Like the fist of an angry god, Kenri reviews ZOE: The Fist of Mars!
Right from the beginning of Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, you know that you’re playing a story based game. The sheer amount of time and number of cutscenes before you can even control your character are a strong indication of this. That being said, ZOE seems to have an identity crisis when it comes to the story. If you’ve ever watched, say, one of the many Gundam anime, while you hear your parents watching Days of Our Lives in the next room, so that the anime visuals and over-the-top semi-romantic with hints of betrayal dialogue mix and form an entirely new show altogether, you might have some idea what this game is like.
Cage has always depended on his best friend Ares to save him when he gets in trouble. But when the Bonaparte III, a space cruiser heading for Mars, is attacked by a flying mech, Ares is no where to be found. Cage manages to escape thanks to Myona, a mysterious girl who had no record of being on the Bonaparte. They escape in an unnamed mech, and shortly after a tutorial duel with the attacking “Black Frame”, the mech crash lands on Mars. Myona is taken away and Cage is questioned by the UNSF, the Mars government, so to speak. Despite his pleas, they label him as a terrorist and decide he was the one to attack and destroy the Bonaparte. He’s thrown in jail, but with the help of Mr. Deckson, leader of the BIS (Born In Space), he and Myona escape. Being fugitives, they join the BIS and fight for a better Mars – one free of Earth’s tyranny.
During the story, you’ll observe distrust begin to brew between members of BIS, as well as seeing romances blossom. The amazing cast of characters – each unique and with their own fully developed personality – only makes the plot all the more enjoyable. And as the story goes on, you begin to think like a character in the game yourself. You wonder whether an ally will betray you at the next turn, or whether someone will die in the next battle, and when a unit of yours goes MIA, you actually worry about them.
What’s nice is that the game doesn’t try to force you to feel something you don’t want to. In some games, when a plot twist occurs, there will have been something wrong with its presentation. Either the foreshadowing was too obvious, or the twist seem redundant, or it involves a character so minor that you really don’t care. But all the twists and turns, from the beginning to the end, are genuinely well done, and serve to make the game very memorable.
I really feel this game would have been better as a book. The gameplay is only there to have something between each story segment, and if you don’t care about the story, you won’t like this game. At all. If you’ve ever played a GBA Fire Emblem or Advance Wars, this plays a bit like those. You’re presented with a grid, and each of your units has a set number of spaces they can move. You select a unit, move them, select another unit, move them, and so forth until you end your turn, at which point the opponent will do the same. Most mechs have several weapons to inflict general havoc on your opponent’s forces. If you move directly adjacent to an enemy unit, you can use “fighter” type weapons, such as laser swords, and slightly different laser swords. The advantage of fighter weapons is the ability to move and then use them. With “shooter” type weapons, such as missiles, grenades, energy beams, and sniper rifles, you must use them instead of moving for the turn. This is an excellent, if irritating, way of balancing the two weapon types.
After each attack, you’ll get experience and money. Experience levels up your units, although levels really don’t seem to have any major difference. Unlike in some strategy games, a level twenty unit and a level twenty-five unit are on about equal grounds. Money can be used in between missions to purchase upgrades for your mechs’ HP, shell, and weapons. However, your team is separated into Orbital Frames (OFs) and Laborious Extra-Orbital Vehicles (LEVs). The main difference between the two, besides OFs flying and LEVs being ground-bound, is the inability to upgrade OFs. I have no idea why you can’t, except that, in story terms, they’re advanced technology and therefore…are more expensive to upgrade? I’m not sure, but you can’t, and it’s very annoying. Instead, you must find “servers” located on certain levels (they’re right out in the open), and have an OF hover over them for a turn. This downloads information which upgrades a single OF (not necessarily the one that accessed the data) at the end of the battle. It shows the differences between the two unit types, I suppose, but it feels a bit tacked on.
So, you’ve moved a unit of yours next to an enemy and selected a method of inflicting death. You’ve been present with the stats screen, and you’re okay with attacking (if you’re not, you can undo your move). Now the combat begins. And therein lies the problem. In most strategy RPGs, the game would simply generate a random number and you’d either hit or miss. In ZOE, you cut to a battle sequence. You must aim your crosshairs at the enemy mech and press the A button to initiate the attack in a certain amount of time (anywhere from three to twelve seconds). You only get one shot, though, so you have to be spot on. The size of your crosshair and the amount of time is determined by your hit rate. To avoid an enemy’s attack, you must move a similar crosshair, this time representing your mech, to avoid a barrage of attacks from the enemy mech. Why they can shoot about eighteen times in seven seconds and you can’t is unknown to me.
This sounds good in theory, but the enemy AI is so stupid, that by the time you’re even mediocre with the controls, you’ll be hitting with every attack and avoiding every attack of your opponent’s. I don’t believe I was hit or missed the enemy once during the last nineteen or so chapters. Another problem is the hit detection. If even a small portion of the enemy’s mech is in your crosshairs, you’ll hit and do the same amount of damage as if you, say, had targeted their cockpit. There is a “critical hit” target present on every enemy, but it is so hard to hit that, just like in other RPGs, criticals will be entirely luck based.
If the combat had been just a little bit better, this would be the definitive SRPG combat system. But when you can dodge the final boss’ 89% hit rate indefinitely with even your worst mechs, something is horribly wrong. The sad fact is that challenge simply doesn’t exist once you get decent at this game.
For each mission, you’re presented with a win condition. Normally it’s “obliterate the enemy”, but sometimes you’ll be charged with saving hostages, saving a single hostage, or preventing the destruction of a building full of hostages. These are basically escort missions and they only serve to weigh down the already suffering gameplay.
The sounds and music are nice. Generic blips and bloops from the mechs, as well as “psheeewww” and “shooshjing” when attacking work well, probably due to their commonness – we’ve come to expect those sound effects from super-advanced robotic war machines. The music fits the mood about 90% of the time, and I found myself tapping my fingers along to it a lot during my time playing. However, there are one or two tracks that are so horrendously terrible, I could hardly listen to them without my ears bleeding. These absolutely kill whatever mood was present before they start playing, and almost drag the game as a whole down a peg.
Graphics are nice, albeit not spectacular. We’ve come to expect these graphics from GBA SRPGs, and they’re certainly not disappointing. Mars is desolate and red, the mechs are blocky and blue or red, depending on whether they’re your units or enemies, and buildings are generic gray cubes. However, the character profiles which are present during cutscenes are great. They show a wide variety of emotions and are very well drawn. If only the same level of detail was put into the mechs during the few times you see them up close…
As for replay, there’s a good ending and a bad ending. But after I got the good ending, I really had no desire to go back and see the bad ending. It felt like it would cheapen the experience. The game is fairly short, too. There are roughly twenty-five chapters, and each chapter takes at absolute most forty-five minutes, so you’re looking at a moderately short game. The cutscenes are lengthy and make the experience longer, if you read through all the dialogue, but that doesn’t really count.
So is it worth it? As a guy who loves a good story, I wasn’t disappointed. But if you could care less about anime style characters and their problems, the gameplay alone doesn’t justify a purchase. For being able to pass as an interactive book, and a good one at that, Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, gets an amazing eight out of ten. Long live the red planet.
Kenri of the Yuri is just this guy who writes silly things, sometimes. He is profoundly embarrassed about a good 60-70% of the stuff he's written. You might know him better as your friendly neighborhood Level 43: Editor. View his or her author page or author profile.
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