Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars (GBA)

Here's another requested game for y'all: Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, for the Game Boy Advance. A relentlessly, fervently and strenuously requested game in fact. Hopefully now I've finally gotten around to playing it I'll be able earn myself some peace.

I honestly don't know much about the Z.O.E. franchise, except that it's about giant robots shooting at each other, though I have a feeling that they tend to be 3D third person shooters. But that isn't usually the GBA's style so I don't know what to expect from this. Judging by the music I'm guessing... Ridge Racer style racing game.

Oh good, I love it when a game starts with a huge block of scrolling text. It's flying by reasonably fast, but there seems to be no end to it. Hang on, I just need to get my stopwatch out for this.

Wow, there's just over two minutes of narration here, explaining the history of space colonisation from 2045-2173. They sure have a lot of respect for their audience's attention span. The Star Wars movies manage to get away with about minute and a half, but they've got one of the most memorable movie themes in history keeping people's interest going. This... not so much. Thankfully it's all skippable.

Oh, so this is another 'grey spaceship' kind of sci-fi universe then. It's funny how boats tend to have a bit of colour to them, planes are all kinds of colours, and even space shuttles have a cool black and white tiled look, but when you get to sci-fi even the commerical ships are military grey.

Our story starts in deep space, aboard the "Bonaparte III," Mars-bound... well, you can read that bit yourself.

The main character is crewman called Cage, who begins the story getting bailed out of trouble by his buddy Ares. So far the game's reminding me a lot of Super Robot Taisen in how the cutscenes play out through a series of message boxes, with portraits to show who's talking and how distressed they are.

I can't make any decisions or influence the story in any way, all I can do is skip through text. Though it does have a feature I don't remember ever seeing in a game like this before: I can rewind the message boxes. Handy if there's some dialogue I skipped past earlier that I want to check again.

Cage soon catches a glimpse of mysterious girl in the ship's hangar and goes in to investigate. There he finds a huge mech just sitting there with the keys in the ignition. Which is handy because the Bonaparte's about to get blown apart by an unidentified assailant.

But what about the stranger trespassing in the hangar, is she involved in this sudden calamity in some way?

Damn, she's like that girl from Evolution on the NeoGeo Pocket Color all over again, speaking in dots. Myona definitely seems a bit out of it, though fortunately she's got enough wits about her to do the sensible thing and escape with Cage inside the mech.


SCENE ONE: ON THE BATTLE GOD'S PALM.
(Seriously.)

The Bonaparte explodes before their eyes and it's soon obvious why. There's another mech out there! It's almost like a.... a...

A what? A big metal angel? A Final Fantasy end boss? Tell me you bastard! Oh whatever, it's not like I even cared.

Finally I get to do something! I had to skip through 155 message boxes before it offered me the privilege of actual gameplay. Man that's got to be a new record for the site.

And wow this really is just Super Robot Taisen again: top view turn based tactical mech combat. I decide to select 'Move' and a blue circle appears on the grid to show me my mech's range. I position myself behind the enemy mech in the futile hope that it'll give me some kind of damage bonus (I doubt these little unit icons can even turn around), then find it's letting me attack as well.

Just like Super Robot Taisen, it's trying to baffle me with stats and cryptic terms. There's only one weapon I can use though, so it's not like I have to think hard about my next move.

Right, I've select my weapon and I've selected my target, and now I have to figure out what that Pow/Hit bar's about. Also it seems that I can toggle the IAS and ANIME options, though I haven't got a clue what they do. You know, I think it's probably best if I just don't touch anything.

Hang on, that shadowy mech pilot looks really familiar somehow...

Hey it's our buddy Ares! Or am I not supposed to know that yet? I guess if they were trying to make it a surprise they probably would have used a different picture, as the silhouette's a dead giveaway.

Alright nothing left to do now but ATTACK!

Uh... what?

I was expecting an attack animation, but it's suddenly gone all first person view in a scrolling blue cyberspace and I've got 7 seconds left to do something. Am I supposed to be moving my crosshair around shooting him as he darts around the screen? Shooting him my with my Rusty Lancer?

Ah, there's the attack animation!

I missed him by a mile. Total failure.

There's the menu in case you were wondering what my options are. Oh shit, there's a save option! It lets me save during battles! I wish I'd noticed that before I fucked up my attack.

Now it's Dark Ares's turn to attack and I guess I'm suppose to move my little blue crosshair around and dodge all the red crosshairs he fires at me.

Sadly it ended in another total failure, though in my defence he threw a hell of a lot more attacks my way than I was allowed to use on him (ie. more than one).

