Panzer Dragoon Remake
Dec 13, 2023 20:53:00 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Dec 13, 2023 20:53:00 GMT -5
Panzer Dragoon Remake is a strange game that leaves me feeling conflicted. On one hand, modern graphics truly can depict the world of Panzer Dragoon far more beautifully than the Sega Saturn ever could in 1995. On the other hand, Panzer Dragoon Remake doesn’t lift a finger to address certain other quaint and anachronistic facets of its source material. As a result, the remake feels at odds with itself. At the end of the day, I personally like Panzer Dragoon Remake, and I’m glad it exists. But I’m doubtful this would win over anyone who isn’t nostalgic about the 28 year old Saturn version.
My Background with Panzer Dragoon on Sega Saturn
A series of childhood experiences made me obsessed with the Sega Saturn. The first time I ever saw one was when I went to the store with my Dad in Winter of 1995 where I played Bug on a Sega Saturn demo kiosk. Bug sucks now, but to a kid in 1995 it looked amazing. It made me want a Saturn for Christmas, although I got a Sega Genesis instead.
Later in 1998 my Dad took me to the mall where I played House of the Dead at the arcade. I asked my Dad if there was a Genesis version of House of the Dead. Dad didn't know off hand, but he did know how to use dialup Internet. So, he checked Sega’s website for me and discovered that you could in fact play House of the Dead at home, so long as you had a Sega Saturn.
In 2004 I played Shining Force for the Sega Genesis. I loved every second of it. Then I got online and learned there had been a 32-bit sequel to Shining Force, but only on - you guessed it - Sega Saturn.
Finally in 2005 I got my very own Sega Saturn from Goodwill for $40. I was thrilled, but it didn’t come with any of the games I wanted. Thankfully, a nearby game store that still sold 90s games had a copy of Panzer Dragoon beneath their glass display case for $10. I had read online that Panzer Dragoon was good, so I took it home and played it over and over. Panzer Dragoon was the best Saturn game in my possession for quite a while.
The Sega Saturn meant a lot to me as a teenager in the 2000’s, and so did Panzer Dragoon. That's why Panzer Dragoon Remake evokes the same feelings as hearing a classic song I would listen to all the time in my youth. This is not just some random piece of software to me.
Making Sense of The Sega Saturn Version of Panzer Dragoon
There are a several reasons why “Playstation” and “Nintendo” are still household names, while nobody knows what “Sega Saturn” is anymore. Panzer Dragoon highlights several of these reasons. The first is that for a game that you’re supposed to play at home, Panzer Dragoon feels very arcade-like.
In the 90’s, Sega was an industry leader with their arcade games. Since arcades were pay-to-play amusement machines installed in public venues to generate passive revenue, they had to be bombastic, enticing, and easy to pick up. But they couldn’t be dozens of hours long, welcoming the player to make themselves at home and carve a lasting impression on the game world. The intricacy of a dungeons and dragons campaign was impractical for the arcade. Arcades had to be more like “step right up!” carnival games.
In the 80’s, that “step right up!” carnival mindset was unquestioningly peddled in the living room, with the Atari 2600 flaunting its downscaled versions of arcade games. In the early 90s, when the arcade fighters Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, it drove the gaming world crazy. Advertising copy would boast how it was “just like the arcade!”, something that nobody would bring up as a selling point today.
But Nintendo and Sony in the mid 90s were starting to realize that games at home didn’t have to copy arcades anymore. Since the game was in the comfort of the player’s home, the player could take as long as they wanted. So, you started to see games that took multiple hours to complete, saving your progress for you to pick up where you left off. As a kid I viewed such console games as being PC-like, since games on my Dad's MS-DOS PC would let me save my progress on the hard drive.
I am skeptical that 90’s Sega caught on to this “gaming at home” paradigm shift, because many high profile Sega Saturn games were literally just adaptations of arcade games. In Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop, your saved “progress” was little more than a number quantifying your highest score. Yet these titles all got marketed like they were key reasons you should buy a Sega Saturn. This was while Sega’s competitors were promoting deeper, more substantial games that you had to play in multiple sittings, like Super Mario 64 or Final Fantasy VII.
