Medium Review: Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition

Yup. “Medium review.” We’ve already got Mega Reviews that drone on for-fucking-ever and Mini Reviews that cover a bunch of games in paragraph form, so why not a Medium Review that covers a single game that, for whatever reason, couldn’t find a spot in the print edition of The Merc?

• Atlus USA
• What did the five fingers say to the face?

Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition — $15 — Xbox Live Arcade

The gaming industry is a lot like Hollywood in that it takes a ton of cash to make a blockbuster game and as a result the people who usually put up the cash to back game development want to make sure they’re going to see a return on their investment. Thus, we see fewer and fewer releases that take any kind of risk. Store shelves are filled with endless first-person shooters and Madden sequels because the money men know that these things will sell, regardless of quality.

That’s why I absolutely love Atlus. The publisher is one of the few willing to take a risk on batshit insane ideas, and while some of these ideas don’t work out as well as one might hope, the company is responsible for some of the most inventive, most original, and best games of the past few years. Demon’s Souls alone is one of the best reasons to buy a PlayStation 3, and the most recent Persona sequels even top the Final Fantasy games as the best Japanese-style roleplaying games on the PlayStation 2 — a console riddled with quality entries in that particular genre.

With that in mind it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Atlus is responsible for yet another stellar title that comes out of absolutely nowhere, but Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition is just so utterly out there that a sense of dumbfounded surprise is the only emotion I can use to properly convey its charms. I’m unsurprised that this bizarre gem of a game would come from Atlus, but I’m absolutely baffled that this thing exists at all.

How does one accurately describe Zeno Clash? That’s going to be the most difficult part of this whole review.

In the superficial, the game would best be described as a “first-person beat ’em up;” Something like a cross between Streets of Rage and Half-Life. This is an incredibly shallow way to look at it though, because while it covers the first-person viewpoint and the fact that while you can fire guns like Gordon Freeman, and the majority of your offense is comprised of punches, kicks, throws and grabs, it fails to mention that all of these elements actually work together.

If it didn’t make for such shit PR copy, that bullet point would be at the very top of Zeno Clash’s non-existent retail box. Many, many, many games have tried to combine first-person gunplay with fisticuffs, but outside of giving players a single melee swing for times when foes get a bit too close, no developer that I can recall has ever been able to viably combine gunplay and the nuances of the martial arts. For decades we’ve had two disparate sides of the action genre, the shooter (Halo, Half-Life) and the fighter (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat) and a universally accepted law — like something Newton would write about a vengeful apple — that the two shall never meet.

• Atlus USA
• The AK-47 is EVERYWHERE

Zeno Clash developer Ace Team however has no use for “rules.” The company wanted their players to punch, kick and fire guns, and by carefully balancing the strength, speed and animation for each individual action, the team created a world in which your dreams of homicide are limited only by what weaponry you can find. Remember this moment, ladies and gentlemen, because Ace Team has single-handedly spawned the functional first-person beat ’em up genre.

The innovative, creative combat is certainly Zeno Clash’s most important contribution to the world of gaming, but it isn’t the reason why I recommend the game. Instead, I’m promoting this thing almost entirely because of its story.

Zeno Clash is, to put it in a way that will no doubt seem like hyperbolic cliché, unlike anything you’ve played before. I won’t delve deeply into the plotline — both because I’d hate to spoil things and because I doubt I could even begin to explain any of the bizarre characters or happenings in the world of Zenozoik — but if I had to describe it succinctly I’d say it’s like “Spartacus as reimagined by Terry Gilliam and Jean Giraud, and starring every puppet rejected from Labyrinth and the lovechild of Chris Cornell and Karl Urban.”

At this point your interest is either piqued or you’re totally baffled right the fuck off. You’re not alone.

The bit that I really appreciate though is that while the game is weird, it never seems to be weird just for the sake of being weird. In one bit of description, regarding a character who is secondary or tertiary at best, the narrator says “Erminia peed on herself and starved to death because that is what she did. Corwids are not slaves to reality.” Now that is some really bizarre shit, but given how bizarre the world is, the tale of this nearly naked (did I mention that this character is clad in only a bikini and a giant eyeball helmet?) woman peeing on herself and starving to death is treated as so commonplace that it doesn’t even warrant a second thought. This world and these characters are weird. Deal with it.

Also very impressive is the feeling that while the world is wholly alien to our own, it seems to exist under its own laws that are more or less sensible given the innate strangeness of the place. Once you’re able to suspend your disbelief enough for the world of Zenozoik to exist in your mind it’s very easy to imagine all the game’s events taking place. That’s a difficult enough task when you’re dealing with real-world elements like modern military action or skateboarding, but it becomes almost Herculean when your game is about a guy punching, kicking and firebombing his way through legions of mutant chicken people, giant flying beetles, bipedal pigs and women whose hairstyle is as reminiscent of Robert Smith as it is of the American bison. Way to go Ace Team!

Like most experimental games Zeno Clash isn’t without faults. The music in the game is a bit on the generic side, particularly given how unique everything else is. That uniqueness will also probably turn off a number of gamers. Personally I love it and want everyone to give this game a chance, but I realize that many gamers simply don’t want something new and original. Those people live and die by the endless Madden and Halo sequels and it takes a really momentous occasion to pull them from their comfort zone. Zeno Clash is not made for these people and nothing anyone says will bring them on board.

C’est la vie.

• Atlus USA
• The Spear: Because Punching, Kicking and Shooting weren’t enough

Finally, the $15 price tag for Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition is questionable. I won’t say it’s too expensive, but it is borderline.

A $10 price tag would make the game one of the best gaming values of late, but at $15 I can only recommend it to people with a known taste for the esoteric. That said, I do give Atlus their propers for including a number of improvements in Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition over what was originally found in the Windows/Steam version. For instance, those who find themselves in love with the game will love having what is essentially a time attack mode for each of the Zeno Clash’s stages, especially since it allows you to post your best scores to an online leaderboard.

In the end, I get the feeling that Zeno Clash is going to miss the audience it deserves. Not because it lacks quality, but simply because it is so unabashedly different from everything else. There is no way for your local Gamestop employee, no matter how well-intentioned, to tell someone “Well if you like X, you should try Zeno Clash!”

(Not that the braindead, teenaged wage slave would take a moment to break away from the corporate mandated line of questioning designed to annoy you into buying useless protection plans for your games or “added value” cards whose only real purpose is to suck money from your wallet and lock you into repeated patronage anyway, but I digress.)

There just isn’t anything out there like Zeno Clash, so I urge you, if you take my advice and pick up a copy and enjoy it, to spread the word to everyone you know. Atlus and Ace Team deserve massive credit for taking a risk with this one, and even more for succeeding where so many other developers have failed.