Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past four years, you’re probably familiar with at least one of the games made by the Chinese gaming juggernaut Mihoyo. Between the two most popular titles, Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact have a monthly player base somewhere around 75 million. Mihoyo is known for high production values, anime-inspired character and world design, and, of course, gacha mechanics. And now that Mihoyo has released its latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, after two years od development and several betas, we just had to go hands-on with it.
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What’s the story in ZZZ?
It’s the end of the world as we know it
Zenless Zone Zero takes place in a post-apocalyptic cyber-punk future. From what I can piece together after a few hours of game time, the apocalypse, in this case, is something called The Hollows. Hollows are a sort of extra-dimensional space that began popping up all over the planet until only one city was left, New Eridu.
Zenless Zone Zero gameplay video, almost half an hour of fresh footage for your eyeballs.
Inside these Hollows are valuable resources that need to be extracted, but they are populated with monsters called Ethereals. If you find yourself inside a Hollow, it’s nearly impossible to find your way out without help. If you’re inside for too long, you’ll end up transformed into a monster. That’s where Proxies come in.
Proxies are people who can pilot waist-high robotic rabbit things called Bangboo (they’re totally kawaii) to help Hollow Raiders navigate the dangers of Hollows. When the game starts, you can choose to play as one of two Proxies: Belle or her brother Wise. Things kick off when your friends in the Cunning Hares gang get trapped in a Hollow, and their boss comes to you to help get them out.
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What happens in the Hollows?
Exploration and action combat
The Hollows are where the “action” in this action role-playing game takes place. As a Proxy, you don’t actually do any fighting yourself; rather, you take control of whoever you’re guiding at the time.
How is the combat?
Despite the “action” in the genre, combat seems to be a very small part of the game, but it does it pretty well. Think of Devil May Cry, but more light-hearted and anime-inspired. At its core, combat boils down to spamming the attack button over and over, but there is some nuance if you have the patience to find it. If an enemy attacks, press the dash button to dodge and trigger a counter-attack. Occasionally, a flash will appear from an enemy; this is your chance to press the switch character button and trigger an assist attack. Attacking enemies generates energy. Once you have enough, you can launch a special attack that looks cooler and does more damage. It goes a bit deeper, but that’s the gist of it.
I’m not a fan of the on-screen controls. They’re not bad, but it’s just really hard to do right for a mobile game. Because combat involves pushing the right button at the right time, it’s frustrating to miss a button because you can’t feel it. Thankfully, ZZZ offers controller support built in right out of the box, something missing from previous Mihoyo titles. Another problem with mobile is the size of the screen. A lot of the combat mechanics rely on being able to see when an attack is incoming and pushing the right button in response to that. I found myself wanting to play the game on my PC monitor, just so I could see more of what was going on.
What about the exploration?
Exploration is weird. The combat portion of the Hollows takes place in a closed-off 3D environment that looks gorgeous, but there’s not much to do besides fight. Exploration is much more meta. Instead of running around a 3D environment, the Hollows are represented by a grid of monitors. As you move around, you can find rewards, obstacles, and classic top-down RPG puzzles. Along the way, you’ll also encounter Ethereals, but not random encounters. You can see where they are on the map/screens/grid. Moving to that tile will put you back in the combat portion of the game, and once you clear it, you’re back to the array of monitors.
Honestly, I think this is a really interesting concept. I imagine it’s done to save on resources, but I think it adds to the aesthetic of the game. Monitors and screens and displays and TVs are all over in the game, whether it’s the computer you use to access your Bangboo, or the TV on your couch used to advance the narrative, or the arcade down the street with minigames, screens are everywhere. Heck, your headquarters is hidden inside a video store.
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What happens in New Eridu?
Let’s go shopping
When you’re not in the Hollows, you’re in the real world, New Eridu. This is where you can find your headquarters, shops, and NPCs. This is where the administrative portion of the game takes place, and you can access the massive menu system, tweak your characters, and try your luck with the gacha mechanics. There isn’t a lot to do in the overworld as of the first four hours I’ve played, but Mihoyo promises more, and it has a reputation for delivering.
How is the story told?
Zenless Zone Zero has a couple of cool story-telling techniques that it uses and a couple I could live without. The live cutscenes are animated flawlessly and look beautiful, but lots of games do good cutscenes. What I really enjoy is the comic book–inspired cutscenes. They have the feel of an Oni comic but with slightly better writing. There are also more simple narrative devices, such as the classic talking image, where dialogue is played over static images of the characters conversing. And occasionally you get dialogue over 3D models that are devoid of any dynamism. These latter two narrative vehicles are mostly used for exposition dumps and I find myself skipping most of it and quickly skimming the dialogue.
I don’t think you miss too much when you skip these scenes, though it’s worth noting the voice acting is a lot better than I was prepared for, and after suffering through the hollow voice acting of Devil May Cry, ZZZ is a breath of fresh air.
Parting thoughts
With so much to explore, one article won’t cover everything
There’s a lot going on in Zenless Zone Zero, and even 1,000 words barely scratch the surface of how much content is packed within. I didn’t mention W-Engines, or the Factions, or how to level up. Each of those subjects could be its own article, and there is already an avid community maintaining a wiki that covers pretty much all the minutiae. I didn’t expect that I would be interested in playing ZZZ again after writing this article, but I low-key enjoy most of it and am eager to see how the story and world open up as I get deeper into it.
Zenless Zone Zero is free-to-play and available right now for Android and iPhone as well as PC. If you decide to give it a chance, be ready for the initial assets download, which will take at least 30 minutes to download 20GB, so make sure you have some space on your phone.
