Releasing on the week of July 4th, MiHoYo’s newest F2P game, Zenless Zone Zero, popped onto people’s radars after a lengthy tease from the publisher and a fairly long period of radio silence following a few closed beta tests. Promising a character action game mixed with a growing narrative and set in a semi-futuristic cityscape, ZZZ certainly oozes aesthetic charm and visuals, but is the game worth playing? Put on your favorite trap beat mix music, get your VHS player ready, and grab your Highly Marketable Bangboo Plush That Doesn’t Exist Yet as we talk about the highs and lo-fis of the ZZZ experience, dear reader.
Character Acting? I’m More Method Myself
The biggest draw to ZZZ for me was the promise of it being a Character Action game. For those unfamiliar with the term, Character Action are games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Nier Automata, or even God of War. “Character Action” itself somewhat overtook certain other terms like “hack and slash,” but generally focused on games where the characters you play are viewed in third person and have combination input attacks, blocking, special attacks, and usually some form of flashy special and ultimate moves. A lot of these games have also lately focused on systems that reward good timing for dodging or parrying, like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance or the aforementioned DMC series, somewhat pushing the idea that your character is insanely cool and stylish, but also that you, the player, are the one doing that with your timing and input skills.
So to answer a question: Is ZZZ character action? Yes. Is it good character action? I think so. But what do I mean by that, since you perhaps noticed that it wasn’t an emphatic “Yes?” Well, let’s talk about how ZZZ works. Characters have a very limited amount of buttons available to them: A Basic attack, an EX attack, Dodge, Swap, and an Ultimate. Some might argue that this is too simple–that your character is just going to be you button mashing the Basic attack button until you need to do the other things–and while that’s not wrong, that’s also actually pretty true of any character action game. What’s being missed here is that ZZZ does not immediately instruct players about how each character’s rotation and inputs actually do function differently and have slight variances beyond just what type of character they are.
The first three characters you get are from the team Gentle House, otherwise known as the Cunning Hares, including the pink-haired semi-banner character Nicole, white haired Anby, and robotic goofball Billy. Billy has two guns (so twice the accuracy), and his playstyle revolves around dodging in and out of enemies and keeping slight distance between them, which is an obvious difference from Anby’s rush-down style of play that wants you to get into the enemy’s face and stun them with quick attacks. That probably seems obvious, but what the game doesn’t exactly teach you right away are things like Anby’s combo string: hitting 3 basic attacks and then her EX attack will increase damage, adding a level of timing to the rotation of her attacks, or that Billy’s attacks do more or less damage based on how close or far he is from enemies, meaning that you want to be weaving him in and out of certain ranges. So while the argument could be made that the combat seems “simple,” there’s quite a bit of depth to the system, and that isn’t even getting into the Dodge and Assist mechanics.
Dodging attacks at the right moment (telegraphed by an orange flash from the enemy) slows time and allows you to launch a retaliatory attack with different properties and damage depending on the character. Hitting the Swap button instead right as the attack connects swaps out your character for another, launching into Parry mechanic where the incoming character repels the attack and launches a special ability. Knowing when to swap or dodge is important, because you can only parry so many times in a row before the meter needs to refill.
Once you’ve mastered that, MiHoYo’s penchant for “break” mechanics appears again: enemies take damage, but also build up a Stun meter, and when the meter fills, hitting enemies with a heavy attack (such as an EX) will allow you to fire off a series of character swapping chain attacks that can do massive amounts of damage to your foes. They also look insanely cool, and are the most fun part of the battle system to me: firing off a perfect parry that leads to a stun and then chaining my three characters attacks together, culminating in perhaps an Ultimate, feels slick, amazing, and satisfying.
So to restate my earlier point: Is ZZZ Character Action? Yes. Is it good Character Action? Absolutely. I love it; the game is so addicting and allows you to feel and look cool with a simple system that I’ve found myself simply playing the game just to play it, having already reached the “end game” content of the release patch; I had to actually pull myself away from playing the game to write this review.
Gacha Moment: Let’s (Not) Go Gambling!
