During the 1990s the console wars were all about Sega vs Nintendo for the first half decade, and then geared up to be a three way face off between Sega, Nintendo and Sony. Whilst Sony would dominate the home console business, the handheld war was still Nintendo with their all dominating Game Boy vs Sega’s Game Gear. History would tell us that the Game Boy thrashed the Game Gear, but that isn’t exactly true.
It was Pokemon that truly sent the Game Boy light years beyond the Game Gear, but that didn’t release until 1996 in Japan and later elsewhere. Today we’ll be looking at a game that could be considered a big franchise release for the Game Gear, but we’ll also look at why Sega’s efforts would eventually lose out to Nintendo’s.
Panzer Dragoon Mini was a game from the series that was one of the big hitters on the Sega Saturn. It’s play style is similar to Space Harrier and Star Fox and is an on-rail shooter where you fly about as a dragon…or dragoon and shoot enemies that fly towards you or come along on ground level.
The game is fairly short with only five stages and can be beaten in about half an hour. The last couple of levels do up the challenge, but only really when it comes to the boss fights. It’s a shame it’s so short and is a sign why Sega wouldn’t make the Game Gear survive when compared to the thirty hours you’d get out of Pokemon that released the same year. That isn’t a completely fair comparison, but when you’d be in the video game store and the two games would have been side by side at a similar price the comparison is justified.
Both an advantage and disadvantage for the game is that you can hold down the fire button to lock on to multiple enemies at once. This meant that for most of the play time I simply held down the fire button and aimed at the enemies until they were all highlighted and then took them all out at once. This makes the game too easy as you only need to move the reticle over the enemies for a split second to lock on to them and therefore don’t need to aim and fire for the most part.
Boss fights are all about dodging enemy fire and then rapidly firing at them. Occasionally a small enemy will also appear and you just need to lock on and take them out before continuing the onslaught of firing at the boss.
Want to watch the whole gameplay of the game? Check out our longplay video to see the whole game from start to finish on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube Channel below!
The graphics occasionally give the illusion of you changing direction that you fly on the play field, but this doesn’t really change how the game plays. It’s a nice effect though.
The game is short, but thankfully, you do also get passwords so you can restart back at later levels. Even though it’s short, it would be frustrating to have to start the whole game again to get to the final level if you needed to attack it more than once to beat the game.
Sega haven’t shown a load of love for the Panzer Dragoon series in a long time. After two great games on the Saturn, it received it’s epic third in Panzer Dragoon Saga, before being dormant throughout the Dreamcast era and popping up again on the Xbox. It’d then take some twenty odd years to get a remake of the original game on modern platforms, but maybe it’s time for a brand new entry. Maybe to get fans hyped there should be a complete collection that has the original trilogy, the later game, but let’s not forget this short but sweet Game Gear classic too!
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