Zenless Zone Zero Review – Fashionable, But Not Fun

Introduction:

With Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail becoming runaway successes, Hoyoverse, formerly Mihoyo, has decided that they’ll add another gacha game to their growing list in the form of Zenless Zone Zero. I’d seen some trailers showing off a fast-paced combat style, and it got me curious. They’d released an action title before, Honkai Impact 3rd, which I played for a bit eons ago. I don’t usually play live service games, so I thought I’d give this one a fair shake.

Within the world of Zenless Zone Zero, the apocalypse nearly happened thanks to the mysterious advent of strange dimensions called hollows. They drag people inside and corrupt them, turning them into monsters. However, the city of New Eridu survived this, thanks to figuring out how to harvest assets inside the hollows, turning them into revenue streams. Now, diving inside is a job you can take on. Just don’t stick around too long and watch out for monsters.

World and Story Overview:

You play as the sibling hacker duo Belle and Wise. They work as the proxy unit Phaethon, guiding ‘hollow raiders’ through the hollows from their secret hideout of a video rental store. See, grabbing assets from Hollows is only legal if you’re employed by the government, so they’ve gotta keep this guiding career on the down-low.
The two get a sudden job from a repeat client and find themselves caught up in a conspiracy that could determine the fate of the city itself.

Despite the visual novel styling, basic things like text speed cannot be altered.

The main gameplay is thus that you take commissions/missions off the internet and then assemble a crew of up to three to delve into the hollows. These are fairly basic 3rd person action stages, where you run into combat arenas and fight the enemies that spawn. Combat is also just as simple; you’ve got an attack, a dodge, a character swap, a special attack tied to a special meter, and an ultimate that charges as you play.

Character and Equipment System:

As you might expect for a game that is also released on mobile, it’s very simple: simply tap or click to perform your stylish combo string, while a couple of characters have an attack that can be triggered on dash. Each of these attacks and specials comes with all sorts of crisp visual effects, with special mention going to the stage clear effect. While there are a variety of characters and weapon types, this is a free-to-play gacha game, so you will need to roll the slot machine. You do start off with a couple of characters, but your team will be dictated by the will of the fates or by how much money you put in.

The combat feels far better; the one-button combos do feel very good, and there are a lot of good visual effects to make hits feel weighty.

Rates start at 0.6% for your 5 star/S-rank characters and end at 7.2% for 4 star/A-rank characters. Also, there are no B-rank characters. To make a character the best they can be, you will also need to pull five additional copies to give them further passive skills. Gacha pulls will include equipment and W-engines, which range from S to B rank, but the especially good equipment for specific characters is in its own separate banner.

Exploring the Hub World:

To break up the combat, you can navigate a hub world, explore streets around you, grab food and equipment, or play some simple arcade games. You can also go to a place to do daily quests for resources. Main story missions have some extra presentation features to set them apart. The story is told in a fully voiced visual novel-esque style, with the character model posing to make different portraits.

Story actions that want more emphasis aren’t given CGs but rather comic book pages. You have a unique map screen that feels somewhat like a board game, with tiles made of televisions to traverse. These are used to tell a more cohesive narrative throughout the mission, where the player interacts with small puzzles and combat maps, allowing more interspersed dialogue throughout progression.

Voice Acting and Sound Design:

It all sounds largely decent enough, but there are a lot of flaws. While the posing allows them to get away with more poses than other gacha games, the actual framing of the scenes means they are hardly noticeable unless on a character such as Billy, who has a non-standard character design and thus needs his poses exaggerated to be understood. The English dub is also not very good. The actors themselves are fine, but they’re following the direction that can oftentimes feel overdone in a cringe-worthy way.

Despite the visual novel styling, basic things like text speed cannot be altered. While creating a comic book style as opposed to using CGs is fairly novel, it’s not used in a way that takes advantage of the medium. This leads to messy panel compositions and ones where speech bubbles are placed on top of relevant items and then filled with so many lines that they need scroll wheels.

The main gameplay is thus that you take commissions/missions off the internet and then assemble a crew of up to three to delve into the hollows.

We can easily compare this to Anonymous;Code, which used a similar comic presentation style but displayed all the text neatly, as if it were within the actual medium, making it feel more immersive.
Zenless Zone Zero has an unfathomably larger budget than Anonymous;Code, which makes this all the more obviously sloppy.

It also doesn’t help that the script is dry. Spicing up your text with funny quips, doesn’t actually do all that much and becomes an increasingly obvious patch attempt the more you do it. The story thus far does an awful job of selling the cast outside of using gimmicks. Just look at the main duo. They’re supposed to be super experienced not-quite-hackers and then get themselves hacked into twice. Writing genuinely witty characters is a tricky task, but when all your computer guys can verbally try is ‘turn it off and on again’, you might have issues.

Visual Style and Graphics:

The mission maps are also frustrating. The premise is fine, but in execution, it is a bland mess of light and sound. It does not feel good to control and is so dull that the constantly playing special effects feel like a desperate plea to hold the player’s attention. The combat feels far better, the one-button combos do feel very good, and there are a lot of good visual effects to make hits feel weighty. However, it’s all separate and disparate. You can’t combo into your main skill. The dodge is so strong that you don’t really even need to think, let alone move. I played many games using only the left and right mouse buttons.

As your reward for hitting the enemy enough, you’ll get incredibly flashy character switches, with such frequency it’s the video game equivalent of stapling a subway surfers clip to a tiktok. Fight strategy is almost entirely contained entirely within the pre-battle preparation, where you select your best characters that work with your best equipment. Then maybe you are also taking advantage of the fact you pulled a character from the gacha, which exploits a weakness.

Conclusion:

It’s obvious that the game has a skill ceiling so low among action games and beat ‘em ups that this is simply designed so the developers can just inflate the enemies numbers until you need to pull a new character with some unique mechanic, or new equipment to buff what you have to reduce the tedium. If they can’t have your money, they’ll have your time. They want it so badly they have not one, but two paid battle pass tiers!

I had some hopes for Zenless Zone Zero, given that even Hoyoverse has released more complicated games before; this seems baffling. But really, maybe it’s because of the popularity of their other games that this can just come out in such a state. There’s nothing here yet worth investing your time in.