Panzer Dragoon II Zwei: Remake — it has been in the works for roughly seven years. Forever Entertainment and MegaPixel Studio announced remakes for the first two Panzer Dragoon games in late 2018. Sega Saturn, SHIRO! interviewed one of the remake developers in the summer of 2019.
Panzer Dragoon: Remake first released on the Nintendo Switch in March 2020 before eventually getting ported to numerous modern day platforms. As the title suggests, it is a remake of the Sega Saturn classic, known for boasting capabilities of the console in its earliest years. The on-rails shooter has the player control a dragon rider, using both single-shot and homing beam weapons against enemies through Moebius inspired landscapes. Contemporary critical reviews of the Sega Saturn original were overwhelmingly positive, whereas critic reviews of the remake were more mixed.
Shortly after this release, Forever Entertainment made a post that said its remake of the sequel, Panzer Dragoon: Zwei, will come out in 2021. Later that year, a company presentation showed its release window as being “TBA.” In recent years, the company has produced remakes of Front Mission and The House of the Dead games on a variety of platforms. A new Fear Effect title from the company appears to be canceled.
After multiple years of spotty and evolving information, signs of life from the dragon rider sequel are beginning to surface.
Lagi is still coming
Earlier this month, Forever Entertainment announced Panzer Dragoon Zwei: Remake will be playable at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show event. Their Steam page for the game shows 10 screenshots and some new info.
The page confirms Panzer Dragoon series alumnus Saori Kobayashi is returning to arrange a remastered version of the game soundtrack. While she did not work on the songs in the original Panzer Dragoon: Zwei, Kobayashi did compose the music for both Panzer Dragoon Saga and Panzer Dragoon Orta. In the upcoming remake, the original Sega Saturn soundtrack will be available as an option to its players.
Perhaps the most notable difference is its new look. The Steam page lists recommended system requirements as having 16 GB of RAM, a 3.6 GHz processor and 6 GB of video RAM. By current day standards, this means most gaming capable computers should be able to run the remake at high settings.
Screenshots show Jean Jacque Lundi and the dragon Lagi tearing through most of the episodes. The fifth episode and the legendary final boss are absent from current Steam screenshots.
While the game is still in development, it remains to be seen if more will be added to the environments and other graphical features.
Unlike its predecessor, Panzer Dragoon: Zwei featured branching paths and dragon evolutions that progress depending on player performance. It also added the Berserk Attack to the player arsenal, acting as a screen bomb equivalent by way of unleashing torrents of homing beams. These are listed among the key features on the Steam page for this remake. The modern reimagining will contain Pandora’s Box, in which the player can “unlock additional gameplay options, modifications and mission variants after completing the campaign.”
Tokyo Game Show 2025 runs from Sept. 25 to 28, so we anticipate seeing gameplay footage from the show floor demo. In the coming days, SHIRO! will compare the released screenshots to the same parts of the game on Saturn.
There is no release date set for Panzer Dragoon Zwei: Remake as of this writing.
The criticism of the first remake was overly harsh, imo, but the targeting complaints were fair. Fingers crossed that the Zwei remake is what saturn fans are anticipating.