But the funny thing about Sega was that even their home-only titles still felt very arcade-like. For example, NiGHTS into Dreams was a hit on Sega Saturn and adored by critics in 1996. NiGHTS never came out in the arcade, but personally I always felt that it had the DNA of an Atari arcade classic like Centipede or Tempest. To “beat” NiGHTS into Dreams doesn’t take very long. But simply reaching the end screen was never the point. To me, NiGHTS was always about playing the same stages over and over again, finding ways to optimize and push my score as high as possible.
Panzer Dragoon never existed in arcade form, either, but it still feels suspiciously like an arcade game. For one thing, Panzer Dragoon is short. There are just six stages, with play throughs of Panzer Dragoon on YouTube all averaging around 55 minutes. You could easily experience everything this game has to offer in an arcade before your legs would get too sore.
Panzer Dragoon’s main attempt at replay value is to tally up how many enemies you’ve killed in a stage, sort of like the end screen in a level of Doom (PC, 1993). I think it wants you to go back and challenge yourself to kill 100% of them. This makes it rather like a shooting gallery, which was common in arcades. But it doesn't feel as though it has enough content to count as a full game today.
Panzer Dragoon also touches on another one of the Saturn's shortcomings which was critical for mid-90’s gaming: 3D polygons. We did have 3D polygon games before 1995, but they were rare. Most games in those days took after Super Mario Brothers from the 80's, where your character was basically an animated gif who could move up, down, left, and right. But the camera could rarely move deeper into the screen, and actually panning or tilting the camera was unthinkable.
This is why when games like Tekken came out, I never noticed that the fighters were so awkward and robotic. Giving gamers in 1995 that kind of 3D perspective was like giving Coca Cola to a caveman.
The Sega Saturn was capable of 3D, but it sucked at it. Recently an interview with senior Sega leadership came to light divulging that the Saturn was originally designed for 2D graphics. Then when they learned the Playstation would specialize in 3D graphics, they panicked and added 3D capabilities at the last minute. Teenage me always suspected the Saturn suffered from some innate shortcoming like this.
Panzer Dragoon is visually impressive by 1995 standards. If all you had was a Sega Genesis, and you upgraded to a Sega Saturn with Panzer Dragoon, then you would feel like you were playing a game from the future. But Saturn graphics were starting to look rough as early as a year or two later.
Once after playing Panzer Dragoon all day, teenage me got out Starfox 64 (Nintendo 64, 1997), and just the startup screen floored me. Everything was just so much cleaner and more cohesive than anything on Sega Saturn. I only had a passing awareness of what a game's “frame rate” was supposed to be, but now I suspect teenage me wordlessly sensed that Starfox 64 was 60 frames per second, while Panzer Dragoon was only 20.
Panzer Dragoon takes place in an imaginative and otherworldly land, but the Saturn’s technology struggles to depict it. Polygons unceremoniously “pop-in” rather close to the camera. Affine texture warping runs rampant, with flat surfaces defying the laws of perspective and canting away from the camera's vanishing point. The polygon budget is stringent, and the raw, unfiltered texture maps have so few pixels in them that it lends the graphics a surreal, dreamlike quality relying on the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps. While playing Panzer Dragoon as a teenager I would often ask myself, “What IS that thing supposed to be, anyway?”
In Panzer Dragoon, pre-rendered CGI videos tell the story of your hero befriending a dragon and embarking on a warpath against the mighty forces of “the empire.” In 2023, anyone with a computer can download Blender for free and learn to make beautiful CGI at home. But in 1995, consumer grade PCs weren’t great for CGI work. You generally needed special hardware and software costing tens of thousands of dollars. That's why in 1995 just the sight of pre-rendered CGI meant opulence and quality. It didn’t even have to be particularly lifelike CGI. Any CGI at all was a treat.
I understand what the developers saw in their heads when they visualized Panzer Dragoon's expository movie clips, but what actually ended up on the screen only makes sense if you make a conscious effort to imagine it along with them. Today, the most charitable way to look at it would be as vintage CGI.
When I was a high schooler in 2005, wanted to start collecting for Sega Saturn, and Panzer Dragoon was the only good game I could find, then Panzer Dragoon hit differently. Maybe my experience wasn’t far from that of Sega Saturn owners in Spring of 1995, since Panzer Dragoon was a launch title in a meager lineup of games. I am certain there were early Saturn owners with nothing but Panzer Dragoon to play for months on end.
