4Gamer Interviews Wildman Inc. about Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record

During an interview with 4Gamer and Mr Wildman / Haruto Watanabe (founder of Wildman Inc.) and Naoki Horii (director at M2), we learnt the following about the upcoming Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record.

• Naoki Horii, representative director of M2, was impressed by Wildman’s “The Gunner of Dragoon”, and decided to introduce Wildman to SEGA.
• Initially, Wildman hadn’t thought about making on official Panzer Dragoon game. Instead, he went to SEGA to ask them if he could put the Blue Dragon in his The Gunner of Dragoon game. However, SEGA encouraged him to instead try to get an official license for a Panzer Dragoon game instead. As such, he ended up making a pitch for Panzer Dragoon VR and delivered it to SEGA.
• SEGA asked M2 to make a Panzer Dragoon for Nintendo 3DS, but it didn’t end up happening. Instead the VR project seemed like it would get a lot of attention.
• Discussions with SEGA went smoothly thanks to Mr. Horii.
• Wildman Inc. will also be publishing the game, which means SEGA doesn’t stand to lose any money on the project. Wildman argues that if he were to ask for a SEGA to invest money into the game and the sales didn’t meet expectations, it could damage the Panzer Dragoon franchise. That’s something he wanted to avoid.
• Wildman also mention that despite low sales outside of Japan, Panzer Dragoon has a cult following, especially in North America.
• Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record is a VR remake of select stages from the trilogy, rather than a full VR remake of the first game. Wildman wasn’t sure if he could make more Panzer Dragoon VR games after this one, so rather than making a full remake of the original game, he wanted to include parts of Panzer Dragoon II Zwei and Panzer Dragoon Saga as well.
• For Panzer Dragoon Saga, the focus was on recreating the battle scenes in VR.
• There will be very few stages in the initial game, but it will contain “3 dragon fights + popular scenes”. Since they don’t have a huge budget, the focus is on recreating a small number of stages in AAA quality.
• Wildman says the goal of this project is to continue the Panzer Dragoon series based on the attention and performance of this VR project.
• Development of Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record is going well.
• The D-Unit Type 01 (a.k.a. Blue Dragon) in Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record is a 3D model created by K’s Design Lab based on the garage kit created by Yoshikazu Yamamoto based on the official documentation. It’s still being tweaked. Not all models will be based on garage kits.
• SEGA has given Wildman Inc permission to use crowdfunding to raise funds for the development of stages and scenes that can’t be implemented by Wildman alone.
• Mr Horii explained that people within SEGA had been pitching a new Sakura Wars project every year, much like with Panzer Dragoon, but there are a lot of steps involved in making such a project a reality. It took a “reckless young man” to knock on SEGA’s door and pitch his own project.
• Mr. Horii thought that if he could show Gunner of Dragoon to SEGA, there would be a future where Wildman would make a Panzer Dragoon game, and also a future where SEGA would make their own Panzer Dragoon game again.
• When presenting his demo to SEGA producers, Wildman told them that they “should do this too”, referring to making their own Panzer Dragoon game. Mr. Horii says he was hoping for Wildman to do that.
• Mr. Horii isn’t earning money from this, but he’s fine with that. He just wants to see the game released.

We tried to translate this to the best of our abilities. The full Japanese language interview can be found on 4gamer.net, where some concept art from Panzer Dragoon Voyage Record has also been added. Nice to see Atolm!