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» » Enemy Zero (1996)

Short summary

The Aki, a research vessel on a long voyage, is returning home to Earth with its crew complement of seven. All seven members are woken from deep sleep mid-voyage to the confusion of all, but the reasons why they were roused become clear as Laura Lewis witnesses her shipmate being brutally massacred by an unknown and invisible creature. Cut off from her shipmates and unarmed, Laura must face this creature before it takes out the crew one at a time.

Enemy Zero (1996) began life on Sony's PlayStation. Its unveiling at the 1996 PlayStation Expo in Tokyo was described by journalists as the highlight of the show. Irritated by Sony's failure to meet even a third of preorders for the PlayStation version of D no shokutaku (1995) (and to a lesser extent, their policy that all marketing for third party games had to be approved by them), at a press conference during the expo Kenji Eno made a shocking move. Eno showed a preview of Enemy Zero. At the end of the clip the PlayStation logo appeared, but slowly transitioned into the Sega Saturn logo, indicating that the game would now be a Saturn exclusive. Despite popular opinion that the Saturn cannot handle 3D games as well as the PlayStation, Eno commented "...the PlayStation and the Saturn aren't that different, so moving it [Enemy Zero] to Saturn wasn't too difficult."

Fumito Ueda, director of the cult video games Ico (2001) and Wanda to kyozô (2005), worked as an animator on this game, before becoming a video game director.

The game was in development for nine months.

The full motion video sequences were all rendered on Silicon Graphics workstations using PowerAnimator.

While Kenji Eno did the music for D no shokutaku (1995), Michael Nyman, composer for films such as Fortepijonas (1993) and Gataka (1997), was hired to create a score for this WARP title. In an interview, Kenji Eno explained how this came about:

...I like Michael Nyman a lot, and I like his soundtracks, so I was thinking that it would be awesome if I could get him to do the music. I thought, "That would be impossible, but it'd be great if that happened." ...then, there was a big earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995, and Michael Nyman was donating pianos to schools in the city. When this earthquake happened, he said that he wanted to check out how the pianos that he donated were doing, so he came to Japan. When I found out that he was in Japan, I invited him back to my hotel room and tried to convince him, for six hours, to come work with me. So, at the end, Michael was like, "OK, I'll do it, I'll do it. Just let me go back to my room." So he went back exhausted after being convinced for six hours. We didn't work out terms or conditions; he just said that he would do it."

Kenji Eno had initially considered asking Ryuichi Sakamoto to create the score, but decided that his style would not be appropriate for the game.

There was an edition of the Saturn version limited to 20 copies that cost about 2,000 per piece. Although nothing was different about the release itself, it was hand-delivered by Kenji Eno at your home.

Jill Cunniff, singer/songwriter/bassist for the band Luscious Jackson provided the voice for Laura in the English versions. Since Laura remains mute throughout the game itself (as in D) you will only hear Jill's contributions in the brief "story so far" summary when loading your game from the voice recorder.


Credited cast:
Yui Komazuka Yui Komazuka - Laura Lewis (voice)
Naoko Koda Naoko Koda - Kimberly Hurd (voice)
Akio Ôtsuka Akio Ôtsuka - David Barnard (voice)
Hôchû Ôtsuka Hôchû Ôtsuka - George Takahashi (voice)
Tesshô Genda Tesshô Genda - Ronny (voice)
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Jill Cunniff Jill Cunniff - Laura Lewis (voice)
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