Zone of the Enders: HD Collection Review
If you have never heard of the Zone of the Enders series, then I pity your existence.
Release Date: October 30th, 2012
Genre: Action
ESRB Rating: M for Mature – Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity
Platform: PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
Developers: Konami, High Voltage Software
Publisher: Konami Computer Entertainment
Plot Overviews
Zone of the Enders 1: A young boy by the name of Leo Stenbuck finds himself thrown into a giant mecha after his “friends” are ironically killed by a LEV meant to protect them from an ongoing invasion of unmanned machines. So what do boys in giant mecha do when their friends get killed? What else but to make sure other people are fine? After some time Leo is contacted by the guys who were suppose to pilot the orbital frame Jehuty, which Leo is now in control of. his mission is to suddenly bring the orbital frame to the other side of the godforsaken colony, and safely deliver it to the true pilot. Along the way he finds plenty of assholes in bigger machines just waiting to take him down.
The Antilia Colony where the 1st game takes place.
Zone of the Enders 2: 2 years after the events of ZoE. 1, a new pilot by the name of Dingo Egret happens to stumble upon the orbital frame Jehuty while on the moon of Callisto. Conveniently enough his LEV gets damaged in an attack, and he trips into the orbital frame he found. After getting control of Jehuty, Dingo decides to pursue the forces that are attacking his comrades. After getting Jehuty beat to living hell by the final boss of the last game, Dingo gets out of the frame and decides to have a word with the pilot of the opposing orbital frame, Colonel Nohman. After declining Nohmans offer to rejoin BAHRAM Dingo begins to walk away. Nohman being the main antagonist and all, pulls out a gun, and shoots Dingo in the heart. Lucky for dingo a girl named Ken Marinaris whom he met 2 minutes prior to this event happens to be a spy for the space force which is a resistance movement against BAHRAM. Ken revives Dingo by using Jehuty as a power source for his heart and lungs. From there Dingo is basically just trying to stop Nohman from activating a super fortress, and has to fight other orbital frames to gain their sub-weapons for that to happen.
HNNNGGGGGG
Gameplay and Issues
Zone of the Enders has always been about fast paced robot action, having beautiful atmosphere, and having a great OST. The only problem ZoE (mainly ZoE 2) ever had was frame rate issues since the PlayStation 2 could not handle it. Unfortunately the HD collection does not fix this problem, in fact most would say it makes it worse. As an example, Later in the 2nd game an army of unmanned machines flood the battlefield, which sends your frame rate to a point so low that it’s almost unplayable. Another thing about the frame rate that should be mentioned, the Xbox version actually maintains a better frame rate than the PS3 version for some fucktarded reason. Looking past that issue, the actual gameplay is fast, fun and at times requires you to think on your feet. The bosses in ZoE 2 are a perfect example of that, forcing you to learn their weakness or how to find an opening in their defense before they obliterate you. Even with the combat system being relatively basic, ZoE still manages to find unique ways to keep the combat fresh and interesting.
Additional things to point out
While this is not a perfect game or a perfect HD version, it is still as fun as I remember it back when it originally came out. The HD also looks beautiful compared to the original ps2 version. The new intro animated by sunrise is also top notch. The dub cast is still pretty bad but unless you want to be that much of a faggot about it, voices won’t exactly be an issue. I was also disappointed in the decision to remove ken screaming “Haidaraaaaa” from the US versions opening, but that has no bearing on the rating. The HD collection also introduced bonus content to US players from the special edition of Anubis Zone of the Enders, which until the HD collection, has not been on any US version. One other thing that is unique about the HD version is that they used the difficulty and AI settings from the European versions of ZoE, which has gained infamy for being much more difficult than the US and JP versions.
Ps2 Quality
HD Quality
tl;dr
High Voltage Software is shit and Bluepoint Studio would have been the best option for Konami to go with. Since Konami’s excellent decision was to use an inferior company to upscale their game, we are stuck with a great game bound to noticeable frame drops. While many will be able to ignore the frame rate issues while playing, I believe some others would not have nearly as much fun playing something with frame rate drops this bad on a current gen console.
I give Zone of the Enders: HD Collection a Haidaraaaaaaaa out of Haidaraaaaaaaaaa
(Thats 8/10 for you slow people)
“the Xbox version actually maintains a better frame rate than the PS3 version for some fucktarded reason”
What’s so strange about it?
All else being equal (and the frame rate issue is a pretty sure sign the HD remake wasn’t truly optimised for either console), for ports of the same games the Xbox 360 has usually maintained better looking graphics and/or better performance than the PS3.
Objective analysis of screenshot and video comparisons has proven this through and through.
What I found strange about the lag is that the HD collection was directly up scaled from the PS2 version (aside from sunrise re-drawing anime cut-ins). you would think the successor to the PS2 would be able to handle the game that was designed for its predecessor much better than a console which they would have to re-write certain lines of coding for.
This actually isn’t that surprising et all, since under the hood the XBOX 360 is more like the PS2 than the PS3.
The PS2 used multiple dedicated, specialized chips to do various sub-tasks, which makes it a bitch to emulate or port software that was written for it to different hardware.
The XBOX 360 is built pretty much like a PC, as far as architecture goes.
The PS3 by comparison is huge CPU cluster that you will never properly utilize unless you planned your software with parallel computing from the get-go.
In the end, I think the familiarity with the architecture enabled the porters to achieve better results on the XBOX 360.
ZoE, especially ZoE 2 have lots of triangles and transparancies appearing on screen.
it’s a bandwidth killer.
in PS2 and xbox 360, they have superfast eDRAM to be used.
It’s not frame rate droppage it’s actually a hidden slowmo feature.
Also If anyones tried to emulate a game they’ll know the company didn’t really change much internally.
i actually loled at the comment regarding the pS3 and xbox360.
sadly, it kinda true that xbox360 is similar to the pc. i’m not sure if anybody noticed, but nearly all games released for PC require you to have a controllers designed for x360 instead of building their own layout for controllers.
but, i wouldn’t be surprised if a next gen console after PS3 is hard to work on and ps3 finally reaching it perk like how PS2 and PS3 was in the past. heck, i wouldn’t be surprised if PS2 is still around.