Woooo I finished Zone of the Enders, been a bit since I've cleared a game. It was pretty good! Time to write a lot about a game for no reason, though I'll try to keep it shorter this time
Zone of the Enders
Developer/Publisher: Konami
System: PS2 (I am personally playing the PS3 HD Collection port)
Release Year: 2001
Genre: 3D Action Beat 'em Up / Mecha
Zone of the Enders is best known because people only bought to play the MGS2 demo, and because it's a "Hideo Kojima Game", even though Kojima mainly served as a producer. As a result, the story isn't anything super complicated; I'll spare you a plot synopsis but you can pretty quickly that it is...
subtly inspired by Evangelion, with some classic AI tropes in there too (ala Terminator 2, Metroid Fusion, etc. Maybe ZoE is a bit original in this regard but the ideas definitely feel familiar). I am surprised to hear that the localization was considering one of the game's biggest problems. Don't get me wrong, the voice acting isn't
good, especially given the poor cutscene lip sync (and there's no option to use Japanese audio as far as I can tell) but it certainly isn't bad. The voices match the characters well enough, though some of the delivery isn't as natural as it should be. But I think the story still works; it really comes down to the game's small scale and characters. The game isn't about a hero and the plot isn't really about saving the world (though you do end up doing that I guess), it's just carrying out a simple but important task and watching our characters grow as that happens. I don't think Leo is whiny and his general anxiety about everything is perfectly understandable, and his steady growth and interactions with ADA to become someone better: Finding a purpose beyond survival and, more importantly, be willing to the "illogical" thing of doing brave things even in the face of near-certain death. And watching ADA grow with him, and seeing his interactions slowly develop with other characters, it's all super endearing. Zone of the Enders's plot and premise isn't super original, and it really feels like a prologue to something bigger, but its nature and the way it's told really makes the game so much more pleasing to play.
Come to think of it...I don't really have much to say about the gameplay. 3D Action Beat 'em up, mech combat so you can fly around, it's nothing particularly complicated. There's like a weapon system or something but it's not particularly useful, and as cool as the bosses are most of them just involve camping with projectiles, while most enemies are dealt with melee. It does get repetitive and mindless at points (which I'll get to), but it's very satisfying nonetheless, and I think that's what matters most. I'd hope Hard or Very Hard makes the game a bit more interesting. The music isn't anything to write home about either, but there are definitely some good tracks (
City Area, both the
piano version and
main version of Flowing Destiny,
the final boss theme)
Now, despite all this praise, I don't think the game is great per se. The graphics on this PS3 port aren't very good seeing as it's just a sharpened up PS3 game that has still has meh draw distance and the occasional pop-in. The performance is also uh...
questionable, with some bleh framerates especially in the Mountain stage, though as a retro game nerd it's far from unplayable and I've seen worse in Youtube vids of some AAA games. I have heard the PS2 port runs better but then you have to play it in SD, so pick your poison there (apparently the 2nd Runner HD port was patched to have better performance so I'm hoping for the best). But my main of contention with this game is the middle third (dare I say middle half) which...is pretty bad to be honest. While the first third is linear with the occasional side objective and the last third is completely linear, for this middle section the plot and pacing screeches to a halt as the game basically becomes a series of fetch quests interrupted by fairly mindless battles. You're constantly blocked from progress because there's some item you need to unlock something, that item is often located in previous areas and may even be locked behind a password, which is an item you'll need to grab from somewhere else, meaning you'll be constantly poking your head into old levels hoping to find what you're looking for; there's one particular item you need that isn't even marked on the maps so I just gave up and resorted to a guide rather than waste another hour. This section really only serves to pad out the game to 4-5 hours, when I would've been perfectly fine with a 3 hour campaign.
But yeah Zone of the Enders was fun. Honestly, the story was the through-line that made this a fun time for me, though the gameplay was fun for what it was. Go play it I guess, or play the sequel, it's apparently much better and includes a quick summary of this game's plot.
7 / 10