Before going too much further with the review, I wanted to get this part out of the way immediately: ZZZ is is Free to Play, with the clause that it includes a Gacha system for obtaining new units and W-Engines (equipment for your characters), very similar to the systems used in other MiHoYo games like Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail. On paper, that means that over time while playing you earn currency (Polychrome) that can be used to “pull” from the banners to try and obtain new characters, but gacha games are, in a way, gambling. You can use real money to buy currency to pull from these banners, and if you find the ethics of gacha systems dubious or feel that you are someone who can easily suffer from FOMO, you should keep that in mind as to whether you want to play ZZZ or not.
I’m not looking to argue one way or the other for or against Gacha systems or their ethics, but it is important to know that ZZZ has them: One for a limited time character, one for W-Engines, and one “Standard” banner that will remain permanent and has a set pool of S-rank characters (There is a 4th banner for Bangboos (the little rabbit mascot things), but you can’t actually spend money to pull from that one, so I’m only including it so someone doesn’t go “well actually there are four”). MiHoYo’s pity system for pulling works in two ways: after a set amount of pulls (90) you are guaranteed an S-rank character or W-Engine, and if you are pulling on a Limited banner, you have a 50/50 chance (75/25 for W-Engines) to get the banner character. If you fail the 50/50, the NEXT S-Rank you get on a Limited Banner will be guaranteed to be that character. Assuming you have the worst luck in the world, that means that 180 pulls will guarantee you one copy of the Limited character of a banner.
A lot of this is to say that the allure of pulling on banners does exist, but playing as a F2P player is not only totally feasible, ZZZ is so much about the vibes of what characters you play that simply pulling on the Standard Banner forever would probably set you up fine. The argument about whether you should spend money or not is up to you; for me, I don’t mind spending money on games that I am playing and enjoy, and in a world where entry to an AAA title is increasingly 70+ dollars and a Season Pass to give me the “full experience” is an extra 30-40, I’m finding it harder to justify that over tossing a Gacha game I really like 20 dollars for a season pass or skin I really like every few months.
Aesthetic Comfort Food
The “spice” for me with ZZZ comes not from the slick action gameplay, although it is extremely satisfying. For me, it’s the game’s overall aesthetic, a somewhat near-future alternate world where humans, “Thirens” (people with animal like characteristics, such as shark tails, cat ears, or literally just being talking bears), robots, and more live together in the city of New Eridu, which is attempting to recover from and grapple with growing threats known as “Hollows”, areas of dangerous alternate reality that eventually corrupts and poisons people lost inside of them for too long. Your character–either of the siblings Wise and Belle-navigates New Eridu from their home base of a video store, and on the street you’ll become acquainted with is a noodle stand, coffee shop, arcade, and more. I often find myself just casually strolling around the neighborhood, enjoying the immaculate vibe the game creates in a somewhat small but evolving space. The combination of retro technology (VHS tapes, CDs, arcades, payphones) with sci-fi terminology and aesthetics in an urban environment just works for me personally in a way that is hard to properly describe. It feels somewhat like the urban future environments of Jet Set Radio or Splatoon, and it just scratches a particular itch for me that many other games and media do not.
The storytelling also follows a lot of these aesthetics, with cutscenes told in a comic-book style format at times that has running film strip bars, and there’s a large emphasis put upon lost media, film, televisions, and music throughout the game. The secondary mode of the game–an exploratory, puzzly mode–uses televisions as the main vehicle for how it operates, with your character moving around from screen to screen. It all works incredibly well in a tight package, and also helps set the game apart from even MiHoYo’s other titles–Star Rail is far more “science fantasy,” and Genshin Impact is very much Fantasy, whereas ZZZ is very snugly in a urban fantasy future realm that has few contemporaries.
It also doesn’t hurt that this is one of MiHoYo’s most graphically appealing games either, showing off some of the developer’s progress from their earlier titles till now very strongly; the environments are colorful and vibrant, characters look great, and the battle effects are all explosive and fun to watch; not only does the action often leave you feeling like you did something cool, you also get rewarded by seeing your characters DO cool attacks and abilities.
Crossed Wires
That doesn’t mean everything in ZZZ is perfect. There’s some slight rumblings amongst players about the “exploration” side of the game, which uses the aforementioned television screens. Personally, I’m on the fence about it myself. Functionally a board game, you move your character around the board to interact with various spaces, solving puzzles, fighting enemies, and finding items. I don’t mind this system entirely, and I like that I’m not trudging along huge empty arenas from one battle to the next, but there are times in which this exploration mechanic feels rote and slow.
