Panzer Dragoon Orta

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Panzer Dragoon Orta
System(s): Xbox
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Smilebit
Genre: 3D Rail shooter
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Panzer Dragoon Orta is an Xbox video game developed by Smilebit. It is the sequel to the Panzer Dragoon game series for the Sega Saturn, and is the fourth game in the series. It is also known as Panzer Dragoon 4.

Developer

Panzer Dragoon Orta is the only Panzer Dragoon game to be developed by another company than Team Andromeda. Smilebit, an internal development team at Sega (their previous games include Jet Set Radio for the Dreamcast and GunValkyrie for the Xbox) created the game. However, Smilebit included several former members of Team Andromeda, which was also one of Sega's internal developers. In the credits a special thanks is dedicated to Team Andromeda.

Plot summary

The main story is takes place several decades after the events of Panzer Dragoon Saga, and is told through ten Episodes. The Empire has risen to power again, and has utilized technology from the Ancient Age to create genetically-engineered dragons called "Dragonmares", that they may rule once again with an iron fist. The dragonmares quickly cause widespread chaos and terror, separating the nations and people governed by the Empire. The player learns through an opening narration that a young girl, Orta, has lived all her life imprisoned in a tall tower in a mountainous region near Yelico Valley. She is kept there by the Seekers, people who fear that she is a harbinger of doom. One night, a pack of Empire-led Dragonmares invade the valley; they destroy much of the city and make for Orta's tower. However, before the Dragonmares can harm her, a mysterious Dragon appears and eliminates them. Frightened and confused, Orta quickly flees the Valley on the Dragon's back. Evren, a general in the Imperial Army and leader of the attacking Dragonmare Squadron, follows Orta and surrounds her. She is saved again, this time by Abadd, a former Imperial Drone turned traitor. He flies away, cryptically hinting at Orta's importance. Orta asks the Dragon to follow him. In her search, Orta meets Mobo, a friendly but reckless member of the Wormriders. Mobo leads Orta through a river valley and a sea of ash before returning to the Wormriders' village, built upon a gigantic hovering creature called a Lathum. The Empire quickly attacks the Lathum with their capital fleet, and in the ensuing battle to drive them off, Mobo is shot down. Evren's squadron reappears and engages Orta in a fight, and the Dragon defeats them. Though Evren is defeated, his Dragonmare self-destructs in a volatile explosion, sending Orta and the Dragon down to earth. Though the Dragon is severely injured in the blast, its wings badly torn and useless, it can still run. The Dragon carries Orta across a snowy land long into the night, where its wings regenerate. An Els-Enora, a graceful flying predator, attacks the pair, and Orta wounds it in self-defense. It finally begins to fly away, and Orta sees its children fly up to it. She expresses sorrow for her actions, but Abadd suddenly reappears and kills the Els-Enora and its children with a single laser volley. Orta is hurt by Abadd's emotionless deeds, but is compelled to follow him, as he claims to know information of her birth. The trio descend into the the ruins of a Tower, and from there gain access to the ancient information network known as Setren. Deep within this network, Orta finds a hologram-like, left behind by her mother, revealed to be Azel from Panzer Dragoon Saga. She mentions that Orta is the child of a drone and a human, implying that Edge, Saga's protagonist, is her father. As the hologram ends, Abadd manifests himself inside the network and reveals his true plans - he is heading for the Cradle, a gigantic monolithic artifact of the Ancient Age suspended above the Imperial City. Orta orders Sestren to be transported as close as possible to the cradle. A fight erupts above the Imperial captial as the Dragon heads for the Cradle. The Wormriders, led by Mobo, attack the remnants of the Imperial fleet at the City, leaving Orta to fly towards the Cradle. After finishing off the last of the Dragonmares, the Dragon destroys the Cradle's outer shell. A metallic cocoon-like object emerges from the Cradle's core, and Abadd's voice can be heard from within it. The cocoon erupts into a fearsome dragon, which Orta defeats after a long and dangerous battle. The dragon, severely wounded, flies slowly to the ground and collapses. Orta whispers to it in tears as the credits roll. In a final post-credits scene, we learned that the Dragon has died, and the war has come to an end. However, the narration explains that the Dragon left behind an heir. The camera pans across a vast and lonely grassland. A baby dragon accompanies Orta as she silently walks toward the mountains in the distance, to an unknown destiny.

