What heck is Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern?

Subject: What heck is Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern?
Author: Thoth
Posted on: 2020-11-16 16:51:15 UTC

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a ROM of curious and forgotten lore...

I found a videogame. See, I was looking for a copy of Dynamite Cop on the Dreamcast, so I browsed to the 'D' section of my less-than-legal resources, and I found Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern, a game released in 2001 on the PC and Dreamcast by Ubisoft. That, in and of itself, is really weird. By 2000, everyone already knew that the Dreamcast was going to fall behind in sales, and by October of that year, the PS2's insane launch-day sales had cemented that. On January 21 of 2001, Sega announced that it was leaving the console market, and everyone had seen it coming. That means that this game released on a console that was already dead, and on PC, which was not really a great market for this sort of game. So this thing's mere existence is... weird. It feels like something happened to this game. I don't know what happened, but there's no way that everything went as planned, because nobody would have planned this if they were in their right minds.

Futhermore... it's a Pern game. How did that happen? Why did that happen? I don't think Pern was exactly a hot and exciting property in 2001, and the last Pern videogame was released in 1983. Why, after 18 years, why 2001 the right year to try again? I mean, to my mind, 2001 is probably the wrong year to try again, because the Pern series was about to take a nosedive in the general consensus (Although I confess the last Pern book I read was Masterharper...). Once again, the circumstances around this game are baffling.

And the only thing more baffling than the circumstances around the game are how it plays. I'll confess, I haven't gotten very far in it, at all, because it's... so, so bad. Chronicles of Pern is five years behind the times, and I mean that literally, because it plays like Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation. Actually, it plays worse. The game uses a fixed camera and tank controls (forward moves the character in the direction they're pointing, back moves them opposite that, left and right turns them). This was common the Playstation, for reasons that are a little bit complicated to explain right now (technical limitations of the system and ways to make games look better resulted in designs that were amenable to this sort of thing), but this game is on the Dreamcast, and doesn't use any sort of prerendered background. Sonic Adventure, released three years prior, had a much better camera, and that game is famous for having a poor camera. And while fixed camera and tank controls were common for horror games in 2001, since it was traditional and the poor controls and ability for the game to hide enemies just offscreen could contribute to the horror, this isn't a horror game! there's no excuse. This decision... baffles me. And the combat is even worse. It feels unresponsive, the controls are confusing, and I have no idea what's going on.

Also your dragon has a super weird, deep voice that kinda freaks me out?

Honestly, I can't decide if I want this game out of my sight forever or if I want to play more to see how bad it gets. If anyone else is curious, you can grab the PC version on myabandonware, and the Dreamcast version from your favorite piracy site. But... mostly, I'm just utterly confused and fascinated. I had no idea this existed until a few days ago, and I still have no clue how it got made.

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What heck is Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern? by Thoth on 2020-11-16 16:51:15 UTC

Oh dear. by Neshomeh on 2020-11-16 18:14:22 UTC Reply

I don't recall hearing about this back in the day, and I expect there are good reasons for that.

At least the dragons look pretty decent in the screenshots I've just Googled. Old graphics, of course, but someone was at least paying attention to what the form of a Pernese dragon is.

What's the story, though? Or have you gotten far enough to tell yet?

~Neshomeh

I don't know a lot about it yet... by Thoth on 2020-11-16 21:11:29 UTC Edited Reply

The wikipedia description claims it's about a dragonrider who's on a Search for someone to impress a "new young gold dragon". I assume that means an egg, but who knows. There's also apparently a sideplot about a plague vaguely reminiscent of the one in Moreta's Ride...

The dragons do look right, I will give it that. But when everything else is bad...

Huh. by Neshomeh on 2020-11-18 15:53:45 UTC Reply

Y'know, I was thinking about the various attempts over the years to make a DroP movie, or TV series, or whatever. It occurs to me that what they should absolutely not do is try to center on the Ninth Pass. There's so much history that isn't already occupied with stories! The smart thing would be to do what Todd McCaffrey did and choose a different era to play in. A lot of trouble could be avoided that way.

Or, actually, I think Moreta's Ride would make a great film. It's self-contained. There's intrigue, drama, a ticking clock, plenty of action for the third act... it would work.

I'd say "let's explore the future," too, except that would require either coming up with a new adversary to pit against the dragonriders or doing what the fanbase has done a million times before and contriving a way for Thread to return. Either runs a high risk of coming off as an ill-thought out excuse to cash in.

Moreta, though—Moreta would be timely, too. A kick-ass lady hero saving the world from a deadly plague. We need this. Hollywood, get on this immediately!

~Neshomeh

The weird thing is... by Thoth on 2020-11-18 22:02:57 UTC Reply

This game takes your advice. It's set in the seventh or eighth pass (I forget which) with a by and large new cast... But of course, everything else is terrible.

I do agree though. Moreta film ASAP.

The Eighth Pass could be an interesting setting for storytelling. by Neshomeh on 2020-11-19 04:16:23 UTC Reply

Because that's when the Oldtimers come from. I don't know how many of the ones Lessa brings forward would have been active at the beginning of the Pass, but heck, pick whatever point during those fifty years at which T'ron and that lot are the rising stars. Show them becoming the heroes of their time, because for all their flaws (and show those, too), they were heroes in their own time. Done right, it would let us see their inability to integrate and their sharp decline 400 years later for the tragedy it was.

That could also be very relevant. Times change. Old ways get left behind when they no longer serve. It can be hard to let go, and the sense of loss and uncertainty deserves our sympathy—but letting fear of what is new and different overrule you, trying to hold the world back from necessary progress, and selfishly hoarding privileges you had under the old ways, isn't right. At best, you lose your dignity; at worst, you become a villain.

... So my guess would be that the game is set in the Seventh Pass, then. Either way, shame it doesn't play well enough to make good on it.

