Zenless Zone Zero review – lo-fi beats to spend your money to

With a split between a daily life sim and an action game with fast-paced combat, Zenless Zone Zero tries to do both but only truly succeeds with one. From unique systems to the weirdest character designs we’ve seen from HoYo, there is a lot to love about ZZZ. In particular, the combat leaves a lasting impression that will have you wanting much more than the game currently offers.

Let’s start by saying that this game is nothing like Persona, not in terms of quality and especially not in terms of gameplay, style, or enjoyment. Making these connections to what are surface-level similarities does Persona a great disservice and gives ZZZ far too much credit for doing the bare minimum. The VHS store Random Play is not Cafe Leblanc, and this shouldn’t have to be said when the games offer such vastly different experiences.

Daily life, daily grind

Zenless Zone Zero will try desperately hard to convince you it’s not simply a glorified gambling game. This is best illustrated by daily Errands you can complete to earn premium currency for the gacha: sip coffee, eat noodles, grab a scratch card, take pictures of cats, and jam out to the vibes in a VHS rental shop for your Polychrome. Sounds like a game full of heart and a chill time, right?

Wrong. This betrays the game’s true nature as a gacha game. It’s not that ZZZ is especially soulless, it’s simply that gacha games, in general, are predatory casinos parading as games when you boil it down to its most simple terms. Take it or leave it, love it or hate it, but let’s not pretend these games exist for any other reason than to compel you to pull for new characters and spend your money to get ahead thanks to intentional roadblocks.

Herein lies a perpetual dilemma: can you recommend a game that will actively harm someone’s wallet, a game that is designed to be addictive, while at the same time being very fun and delivering a decent, polished gameplay experience? HoYoverse generally does a good job at delivering a fantastic product that, in the case of Honkai Star Rail specifically, delivers far and beyond most AAA games released in recent years. Zenless Zone Zero doesn’t feel like it’s quite there yet, but it certainly has the potential to be more. At the moment, ZZZ feels like a game that will be hard to get into for those who want to be fully free-to-play.

HoYoverse has standardised its gacha systems across Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and now ZZZ. It’s also within this that I have a big problem where I think the same systems don’t translate well. This is best illustrated with the daily resource Battery Energy. This it’s such a limiter here because you simply don’t have enough Battery to do more than a few activities. Further to this point, when you’ve used your Battery, there’s not much else content to tackle in terms of Commissions and other side objectives. In Genshin, you can go explore the huge world when you spend your Resin; in ZZZ, you can mill around New Eridu for the thousandth time when you spend your Battery. Placing this limit on what you can do in the game is more of a block when you reach Inter-Knot 30 and above, trying to get enough materials to improve your Agents. If the Battery replenished at a faster rate, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Further to this point, one of your main incentives to progress is to earn the premium currency for the gacha, which you’ll use to pull for new characters. Polychrome is this currency and the game is fairly stingy with its rewards, rarely giving you more than 30 at any time, which is especially noticeable with how little there is to actually do, and the time it takes to earn it. HoYo is typically very generous and this is especially true for the ZZZ launch, giving you 100 pulls and all but guaranteeing two S-Rank items. However, if these launch rewards weren’t in the game, you’d probably struggle to get any meaningful amount without spending money.

Combat is the saving grace

The combat is where the game shines most, but even here there is a glaring lack of variety. Fights are fantastically fun and enjoyable, if a little simplistic and repetitive. More than anything, they are stylish, and it’s great seeing how well the combat flows with switching characters in and out for Chain Attacks and the parry system. It’s intense and exciting, and a great example of timing-based combat done extremely well.

This problem of variety is exacerbated by the extremely limited stages. Every stage you play through for the combat sections is tiny and the same environments repeat over and over again. Arenas are small and you’ll see yourself barely noticing anything interesting about them. This is a game that confidently backs its combat to gloss over this fact, but there needs to be more variety here with how bare-bones it is.

There is a glimmer of hope with the Rally Commissions, seeing you explore a bigger area with alternate paths and treasure chests to find, but they are few and far between. More than anything, ZZZ is crying out for a dungeon crawling mode, something that sees you explore the Hollows on foot other than through the TV navigation. These two can exist together, and I do enjoy the TV aspect, but being able to explore a more interesting and fleshed-out level or series of levels would be infinitely better.

Outside of combat, you have tiny hubs to explore, but they are so small that you realistically spend a lot of time running around the same places looking for new things to do when you’re trying to rank up your Inter-Knot level. The hubs like New Eridu – even the larger Lumina Square – are cosy, but very boring when there aren’t enough interesting interactions to justify how much time you’ll end up running through them. It’s a nice break from the combat and TVs, but they could remove half of the pointless ‘exploration’ and it would still be too much, overstaying its welcome and then some.

HoYo gets points for giving the two MCs very distinct personalities and shows how they both exist independently of each other and have their own goals and aspirations, but the dialogue options are killing me. So many games are guilty of this, but when prompting me with three dialogue options to reply to someone, and each is a variation on the same answer that will always lead to the same end, is a truly awful way to do this. Either give me a meaningful dialogue option or don’t offer me the choice and have the main character say whatever the game wants. This is especially silly when you are presented with one dialogue option as your reply, which happens often enough to be annoying.

I want to praise and chastise HoYo for the character designs in ZZZ. On the plus side, we’re seeing a huge cast of unique characters, all of whom look very different from each other and are fairly out there with their designs. Ben Bigger is literally a bear. Soukaku is like some sort of Tiefling straight out of D&D. This is amazing since it opens up the door to so many weird and creative designs in the future. The less amazing part of it is the gratuitous sexualisation of all the female characters. Whatever your preferences are, whether you think this is good or bad, it’s hard to deny that the jiggle physics on these characters is front and centre for a reason.

All in all, Zenless Zone Zero is off to a good start. With a fantastic combat system and an intriguing story with compelling characters. I’m cautiously optimistic that it can bring more variety to its systems and gameplay in time. The lack of variety and the bare-bones nature of the game is something new content will remedy.