Bonus Features

Panzer Dragoon Orta has many unlockable bonus features which are opened after certain achievements within the game, such as beating it on a certain difficulty or with a clearing the game with a high shot-down ratio. These features are contained in Pandora's Box, a feature returning from Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and include a detailed encyclopedia of the Panzer world, a bestiar] of defeated enemies, an archive of concept art, extra bonus missions that expand the story of the main game, statistics tracking, a cutscene viewer (including movies from earlier Panzer Dragoon games) even a complete port of the original Panzer Dragoon. Orta's unlockables are also unique in that they are time-sensitive. Accumulating twenty hours of play time will unlock everything, regardless of other circumstances.

Iva's Story

Of particular interest is a detailed set of seven missions that chronicle the life of Iva Demilcol, a young Imperial boy whose father died in a battle with Orta's dragon shortly after a bitter argument with Iva over the morality of war. Iva is stricken with an unusual disease, and must take a strange pill each day to survive. He aims to find out more before all his pills are gone. Though he manages to make a few friends at the Empire's military academy, he becomes isolated once again when Orta's dragon shoots down his fleet, killing all of his friends. Iva himself only survives when he is rescued and revived by a group of Seekers. After proving himself worthy of the Seekers' trust, however, Iva learns that his father was involved with dragonmares, which shocks and angers him. When the conversation turns towards the weaponry of the Ancient Age, one of the Seekers mentions a great weapon hidden in the nearby ruins; whoever hits it would be destroyed, along with everything in a wide radius. Another Seeker gets word of the Dragon, and Iva sets off after it immediately. He cannot catch it, however, and returns to the Seekers' den, where he shocks them by suddenly falling to the ground. It has been a long time since he has taken his medicine, and the Seeker that gives him the pill notes that it is the last one. A Seeker named Emil notices a peculiar amulet that Iva wears around his neck, and identifies it as a letter container used by nomadic tribes. Opening it, Iva does indeed find a letter to him from his father, who tells Iva that he will be dead by the time he reads it. Iva's father tells him that Iva carries in his body a virus, when he innocently drank water from a poisoned well as an infant. Iva survived when his father made a medicine from the internal fluids of a bio-engineered creature. The medicine stopped the virus from spreading, but could not purge the disease completely, as the virus began to evolve into more resistant forms. Iva's father made medicines from more and more powerful creatures, but eventually there existed not a single creature from which a medicine could be made. This led him to join the people responsible for the dragonmares; the pills Iva took recently all came from one. He acknowledges that what he did was ultimately wrong, but he tells him that he continued to make the medicine so that he could be with him for that much longer. He tells him never to give up, that he has faith in him, and pleads Iva to forgive him. The Seeker colony is suddenly attacked by dragonmares. Iva vows to destroy them all and bring the horrors of his father's work to an end. Iva finds the ancient weapon, shaped like a big drum, and activates it just as the dragonmares come tearing into the chamber. A giant beam of light shoots skyward from the drum, repelling the dragonmares; Iva is surprised to find himself still alive. The device was not a weapon of mass destruction, but instead a sound generator meant to ward off bio-engineered creatures. The shaft of light makes a great pattern of colors in the sky, and the many soldiers of the Empire and the Seekers lay down their weapons for a moment in awe. Iva is rescued by the Seekers, and sits quietly with Emil underneath the branches of a great tree. He acknowledges that while humans have a very despicable nature in their tendencies to fight and ultimately kill each other, he is moved that they were yet able to make something so beautiful. He feels tired, and knowing that he may never wake again, he calls out softly to his father before falling asleep, and expresses his gratitude for being able to know the many people that befriended him on his journey.

