On a recent Podtoid, a question was asked about 'water levels'. Levels of a
game that buck the trend of gameplay for the game up to that point. It made me
think of a game I thought did an amazing job of varying experiences: Zone of the
Enders: The 2nd Runner.



Zone of the Enders 2 is an amazing practice in what developers should do when they
come up with a great control scheme: keep the scheme consistent, but augment the
experience through both add-ons to the controls and varied situations. What
they managed in the first Zone of the Enders was a fairly solid lock on/contextual
targeting system that was coupled with a unique way of dealing with movement in
full 3D space. Jehuty (the name of your mech in the game) allows for full
directional hover in midair, assigning 2D plane movements to the left analog and
free look/redirection assigned to the right analog. To allow better 3D
movement, Triangle and X are assigned to increase and decrease altitude,
respectively. Main attack was square, multi-attack with one of the trigger
buttons, L-trigger lock on, and another R-trigger acting as a guard/charge
button. While it sounds complicated on paper, it turns out to be a fantastic
control scheme.


An Egrit ate your baby doesn't have the same ring to it

But ultimately, ZoE was very much a game of repetition. Fly here, destroy this,
protect these guys, fight the boss, do this trench run etc. While by no means a
boring game, it was very clear that there were a core set of gameplay scenarios
that were revisited regularly through out the game. Progressing then to ZoE:
The 2nd Runner, the game seems at first to start along a similar path. There's
a "trench run" sort of area to get you acquainted, followed by a what amounts to
a dungeon crawl/warehouse fight that progresses through a few rooms. Standard
fair. The idea of protecting others even comes back in a very familiar looking
scenario to the first game. One starts to get the sense that the game is going
to take the same run as the first, but things really start to change up.

After leaving the first few standard sort of levels, the game opens up and ends
up steering you away from any excuse to call the experience bland. There's the
train tunnel level, where you have to speed through a tunnel attempting to do
enough damage to a train to stop it from reaching its destination. There's a
boss fight requiring a very different, dog fight sort of mentality, as opposed
to the methodical environment assisted match from the previous. Further in
there's a boss fight that takes place in darkness, and unique escort mission
that requires the use of often offensive "grab" move to bring a disabled partner
out of a pit, while stopping to address constant attacks.


Come for the combat, stay for the light show

It starts to dawn on you that while you're playing the same game, its providing
varied and specific experiences in which you're using your mech to do battle.
Monotony can't be used here to describe anything.

Moving forward, sub-weapons start to play a key role in the objectives. A
weapon is acquired that generates a major energy blast, but takes about half a
minute to charge up from a grounded position. This weapon comes into play for
taking down five serious battleships with heavy weaponry. Moving further, a new
warp ability is brought into the mix and becomes vital to the ensuing task at
hand and ultimately becomes essential to the final boss fight. However, unlike
some games wherein the final weapon is acquired just in time to save the day,
you get three or four levels just to play around with the new skill and really
get a feel for it.


Grow up. That's his cockpit.

By being very deliberate in not getting into a gameplay rut, ZoE: The 2nd Runner
provides a game at once devoid and full of water levels, keeping the experience
very sharp while providing different contexts for the solid controls. Though
I'm not likely to have a PS3 to play it on, I look forward to any solid
announcement of a ZoE 3. Given a the possibilities for AI and personalized
difficulty that current gen systems provide, Zone of Enders could become a standout franchise in the coming years.