Without a leaderboard or any means of memorializing your best runs, there’s little reason to go back more than once or twice. Then again, once you do finish it, there isn’t much more to do except replay it on hard mode, which is more taxing but not necessarily more satisfying.

The campaign is short – I finished my first run on normal difficulty in about 70 minutes – but that doesn’t take the sting out of getting to the last level and losing all your progress. If you don’t, it’s game over and you’re back to the beginning. There’s no mid-level checkpointing, but if you have a credit you can restart the level you died on. You can earn extra lives or “credits” at the end of each level, depending on your performance specifically, your accuracy, how many enemies you shot down, and how many got away. That’s because even though Panzer Dragoon was made for the Sega Saturn it’s built like an arcade game: you have two shots to fly and shoot your way through its seven levels. The 3D on-rails shooter took me just over an hour to beat, and outside. And those seven levels make up the entirety of the game.

“But yes, I did say it’s less than two hours long. Panzer Dragoon: Remake Review Screenshots Provided by Nintendo.

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