I think this touches on how gaming in 2023 has vastly more options than 1995, or even 2005, the year I became a Sega Saturn owner. Panzer Dragoon makes perfect sense as an experience on Sega Saturn. I’m not sure it makes as much sense as an entry in a crowded Steam Library.
The Panzer Dragoon Remake
Originally I bought Panzer Dragoon Remake on Nintendo Switch. But right off the bat I realized that Switch would not be the best way to experience it. On Switch, it felt like the hardware was struggling to play a downscaled PS4 game. My instincts were telling me that the whole point would be to marvel at how much better the graphics were compared to the Saturn version. That's why I ultimately played Panzer Dragoon Remake on PC.
The aircraft in this game feel like UFOs. What I mean by that is, they are somehow producing lift, but it must not be lift as I understand it, since they don't appear to be aerodynamic and are free of any wings, propellers, or even rocket boosters. Maybe those white plates embedded into their craft have something to do with antigravity? On Saturn I thought those white plates were made out of ceramic, but in the remake they appear to be made of stone.
The soundtrack in the remake is unchanged, because the original Panzer Dragoon soundtrack is perfect, and one does not iterate upon perfection. Teenage me liked the orchestral music for Panzer Dragoon's title screen and stage one, but felt the synthesizer music in later stages was a letdown. At that age I wanted the entire game to have an orchestral score. I've since changed my mind about this. Perhaps I've just grown fond of the other tracks over time.
There are parts in Panzer Dragoon where your dragon just hovers in mid-air. It doesn't make sense in terms of how I assume a dragon would actually behave when fighting an evil empire, but it does make sense in terms of creating interesting gameplay situations. But I found these parts weirder with HD graphics. With the Saturn's surreal, pixelated graphics they didn't strike me as so unnatural.
Panzer Dragoon Remake is locked to 60 fps. Even if your computer is powerful enough to play it at 120 fps, the game won’t let you. This is why I used my RTX 4080 to play at an obnoxious resolution of 8K supersampled down to 4K. I also played with a keyboard and mouse, an interface far more precise than the Saturn's digital pad. This lead to some weird observations about the original Panzer Dragoon.
The dizzyingly high resolution had the amusing side effect of letting me “snipe” enemies from far, far away. While using my laptop to scrub through my personal play through uploaded to YouTube, I would notice myself shooting at tiny things off in the distance I could not even discern in the web browser. But on a 48” 4K monitor, these tiny enemies over the horizon were crystal clear. Maybe this broke the game somewhat.
It’s also possible that playing at 60 fps breaks the game in other ways. I can see now that some of Panzer Dragoon’s design choices owe themselves to its original frame rate of 20 fps and relatively imprecise Saturn digital pad. Those constraints are probably why the game lets you “sweep” your cursor to lock onto vulnerable targets and blast them all with a series of “fire and forget” guided laser beams. If the Saturn version expected you to precisely hip-fire like in Quake (PC, 1996), that would be too frustrating.
Maybe the best way to view Panzer Dragoon Remake would be like “Super Mario Render 64”, a fan-made mod of the Nintendo 64 classic which replaces the original assets with models and lighting closer to the pre-rendered CGI used to advertise Mario 64 in 1996. In Panzer Dragoon Remake, I kept thinking this is what it would be like to play an interactive version of the original's CGI cut scenes.
Graphics are not all that has evolved since the mid-90's, so it is a bit strange to see a cosmetic glow-up of Panzer Dragoon completely removed from the context of when it originally came out. Even with HD visuals, Panzer Dragoon is so short it barely qualifies as a full game anymore. Its 3D accomplishments no longer mean what they did in 1995. Key parts of the game were designed to be imprecise on purpose for Saturn owners playing at 240p 20fps. I'm still not sure how I feel about translating those parameters to 4K 60fps.
Even longtime fans of Panzer Dragoon seem divided about the Remake. I found comments like this on the r/panzerdragoon subreddit:
While I'm not sure I agree with all that they have to say, I do share their distaste for the Remake's sound design. It's petty of me, but the “target lock-on” sound effects are unsettlingly different from the Saturn version. Those sounds are an inextricable part of Panzer Dragoon's soul, just like Sonic's ring jingle, or the noise Mario makes when he picks up a giant mushroom. You just don't change that stuff. Why didn't Panzer Dragoon Remake just copy the original Saturn sound effects? That's what they did with the soundtrack, after all.
