Really cool aesthetic, with fully animated cutscenes that make you feel like you're watching one of those early 90s Sci fi anime movies.

Gameplay wise, this is my favorite mecha game, if you can even call it that. It's much more like a character action game where you happen to play as a mech. It's lightning fast and you are loaded with special weapons you can use to approach fights, but my favorite thing to do is to grab enemy robots and bash them into each other. The core combat is extremely fun.

The story missions are very mixed. The game is at its best when it goes hands off and throws scores of enemies at you and let's you handle things, or during boss fights. The game is at its worst during the several escort missions where you have to protect ally mechs, and theres even a forced stealth section. Other missions, like one where you fly around in the stratosphere blowing up an enemy fleet of battleships, make up for it though.

The degree of environmental interaction is impressive, buildings can be destroyed, objects can be thrown and swung as weapons. Always appreciate when environments are more than just props in action games.

This game is a classic, wish it was talked about more.

Talk about an absolute improvement. ZOE2 enhances and refines almost every element from the first game (with the exception of the voice acting and music). Jehuty controls so insanely well and zipping around the field feels so smooth. Combat feels snappier and more strategic with how subweapons got overhauled, I was discovering easier ways to take down fights on subsequent playthroughs. Dingo is a sassy bitch and I love him. NG+ runs are where ZOE2 really shines, you can blast through the game in like an hour and a half, and be ready to hop right back in for more.

Also the mech designs CONTINUE TO COOK MAN

I'll spare you a full repost and just link the original review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Reyn/review/665135/

To leave some comments on the original version specifically...well, it's still ANUBIS: Zone of the Enders. The combat's beauty was obviously nailed the first time around, and this is technically still true for the encounter design, but (and this might just be from playing the versions with the Special Edition content so much) the pacing might be a little tooooo snappy; going straight from Anubis to finding Taper is the big glaring point in my eyes. Not necessarily worse, just pretty abrupt.

Part of why the SE content works is that all of the new fights are actually pretty general, owed to the reuse of areas (the Cellar Room was a VS. Mode map in the original). There's no real gimmick to any of them, but instead they give you some appreciated space in the main game to mess around for a bit. If you ask me, it's more preferable than the Extra Missions, which usually just tend to be recycled fights anyway, only now with a best time to shoot for.

Beyond that, it's mostly some visual polish that the SE has to its name: the extra Subweapon displays in cutscenes, and, ironically, extra cutscenes in general, smooth things out a bit more. Another abrupt jump in the original game is from the Codec bit with Ken on Phobos straight into the Nepthis clones. The new cutscene alone helps it feel less sudden, not to mention the chance to nuke regular mobs as Naked Jehuty. For all intents and purposes, the endgame is the equivalent of reaching robot godhood, and getting to exercise that power is always satisfying; funny how even a non-fight can add so much to the experience.

VS. Mode's new UI and meter system also make it feel more refined...even if it's still kusoge-tier.


Still a great game, just that you can see how those extra months in the oven made it even better. Does bring the fine-tuning (or lack thereof) of some of the wackier sections on Extreme into question, though.

zone of the enders 1 is an OK game. it has a hefty amount of problems, and doesn't amount to much more than a tech demo, but it's a fun enough tech demo. the combat system is fun enough to use and the story and voice acting have a kind of so-bad-they're-good quality to them. it's the exact kind of game a sequel is essential for, and in this case it would have been a doddle to make it good. give it a good narrative, make the voice acting work, and tighten up the mission design, and you would have something truly special. the high praise for this game left me excited to see what a truly good ZotE game would look like. those hopes did not last long.

there is far too much clunk. there is far too much jank. the experience of playing this game has aged like milk. the difficulty step up is monumental, for a start. certain sections of this game took far too long to complete. one after another, you are hit with missions that are just so poorly designed and repetitive. whoever conceived of the train level, there is a special place in hell for you.

the player has to constantly fight the awful camera system you get to work with. furthermore, you have to work around this hideous lock-on system. it works fine in a handful of battle scenarios (although often leads to these situations being so visually disorientating and chaotic you want to be sick) but something the game constantly likes to do is throw swarms of tiny enemies at you. this wouldn't be too bad on its own, but when there are other actually threatening robots in the mix, it's all over. when you are just trying to lock-on to the robot that is pummelling you, and the lock-on system is targeting individual enemies in these swarms, you feel a frustration i cannot put into words. just awful to play, and feels so bad.

the majority of your subweapons are useless in the majority of battle scenarios, too. this means that your best bet is to hack-and-slash through your opponents, and the game is not well-designed around this and doing it just feels so mindless and mind-numbing. the story starts out interesting, and there's a particularly cool cameo for players of the first ZotE game, which was nice. however it just doesn't lead to anything interesting happening and the cutscene writing feels like a combination of MGS and the more tech jargony stuff in a mecha anime like evangelion. that, and the voice acting is now just flat-out lifeless.

fuck, man. i was rooting for this game at the start. but, by its end, i had grown so sick and tired of it. ZotE 2 totally failed to live up to any expectations i had for it, and is proof that just because a sequel is bigger does not mean it's better. improving on the first game should have been so easy, and how hard they failed in that way just makes me sad.

yes this means i prefer the first ZotE game. i am not immune to abysmal takes, it seems.

One of the best action games on the PS2 and still one of the best mech action games. It's fairly short, but it allows for quick replays on higher difficulties. The campaigns momentum never lets up and every section of the game has some unique gimmick to it. City defense, destroying airships with a super weapon, navigating through minefields, fighting alongside an entire army against an enemy force in the 100s. By the end of the game you've unlocked so many powers that you feel like you're on a completely different level compared to the start of the game. The final power letting you instantly teleport behind enemies from long range and one shot them is incredible.

bring pride to glorious nation



me gusto

Zone of the Enders: The Twin Snakes.

