You get up and go downstairs to shelves full of videotapes set against red bricks. Behind the counter, a robot bunny with an orange bandana is bouncing on its seat, staring at nothing with its yellow circles for eyes.
You check out what’s on the neatly organized shelves. The videotapes’ cover art is so well-designed, as though these movies are real-life and not made up for a free-to-play (F2P) gacha game.
In the staff-room-turned-den, your sibling waits for you to start the dialogue and continue the story.
This is how a regular day goes in “Zenless Zone Zero” (ZZZ). The game’s art assimilates a kind of city pop and mecha-anime synthesis, with stylistic combat and storylines shifting between animation clips and an interactive comic format.
Released to much fanfare last July 4, it’s the latest game from Shanghai-based developer MiHoYo, who created some of today’s most popular F2P gacha adventure games, such as “Honkai Impact 3rd,” “Genshin Impact,” and “Honkai: Star Rail” (HSR).
ZZZ’s gameplay is something of a mix between those three Hoyoverse games. It’s especially similar to the initial Honkai 3rd in terms of action combat and dialogue system, but there’s also something based on ZZZ’s “assist” feature, with characters (called “agents”) taking turns to deliver a sequence of coordinated attacks, sometimes even darting in for the kind of follow-up attack seen in HSR combat.
But on the whole, despite the success of its predecessors, ZZZ is its own game, with its own personality and immersive story-telling.
Project-based story structure
Set in the futuristic, last remaining city of New Eridu, siblings Wise and Belle live an ostensibly normal life in their two-story videotape-lending store on Sixth Street. As a side hustle, they take on commissions where they commit illegal cyber-activities such as “proxies,” on par with dabbling in the dark web and electronically trespassing on dangerous, government-prohibited areas—but mostly for a good cause.
Small bunny-like pet robots called Bangboo are common in New Eridu, and are the primary devices used by the siblings in their secret cyber-racket. They can digitally sync their consciousness with a Bangboo using a unique computer system that they exclusively possess.
In this setup, Wise and Belle can remotely perform their job as proxies in the comfort of their home, using the Bangboo to guide “clients” through the dangerous alternate dimensions known as Hollows, which are essentially toxic, monster-making black holes that have engulfed most of civilization and wiped out all other cities in the world.
New Eridu survived by developing technology for resource extraction in the Hollows, which the city then capitalized on, leading to conflict and power play between several factions that each worked for their own interests.
Like the earlier version of Honkai 3rd, ZZZ is not open-world; exploration is limited because it’s not as locationally expansive as Genshin or HSR, where new regions or worlds are built for every major story update.
The narrative is, put simply, project-based. The chapters unfold primarily by introducing the factions in New Eridu with which Wise and Belle would be involved as experienced proxies. These factions range from infrastructure companies to criminal investigation units to housekeeping agencies.
In general, although most of the action happens in the Hollows, the story always returns to Sixth Street, with its calm, clueless, orderly neighborhood of huskies staffing the newsstand and elegant robots running a coffee shop.
Metropolitan action with slice of life
The game’s user interface (UI) is artfully and maximally stylized but is fairly easy to navigate, with some likeness to the UI in “Persona 5” minus the extreme red/black/white color contrasts and Saul Bass-inspired motifs. ZZZ goes for a more 90s to 2000s aesthetic in a subdued palette, added with lo-fi, graffiti, and very advanced tech systems engineered into analog devices.
On entering a combat mission in the Hollows, there is an overview of the terrain ahead and a brief moving close-up shot on the first deployed agent à la “Asphalt” at the start of a race. In some instances, it also has that cartoon nostalgia to it—some of the illustrations in the Event tab call to mind popular 2D cartoon shows that aired in the 2000s, such as “Danny Phantom” and “Kim Possible,” and even more recent ones like “Teen Titans Go!” and “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”
Although the game’s world-building itself is far from mediocre, the storytelling mostly errs on the side of fun-loving and pleasantly quotidian. You can tell the huge difference against the complex, borderline metaphysical story-telling in HSR released in 2023, which, while also not too serious and dark in its portrayal, did not shy away from slightly heavier existential themes.
Another notable distinction is that ZZZ conceptually leans more toward the sci-fi genre than fantasy, on which Genshin and HSR are heavier.
ZZZ is perfect for casual players who want a fusion of sporty webtoon-styled stories, retro-tech puzzles, uncomplicated combat mechanics, and occasional slice-of-life quests with neighborly interactions. One of its distinctive pleasures is how, despite its post-apocalyptic setting, it offers the experience of ordinary life, like walking down a charming and serene city neighborhood, with the well-kept alleys of Sixth Street reminiscent of a Tokyo residential area.
Some of the daily missions and city side quests allow you to pet and take pictures of alley cats, order coffee, eat ramen, buy a scratchcard at the newsstand while reading the day’s headlines, and play a few co-op games at the arcade.
Simplistic hack-and-slash
In terms of combat, the game does give its players an option to play on “casual” mode or “challenge” mode, purportedly for the more intense gamers looking for harder combat experience.
The combat experience itself is another conversation altogether, and may leave much to be desired for those who want stronger action. Its mechanics are fairly easy to learn—maybe even too easy. It’s tailor-fit for optimal mobile experience, to which MiHoYo puts significant attention as a gaming platform due to its significantly large user base.
Compared with similar hack-and-slash games, especially the action-adventure game series “Devil May Cry” which pioneered the combat style and is often cited as an inspiration for ZZZ’s combat gameplay, there is a lack of dynamism and pizzazz in ZZZ’s movesets.
For the most part, combat methods for damage-dealing are pared down to or focused on leveled basic attack, assist, and distinct “chain attacks,” where deployed agents take quick turns delivering heavy assault on stunned enemies. There is little flexibility to experiment with movesets even with the basic attacks, more so with special. Or else a degree of flexibility is only available in the movesets of certain agents obtainable exclusively through the gacha system.
On the other hand, MiHoYo is known to constantly improve gameplay on every update based on player feedback. Just last July 24, only three weeks after the game’s official release, developers released patch notes on ZZZ’s official X (Twitter) account, announcing that they will optimize the game’s combat mode and other gameplay features for versions 1.1 and 1.2.
A critical combat modification includes the ability to cancel or switch to manual chain attacks, which are currently automatically triggered and cannot be opted out of, as well as additional missions and game modes that would suit those who want more engaging and challenging fights.
Smooth game for smooth operator
The combat mechanics are arguably not ZZZ’s most innovative feature so far, but the rest of the gameplay certainly makes up for it with good taste, beautifully crafted graphics and animation, compelling world-building, and ease of UI. For a video game with quite a lot of components, it’s refreshingly uncomplicated, not to mention pleasant to look at. The dialogues are not too confusing despite the use of computer terminologies, and the stories themselves are straightforward and simply executed. Hopefully, there should be enough content for one to get by until the next big update.
It’s still early days, and it remains to be seen how ZZZ will work out, technically and narratively, in the next few months. There’s something to look forward to with the planned changes in the version updates.
But for now, commissions must be completed, monsters rubbed out, and videotapes recommended to inquiring customers. Don’t forget to buy your coffee for the day.
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