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Zenless Zone Zero feels like it occupies two opposite spaces - at times, it feels like Hoyoverse's most ambitious effort yet. It's a savvy blend of some of the mechanics that have made Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail popular, added to a foundation of innovation and style, creating something that's unique to the developer's offerings thus far. At other times, it feels explicitly designed to be accessible and relaxed, with just as much emphasis placed on creating a café setting people might actually want to spend time in as the enemies our heroes will fight throughout ZZZ's story.
Ever since spending time in the beta, I've been wondering just how well this amalgamation of philosophies will work in what's ultimately a Gacha Game. That descriptor means two important things: it needs enough depth to keep players coming back to play; and it needs to be different enough from other games on the market - even its siblings at HoYoverse - to factor in to busy players' schedules, often unable to juggle more than a handful of live service titles at best. In a recent hands-on event in Singapore, I had the chance to test what was essentially the launch build (minus a few surprises and story bits), and I'm now quite sure that when Zenless Zone Zero launches, it will gracefully compete with its contemporaries as a stand-out Live service game.
More than anything during the preview, what stood out the most was just how compelling the concept of New Eridu city is. Everything feels hyper-connected in a way that's much harder to achieve in other HoYoverse titles because of their varied locales and expansive cities - as the last bastion of humanity, New Eridu is simply where everyone is by default. That sense of community makes the struggles of the populace feel very intimate, even if it's as all-encompassing as surviving in the face of disaster. Robots, strange creatures, and humans co-exist and form a network of people who support each other.
It's not a revolutionary concept, but it is a fascinating one in a Gacha Game, which often to get by on variations of biomes and themes rather than an adherence to a central hub. Unfortunately, the preview also obscured potential story moments that took place over audio, so it's difficult to intuit too much about how the active characters might interact with their NPC counterparts, or how some of the later story beats revolve around New Eridu. For that reason it's not possible to pass judgment on how effective this endeavor into Urban Fantasy is just yet, but the blueprint is there for something both memorable and entertaining.
I think as far as gameplay goes, Zenless Zone Zero has cleaned up some of the criticisms it faced in its past beta; the Roguelite mode, HDD, is accessible through the menu's UI and immediately lets players jump into a mode that scales for challenges and is full of the style that makes the game its most charming. Players navigate HDD by moving their avatar through television paths that are full of potential coins, items, enemies, events, and more. Completing battles or certain other triggers awards players with modifications that affect their performance in future combats - with some of them negative. Combining similar modifications boosts their effectiveness even more, and there seem to be a solid number of options in the preview build.
HDD also features the usual you might expect from a team-based Gacha game, tasking players with building out a squad of three characters who will then embark on the journey together. There's complementary builds and supports, where, again, the modifications can really shine - getting the ice damage ones on a team of 2 ice characters is a simple example of how these work - and also spin approaches to battle in interesting ways. In one run I accidentally traded my team-appropriate mods for an entire set of different ones, whose bonuses affected my ultimate frequency; I still completed the run successfully, but had to puzzle out a new way for my team to work, which was a lot of fun after the initial panic passed.
It's no secret that Zenless Zone Zero's approach to combat is a divisive one - producer Zhenyu Li has commented multiple times on wanting the game to be accessible even to people who aren't necessarily good at the genre, and with that comes the usual hesitancy from veterans to admit that simplified battling can still be fun. It definitely can, though, and was, throughout the Zzz preview event. I spent most of my time just finding new ways to battle enemies rather than dive too far into the game's story, and that's because combat was so rewarding and fun. Our build had many characters available, but the ones I tried and enjoyed the most are predictably the 5-stars with the most interesting designs:
Perhaps the most emblematic example of why battles in Zenless Zone Zero continue to fascinate me was access to Zhu Yuan, the police officer, pistol-wielding character with an Ether affinity and bombastic maneuvers to get the most out of her weapons. Slotting her into a team I was familiar with already, it was immediately apparent to me that every character impacts their composition, whether it's as simple as the way their combat skills place them on the battlefield during and after their use or as complex as the varied buffs and debuffs that can be applied to friends and foes alike. As forgiving as some of Zzz's mechanics can be - I really don't think I'm as good at dodging as the game leads me to believe, for instance - its minutiae is no joke.
My takeaways from the game's presentation itself set aside, I think Li's Content development philosophy is what's going to set Zenless Zone Zero apart. In a sit-down interview we had with him on-site, I asked about grinding, and how it can be detrimental to player's enjoyment of a title. Li has put thought into it - dailies, for instance, range from the usual combat or item-focused options to much newer ones, like having a cup of coffee to start your day. It's all because ZZZ is an urban living game more than it is a combat-focused HoYoverse title, which informs the very core of how it approaches things like planning out content and how to manage Player investment.
As someone who has played a lot of gacha games - Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail account for hundreds of hours already, not to mention an ungodly amount sunk into Fate: Grand Order and Arknights, for example - what Zenless Zone Zero is doing really excites me. I don't have the same amount of free time I used to and, as a result, keeping my accounts up-to-date in my daily driver Live service games has been a difficult endeavor. I look at ZZZ and I see a game that I can slot into that lineup without having to sacrifice something else, because it appears to want to be as relaxed as some of Eridu City's most vibed-out residents. That's a powerful position in a sea of games that are greedy about their player time, and if Zenless Zone Zero strikes a balance between rewarding gameplay, engrossing World design, and a relaxed spin on its gacha stylings, I think it's the sleeper hit of 2024 and a game that could very well surprise a number of people who don't have it on their radar just yet.