I have no idea what newcomers would think of Panzer Dragoon Remake. But something tells me this isn't like Metroid Prime Remastered, which I can easily recommend to anyone who never played the original because the underlying experience still holds up under modern scrutiny. Even with its updated visuals, Panzer Dragoon Remake could prove hard to enjoy for those unwilling to mentally time travel back to 1995.
My Background with Panzer Dragoon on Sega Saturn
A series of childhood experiences made me obsessed with the Sega Saturn. The first time I ever saw one was when I went to the store with my Dad in Winter of 1995 where I played Bug on a Sega Saturn demo kiosk. Bug sucks now, but to a kid in 1995 it looked amazing. It made me want a Saturn for Christmas, although I got a Sega Genesis instead.
Later in 1998 my Dad took me to the mall where I played House of the Dead at the arcade. I asked my Dad if there was a Genesis version of House of the Dead. Dad didn't know off hand, but he did know how to use dialup Internet. So, he checked Sega’s website for me and discovered that you could in fact play House of the Dead at home, so long as you had a Sega Saturn.
In 2004 I played Shining Force for the Sega Genesis. I loved every second of it. Then I got online and learned there had been a 32-bit sequel to Shining Force, but only on - you guessed it - Sega Saturn.
Finally in 2005 I got my very own Sega Saturn from Goodwill for $40. I was thrilled, but it didn’t come with any of the games I wanted. Thankfully, a nearby game store that still sold 90s games had a copy of Panzer Dragoon beneath their glass display case for $10. I had read online that Panzer Dragoon was good, so I took it home and played it over and over. Panzer Dragoon was the best Saturn game in my possession for quite a while.
The Sega Saturn meant a lot to me as a teenager in the 2000’s, and so did Panzer Dragoon. That's why Panzer Dragoon Remake evokes the same feelings as hearing a classic song I would listen to all the time in my youth. This is not just some random piece of software to me.
Making Sense of The Sega Saturn Version of Panzer Dragoon
There are a several reasons why “Playstation” and “Nintendo” are still household names, while nobody knows what “Sega Saturn” is anymore. Panzer Dragoon highlights several of these reasons. The first is that for a game that you’re supposed to play at home, Panzer Dragoon feels very arcade-like.
In the 90’s, Sega was an industry leader with their arcade games. Since arcades were pay-to-play amusement machines installed in public venues to generate passive revenue, they had to be bombastic, enticing, and easy to pick up. But they couldn’t be dozens of hours long, welcoming the player to make themselves at home and carve a lasting impression on the game world. The intricacy of a dungeons and dragons campaign was impractical for the arcade. Arcades had to be more like “step right up!” carnival games.
In the 80’s, that “step right up!” carnival mindset was unquestioningly peddled in the living room, with the Atari 2600 flaunting its downscaled versions of arcade games. In the early 90s, when the arcade fighters Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, it drove the gaming world crazy. Advertising copy would boast how it was “just like the arcade!”, something that nobody would bring up as a selling point today.
But Nintendo and Sony in the mid 90s were starting to realize that games at home didn’t have to copy arcades anymore. Since the game was in the comfort of the player’s home, the player could take as long as they wanted. So, you started to see games that took multiple hours to complete, saving your progress for you to pick up where you left off. As a kid I viewed such console games as being PC-like, since games on my Dad's MS-DOS PC would let me save my progress on the hard drive.
I am skeptical that 90’s Sega caught on to this “gaming at home” paradigm shift, because many high profile Sega Saturn games were literally just adaptations of arcade games. In Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop, your saved “progress” was little more than a number quantifying your highest score. Yet these titles all got marketed like they were key reasons you should buy a Sega Saturn. This was while Sega’s competitors were promoting deeper, more substantial games that you had to play in multiple sittings, like Super Mario 64 or Final Fantasy VII.
But the funny thing about Sega was that even their home-only titles still felt very arcade-like. For example, NiGHTS into Dreams was a hit on Sega Saturn and adored by critics in 1996. NiGHTS never came out in the arcade, but personally I always felt that it had the DNA of an Atari arcade classic like Centipede or Tempest. To “beat” NiGHTS into Dreams doesn’t take very long. But simply reaching the end screen was never the point. To me, NiGHTS was always about playing the same stages over and over again, finding ways to optimize and push my score as high as possible.
