Immensely cool ideas marred by middling execution.

I've got a bit of a history with Zone of the Enders. A lot of people bought this game when it was brand new, purely for the sake of getting to play the included Metal Gear Solid 2 demo. I was born a good decade and a half after most of those people, which meant that I bought Zone of the Enders HD Collection purely for the sake of getting to play the included Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance demo. I look forward to 2033 when we’ll all be buying Zone of the Enders Holodeck to play the demo of Metal Gear Solid VI: Providential Pachinko Action.

All of this to say that I owned Zone of the Enders, but I never played it. I dropped like forty dollars on a game I had zero interest in booting up just so I could get early access to a demo for something else. This isn’t even an uncommon experience; a lot of people who picked up the PS2 original only bothered opening up the box to get to the demo disk of Metal Gear Solid 2. It was like throwing out the corn flakes to get to the prize at the bottom. The sequel games sold like complete shit and killed whatever momentum the series had going, and the HD rerelease suffered a similar fate. Zone of the Enders, it would seem, is not allowed to succeed on its own merits.

This is something that I was instructed to play, but it’s a title I’ve always had in the back of my mind. A super robot game with Hideo Kojima’s name on it should be the exact kind of thing that tickles all the good spots of my brain.

Why doesn't it, then?

Zone of the Enders is a remarkably shallow game. Despite — or perhaps because of — its short runtime, the game is made to be as padded as physically possible. You will constantly be going back through areas you've already cleared in rote cycles, cluelessly fumbling around until you find the one zone where the item you need to progress has mysteriously spawned in.

There are precisely three different enemy types, though two of them are practically identical to one another, and you will never, ever be able to tell them apart in combat. Each foe can easily be bested by dashing and slashing, and these two actions are going to be making up the overwhelming bulk of what you're doing if you're trying to spare the buildings around you; laser shots are inaccurate and cause collateral damage, throws are slow and will obliterate terrain, and subweapons seem laser-guided to dodge foes and seek out houses.

A single stray shot will cause an entire duplex to go up in smoke and flames as though people have been storing open cans of gasoline in their bedrooms. You are ranked on how many buildings are destroyed, or how many lives are lost, but this doesn't seem to actually do anything besides make you feel kind of shitty for not doing well. If you play on hard or above, destroyed buildings take your experience points away and level you down, making the Jehuty weaker. Considering how one single, piddly laser shot is all it takes to clear-cut a city block, your choices in difficulty are between "so easy you could beat it while in a coma" and "frustrating enough to make you chew through your own Dualshock 2 wires".

But these are interesting ideas! It's cool that you're incentivized to minimize destruction in a genre where destruction is almost always maximized; big, cool, physics-defying robots, tearing apart cities in grand battles with one another just for the sake of setting up a cooler setpiece. Zone of the Enders certainly wasn't anywhere near the first to notice or make comment on this — the Gundam OVAs were already showcasing what happens to the little people who get caught in the crossfire a decade prior — but video games are fun. They're explosive, they're chaotic. Disincentivizing the wreaking of havoc is uncommon. Forcing the player to reign it in and kite enemies to barren parts of the map like Goku to Cell is a neat concept.

The plot beats of a heartless computer finding love for humans and a kid getting in a big robot to fuck some horrible warmonger's day up are so good that they almost make it possible to overlook the atrocious voice acting and even worse translation. Everything surrounding Anubis owns. Seeing Jehuty's needle-thin feet slicing through steel floors while it skates around had me doing donuts just so I could keep looking at the animation for longer. The game nails an aesthetic and an attitude, and it's one that I'm a sucker for.

But the act of playing the game is made boring through its constant repetition. If Zone of the Enders was an anime, it'd be comprised almost entirely of static panning shots and be made on the strictest possible budget. This is evidenced further by the Zone of the Enders anime that was comprised almost entirely of static panning shots and was made on the strictest possible budget. If you've seen Zone of the Enders being played for ten minutes, you've seen it being played for five hours. It feels more like a demo than the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo did.

I've heard that the sequel game improves on nearly every aspect of the original, and it's one that I'm definitely interested in checking out. This game sets the stage for Zone of the Enders to turn into something spectacular, and I'm optimistic that a more experienced, confident development team can find it in themselves to evolve, iterate, and learn from everything that was done here.

We have obtained the Metatron ore. We have obtained the Metatron ore. We have obtained the Metatron ore.