A Colorful Apocalypse
Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) throws players into a world where the apocalypse has struck with the appearance of expanding, dangerous bubble realms known as Hollows. These space-warping zones are filled with dangerous creatures that can afflict humans with a deadly disease that may just kill them or transform them into monsters. Rather than relocate far away from these Hollows, the citizens of the city New Eridu have developed tools to explore them for treasures and resources.
While I can’t speak to how interesting ZZZ’s story is, I do already appreciate its tone. It’s incredibly goofy. For instance, while roaming around a construction site, I found a Bangoo (small helper robots that fulfill all sorts of roles in New Eridu), Catloverboo, lovingly watching over a cat burying its business in a pile of sand. When I asked the Bangboo what it was doing, it went on and on about how nice cat paws smell, and sharing in its enthusiasm got me a few resource rewards.
Delightfully, that goofiness persisted. From misunderstood affection causing multiple characters to be flustered by a robot-lover’s advances at robots to cheeky text messages from other characters, ZZZ’s lighthearted tone creates a welcoming atmosphere. It’s as though the people of New Eridu’s attitudes reflect the city’s fun and vibrant design rather than the collapse of society at large.
It’s a Team Effort
Zenless Zone Zero’s playable characters are divided in an interesting way. The protagonist siblings Belle and Wise are “Proxies,” individuals who have the technology and know-how to direct others in navigating the winding paths in Hollows. They don’t go in physically themselves and instead guide Agents on their dives into the dangerous realms. One selected sibling is playable during city exploration while the Agents are playable in Hollows. The 15 currently playable Agents are split among various factions often associated with their jobs, from groups like a housekeeping company to a construction company.
Whether diving into combat from the campaign, a side quest, or by choosing to run through one of the many various combat challenge modes, three Agents and (depending on the situation) a combat Bangoo make up a team. Like with other HoYoverse games, team composition is critical. Every character has a combat specialty type (like defense, stun, or attack, among others) and a damage affinity (like physical, fire, or ether), both of which need to be taken into consideration when building a team, especially for more difficult encounters like boss challenges. Pairing at least more than one member from the same faction on the team awards each of those characters an extra ability too.
I like that the Bangboo, which acts independently of the playable team and attacks on their own, can fill in for a damage type if you don’t have a particular character ready to take on that role or don’t want to swap any one of your favorite characters out. Though ZZZ isn’t focused on elemental combinations like Genshin Impact, considering affinities and enemy weaknesses still matters.
The combat itself is a ton of fun, and I appreciate that certain encounters have a regular difficulty and a hard difficulty for players looking for extra challenge. Engagements are flashy and fluid; players can hack-and-slash their way through, but those who take time to learn attack combos and make use of the dodge counters and the chain attack will see their efforts rewarded. Plus, it’s fun to learn how to optimize a team’s combat.
The Other Half of Exploring Hollows
When I first played ZZZ, I was most surprised by its Hollow Deep Dive System, the other part of combat exploration that doesn’t really have all that much combat involved. Rather than navigating repeating combat paths, ZZZ pulls players back a layer into what could be considered an imagined top-down view of the Hollow represented through TVs on a board. Here, additional combat encounters can be found along with navigation puzzles and rewards on hidden paths.
This view most clearly represents the Proxy’s perspective of the Hollows. Paths unseen by the Agents on the ground, but easy to navigate for those beyond. This board system is intertwined with combat in the campaign. For players who don’t favor it and just want to get into the action, though, there are specific “Combat” and “Exploration” divisions at the Hollow Deep Dive menu that separate missions based on the kind of experience players will have, with the Exploration selection filled with the Hollow TV board.
When I played a random puzzle mission listed in the Exploration section, I was disappointed with how easy it was. In fact, in one mission, the memory puzzle was solved for me. I hope these were one-off instances and not representative of the Hollow Deep Dive exploration system as a whole. If there’s no challenge to navigating these boards, then what’s the point of having them?
Character dialogue is another issue in the Hollow Deep Dive exploration. Maybe it’s not so bad on a mobile device or other small screen, but all dialogue boxes in this mode are relegated to the top right corner of the screen. Given that these “exploration” boards are part of the campaign, it makes me worried that I’ll miss out on lore or good conversations between characters. Overall, though, I think the board system could add an interesting mix to ZZZ’s gameplay, but I do hope it poses more of a challenge.
Walking the Streets of New Eridu
Exploring New Eridu is limited. ZZZ isn’t an open-world game and it doesn’t pretend to be. Instead, players can explore multiple streets connected by an in-game menu. Once at the chosen destination, running through the entirety of a street and its side paths doesn’t take long at all, though I found quite a number of people to talk to and various activities to do.
An important exploration aspect of ZZZ is its in-game clock. Days are split into four segments; morning, afternoon, night, and late night. As the time of day changes so do the city streets, making certain individuals unavailable at a time of day. According to the in-game handbook, things like completing story and side mission tasks and resting advance time rather than your real clock. I’m curious to see how this mechanic plays out in the long term, but in my playtime, it only mattered to me when scheduling a meetup with an NPC for a side quest and for opening the video shop.
There are plenty of other activities other than digging into combat, like running the protagonists’ video shop. This is more of a quick optional task to kick up at the beginning of each day where you’re asked to stock three tapes based on customer genre preferences. Once a promoter is selected to run the shop for the day (new promoters can be hired too), you let them do the work, though you can also interact with customers throughout the day while the shop is open. This is just one of the few fun side activities I found that enrich the time of being in New Eridu.
Other activities included things like minigames in the arcade (anyone up for competitive Snake?) and helping the street-based Officer Mewmew with his list of side missions for residents of the street. There are also functional activities like grabbing a daily coffee (in-game daily, not actual daily) from the cute coffee shop for buffs and a refill on rechargeable energy used for specific combat encounters to earn materials for character upgrades. While New Eridu might not be sprawling now, it’s easy to see how HoYoverse can expand the city with new streets, shops, activities, and characters in the future.
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