Production Credits

Producer: Takayuki Kawagoe
Director: Akihiko Mukaiyama
Art Director: Takashi Iwade, Kentaro Yoshida
Chief Programmer: Takashi Atsu
Sound Director: Tomonori Sawada (Wave Master)
Supervisor: Masayoshi Kikuchi
Level Designers: Tadashi Kuroi, Yuji Takii, Toru Osaki, Tadashi Okuda, Takahiro Tabata
Boss Enemy Designers: Nobuya Ohashi, Norihisa Iwasaki, Satoshi Kawase
Dragon Action Designer: Riichiro Yamada
Pandora's Box Designer: Norihito Kato
Game Story: Shigeru Kurihara, Kenichiro Ishii
Level Programmers: Yutaka Takeda, Yoshiaki Hattori, Masato Hagishita, Satoshi Kuwata, Keisuke Yuasa, Keisuke Inoue, Tamotsu Maeno
Boss Enemy Programmers: Trevor Stricker, Takahiro Nagata, Outa Sano
Dragon Action Programmer: Fumiaki Hara
Special Effects Programmer: Yuichi Okazaki
System Screen Programmer: Toshiharu Kume
Event Programmer: Hitoshi Ota
PDI Conversion Programmer: Kazuhisa Hasuoka
Level Art Designers: Tsuyoshi Tsunoi, Mikio Hayashi, Sanae Tatsuo, Miho Takayanagi, Maki Kaneko, Kaori Shoji, Yoko Yamazaki
Enemy Art Designers: Takeo Kimata, Akio Sakai, Ken Karube, Seiju Taniguchi, Ryuta Ueda
Boss Enemy Art Designers: Kazuki Hosokawa, Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, Yuichi Higuchi
Dragon Art Designers: Masaharu Nakayama
Special Effects Art Designers: Yusuke Ichikawa, Minobu Fujii
System Screen Art Designer: Daisuke Tomoda
Event Art Designers: Yuichi Ide, Shinya Murakami, Tomokazu Honma
Illustrator: Koichiro Tamura
Concept Art Designer: Tohru Watanuki
Music Composer: Saori Kobayashi, Yutaka Minobe (Wave Master)
Assistant Producers: Osamu Sato, Hiroko Yosuka
Technical Advisor: Naohiro Warama, Osamu Ogata, Tomonobu Takahashi
Executive Sound Producer: Yukifumi Makino
Executive Sound Director: Fumitaka Shibata
Chief Recording Engineer: Hirokazu Akashi
Recording Engineer: Yoshitada Miya
Assistant Recording Engineer: HAL
Voice Recording Producer: Hiroyuki Inage (TOHOKUSHINSHA FILM CORPORATION), Ryoko Matsumoto (TOHOKUSHINSHA FILM CORPORATION), Kazuhiro Terasawa
Voice Recording Director: Toshio Sato

Theme Song (Anu Orta Veniya)

Music: Saori Kobayashi
Arrangement: Hayato Matsuo
Lyrics: Shigeru Kurihara
Vocal: Eri Itoh
Chorus: Yumiko Takahashi
Recording Corporation: IMAGINE

CG Movie Producer: Nobuya Okabe
CG Movie Director: Masayuki Gotoh
CG Movie Line Producer: Naoko Uchiyama
CG Movie Technical Support: Naoto Ooniki
CG Movie Sound Effects: Shizuo Kurashashi (Sound Box)
Lightwave Team Director: Akira Suzuki
Lightwave Team: Tatuya Kouno, Yuji Umoto, Kunhihko Mita
3dsTudioMax Team Director: Minoru Kusakabe
3dsTudioMax Team: Kenichi Kutsugi, Junko Kubgta, Nobuyuki Hanabusa
Orta Modeland: Takuya Hayama
Dragon Modeland: Takayuki Hayama
Modeland: Akihisa Takada, Kazunobu Hagiwara, Seiko Endoji, Yuichiro Ando, Hiroyuki Yui
Mat Panter: Masanori Kubota
Dragon & Dragonmare Macket Model: Yusuke Takayanagi
Motion Actor: Tsutomu Kitagawa (Links Digiworks Inc), Yuko Takahashi (Links Digiworks Inc)

Sega Corporation (Japan)

Director Of Marketing: Koji Kuroki
Product Manager: Hitoshi Kurosawa
PR Manager: Takayoshi Ohuchi
Director Of Creative Services: Yoshihiro Sakuta
Assistant Director Of Creative Services: Takashi Nishimura, Masaru Kobayashi, Tetsuya Honda
Lead Teaters: Akira Nishkawa, Hiroyuki Miyano
Assistant Teaters: Kazumi Kigawa, Tomoki Matsuura

Sega of America, Inc.

Vice President Product Development: Jin Shimazaki
Localization Manager: Osamu Shibamiya
Localization Producer: Klayton Vorlick
Director Of QA: Deborah Kirkham
QA Manager: Arnold Feener
Lead Tester: Shawn Dobbins
Vice President Entertainment Marketing: Mike Fischer
Product Manager: Rich Briggs
Assistants Product Manager: Noah Musler
Public Relations Manager: Kirsten Merit
Public Relations Specialist: Bryce Baer
Senior Adventing Manager: Caroline Mcniel
Adventing Specialist: Teri Higgins
Senior Standards Relations Manager: Roxana Hui
Special Thanks: Takeshi Gotou, Takeshi Asano, Tsuyoshi Koyama, Midori Shikakura, Tetsuo Shinyu, Hiroshi Nakatani, Misaka Kitamura, Tadashi Ihoroi, Yumi Morikawa, Yuji Saito, Yousuke Karasawa, Yoshihito Kawanishi, Ikuo Ishizaka, Yuri Maita, Florian Patzke, Team Andromeda
Executive Producer: Tetsu Kayama, Shun Arai
Sound Designed By: Wave Master, Dolby Digital 5.1
Cooperation With: Sofdec, Buildup
Created By: Smilebit
Presented By: Sega