Panzer Dragoon never existed in arcade form, either, but it still feels suspiciously like an arcade game. For one thing, Panzer Dragoon is short. There are just six stages, with play throughs of Panzer Dragoon on YouTube all averaging around 55 minutes. You could easily experience everything this game has to offer in an arcade before your legs would get too sore.
Panzer Dragoon’s main attempt at replay value is to tally up how many enemies you’ve killed in a stage, sort of like the end screen in a level of Doom (PC, 1993). I think it wants you to go back and challenge yourself to kill 100% of them. This makes it rather like a shooting gallery, which was common in arcades. But it doesn't feel as though it has enough content to count as a full game today.
Panzer Dragoon also touches on another one of the Saturn's shortcomings which was critical for mid-90’s gaming: 3D polygons. We did have 3D polygon games before 1995, but they were rare. Most games in those days took after Super Mario Brothers from the 80's, where your character was basically an animated gif who could move up, down, left, and right. But the camera could rarely move deeper into the screen, and actually panning or tilting the camera was unthinkable.
This is why when games like Tekken came out, I never noticed that the fighters were so awkward and robotic. Giving gamers in 1995 that kind of 3D perspective was like giving Coca Cola to a caveman.
The Sega Saturn was capable of 3D, but it sucked at it. Recently an interview with senior Sega leadership came to light divulging that the Saturn was originally designed for 2D graphics. Then when they learned the Playstation would specialize in 3D graphics, they panicked and added 3D capabilities at the last minute. Teenage me always suspected the Saturn suffered from some innate shortcoming like this.
Panzer Dragoon is visually impressive by 1995 standards. If all you had was a Sega Genesis, and you upgraded to a Sega Saturn with Panzer Dragoon, then you would feel like you were playing a game from the future. But Saturn graphics were starting to look rough as early as a year or two later.
Once after playing Panzer Dragoon all day, teenage me got out Starfox 64 (Nintendo 64, 1997), and just the startup screen floored me. Everything was just so much cleaner and more cohesive than anything on Sega Saturn. I only had a passing awareness of what a game's “frame rate” was supposed to be, but now I suspect teenage me wordlessly sensed that Starfox 64 was 60 frames per second, while Panzer Dragoon was only 20.
Panzer Dragoon takes place in an imaginative and otherworldly land, but the Saturn’s technology struggles to depict it. Polygons unceremoniously “pop-in” rather close to the camera. Affine texture warping runs rampant, with flat surfaces defying the laws of perspective and canting away from the camera's vanishing point. The polygon budget is stringent, and the raw, unfiltered texture maps have so few pixels in them that it lends the graphics a surreal, dreamlike quality relying on the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps. While playing Panzer Dragoon as a teenager I would often ask myself, “What IS that thing supposed to be, anyway?”
In Panzer Dragoon, pre-rendered CGI videos tell the story of your hero befriending a dragon and embarking on a warpath against the mighty forces of “the empire.” In 2023, anyone with a computer can download Blender for free and learn to make beautiful CGI at home. But in 1995, consumer grade PCs weren’t great for CGI work. You generally needed special hardware and software costing tens of thousands of dollars. That's why in 1995 just the sight of pre-rendered CGI meant opulence and quality. It didn’t even have to be particularly lifelike CGI. Any CGI at all was a treat.
I understand what the developers saw in their heads when they visualized Panzer Dragoon's expository movie clips, but what actually ended up on the screen only makes sense if you make a conscious effort to imagine it along with them. Today, the most charitable way to look at it would be as vintage CGI.
When I was a high schooler in 2005, wanted to start collecting for Sega Saturn, and Panzer Dragoon was the only good game I could find, then Panzer Dragoon hit differently. Maybe my experience wasn’t far from that of Sega Saturn owners in Spring of 1995, since Panzer Dragoon was a launch title in a meager lineup of games. I am certain there were early Saturn owners with nothing but Panzer Dragoon to play for months on end.
I think this touches on how gaming in 2023 has vastly more options than 1995, or even 2005, the year I became a Sega Saturn owner. Panzer Dragoon makes perfect sense as an experience on Sega Saturn. I’m not sure it makes as much sense as an entry in a crowded Steam Library.
