Zone of the Enders

"KCEJ West again shows that they are on of the best"

Zone Of the Enders, ZOE, takes place on the space colony Antillia in orbit around Jupiter. You play as Leo, a young boy, who by an accident comes over the Orbital Frame (large humanoid robot) Jehuty while running away from an assault on the colony. The onboard computer ADA tells him how to operate it and that he has to do as framerunner (pilot) since the original framerunner didn’t get to Jehuty. So Leo has to fight off the invading forces himself. You’ll play in different areas that you travel to from an overworld map. The game could best be described as an adventure game with lots of action. It also has some RPG elements; Jehuty will level up and get new abilities and new weapons. From the start Jehuty has almost nothing except the basic equipment. New abilities and weapons are gained from passcodes, which allows you to download new programs from terminals. Have you ever wondered what happens to the people in trashed buildings in Evangelion? Well, in ZOE some of the areas are populated and the amount of killed people will affect the ending. This is a very interesting thought for a game like this. Hideo Kojima says this is an anime robot game.
And that is a very fitting description.

Presentation – 9
The case has a nice design and so has the DVD and manual. The game starts with a nice cinematic. Some various scenes from the game are put together and a nice song is played. The menus have a nice layout and the only flaw is the way the selected line is marked. At least I needed some time to get used to it. No big deal though. You can also select how hard you would like to have it when you start a new game. I miss two things that should be standard in those days; a selectable NTSC video mode since it’s faster than PAL and 95%-99% of all PAL TVs supports a NTSC video signal, and a screen adjust option. On my two years old TV about 1cm was outside the left border. All my other PS2 games allow me to correct this, but ZOE didn’t.

Graphics 9
This is a gorgeous looking game. High detailed Orbital Frames, very good light effects, detailed backgrounds. Yoji Shinkawa certainly knows how to design cool robots. This is what the new games for the PS2 should look like. The camera is very dynamic and follows your Jehuty very good. I would have given this a 10 if the camera didn’t hide between structures etc once in a while. It doesn’t affect the gameplay much since it’s usually only for a split of a second. But, nevertheless, it is a flaw.

Sound 8
To be honest I was worried when I heard they would give the game English voices. I’ve played the Japanese version at my local gamestore some times and I really liked the Japanese voices. But, fearing the worst, I was surprised they turned out as good as they did. Except from Viola who sounds like some uninterested voice actress reading directly from the script and ADA who sounds more like a machine than the Enterprise computers (I really liked the Japanese ADA), the rest of the voices are surprisingly well done. Not up to MGS standard, but not to far from it. But, even if they English voices were actually good we do live in the DVD era, so why not making an option where you can select a Japanese voice mode with English subs? The music is good, but it could have been some more tracks and some tracks lack variation. And finally, the sound effects are also good.

Gameplay/Control 10
Since the heavy amount of fighting (570 enemies destroyed during my first play through) this is important. And the controls are very responsive and neither too complicated nor too simple.
You use the left analogue stick for moving forward, backward, and to turn left and right. In combat you are always facing the opponent you have looked on to. The right stick is for fine homing during non-combat when you need to hit object you cannot look on. The rest of the buttons are used clever, the L buttons are for target selecting-deselecting and the R buttons are for shield activation and boost. Triangle and X buttons are for up and down move, and square and circle are used for normal attack and firing the sub weapon. On long distance you shot, and on short distance you use a sword. Attacking while using the boost changes the attack. On long range a moving boost attack fires off six guided beams while a non-moving boost will fire off a huge energy bolt. In short distance this will instead make you lunge or pull of a spin strike. And the circle button will make you grab and throw. One interesting thing is that one sub weapon makes use of the analogue button mode; a light press will make it fire with more spread and a hard press will make it fire more rapidly and with less spread.
Finally the d-pad selects sub weapon. All buttons used but in a logical and uncomplicated way.

The combat itself is very fast and energetic. Especially the close combat. Different enemies will require different ways of attacking. For someone watching someone else playing ZOE, it may look very chaotic, but in fact you know exactly what you are doing and Jehuty does what you tell him to do. This is because of the perfect balance between manual and automatic control.

Lasting 7
It’s a fun game but 6-7 hours playtime is too short for 50$ (that is what it comes here). There are two endings though (depending on the amount of casualties) and the VS mode which is unlocked when you finish the game make it last just a bit longer.

Overall 9
This is a true next generation game and hopefully some developers will take this as an example and deliver us more innovative games instead of sequels. I know some more are coming but until know it has been to many sequels. This game is definitely worth buying.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/01, Updated 03/24/01