Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner

The second installment of Kojima’s mecha action series has aged quite well.

What Is It? Zone of the Enders is a mecha action game which has you playing as Dingo. Dingo meets an unfortunate fate very quickly in the prologue and awakens to find himself fused to an “Orbital Frame” (mecha) called Jehuty. The game follows Dingo’s story as he reluctantly teams up with Ken Marinaris with the ultimate goal of taking out a Mars military organization leader named Nohman. The plot is relatively straightforward for a Hideo Kojima game, I’d say.

The game plays in a third person view behind Jehuty. You get dedicated buttons for attack, special, dash, block, ascend, descend, and target. The left stick moves while the right stick controls the camera. Pretty standard 3D action stuff, really. The magic is in how well it all fits together.

A typical encounter for Dingo might involve a squad of four enemy Orbital Frames approaching. You can use your multi-target attack to fire at them from a distance, dealing a little bit of damage to each. You could also dash in close and switch your sword for a powerful melee attack. You could also equip your Grab special then pick up an enemy and start using them as a baseball bat to attack the others. As you would expect, various enemy types make these various strategies, along with the others added with other special attacks, more effective against certain enemies versus others.

The game offers a variety of special weapons throughout the game. Most of them are gained through normal story progression. Your onboard AI assistant (ADA) will recommend certain specials against specific enemies throughout the game. I rarely found situations outside of boss fights where the best strategy was anything other than “grab an enemy and use them to destroy the others.” This is, objectively, a very fun videogame thing to do, so I didn’t mind, but it is kind of funny that the game put so much effort into a variety of special attacks only for them to be mostly outdone by a simple “grab an enemy and use them as a club to bash the others.”

The game has a mix of normal enemy fights and boss encounters, with the bosses being a major focus. To the game’s credit, the areas between bosses show a ton of variety. You will chase a train, find your way through a maze-like area, escort a friend while fending off enemies, and other things along the way. It would have been very easy to throw together a few stock, linear levels that all look the same between the boss fights, but this game provides a lot of variety.

The boss fights are typically a mix of reflexes and puzzling. You will likely need to figure out how to break through against a particular boss, ADA will chime in if you get stuck, then execute the plan. There are some very memorable moments, but a few certain run together as being fairly bland.

The game looks great, although it does suffer from the of-the-era “everything is a different shade of brown” style. It is legitimately difficult to tell apart various named, talking, enemy Orbital Frames because they look so similar. The common enemies mostly run together as well. Still, the cutscenes feature a fun anime style and the gameplay visuals do the job.

I played the game on Normal difficulty and my save file showed about 7.5 hours, but I don’t believe that counts all of the deaths and retries which would have likely added another couple of hours. This game was difficult but never to the point of being frustrating. That line is different for everyone, but do note that there is an Easy mode if you want to minimize the retries.

The Best Part: There is a boss fight somewhere about halfway through the game. After a routine, but fun enough, start to the fight, the entire room turns dark. You then have to rely on ADA to instruct you on what to do. “Move to the right”, “Defend”, “Evade”, etc… will be the calls that come out and you get a second to react before the attack emerges from the darkness. This was an absolutely wonderful twist on a boss fight. I feel like I’ve played a bunch of variations of “blind protagonist” fights in videogames, but this might be the best of the bunch. It’s fun, exciting, tough, and fair at the same time.

The Worst Part: The movement is a little stiff at times, specifically when you need to turn quickly. The auto-lock can do some of the heavy lifting here, but often if you need to quickly turn to address an attack from behind, it’s not going to be a great time. It isn’t anything truly awful, but it does stand out in a game that gets pretty much all of the other 3D mech action controls right.

The Verdict: I did not entirely know what to expect going into Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. It was a Kojima game in the PS2 era; how weird was he going to get? How long would the ladder be? Luckily, the story here, while still quite cutscene-heavy, is fairly straightforward and doesn’t overshadow any of the great action gameplay. 

The game holds up well, with only some minor control complaints to speak of. It’s worth noting that the targeting and camera/control issues I had with this are very similar to my issues with Armored Core VI.

The gameplay is great and way more varied than it probably needed to be, but I’m not complaining. There really aren’t repeat sections anywhere, if anything, it is the boss fights that are the most repetitive. Given this is a Kojima game and does include some super memorable bosses, that says a lot about the gameplay in between.

Zone of the Enders 2 is a great game. It finds a difficulty balance that lands just right for me, looks pretty good, and lets you blast all kinds of enemies with a really fun, nimble mecha. If you want to spend a few hours in a fast-paced, mecha action game, you can do far worse than this game, even over two decades after its release.

How to Play: PlayStation 2*, Remaster: PlayStation 3/4

*console played on for this review