The Panzer Dragoon Remake
Originally I bought Panzer Dragoon Remake on Nintendo Switch. But right off the bat I realized that Switch would not be the best way to experience it. On Switch, it felt like the hardware was struggling to play a downscaled PS4 game. My instincts were telling me that the whole point would be to marvel at how much better the graphics were compared to the Saturn version. That's why I ultimately played Panzer Dragoon Remake on PC.
The aircraft in this game feel like UFOs. What I mean by that is, they are somehow producing lift, but it must not be lift as I understand it, since they don't appear to be aerodynamic and are free of any wings, propellers, or even rocket boosters. Maybe those white plates embedded into their craft have something to do with antigravity? On Saturn I thought those white plates were made out of ceramic, but in the remake they appear to be made of stone.
The soundtrack in the remake is unchanged, because the original Panzer Dragoon soundtrack is perfect, and one does not iterate upon perfection. Teenage me liked the orchestral music for Panzer Dragoon's title screen and stage one, but felt the synthesizer music in later stages was a letdown. At that age I wanted the entire game to have an orchestral score. I've since changed my mind about this. Perhaps I've just grown fond of the other tracks over time.
There are parts in Panzer Dragoon where your dragon just hovers in mid-air. It doesn't make sense in terms of how I assume a dragon would actually behave when fighting an evil empire, but it does make sense in terms of creating interesting gameplay situations. But I found these parts weirder with HD graphics. With the Saturn's surreal, pixelated graphics they didn't strike me as so unnatural.
Panzer Dragoon Remake is locked to 60 fps. Even if your computer is powerful enough to play it at 120 fps, the game won’t let you. This is why I used my RTX 4080 to play at an obnoxious resolution of 8K supersampled down to 4K. I also played with a keyboard and mouse, an interface far more precise than the Saturn's digital pad. This lead to some weird observations about the original Panzer Dragoon.
The dizzyingly high resolution had the amusing side effect of letting me “snipe” enemies from far, far away. While using my laptop to scrub through my personal play through uploaded to YouTube, I would notice myself shooting at tiny things off in the distance I could not even discern in the web browser. But on a 48” 4K monitor, these tiny enemies over the horizon were crystal clear. Maybe this broke the game somewhat.
It’s also possible that playing at 60 fps breaks the game in other ways. I can see now that some of Panzer Dragoon’s design choices owe themselves to its original frame rate of 20 fps and relatively imprecise Saturn digital pad. Those constraints are probably why the game lets you “sweep” your cursor to lock onto vulnerable targets and blast them all with a series of “fire and forget” guided laser beams. If the Saturn version expected you to precisely hip-fire like in Quake (PC, 1996), that would be too frustrating.
Maybe the best way to view Panzer Dragoon Remake would be like “Super Mario Render 64”, a fan-made mod of the Nintendo 64 classic which replaces the original assets with models and lighting closer to the pre-rendered CGI used to advertise Mario 64 in 1996. In Panzer Dragoon Remake, I kept thinking this is what it would be like to play an interactive version of the original's CGI cut scenes.
Graphics are not all that has evolved since the mid-90's, so it is a bit strange to see a cosmetic glow-up of Panzer Dragoon completely removed from the context of when it originally came out. Even with HD visuals, Panzer Dragoon is so short it barely qualifies as a full game anymore. Its 3D accomplishments no longer mean what they did in 1995. Key parts of the game were designed to be imprecise on purpose for Saturn owners playing at 240p 20fps. I'm still not sure how I feel about translating those parameters to 4K 60fps.
Even longtime fans of Panzer Dragoon seem divided about the Remake. I found comments like this on the r/panzerdragoon subreddit:
While I'm not sure I agree with all that they have to say, I do share their distaste for the Remake's sound design. It's petty of me, but the “target lock-on” sound effects are unsettlingly different from the Saturn version. Those sounds are an inextricable part of Panzer Dragoon's soul, just like Sonic's ring jingle, or the noise Mario makes when he picks up a giant mushroom. You just don't change that stuff. Why didn't Panzer Dragoon Remake just copy the original Saturn sound effects? That's what they did with the soundtrack, after all.
I have no idea what newcomers would think of Panzer Dragoon Remake. But something tells me this isn't like Metroid Prime Remastered, which I can easily recommend to anyone who never played the original because the underlying experience still holds up under modern scrutiny. Even with its updated visuals, Panzer Dragoon Remake could prove hard to enjoy for those unwilling to mentally time travel back to 1995.