Spent the night playing through Zone of the Enders 2 PS4 Edition. I haven't played this since the PS2 release where I played it like 6 times in a row and all the EX missions and stuff during the month it came out. I skipped the PS3 version because I heard it was a mess (although they fixed it later).
It's interesting seeing the game these days. Back 16 years ago it was one of my favorites games of all time. Today...it's still pretty good but has some issues. On the plus side the pacing is still fantastic. Just like the first night I played the game I pretty much played the entire thing through in one 4-5 hour sitting because there's no good stopping points. Shit is always happening. Lots of boss fights, constant sub-weapons given to you, and a really tight script that's great (and unfortunately butchered in localization; would recommend trying to play it with JPN audio in a Steam version hack if you can).
The boss fights are pretty creative. The core combat of ZoE is fairly simple and so the game is a mix up of minigame-esque scenarios, grunt battles with different enemy types requiring different strategies and usage of subweapons, and bosses where most have something unique about them whether it's dodging a boss so they fly into an electric field paralyzing themselves, throwing girders, or grabbing pieces of the boss to block the boss's weapon. All great. The sub-weapons are awesome and a lot of fun. It's still a blast to grab guys with WISP and use them to punch others, to launch a bunch of homing missiles, to drop mines at attackers, to use giant beam guns and decoys, and of course Vector Cannon and Zero Shift are still amazing and have influenced gaming to this day. Cutscene direction and music and art direction are great as well.
What's not so great these days is the camera from hell, which is really pretty bad. I'd kill for a remake of ZoE2 with just a modern 360 degree free camera you can rotate around smoothly instead of weird snapping and hard to turn and constantly locking on (which you can ignore with holding L2 but it doesn't make moving around much easier because the camera just kinda sucks). Also the musou stage while impressive on the ps2 is just kind of a long zzz bit these days. But the air ships with vector cannon stage is still great.
Anyhow, outside the camera I've only got one complaint, and it may be less on the game and more on Cygames' port of the PS4 version (which otherwise is great),
They fucked up the final Aumaan Anubis fight and made it kinda awful. Like I was surprised when I was having trouble beating it because my memory was that the prior Anubis fight in the light tunnel was the harder fight (and it's still challenging but it has consistent patterns and if you do them right you win). Basically there's a couple issues with the fight now. First is what from what I'm reading, in the original ZoE2 Aumaan Anubis did a heal himself move pretty rarely, maybe once a fight or not at all. Now he does it at 75% HP, at 50% HP and at 25% HP. At the 50% and 25% HP ones he fires bursts attacks while doing it so you can't stay in his face burst blading the healing pieces and have to rely on dodge homing laser which doesn't seem to do a great job so he tends to regain about 25% HP each time, so now he's got about 150% HP or more (depending on what he gains the first time) which makes the fight more of an endurance fight than it was. Next, his melee stuff seems inconsistent and so do the controls a bit. You zero shift in and hit and then dodge left/right and try to hit like on the PS2 and it works like 1 in 4 times and the other 3 times you dodge and go for a hit and he instead hits you and does like 25% damage in a few hits. The controls thing is that the burst blade was not coming out consistent for me at all. I'd hold R2 for a second when he has his shield up and then hit square and sometimes he'd do the burst blade and get some damage in, but sometimes he'd just sit there and do nothing and then anubis would hit back for 25% damage or sometimes anubis would move back a step and he'd do the giant energy ball and anubis would hit me for 25% damage. It was also tough to burst blade the healing bit because you keep getting pushed away from anubis and half the time you do the energy ball instead of the burst blade when you hold R2 for a second.
Basically I got through the game in like 4:30 with a couple deaths and then it took me an hour and like 25 retries on Aumaan Anubis and I still won the fight with just like 1 hit until death. It kinda ruined the exciting pace of the game and by the time I beat him I didn't care about the story/cutscenes at the end because I was just glad it was over. Even though the rest of the game is perfectly fine difficulty-wise if I ever replayed this version I'd probably play on easy just to be able to play straight through the story from start to finish without banging my head on a wall for an hour on the final boss. I guess they felt it was wrong that the 2nd to last boss was tougher than the final boss so they beefed the final one up to feel like a real final boss that you struggle and just barely beat eventually.
Anyhow, other than that it's still great and looks nice. I wish they made more games like this these days and it makes me wonder why no one's really tried to do a good ZoE2 clone with a fast paced exciting story and a bunch of bosses and cool sub-weapons. Indie games have done that kinda game in other genre, but I can't think of any indie mech games like it.
