels quite a bit.
While the main quest is enjoyable enough to play through multiple times, a good amount of replay value comes from the Pandora's Box feature. As you play through the game and other features in the box, you'll unlock a treasure trove of information and playable scenarios. You'll find extensive documentation on anything and everything in the Panzer world, bonus missions (some which fit in to the story, some which do not), an entire playable side story involving the son of the boss who pursues through the first four levels, an encyclopedia on various terms and an appendix including many other features, not the least of which is the improved PC port of the original Panzer Dragoon in its entirety and the ability to play through the game's levels with parameters you may set with everything from increased to decreased statistics to entirely different characters. Orta sets a new standard for extras and brings the total amount of missions to at least 29, and that's not counting the endless combinations in box mode.
The sound is the game's Achilles heel. While it is still better than about anything else on Xbox with an incredible orchestral score and its own language, the sound effects are generally unremarkable. There are a few new sounds and the voicing is fantastic, but it still sounds like the original released in 1995. Granted that it was the best sounding game of its time, it would be nice to up the ante a bit.
But behind the amount of extras, good sound and fantastic graphics, Orta still shines where it counts, gameplay. Though it may feel limiting to people who grew up on Quake, it offers a better experience than about any other shooter out there and one would be crazy not to give it a try.