No idea how this ended up being the first Kojima game I actually played despite being familiar with his works for nearly a decade and this being one of them I knew the least about prior to playing.

Zone of the Enders might be the most standard cheesy mech game to ever cheesy mech game. The controls and camera are definitely a product of their time and fights can become a bit samey with standard enemies constantly being reused throughout the game's runtime. Variety still manages to at least present itself in interesting boss fights that were pretty fun to figure out the different timings/rhythms to and the different upgrades that can be applied to your mech. The balance was a bit silly with some items being blatantly better than others while some were nearly useless, but just having the option of a large arsenal combined with the fun movement made combat all the more fun than it had any right to be.

I'd go far as to say that this would objectively be a very average to mediocre game, but it was good to me. Something about the early-2000s cheesy sci-fi atmosphere and combat that didn't try to be deeper than it was made this one really fun despite some minor frustrating moments.