Panzer Dragon

Panzer Dragoon is a series of video games developed by Sega. The first three games—Panzer Dragoon (1995), Panzer Dragoon II Zwei (1996), and Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998)—were produced by Sega's Team Andromeda for the Sega Saturn. The Panzer Dragoon games are rail shooters, except for the role-playing game Saga. Each game follows a protagonist who rides an armored flying dragon, fighting human and monstrous enemies in a post-apocalyptic world. The Panzer Dragoon games have received consistently positive reviews emphasizing their art design, visuals, sound design, and atmospheric settings. Saga is one of the most acclaimed Saturn games and is often listed among the greatest video games. The Panzer Dragoon series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have begun to recover technologies from the Ancient Age, a world-spanning, hyper-advanced civilization destroyed thousands of years before the events of the games. The Ancients used genetic engineering to create living weapons, which were unleashed in a cataclysmic war that nearly destroyed humanity. The mutated descendants of these creatures have merged into wild ecosystems, where they pose a continual threat to human civilization and serve as enemies encountered in the games. Various human factions use recovered Ancient Age technologies, such as ubiquitous floating military airships, to defend against the wild mutants and to wage war against each other. Over the course of the series, a succession of characters ride mysterious armored flying dragons of extraordinary power, fighting to prevent humanity from reactivating the most destructive Ancient Age weapons and, ultimately, to destroy the remaining weapons and facilities of the Ancient Age so that humanity can be freed from the threat they pose.