It's a cruel perch you explore the world from, then, but for all the power of the vision - and of the Xbox One - it's never sold as well as in any of its predecessors.Ĭrimson Dragon is an ugly game.
There are moments when Crimson Dragon astounds with its art - but they're quickly lost in the visual muddle of a sloppily executed game.īeneath Crimson Dragon's fantasy there's even a tug of sadness - you're part of a colonising force of humans who have chanced upon an alien world, and who then go about capturing and controlling its dragon inhabitants. It's a fantasy world that's at once surreal, cruel and regal - colossal termite hills burst out of lakes patrolled by soaring dragons, while forests see luminescent fruit blossom under impossibly tall trees.
Manabu Kusunoki, artist on the first trio of Panzer Dragoon games, returns for Crimson Dragon, reunited with original composer Saori Kobayashi, and their partnership again conjures up visions of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa as scored by Joe Hisaishi. The prospects for the spiritual return of one of the Sega fan's most cherished series looked good. Here was a game that would take the unobtrusive motion control of Child of Eden and meld it together with some of the deeper RPG elements of Panzer Dragoon Saga. When Futatsugi first announced his new project with developer Grounding at the Tokyo Game Show in 2011 - it was known as Project Draco back then, part of a small collection of Japanese-developed games for the then fledgling Kinect - it was easy to get excited.
Most recently, Mizuguchi would return to the form again in 2011's Child of Eden, a heavenly successor to Rez that introduced Kinect motion control.
It's a form that has evolved in some odd, fascinating ways since Futatsugi's Saturn original: in developer Team Andromeda's hands, it became a majestic, soaring role-playing game with Panzer Dragoon Saga, while elsewhere at Sega it was transmuted into the strange and beautiful Rez by Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his team at United Games Artists. The work of producer Yukio Futatsugi, its roots stretch back to 1995's Panzer Dragoon, itself a continuation of a form birthed by Sega with 1982's Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom and, more famously, the brilliant Space Harrier. You couldn't tell from its unappealing looks, but Crimson Dragon's heritage is sublime.
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