Zenith

Here’s another Bean Dive and the first one I’ve gone back to since completing games for my American friend. I sampled a review before diving in to this game and the review was scathing but potentially unfair for reasons I will discuss.

Zenith follows the bizarre story of Argus Windell as he gets caught up in an adventure to save the world from the Unexpected, the worst named evil character in the history of role-playing games. The thing to note about Zenith is that the whole thing is satirical, and the majority of the story is there to take the piss out of RPGs and other games, and even itself at certain points.

It got off to a very good start where Argus is talking to some potential attackers and tells them that he had to come this way to get away from the singing, man-size spiders. Of course, his attackers don’t believe him and it’s meant to be a play on the standard ‘lie’ that game characters tell to get out of sticky situations… but when the spiders actually show up and save Argus (more through luck than design) I actually found it hilarious.

Running into satirical versions of characters from the Final Fantasy series was also fun, especially the ones based on Tidus and Cloud. The game des well at highlighting how annoying Tidus was and shows how Cloud – or Claude, as he is referred to – as the strong silent type shouldn’t actually work in the real world. You also run into Tifa who bitches about Claude running off with a flower girl. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek but as I could relate to it, I found it funny.

Another funny bit was a conversation I had by sheer chance. I ran into someone called Gerald who is Zenith’s answer to Geralt from The Witcher series, and he talks about how he can’t remember what his epic quest was because of all the side quests he had done. It reminded me of my Skyrim review and is so true of the RPG genre.

In terms of the actual game story, it’s okay but it feels like it’s only there to play on the character tropes of ‘strong female’ and ‘reluctant hero’ but it works for the most part and produces a few genuinely funny moments.

Zenith is a funny ‘game’ though because the gameplay sucks. And I mean really sucks to the point where I felt the only reason I got to the end was luck. You get potions for health and mana and some equipment, which I’m not convinced offered any kind of real noticeable bonus. Because your character is so shit at staying alive, most of the game is incredibly difficult and it doesn’t feel like it’s by design. Unfortunately for me, this undid all the good work that went into the dialogue and story. Literally no effort has gone into it and if this was meant to be part of the humour, it falls flat.

Graphically, it doesn’t look great and I found the music to be cutting and massively repetitive.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

Achievements wise, there’s not really a lot to do and this is only a good thing considering how shitty the gameplay is. 6 achievements are earned from getting from one end of the game to the other and based on the difficulty spikes, this is the hardest part of the achievement list.

Outside of the storyline achievements, there are achievements for killing enemies and destroying barrels, but all of this should unlock before the end of the game through normal gameplay anyway. The only possible exception would be the achievement for killing 500 enemies as when the game gets difficult, you can get away with just running past a lot of them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Zenith wins a lot of points for its humorous story but shits all over itself with the game play. It’s a real shame too because the bare bones were there to have a fun to play game. It would have worked as well if it was overly easy but the unintentional difficulty – which is solely because of the game’s poor design – made it a slog to get through. That said, it still took me less than 10 hours to get to the end.