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.