~Neshomeh

The issue with exploring the past... by Huinesoron on 2020-11-19 17:00:55 UTC Reply
... is that every time Pern does it, it ends up dragging in all the stuff from the present as well.

The Ninth Pass stories established very firmly that such things as timing it, fire lizards, and the Southern Continent were effectively unknown prior to the Pass. But is there a single past period which doesn't wind up pulling in at least two of those? By my count, Anne explored the First, Second, Sixth, and Ninth Passes, while Todd focussed on the Third. Add in this game in the Seventh - and yes, the wiki confirms it includes all three - and it's starting to sound like AIVAS woke up in the Eighth Pass and implemented a mass mind-wipe on the population of the planet!

Mind you, I reckon "Oldtimers" would be a great entry in the Pern Cinematic Universe. But if you did it first, the audience would be annoyed that nobody they actually like from the books showed up; while if you did it later, you'd have to find something useful to do with it rather than just writing a movie/series-length flashback.

... okay, now I'm imagining a PCU done in the same manner as the MCU - just tearing apart the original stories and scavenging them for parts. O'course, the reaction to the Discworld "Watch" series suggests that might be a losing gamble when it comes to book fandoms.

...

Okay so what you do is combine the Third and Ninth Passes.
1. Dragonriders of Pern - The dragon-centric bits of Masterharper
2. Masterharper - Politicking with Robinton and the rise of Fax
3. Untitled Crom Film - Kindan and Nuella (blind protagonist for the win!) mucking about in Crom, with industrialisation and Whers.
4. Lord of Seven Holds - Fax, down to his abrupt death.
5. Weyrwoman - Lessa and Ramoth grow into their power, probably including the time travel shenanigans with F'nor.
6. Untitled Harper Film - Kindan at Harper Hall, but also Fandarel doing technological stuff with the Crom lot.
7. Fall - Crash it all together, doing the Hold rebellion and the first Fall, F'lar's desperation - and end with Lessa going off on her suicide mission.
8. Oldtimers - 2/3 of a film about the end of the Eighth Pass, and then Lessa appears and drags them all away for:
9. Dragonflight - Pure dragon movie set at the start of the Pass, focussing on the Oldtimers' rebellion and its consequences. Jaxom, Southern, all of it.
The flashback movie conceit means we can drop in the Third Pass plague (with Moreta flashback - stuff Windblossom, Moreta gets the time-speaking healer gig), the Harper Hall trilogy (I admit I can't think of a plot-relevant Red Star Rising/Dragonseye flashback point), and of course AIVAS (Dragonsdawn flashback) across the next couple of phases. You end with the climax of All the Weyrs of Pern, because a) who cares about dolphins and trundlebugs, and b) who wants to watch a Pern series after Robinton died?

My read of the "The Watch" conversation - and the Star Wars EU dump - is that people are quite forgiving of changing the storyline, so long as you get the characters right. So I think this stands a chance! ^^ ^^ ^_^

hS

There sort of was a mind-wipe. by Neshomeh on 2020-11-19 22:07:50 UTC Edited Reply

Not in the literal sense, but in the sense that so much history was lost by the Ninth Pass. And it's not too surprising, considering the utter disaster that the loss of the "Oldtime" Weyrs would have represented for the people heading into the Long Interval. No one was allowed to say "Don't worry, everyone, they're going to the future to help out the people 450 years from now, everything will be fine." The reason for their disappearance had to be a complete mystery, with only a couple of cryptic clues seeded for Lessa to find so she could fulfill the predestination paradox. Back then? The world at large might well have felt it was the End Times and sunk into chaos.

Losing the five Weyrs means losing a sizeable chunk of Pern's store of knowledge, written and otherwise. After a few record-destroying earthquakes (Pern gets plenty of those) and maybe a couple other natural disasters to boot, boom, near-total loss of history, especially as pertains to the dragonriders. The only people who might creditably remember the truth about the Southern Continent, fire-lizards, timing it, and all the rest—Benden Weyr and the Harper Hall—lose as much as anyone, and they both eventually fall from grace, too. With only the Lords Holder remaining to represent leadership and security, they scramble to secure whatever control they have. The Holds become more insular; their leaders become more autocratic; they sink into the medieval-esque state in which we find them at the start of the Ninth Pass. The traditions that remain are clung to fiercely, with little to no understanding of the purposes they're meant to serve. It takes visionaries like Robinton, Fandarel, F'lar and Lessa, and the likes of Toric to begin drawing people out of the Dark Age and into Pernese Renaissance.

That's my attempt to headcanon that contradiction into making sense, anyway. {= )

That said, just because the franchise has dragged the present into the past before doesn't mean it always must. I understand the temptation to Do the All the Things, because the fans liked those things when Anne did them, so they must want them all the time, right? For my two cents, though, I don't think that's true. Back in my RP days, the bits everyone focused on were Search and Impression, fighting Thread, and mating flights. If a new adaptation takes us on a fun adventure with likeable characters and features those three things, I reckon it'll feel enough like Pern to work. If you want to focus on anything else, focus on the Harper Hall, and don't neglect the music. Scoring a film or TV adaptation well would be absolutely critical to making it feel like Pern, since we already have an idea how (some) Pernese music sounds thanks to the two albums.

I'm not sure how I feel about a whole PCU—in my thoughts about an Eight Pass film, it was a stand-alone supplement to the existing book franchise, not the foundation of a new cinematic universe—but I do know that I wouldn't appreciate seeing Menolly get the boot in favor of Kindan. You're already ruining my childhood! {; P

TL;DR, there's no need to reinvent the Ninth-Pass wheel or gild the dragons-and-riders lily.

~Neshomeh might have more thoughts later; these were strung together at work. Hope they make sense!