Well thank you ????????, that was very helpful. I had a theory that the robot that destroyed my ship and is currently wrecking my mech might be hostile, but it's nice to have it confirmed. I guess at least now I know my unnamed Navigation System is paying attention.

I totally failed the battle in the end. My poor defeated mech ended up caught in Mars's gravity and was forced to land. But I decided to restart and give it another shot. This time I knew what I was doing and won the battle easily... then got caught by Mars's gravity and was forced to land.

The Martian authorities weren't impressed by Cage's story of how his ship was destroyed by something 'almost like a... a...' and he finds himself arrested and blamed for an entirely unrelated attack. It seems that no one actually gives a shit about what really happened to the poor Bonaparte and everyone on board is presumed dead.

Well at least Myona's getting a bit more lucid, though now she's lost her memory! The poor girl is a walking question mark. And a potential terrorist! I wish she'd stop whispering about it during my interrogation though.

Uh, are we in the corridor now or are we supposed to be locked behind one of those doors? Shame they apparently didn't have the budget to actually put some characters on screen as that would've made it way more obvious what's actually going on.

Well Cage at least has decided to think positive about the situation. Sure all of his friends are dead, his ship's been destroyed, and he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he had zero involvement with, but at least he can be more independent now that Ares isn't around.

Oh hi Ares! Wait, what the fuck, how did you get in here? Also I guess they really aren't hiding that he's the enemy mech pilot seeing as they've given him the exact same shadowy portrait.

He's pretending to be on our side though and Cage is none the wiser. I'm sure I even heard a kiss sound effect and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if these two were in a relationship.


ANYWAY, STUFF HAPPENS.

Gameplay at last! I have finally reached mission 2. Cage has to climb back into his mech and provide a diversion so that his friends can escape custody and... oh, we're back to message boxes already?

We met another guy in the holding cells who turned out to be the leader of an all-female teen mech squad, and with his help we were able to escape the building and run out into the Martian wilderness. I guess the terraforming must be going well seeing as I don't remember packing my spacesuit.

I've just seen a vision of how this game's going to be from now on. It's so depressingly clear to me. Teen mech squad acting like how a thirty year old imagines teens act.

Man, I am so not the target audience for this dialogue.


SOME MOVING AND THEN ATTACKING LATER.

Anyway, skipping ahead. After the fight I was taken to the secret HQ of the resistance where I've been given a chance to save my game and upgrade my mech.

Or not...

Nope, none of them are mine. I guess I can only upgrade other people's vehicles and weapons. Well I would blow my hard earned 2000 cash to get my new friends some extra armour. But nah. 

"Did you sleep well?"
"Oh! good morning I just realised I hadn't introduced myself yet."
"Good morning. Everyone's up so early."
"Well, hello there, Princess. Sleep well?"
"...Yes, I did."

Please shut up. Just... stop. Please stop. Your conversations are banal and uninteresting and I don't give a damn that Semyl has a crush on Ares, and Razma's got his eyes on Myona, and... wait, his eyes?

And this is Mr Philbright?

Razma

Phil

So these two are both meant to be guys? Whu...?

Well at least Cage is as surprised as I am.

Anyway a squad of Earth's UNSF military mechs are raiding a hospital apparently and my new Martian friends are kind of taking offence at that, so we're loading up and rolling out.


SCENE THREE: A HOPELESS HOPE.

This is what I like about this game, the moral ambiguities. Shades of grey. Sure this villain looks like a deformed hunchback vampire henchman and he's bragging about abusing nurses, but... okay fine this is 100% black and white, good versus evil. Downtrodden Martians versus their grotesque Earthling oppressors.

Man, this whole game is basically just anti-Earth propaganda. As an Earthling myself I find it all pretty offensive really.

As the new recruit I get supreme command over all combat operations, so I decided to move my blue mech icons up to the hospital cautiously, keeping my units out of the enemy's attack and movement range each turn.

It seems that units can only move and attack in a single turn if they're ending with a melee attack against an adjacent enemy. Otherwise I can either move or use a ranged attack and then I'm done for the round. I use up my other unit's moves and then the enemy side gets their turn. Staying out of their range means if the evil red mech icons want to hit me, they've got to waste a turn getting themselves into range first, leaving themselves as sitting ducks for my own attack. They usually only take around two hits to explode, so if I keep my units together and focus my fire, the enemies end up dead before they get a turn to hit me.

Of course Ned himself has a more advanced mech that can take more punishment. But I'm getting better at this IAS thing now and can even get a few bullseyes now and again. Critical hit, asshole!