This game might be the poster child for the law of equivalent exchange. Virtually everything that was bad or half-baked in the original has been fixed, but a lot of what's been added is subpar.

Two years may not seem like a lot, and in the world of video games, it isn't. Even then, that was all the time it took for Konami to actually take Zone of the Enders into the sixth generation; the previous entry into the series came out a little over a year into the PS2's lifespan, but it looked like the first Armored Core. It probably wouldn't be hard to trick someone who wasn't aware of the franchise into believing that Zone of the Enders was on the same console as Metal Gear Solid rather than Sons of Liberty. The first thing you'll notice about 2nd Runner is the massive facelift. The game looks stunning. Some choppy faux slow-motion and ghosting frames distract a little from the polish on display here, but these are just occasional strange editing choices more than anything else. Gonzo, Anime Roman, and DR Movie all contribute their work for the hand-drawn cutscenes, which were an inspired decision over the rather mediocre 3DCG shots to be found in the original.

Jehuty also feels significantly less like a flying jalopy and more like the magical mecha that the series has claimed it to be, with a complete overhaul of the controls and battle mechanics. Now introduced to the mix is an increased emphasis on environmental combat, encouraging the player to slap enemies into walls, floors, and ceilings to deal bonus damage and lock them into stun states. Dash missiles now track dozens upon dozens of enemies at once, giving you the tools to instantly mow down hordes of Mosquito drones. Grabbing an enemy still gives you the option to chuck them into terrain, but now also lets you swing them around as weapons and use them as meat shields. Combat is fast, intense, and swarm-heavy; a far cry from the dash-slash dash-slash dash-slash loops of old.

The open-world backtracking segments are out, now replaced by linear level progression. This was one of the more interesting aspects of the original game, even though it could have used some tweaking; it's all been thrown out in favor of some atrocious objective checklisting. If you thought the backtracking felt bad before, you haven't felt the padding in 2nd Runner. Fly through a canyon to get to blow up a generator, fly back through the canyon with all of the enemies respawned, fly through an identical-but-mirrored canyon to blow up a second generator, and then fly back through the second canyon with all of the enemies respawned. This exact same pattern gets repeated about two more times in the game's six-hour runtime, just replacing "canyon" with "basement", or "slightly different basement". You get two escort missions, and they're both awful. One boss fight requires you to do nothing but parry sword swings and then grab the other frame over the course of about five minutes. Another just asks you to throw rebar. A third asks you to grab a steel plate and use it as a shield. In case you can't figure these out on your own, ADA will helpfully interrupt in the middle of combat to tell you exactly what you need to do to progress. Sometimes she'll interrupt while you're actively doing the thing she's telling you to do.

What's clear is that the heavier emphasis on setpieces takes precedence over all else, to mixed results. The massive battlefield sequence is impressive in terms of scale, though marred somewhat by the extremely limited render distance and endless, rapid-fire ally barks begging to be hit with GEYSER. Unloading the VECTOR CANNON (all caps) into an airship's engine for fifteen straight seconds is cool once, and then you have to do it four more times without dying to the anti-air defenses or you have to start over from the first ship. Inhert turning the lights out in his second phase and forcing you to rely on ADA's verbal guidance is awesome, but the fight goes for nearly five extra minutes even though it stops being interesting after the first two cycles. Bosses keep doing that trick where they have a seemingly-absurd amount of health, but you only need to hit them a couple of times before the game automatically ends the fight.

The translation is somehow even worse than the original. It's shocking how bad it is. Like, it's distractingly bad. There are more than a few lines in here where I knew they weren't written by native English speakers because of how rudimentary some of the grammatical errors are. One character, while establishing a timeline, drops the phrase "half year ago" to start their sentence. "Half year ago". Not "half a year ago", or "a half-year ago", or even the stiffer "one half-year ago". Half year ago. You cannot write something this blatantly wrong unless English isn't your first language, or you're in first grade.

A little digging through the credits revealed the answer: while noted Kojima yes-man Scott Dolph — perhaps best known for filling in on the later Metal Gear Solid games in place of Jeremy Blaustein after the latter delivered one of the best translations ever written and was fired by Kojima for not adhering literally enough to the script, but I digress — is here as a translation assistant, the bulk of the work seems to have fallen on the Japan-based translation company SPROUT. SPROUT proudly advertises that they can fully translate a work from Japanese into English in as little as three days, though they admit averaging out at five. It shows. While Zone of the Enders had a rough translation, 2nd Runner's is often so bad that I struggled to understand what some of the characters were even attempting to say. Even then, Ken and Nohman's actors really seem like they're trying to make these lines work, and they kind of save the dub by themselves.

It's certainly a more technically impressive game — faster, bigger, prettier — and yet it feels directionless. 2nd Runner is a game that seems like it's trying to cram everything into a single package, and it winds up making its constituent parts feel half-baked. I'm watching Buster Keaton plugging the holes in his boat with his fingers; for everyone one issue that Konami addressed, they introduced another.

Without the angel effect of including a bundled Metal Gear Solid demo disc, 2nd Runner released to poor sales and resulted in the halting of all momentum the series had going. With the potential for a third game now firmly dead and buried, it's a shame that we may never get to see this series fully realized.

Incredible Mech game, probably the best one I've played after Into the Breach.

Action packed, great boss battles and villains.

Good job not going up your own ass with this one Kojima!