Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner Review – Drifting Toward the Nursing Zone

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner Review

Nostalgia is weird. It has the ability to take something, regardless of its quality, and mold our opinion of it to be more and more positive as the years go by. It’s the reason I still think fondly of Ty: the Tasmanian Tiger, a game that I know isn’t very good, while also being critical of games like the original Dark Souls, which has an abundance of issues that I find too major to overlook. I sat down this week with a PS2-era Konami game, Zone of the Enders: The 2^nd Runner (I’ll be referring to it simply as Zone of the Enders), donning my generic nostalgia goggles I use when I talk about an older game within the context of its own time. However, I’d like to talk about the game not only as a remaster, but also as a game in today’s gaming climate.

When it first released on PS2, Zone of the Enders was rather well received. At the time it delivered fast-paced battle-mech combat (in true Kojima style) with unique style, combining anime cut-scenes and dialogue with 3D gameplay to form visuals that were and still are remarkable. Then and now, these visuals combine with a stellar soundtrack for an overall exceptional aesthetic. The story’s premise is promising, featuring a complex political conflict pitting two groups bitterly against one another, with a protagonist who has history with the primary antagonist of the game.

These set-pieces, in the hands of PS2-era Konami, sound like they could lead somewhere interesting. For those of you who already love the game, you’ll be happy to hear that they have gone nowhere. These set-pieces, with the addition of excellently revamped 3D graphics and even a VR mode, are what the game needs to sell to new players. Like all games, though, Zone of the Enders has problems.

“Ending” that Control

Looking back at Dualshock 2 and comparing it to today’s controllers is a fun exercise. It’s impressive how long the layout of the controller has managed to remain largely unmodified from generation to generation (with the exception of the pad in the middle of the Dualshock 4). What’s more interesting is thinking about how much more drastically control schemes have changed. Controls today are really good. Whatever your opinion of AAA developers and publishers may be, you cannot deny that the control schemes of new games like Spider-Man (2018) and God of War (2018) are solid and rarely a source of complaint. Having great controls today didn’t happen by accident. As with everything, it took iteration and failure to determine what worked best.

Take Resident Evil 4, for example. RE4 is widely considered to be a masterpiece of survival horror, and I largely agree with that sentiment, but if it were released today, even with improved graphics, the control scheme and the UI would be ripped to shreds by critics as being clunky, unintuitive, and even straight-up bad. The same can be said of Zone of Enders. Things we take for granted in modern games, like proper camera controls, are dearly missed by a new player. The game assigns actions that should be doable simultaneously to buttons both requiring the use of your right thumb. Being able to ascend or descend in combat should not keep the player from being able to attack. Things like dashing are used almost constantly, so attaching it to the right trigger results in wasting a button that could be used for more dynamic actions. The controls aren’t miserable, but they show their age, and they damage the experience of a new player in ways that a player wouldn’t have noticed on first release.

Like a Fine Wine

Similarly, standards for writing and dialogue have skyrocketed in the fifteen years since the game’s release. Considering the difference between the storytelling in Activision’s Spider-Man game released in 2000 and Insomniac’s recent 2018 release serves as a nice example. Both games were made by AAA companies, both focused on Spider-Man and a variety of his worst enemies, both were well-received on release, but eighteen years makes all the difference. The production value of this year’s release is of a massively different caliber, and the writing and voice acting exemplify this well.

I expect this going into an older game, but it’s still worth mentioning. The character dialogue tends toward telling rather than showing, considered a sin in writing even in a textual medium, let alone an interactive visual one. To make things even less natural, the voice actors for the game sound like they could have been on separate planets when they were recording their lines. There is no flow to the tone of responses like you hear in everyday speech. Again, these issues were somewhat standard (though still not particularly favorable) in games of the time. Today though, they’re highlighted by the superior production value of those games that they served to influence.

When it comes down to it, Zone of the Enders: The 2^nd Runner is an outdated game that deserved the praise it received on first release, but it falls quite a bit short of the standards we’ve set for games in the modern day. For those of you who have already fallen in love with the game at some point during the past fifteen years, you will not be disappointed by the port. It updates the graphics without sacrificing style and maintains most of the rest of the game in its original form. For those of you who haven’t played it but have heard good things, I wouldn’t recommend against playing it. What I would recommend is playing a few older games before playing this one. Get used to the games of yesteryear to minimize the jarring effect between Zone of the Enders and the games benefitting from the years of improvement in nearly every facet of game design.

When it comes down to it, Zone of the Enders: The 2^nd Runner is an outdated game that deserved the praise it received on first release, but it falls quite a bit short of the standards we’ve set for games in the modern day. For those of you who have already fallen in love with the game at some point during the past fifteen years, you will not be disappointed by the port. It updates the graphics without sacrificing style and maintains most of the rest of the game in its original form. For those of you who haven’t played it but have heard good things, I wouldn’t recommend against playing it. What I would recommend is playing a few older games before playing this one. Get used to the games of yesteryear to minimize the jarring effect between Zone of the Enders and the games benefitting from the years of improvement in nearly every facet of game design.

**A PC code was provided by the publisher***