After 20 years, Panzer Dragoon Saga’s composer finally made the soundtrack she always wanted

Two decades ago Saori Kobayashi was given the chance to work on something epic. As a composer at Sega during the early 1990’s, she cut her teeth working primarily on licensed games based on cartoons like Donald Duck and Inspector Gadget, as well as a few Sonic the Hedgehog spinoffs. Then, after five years with the company, she took on a much more ambitious kind of project, composing the soundtrack to Panzer Dragoon Saga. It was a fantasy role-playing game for the Sega Saturn, and a follow-up to some of Sega’s most beloved games.

Along with co-composer Mariko Nanba, Kobayashi was able to craft a memorable and eclectic album that perfectly suited the game’s fantasy-meets-post-apocalyptic world. Over the ensuing years, it’s an album she hears about regularly from fans. And while Kobayashi has had a long and successful career since, Panzer Dragoon Saga is arguably her defining work. But something about it never quite felt right.

“I WAS ACTUALLY QUITE YOUNG AND INEXPERIENCED.”

Kobayashi says that the songs she wrote for the album have always sounded a little “cheap” when she re-listens to them. Part of the problem is technical; the infamously complex Saturn was a challenging platform to develop for, and that could make it difficult to get music sounding just right on the hardware. Another issue was how new she was to composing soundtracks. “I can’t help but feel that I was actually quite young and inexperienced,” she says.

Now she’s getting a chance to fix that.

Next week will see the debut of a new, rearranged version of the Panzer Dragoon Saga soundtrack, one overseen by Kobayashi herself. (Called Resurrection: Panzer Dragoon Saga, the album is available for preorder now and will debut on January 29th.) With two decades’ worth of experience and skill, she’s taken another look at a number of the album’s songs, and rewritten them so that they better match her initial goals when she set out composing them.

“By rearranging the album this time, I was able to achieve the kind of music that I wanted to do 20 years ago,” she says. “This project allowed me to achieve things that weren’t possible then.”

Saori Kobayashi.

 Image: Brave Wave Productions

Saga is the third game in the Panzer Dragoon series and one that took the franchise in a very different direction. The first two entries were shooters where players rode mythical dragons through the ruins of an ancient civilization, fighting off the rise of a new evil. Part of what made the series distinct was its post-apocalyptic setting, which fused together elements of fantasy and science fiction to create a fascinating realm. It’s the kind of place where you could wield bioengineered weapons while riding a dragon through a medieval-style village.

Image: Brave Wave

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The shift to a role-playing structure meant that Saga would be more focused on story than its predecessors, which included the introduction of voice acting and lengthy cutscenes, though it retained the same setting. The series already had an established sound by this point, a mixture of orchestral music and synthesizer tracks created by Yoshitaka Azuma that fit the eclectic setting well. When Kobayashi came on board, her main goal was to retain that same feeling, while expanding on it by drawing from new influences. “I did have quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how I could add my own style into the game,” she says.

Saga’s soundtrack features sounds reminiscent of traditional European and Middle Eastern folk music, merged with synthesizer sounds that give it something of a sci-fi feel. For Kobayashi, the range of influences simply came from the music she was listening to at the time, which, when put together, turned out to be a great fit for the game’s world. “It’s got this mysterious element to it,” she says of the music.

Kobayashi would go on to compose a number of other games over the years, including Panzer Dragoon Orta on the original Xbox in 2003. Eventually she left Sega, and in 2013 she signed on with budding video game music label Brave Wave Productions. In 2016 she released her debut solo album, called Terra Magica, which featured a similar sound to the one she began exploring with Saga. With the game’s 20th anniversary looming, and Brave Wave having experienced success with remastered versions of the Street Fighter II and Ninja Gaiden soundtracks, they eventually decided to revisit Saga.

One of the initial hurdles with the new album was that none of the original sequencer data for the music still exists. “It’s like losing a game’s source code,” explains Alexander Aniel, co-founder of Brave Wave and director on the album. “You can still play the game if you want, but without the source code, it would be more difficult to recreate it for another platform.” Without the original sound data to reference, Kobayashi instead listened to older versions of the soundtrack on CD, and composed her new arrangements based on that.

“IT’S GOT THIS MYSTERIOUS ELEMENT TO IT.”

“I think the biggest thing I had to think about at the beginning was to what extent should I rearrange the music,” Kobayashi says. The goal was to maintain the original feeling of the songs, while making them feel more modern, the kind of music listeners would enjoy outside of the context of a game. “One of the things I wanted to achieve with the arrangement was that people could listen to it on its own merits, even if they’re not Panzer Dragoon fans, even if they never listened to the original version before,” she says.

The result is a 20-track album that twists and sways, jumping from bombastic, electric songs like “Atolm Dragon,” to more solemn, peaceful tracks like “Toward the Promised Land.” There’s even a new version of the game’s theme song “Sona Mi Areru Ac Sancitu,” which features lyrics in the series’ fictional “Panzerese” language, sung by Eri Itō. The song is more sorrowful this time around, with a slow, yet stirring string section leading into a piano-heavy rendition of theme. The piece is indicative of the album as a whole: both new and familiar, and capable of summoning fond memories of the game from two decades ago.

If given the chance, Kobayashi says she’d be interested in doing something similar with the Panzer Dragoon Orta soundtrack in the future, and she’d also love to revisit some of the Saga songs that didn’t make it on to the new album due to time constraints. For now, though, she’s pleased with the new versions of the album — even if it took a while to get to this point. “I would say these arrangements are quite faithful to the original in a lot of ways,” she says, “so you could say they’re definitive.”