As a love of the Sega Saturn, and the Panzer Dragoon series in particular, I was understandably excited to see a new game in the series launch on Kickstarter. Could this be the next mega campaign? The next Shenmue 3 if you will?
(Queue sad trombone) Unfortunately not.
The campaign for Panzer Dragoon Gaiden is nothing more than yet another pipe-dream Kickstarter with 100 words of text, a crudely constructed cover image, and not much else. Is it a scam? Not necessarily, as scams tend to have a bit more effort put into them. With a scam you would typically see a detailed breakdown of what the supposed developers hopes to accomplish, a variety of funding goals, and a serious funding goal. The Panzer Dragoon Gaiden campaign has none of that. The $5,000(cad) funding goal makes it obvious that a lot of factors haven’t been considered. To drive the point home here’s what’s listed in the “Risks and challenges” portion:
Finding a suitable place within the Panzer Dragoon timeline for the game to occur in has been one of the biggest challenges thus far. Feedback is still appreciated as we still have yet to decide on this.
That’s the biggest challenge? What about getting the rights to make another Panzer Dragoon game? Here’s what the campaign organizer has to say about that:
Q: Do you guys even have rights?
A: No, but we are reaching an agreement that will allow both parties to benefit.
Who knows, maybe $5,000(cad) is enough to get the right and make a worthwhile game?*
Kickstarter seriously needs to be more thorough 🙁