Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code

Title: FINAL ZONE
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 05/09/2025

Story

In this action game, you take control of the head of a squadron who must set out to defeat an evil force known as AXIS! Despite being titled Final Zone, this is actually the third game in the series, shifting genre away from the top-down run and gun style of the prior two and becoming an isometric mech action game. The Japanese name of FZ Senki AXIS indicates this being a spinoff a little better.

Interestingly, this game doesn’t have anything in terms of cutscenes, despite that being a Telenet standard by this point, and Final Zone II being filled with them. Even Gaiares had two, but not Final Zone. No biggie, but definitely something I found interesting.

Presentation

Another Ratalaika port in the new “improved” wrapper, another set of the same usual additions. Rewind and fast forward, with the latter only working properly on a Switch 2, a BGM player, box and manual scans, and various different screen sizes and filters.

Yet again like with the Aero games, we have a case where the english manual is filled with so many edits to remove mentions to Sega and such that it makes some pages borderline unreadable and silly to look at. There’s also page bleed present and the scans overall look pretty rough. What’s nigh unacceptable however are the Japanese manual scans, which are so horrible that it looks like I took them in my own bedroom. I’m not even kidding, look for yourselves.

Yeah, I have no idea how we went from the well-done scans from the prior wrapper to incredibly rough Japanese manual/box scans that look ripped straight from someone’s Imgur, but it really sours the whole nature of the Gallery. Edia’s able to get quality scans done for their collections, so why not ask them? This part of the newer wrapper continues to baffle me.

Luckily, outside of a weirdly sloppy replacement for the Sega bootup screen, (swapping it with the game’s key art) the game looks and sounds excellent, which is a huge improvement from Edia’s own Genesis emulation. This is a compromised port of a X68000 game that looks and sounds far superior, but even the downgraded music has a lot of charm to it, even if the sound effects are rather terrible compared to the great ones from the original computer version. All and all, not a bad presentation downscale.

Gameplay

Final Zone is an isometric action game, where you take control of your mecha with two weapons attached to it, and hunt down a target set of enemies in each stage, before progressing to the boss fight. While you might expect to have to hunt and pick up your weaponry, they’re actually tied to your health bar, with you having less options as you take more damage. You have a main weapon with unlimited ammunition, and a secondary weapon that uses limited ammo but deals a lot more damage, and you can set these two from a select menu by pressing Y.

Right away Final Zone can be a little weird to get used to, especially once you immediately notice your shots move with the screen, meaning if you move upward after firing your shot, it’ll also scroll the screen with you. This can make it real easy to miss things if you’re moving while firing in certain directions, but can also be useful if you take advantage of this weird scrolling quirk.

Nevertheless, there’ll be times where no matter how much you scroll the screen, you won’t find your target enemies, and this was pretty frustrating for me initially until I figured out how shooting down the respawning grunts eventually spawn in the main enemies, making it an easier routine once I figured that out. Some stages have the enemies all in fixed locations, which are of course much easier as a result, but there are multiple stages that require you defeat the generic enemies before your targets show up.

After taking out all the targets, you’re taken to the boss fight of the stage, ranging from cool isometric autoscrolling boss fights, to just typical action levels with only a couple of powerful enemy targets to deal with. Some of these are fun, while others can be trivialized with certain weapons to the point they almost feel meaningless. Luckily you can bump the in-game difficulty up a little bit more if you want that extra challenge, but even then some of these enemy bosses are pretty wimpy.

Overall, Final Zone is a short but pretty fun action game. Nothing’s particularly wrong about it, the weapon system is neat, and the stages are fun enough, but it does have a good bit of jank especially compared to the original X68000 version, and I wish the bosses were more consistent with their quality.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Final Zone is a brief, albeit janky action experience, still being fun enough to get an afternoon of enjoyment out of, while regretfully not being the original X68000 version. The terrible manual scans in this reissue aside, it plays well enough to be a fun time, albeit one you aren’t likely to go back to after completing it. Tying your weaponry to your health bar is an interesting choice, but one I found to be super satisfying when it came to using the strongest weapons.

It doesn’t hold a candle to Granada, but Final Zone is still a fun little romp that I’m happy got reissued, especially with far better sound emulation than Granada ended up with. It might not be the computer original, but that doesn’t mean this Genesis version is worth skipping!

I give Final Zone a 6 out of 10.