Early on, the biggest drawback to this system is the game prevents you from speeding through it, which felt bad in comparison to the battle system, which rewards and encourages you to figure it out and aim to end fights quickly. Once the game opens up more and allows you to fully “play” it, these exploratory systems don’t feel quite so bad, and often have unique little puzzles in them, and I’ve grown to like them a little more. That said, it is absolutely my least favorite part of the game, and I’m hoping that there are ways it gets refined as the game ages into newer patches and content.
There is, also, the content wall to discuss, but for the average casual player, this might not mean much. For someone who perhaps feels the drive to get into the game as hard as I did on launch, I was butting heads with endgame content less than a week after launch. That’s not actually bad: Hollow Zero and Shiyu Defense are the “endgame” modes that really challenge your skills, and having those available has kept me coming back to the game over and over again. There are also Hard Mode versions of stages after you clear them, so while I was already touching the ceiling of what was in the game so far, I’ve found that ZZZ makes me want to keep coming back, rather than the content lull of other F2P games I engage with, which often make me log on, do a daily, and log off; ZZZ keeps me engaged because the combat is so much fun, and interacting with the world is also endlessly endearing.
If you don’t plan on burning into the game’s core immediately, though, you likely won’t notice this at all; the first major patch is coming in about a week and a half from this review, which will expand the game and add more content, and if games like GI or HSR are anything to judge by, ZZZ will keep getting updated and tweaked often.
Knowing Is Half the Battle: Skill is the Rest
Those reservations aside, the thing I’ve really enjoyed about ZZZ so far is that skill carries you very far, and paying attention to the game’s systems will help carry you even further. You’re guaranteed an S rank agent from the Standard banner simply by playing through the game (I had mine before I even finished Chapter 1 fully), and then I built my team around her easily; from there, the second one I ended up pulling off the rest of my levelling freebies has given me the freedom to explore different team styles and compositions, which I’ve really loved. This is further expanded by the fact that characters have different skills and types, with each character having the following variables: Faction, Element, and Class. Getting 3 characters in your party that share either elemental similarities or faction similarities helps unlock passive buffs for each character, and the system is very forgiving: You can have 2 characters of the same Element, and 2 characters who share a Faction, and get the 3 character buff. In the picture below, for example, my Soldier 11 team gets the full buff from having 2 characters with Fire element (Lucy and Soldier 11), and 2 characters from the same faction (Lucy and Piper, both from Sons of Calydon). This flexibility is really nice because it lets players get the buffs without locking you into requiring characters you don’t have, and also allows for some fun experimentation with builds.
Characters also have a class type: Attack, Stun, Support, Anomaly, and Defense, which sets up what their specialty is and how they interact with the game. Stun characters, for example, are very good at building the Daze meter to stun enemies, which allows you to launch flashy chain attacks, while Support characters pass on buffs to the overall team. Since teams are limited to three characters, you’ll be able to experiment to find the type of playstyle and characters that fit you the best, and the team you’re given by the game–Anby, Billy, and Nicole–are very capable of clearing all of the game’s content on their own, if you feel you never wish to pull for another character even with the free currency you’re given.
Perhaps that’s the thing that makes ZZZ feel so interesting to me right now; unlike a lot of F2P or Gacha games, skill feels like a huge component to the mix here. It is also the case that, being fair to MiHoYo, their games are entirely playable with the characters you get for free to start with–Honkai Star Rail for example gives you a very solid team out of the gate that you can use for quite a long time–but it still feels good to know that if I only ever played the game with what it provided to me narratively, I’d still be able to experience the game fully and that my skill in combat wins the day over “overpowered” characters making the game Pay to Win. Could that change in the future? Possibly. But ZZZ just launched, and even based on the current state of the game in China, the content coming soon is pretty much in line with this being true for the foreseeable future.
Live service gacha games that are F2P can be difficult to review; they can easily change from the initial experience, bloated by paying into the game to ‘win’, but MiHoYo has somewhat figured that out very easily how to craft a full game experience in Honkai Star Rail that can be played with minimal to no investment of money, and that’s carried into ZZZ in a lot of very positive ways. The story is fun, the characters are great, the aesthetics are out of this world, and I love that I can pick it up, set out to simply play for 30 minutes, and wind up having played for a few hours. There aren’t a lot of games that I can say I’ve done that with lately, which is maybe the highest praise I can give Zenless Zone Zero: I want to get lost in its world and stay there.
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