Oh by the way, I figured out what that IAS | Anime thing I showed earlier means. Anime refers to the attack cutscenes showing each robot pulling out a gun or whatever, and IAS is this targeting minigame. If I turn it off the computer calculates my aim for me and skips right to the results, which sounds awesome, but I gave it a try and the poor machine's aim is even worse than mine is. I just kept getting 'AVOID' 'AVOID' flashing up as enemies merely stepped around my bullets. 

Come on guys, someone shoot him while he's ranting. Quick, before he disappears off somewhere to plan his revenge. Or you can just sit there and listen to him threaten you I guess.

Whoa... an ice burn from my mech's Navigation System out of nowhere.

And that's another job well done. The hospital director tells us all to fuck off, as we leave a trail of death and destruction wherever we go, so we all go off home for more introductions and discussions about political ideology. Also Myona's still cryptic, Semyl still wants Ares to notice her, and Phil gets laughed at again for looking like a girl.

I do appreciate how focused the story is so far though, compared to some of these kinds of games. It tends to stick with Cage (with occasional cutaways to show what the villains are up to) instead of getting distracted and wandering off to check up on other characters all the time.


SCENE FIVE: A VOICE FROM FAR FAR AWAY.

Every level a new resistance member seems to turn up at some point in another blue icon to help turn the tide (and give me 10 more message boxes to skip through), so I've got a fair number of mechs under my command now. Most of them can handle ranged combat, so I've decided my latest strategy shall be to just sit here in a group and wait for enemies to come to me. As soon as they stray into my weapon's range, my team blasts them into pieces before they get a turn to fire.

But Ned's back and he's got a new scheme: planting bombs on orphans. Seriously. He put them inside rigged mechs as human shields so we couldn't fight back without them detonating. We solved that problem easy enough, only for him to reveal that he put a second bomb on each of them which he'll detonate remotely if we come near him. What sort of an asshole puts two bombs on orphans?

It's all part of a cunning scheme by the UNSF to discredit our group by disguising Ned as one of us and having him commit terrorist acts. Which doesn't really make any sense really as he deliberately set up a situation that would draw us out and force us to stop him, which kinda publicly clears our name.

Well we're screwed. There's no way we'll destroy his mech in time to stop him from detonating the bombs. Not unless Cage's mysterious mech has some kind of hidden power.

W-what??? Cage's mech is transforming into it's TRUE FORM! It's not an LEV, it's a... a... an Orbital Frame!

Orbital Frames are like LEVs, except they're built using Metatron, a resource mined from Jupiter's moon Callisto and... I don't remember anything else. I'm sure they went on about them in that 2 minutes of text at the start though.

Anyway, Cage heroically strikes down Ned (for good this time) and saves all of the orphans! He's been using non-lethal attacks on all his opponents so far so he won't be too happy about utterly obliterating the guy but I'm sure he'll get over it. Ned was pure unambiguous evil after all... plus think of all those orphans!


LATER.

Nope, Cage of course freaks out over killing someone and runs away. The others have to literally get the orphan survivors to thank him personally before he snaps out of it. To be honest though, I'm finding that I couldn't give two fucks about Cage's angst. I'm not personally finding him that appealing as a character.


MEANWHILE IN THE VILLAIN'S BASE..

Oh no, it turns out that Ares is a traitor working with the UNSF! Or probably some other group, I can't even tell anymore. Anyway I think I've seen enough to have a fair opinion on the game, so I'll end it here.


Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars didn't really appeal to me much to be honest and a large part of that is due to the story. I just don't care about any of these people or anything they have to say, as the game feels like it's written for children. In a bad way. I mean I'm pretty damn immature (as you can tell by my retro game site) but even I'm struggling to sit through this dialogue. Super Robot Taisen was a lot like this as well, so it may be just be the style of the genre. But I can't just ignore the text and get right to the action because the story's threaded through the fights. I can't escape it!

The gameplay is very similar to the Super Robot Wars style as well, aside from the optional targeting mini-game, but it's seems a little shallow so far. The reason I haven't shown many gameplay shots is because there's not much to show; I've been winning every fight without a single casualty simply by keeping my units together and forcing the enemy to come to me. Well I did lose one repair wagon once, but thankfully they gave it back to me on the next mission; there's no permanent unit death.

It doesn't seem like a terrible game really overall, and has pretty decent graphics (and music) for such an early GBA title, so I imagine it's worth a look if you're into the genre. Not really my kind of thing though.

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Anything you want to say about what you just read? Perhaps you have an irresistible urge to list a bunch of non-grey sci-fi universes to prove me wrong? Comments and criticism about the game, my post, the site etc. are always welcome! As long as you're not an asshole about it I mean.