Panzer Dragoon
 Mike Toole  rates it:    

We all know how wonderful anime based on video games is-- just look at Tekken-- hell, just look at Fire Emblem! Panzer Dragoon joins these two titles on the compost heap, because quite frankly, I can't find a single goddamn thing about it that's redeeming in any way.

Well, this OVA tries to take the storyline of Panzer Dragoon and crunch it into a 35-minute feature. This isn't necessarily a bad thing-- after all, a seasoned shooter can whip through the Panzer Dragoon Saturn game in about forty-five minutes. Still, the OVA lacks the game's wonderfully alien textures-- the fake "language" spoken at points in the game is totally blitzed here, and the vehicle and character design just looks off somehow. The story of Panzer Dragoon is simple-- after a massive high-tech war drives humankind to the brink of extinction, a few hundred years pass, and mankind starts pulling itself back together. But a threat is posed in the form of an evil black dragon, whose goal is to re-activate the Black Tower, an ancient superweapon. In the game, it fell to you, with your genetically-engineered warrior dragon, to fight your way to the tower and confront the black dragon before he carried out his objectives.

The Panzer Dragoon OVA simplifies this storyline as much as possible, pushing the also-looming threat of the local human empire into the background and otherwise doing little more than assigning characters names (the pilot is Kyle, his dragon is called "Blau" ("Blue"), which I guess means that the black dragon is named "Schwarz") and tacking an extra motive onto the evil dragon (he wants to kidnap Kyle's blonde, blind girlfriend for some undisclosed reason). The OVA then proceeds to whiz by, showcasing really pathetic mixtures of fake computer-drawn "cel" animation and rendered backgrounds-- integration of thse two elements should be relatively easy, but it looks like shit, with tons of artifacting (pixellation) visible where the characters meet the backgrounds. Somehow, this manages to look worse than Tekken.

The dub is a piece of crap, which is unfortunate, since Tristan MacAvery was certainly the most talented director ADV had during his tenure there. Too bad he had jack shit to work with; I'm certain that his work on Those Who Hunt Elves will be better. Normally, I'd bitch about the lack of availibility of a subtitled version, but in this case, I'd rather bitch about the fact that this waste of matter is available in the first place.

Stay away from this, kids. If you need a SEGA anime fix, go with Sakura Wars, or better yet, waste your twenty bucks combing the local Toys R Us for the Panzer Dragoon RPG, because that's a hundred million times more satisfying than this dreck.

Added:  Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Related Link:  ADV Films
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