Image: HoYoverse
Zenless Zone Zero's colourful cast of characters and even more colourful combat make it an instant winner.
What do you get when you cross Devil May Cry, Persona 5 and Honkai Impact 3rd? You get Zenless Zone Zero, a genre mash-up with winsome nostalgia for the cassette tapes and boxy CRT TVs of the early 2000s. HoYoverse has made a name for itself in the gacha community for churning out hit after hit - from Genshin Impact to Honkai Star Rail - but it feels like the developer isn’t looking to replicate that success immediately this time.
While the game’s combat is fast-paced and its missions are short and sweet, Zenless Zone Zero takes its time to let the complexities of its lore and labyrinthian gameplay mechanics simmer. What at first appears shallow quickly reveals itself to be quite complicated - if not wholly obtuse. Still, players will find its gameplay loop to be dizzyingly addictive, should they have the patience to see the story campaign through its lacklustre first act.
What on Earth is a Bangboo?
Zenless Zone Zero takes place in a very different world from the HoYoverse games before it. If you’ve played the Square Enix RPG The World Ends With You, you’ll notice a similar fondness for the tech-obsessed aesthetic of the early 2000s here - complete with bulky CRT TVs, video tapes, and loud, splashy colours. The world of Zenless Zone Zero, a post-apocalyptic city called New Eridu, has retro futurism written into its very bones. Yes, the early 2000s are retro now. I had to look this up, and it displeases me too.
Sometime before the player enters the fray, a cataclysmic event led to the creation of interdimensional portals called Hollows, from which creatures called Ethereals emerged to destroy most of the known world. All that remains of humanity is the city of New Eridu, a bastion of civilization that sustains itself by mining the Hollows for crucial resources located within. You, the player, are a Proxy, tasked with hacking into the Hollows and guiding Agents who plumb their innermost depths for treasures.
Does this world make sense? No. No, it does not. Everything I have mentioned above is only explained either in passing or in lore notes. The campaign begins with characters immediately throwing around terms like ‘Hollows’ and ‘Bangboos’, and trusting the player to pick up on context clues to bring its story into focus. Bangboos, by the way, are Minions. The game tells us that these gibberish-speaking, eccentric bunny-eared creatures are actually robots, but if HoYoverse makes one of them yellow with a set of goggles and overalls, some of that gacha money will have to be funnelled into abject litigation. It quickly becomes clear that this post-apocalyptic setting only serves as window dressing, as New Eridu citizens only make passing remarks about ‘the old world’ before getting on with their otherwise untouched daily lives.
On that grind
Zenless Zone Zero centers around playable siblings Belle and Wise, who both take Proxy commissions to guide other Agents through various Hollows. Both Belle and Wise are refreshingly fun protagonists to have around, with the former being a more bubbly go-getter while the latter is a sarcastic but ultimately good-natured hard-ass. Through their eyes, we meet various factions grouping up the game’s playable roster, starting with a trio calling themselves the Cunning Hares: Billy, Anby and Nicole. What begins as a simple commission for the Cunning Hares quickly devolves into a race against time to stop a bomb threat on a speeding train, and that only covers the first chapter.
These Mission Impossible-like stakes aren’t maintained for the entirety of the campaign, however. Many story commissions are simple fact-finding missions, allowing players to spend more time with the game’s massive cast of Agents and learn more about them. These agents are so colourfully designed and uniquely interesting that engaging with them comes naturally, but these missions come at the unfortunate cost of slowing down the pace of an already bloated first chapter. After all, you aren’t just learning about these Agents and their histories - you’re also learning about the myriad mechanics and systems holding this game together.
At first, Zenless Zone Zero’s gameplay loop might seem simple to get the hang of: fight, upgrade characters, and fight again. However, gacha games call for further engagement, and action-RPGs moreso. This game is a grind, boxed in a grind, taped over with grind, wrapped with a neat little bow of grind and delivered with a note that reads - you guessed it - GRIND. You have to grind various activities to attain 50 different types of currency to do things like pull new Agents, upgrade Agents, raise level caps, upgrade skills, upgrade gear, pull Bangboos, upgrade Bangboos and more. The list is endless.
