The last time I set out to finish a game, I made a nice list of Xbox, PS2, and Gamecube games that needed playing – and then threw it out the window and put Shenmue in the Dreamcast.

This time I went back a little further.

Let’s talk about 1998, and more specifically let’s talk about the demise of the Sega Saturn – well, at least in the US.

After 3 years of making one management mistake after another, the powers that were at Sega of America gave the few remaining fans a hell of a breakup present – four last US game releases. Burning Rangers, House of the Dead, Shining Force III, and…

Panzer Dragoon Saga.

Problem is, they made, roughly, 3 copies of each game.

That is a slight exaggeration. Wikipedia claims that a total of 30,000 copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga were produced for the North American market, and who am I to doubt their word?

3 copies or 30000, the games were not easy to find. I got lucky on Shining Force III – when I reserved it, I paid the full price up-front, and as a result the store I bought it from gave me one of the TWO copies they got in to cover something like 70 pre-orders. I played quite a bit of that but never completed it. Eventually I will forget how horrible the English dubbing was and go back to it. Eventually.

Burning Rangers I couldn’t find at all. I did eventually chance into a used copy in a game store in Tigard – $12.95, complete. One of these days IT will get played, but I’ve only had it for six years and that’s hardly any time at all, right?

With Panzer Dragoon Saga, it worked a little differently. First there was the sadness of not getting my pre-order. I didn’t pay in full that time, or it didn’t help, or something. I forget.

Then there was the mad calling around to mail order places. The only place that had it in stock refused to ship it to me because I wanted it shipped to me at work and they’d only ship to the address on the credit card statement… also they wanted $75 + shipping.

Then there was the pure dumb luck of walking into a game store in Monterey Park and seeing it on the wall, one copy, list price.

It went proudly home with me and got played up to the VERY FIRST SAVE POINT and then abandoned. For nine years I have been quite smug in the knowledge that I owned Panzer Dragoon Saga, and could play it whenever I wanted to, honest, this year for sure.

I’m quite impressed with the Saturn backup memory cartridge, by the way, that save from nine years ago was still on there.

I’ve heard complaints that it’s too short – and yes, it’s pretty short. Even with quite a bit of wandering around, I still finished it in under 18 hours played. If it had been a “EPIC 80 hours of grinding gameplay!” game, it wouldn’t have been finished at all, so let’s hear it for short RPGs.

It is also a horrifically ugly game whenever you are not on a dragon or watching a cutscene. Fortunately most of the game revolves around you riding a dragon around and occasionally watching cutscenes and you are quite rarely on foot. Even when you are on foot and trying to decide which blob is you and which is, say, a door, it still wins out in the audio category – full voice acting (subtitled! not dubbed!) and some gorgeous music.

I don’t think… actually I know for a fact that this is not the oldest unfinished game on my shelf, even limiting that to categories of games I’m capable of finishing (not shooters, for a start). I’m not going to ponder that too deeply right now, I’m happy with finally having seen it and understanding why so many people have said nice things about it.

(Yes, I have the US release of Rayearth as well. I might say unkind things about Working Designs and their definitions of “ship dates” at this point but they’re dead and gone and why beat them up any more?)