Forever Entertainment, MegaPixel Studio, and TA Publishing first announced that they were working on remakes of Team Andromeda and Sega's cult classic rail shooters Panzer Dragoon and Panzer Dragoon II Zwei all the way back in 2018.
However, seven years have now passed since then and only one of the two planned games, Panzer Dragoon Remake, has been released (to middling reviews), while its sequel, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei Remake, is still missing in action. To make matters even weirder, the game still has no definitive launch, and its main development team has seemingly become preoccupied with other projects, including the recently announced House of the Dead 2 Remake. This has led some to become curious about what has been going on behind the scenes and whether the game is even still being worked on at all.
As a result, we at Time Extension decided to conduct our own little investigation into the development of the game, reaching out to both current and former developers at MegaPixel Studio, as well as the various other companies involved to try to get some up-to-date information on the project.
In the end, we spoke to five people with varying degrees of knowledge about the project (under the condition of anonymity) and dug up a bunch of other publicly available information online. This confirmed to us that over half of the original 31-person Panzer Dragoon Remake team at MegaPixel Studio have since left the studio or been laid off since the Zwei was initially announced and indicated that, although some progress has been made on the long-awaited sequel, it hasn't exactly been a priority at the studio over the last few years. This suggests fans may have even longer to wait before the game ever sees the light of day.
According to a Twitter post from the official Panzer Dragoon: Remake Twitter account back in February 2021, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei was originally scheduled to come out a year after its predecessor — something that is backed up by several Forever Entertainment's investor relations reports dated between 2020 to early 2021. This never ended up happening, though, with the game later being given a "TBA" status in a July 2021 presentation from MegaPixel Studio and the main development instead going to work on Forever Entertainment's 2022 House of the Dead Remake.
From then on, updates on the project were few and far between, with Forever Entertainment's marketing & communications manager at the time later telling fans, in early 2023, on Discord that the project was a work-in-progress and calling the previous date the result of an "unfortunate" error made by someone who no longer works at Forever Entertainment. Behind the scenes, however, MegaPixel had again mostly put aside work on the Panzer Dragoon sequel, focusing its efforts on a remake of the PS1 title Fear Effect called Fear Effect Reinvented while committing to work on a further three titles: a remake of House of the Dead 2 and remakes of two games in the Front Mission series (assisting fellow Forever Entertainment subsidiary Storm Trident with the development of Front Mission 2: Remake and leading the production of Front Mission 3).
Fear Effect Reinvented was later cancelled in 2023, as later revealed in a Polish media report, with Forever Entertainment and Square Enix agreeing to terminate the contract for the project. This led to an undisclosed amount of layoffs at the studio, according to our sources, including some members of the original Panzer Dragoon Remake team.
In March 2024, Forever Entertainment's marketing and communications manager later provided another update on the status of Panzer Dragoon Zwei Remake via Discord, stating, “We can’t post a lot of WIPs but as soon as all [parties] involved are happy we’ll show more" before elaborating, "The game certainly exists and yes, I've played it". This led some to believe a reveal of the game might be possible before the end of the year. But Forever Entertainment and MegaPixel instead announced in January 2025 that it was working on a remake of House of the Dead 2 that will be released in the Spring of this year, again suggesting the project has once again been pushed to the side.
We contacted Forever Entertainment for a comment on the game, but again a representative for the company simply stated "The project is still a work in progress."
We followed this up with a more direct line of questioning about what had caused the delays to the project, but the publisher again refused to offer more information, stating "We'll share more information, once we can. At the moment it's a work in progress."
We'll keep digging and see if we can find out anything else. But, in the meantime, it's probably for the best that you don't hold your breath.