To attain all those different variations of currency, the game has multiple game modes and activities, ranging from puzzle-filled exploration minigames to roguelike levels called Hollow Zero, which you must grind repeatedly to complete dailies and weeklies, and earn more resources. There is so much to do, all of the time. That is, in fact, the point. Zenless Zone Zero draws you in with its stylish and clean UI elements, its quirky and flashy Agents and their varying playstyles, and its absolutely incredible soundtrack. Once it gets its hooks into you, you'll find yourself happily hooked to the endless grind of maxing every part of your Agents out.
You'll burn out before you ever get there, but you'll spend a hundred hours trying anyway. That's how these games keep you engaged. If you're already familiar with the gacha genre, this comes as no surprise, but newcomers should be aware of what they're getting into; a simple one-and-done game, this is not.
Changing channels and making the most out of combat
Zenless Zone Zero’s massive roster of playable Agents will often pop up in the main story campaign to give players a better feel of their personalities and shared history, but these characters express themselves best in the heat of combat. This is a character action game in the vein of titles like Devil May Cry, wherein each character has a unique suite of abilities to harness during combat. While your choice of playable characters outside of the story is mostly limited to your fortune doing gacha Signal Searches, the main campaign allows you to take them for a free test run.
The game gives you plenty of ways to try out characters you don’t have, because their unique play styles can end up winning you over even if their visual design doesn't. For example, I wasn’t gunning to pull Agents like Soldier 11 and Rina until I got to test them out in Trial Mode. It was only after trying them that I realised their incredible potential for button-mashy combos. The game lacks Genshin Impact’s element-based combat, but instead demands synergy of its players by matching specific characters together by type and faction. If you’re looking to run an Ice build for example, it makes more sense to take three Ice-powered Agents into battle to ensure their abilities stack up with one another. Swapping between Fire, Ice and Stun gets the job done, but it doesn’t get the job done very well.
Combat is a button-mashy affair that relies on hitting specific combos - which vary from one Agent to the next - to inflict massive damage on enemies. Swapping between characters will allow you to pull off chain attacks, counter-attacks and assist attacks, so constantly swapping while dodging and using special abilities is important. That being said, Devil May Cry this is not. It’s very easy to get by for most of Chapter 1 and 2 by simply mashing either the Basic Attack and Special Attack buttons, even if you ignore character swaps, dodges and counter-attacks. The game will prompt you for chain attacks anyway, and as long as you’re upgrading your characters, enemies don’t hit hard enough for tactics to matter much.
By Chapter 3 however, you’ll be introduced to Hollow Zero, a roguelike game mode that takes the main story’s TV segments and ramps up their combat difficulty. In this and a few other game modes, it becomes important to pay attention to all the little intricacies of Zenless Zone Zero’s combat system. That being said, this will still be one of the easiest action games a person can pick up, which fortuitously makes it accessible to more players as well.
Exploration is done in an interesting way here. When Belle and Wise hack into Hollows, players are met with a 2D interface that looks like several TVs lined up together. This is called the Hollow Deep Dive (HDD) System. Instead of moving through 3D environments, they hop from one TV to the next while solving puzzles and beating enemy encounters. The main campaign often adds fun little twists to these HDD segments, in the form of Bomberman-like levels and other assorted puzzles.
While I enjoyed the creativity on display in these segments, I loathed being pulled out of it every five seconds because the game had to explain a new mechanic, address a story event, or change the world around me in some way. The HDD System seems like a cool idea if it was placed in the hands of a more trusting developer, but HoYoverse is incapable of allowing the player to figure things out long enough for them to actually have fun.
Verdict
Zenless Zone Zero is an addictive experience. While the pacing of its story campaign suffers from bloated missions and languid HDD levels, the diverse personalities of its Agents are enough to keep players invested in their fates. The game has style to spare, even if its slick menus are cluttered with a bevvy of systems, mechanics and event notices to learn about, and its combat is simultaneously ostentatious and simple to master.
The Signal Search gacha system is by nature predatory, but its sheer variety of characters, and their mostly universal appeal in both design and combat, almost guarantee that players will be left satisfied with whoever ends up joining their roster. The overwhelming breadth of its grindy activities and currencies will likely turn away more than a few confused players, but those who stay will find that Zenless Zone Zero’s engaging combat, colourful characters and glossy visual design make for a singularly addictive experience.