Panzer Dragoon Orta

Panzer Dragoon Orta is a single-player rail shooter which spans ten levels of varying lengths and difficulty, covering a variety of environments and each housing a boss. Gameplay consists of the player controlling the protagonist Orta and her dragon, navigating levels through an aiming reticle that can be moved over the whole screen; while the player's path is predetermined, alternate routes can be opened based on in-game actions. The story is communicated though a combination of CGI and real-time cutscenes and dialogue during gameplay, with in-game speech using the fictional language of Panzer Dragoon with subtitles.

The player has a 360-degree field of view and can look ahead, left, right, and behind the dragon. Enemies come from all directions, varying in size and health, and appear on an on-screen radar that monitors the dragon's surroundings. The player can fly around some enemies in 90-degree increments, allowing them to avoid enemy fire and target specific areas. The two forms of attack are Orta's blaster, which uses a free aim mode for continuous fire, and the dragon's lock-on attack, which fires at a limited number of targets at once.

Orta takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans struggle to survive amidst an ecosystem of bio-engineered mutants, remnants of a devastating war. One faction, the Empire, had unearthed weapons from the pre-war Ancient Age, only to be brought low by the appearance of the Dragon of Destruction. The dragon and its previous riders destroyed the Towers, centers of the Ancients' technology, and broke the Ancients' hold on the world during the events of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Since then, the Empire has rebuilt itself, breeding dragon-like creatures called "dragonmares" as an aerial army with the help of an Ancient ruin called the Cradle.

A girl named Orta, thought by some to be the daughter of Saga protagonists Edge and Azel, is kept prisoner in a tower by a tribe called the Seekers, as they fear she is a harbinger of doom. Orta is freed when the Empire attacks the Seekers' city with their dragonmares in search of Orta, due to her potential heritage, and she escapes by riding on the current incarnation of the Dragon of Destruction.

The Panzer Dragoon series saw moderate commercial success on the Sega Saturn. After the release of Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), Sega restructured its departments, and the Panzer Dragoon studio, Team Andromeda, disbanded. Several Team Andromeda members left Sega, including the series creator Yukio Futatsugi and the artists Manabu Kusunoki and Kentaro Yoshida. A new Panzer Dragoon was pitched for Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, but the console did not meet the technical requirements. There was also a feeling that the original trilogy for the Saturn had reached its logical conclusion.

Following the commercial failure of the Dreamcast, Sega left the console market and began developing and publishing games for other platforms, including extensively supporting Microsoft's Xbox. Discussions about a new Panzer Dragoon began in 2000. Takayuki Kawagoe, who became the producer, felt the Xbox was powerful enough to fulfil his vision for a new game in the series. It was originally proposed as Panzer Dragoon Vier, with "Vier" being German for "Four", but was given a different title to distance it from the other games.

Orta met with "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator website Metacritic, receiving a score of 90 out of 100 based on forty-one critic reviews. Its visual design, unlockable content, and faithfulness to the series were consistently praised, while critics were displeased with the short play-time and dated, on-rails structure. Opinions of the controls and the increased difficulty were mixed.

In their review, Famitsu gave it praise for its visuals and gameplay, positively noting both high challenge and freedom of choice for players. The dedicated sibling magazine Famitsu Xbox gave it a higher score than the main magazine, citing it as the best Xbox release to date and lauding its adaptation of the series gameplay and quality of its graphics. The three reviewers for Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it high praise, lauding its graphics, gameplay and unlockable content compared to other rail shooters of the time; common points of criticism were its high difficulty compared to earlier Panzer Dragoon games, and its short campaign. Edge felt the additional controls and variety hindered enjoyment compared to Sega's earlier rail shooter Rez, and described the music as less memorable than earlier entries, while lauding the art design and number of unlockable extras alongside nostalgia for earlier entries in the series and genre.

Alex Wawro of Gamasutra called Orta the best Panzer Dragoon game for gameplay refinements and the technical and graphical achievements made possible by Xbox. In a 2007 series retrospective for 1Up.com, James Mielke said that Orta had aged well both mechanically and aesthetically, and was graphically equal to many games on the Xbox 360. In 2008, Joystiq said it would be a good candidate for porting to the Wii, complimenting the quality of its gameplay and graphics. In January 2011, Darren Jones of Retro Gamer said that it had aged well, predicting it would be seen as a genre classic, and that it represented the older development ideals of Sega as a risk-taking company. Orta was featured in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die (2010), and was selected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for its Art of Video Games exhibition in 2011.

com retrospective, Kawagoe and Futatsugi were interviewed. Kawagoe felt that, while the team were successful in bringing the series to a new platform, fan expectations had an impact on Orta's perception. Kawagoe also noted the development of future entries depended on fan demand. Futatsugi felt the team were held back by confining themselves to the Panzer Dragoon universe rather than designing a game based on an original concept.