I’ve made the mistake of underestimating HoYoverse games before. When Honkai Impact 3rd was released last year, I was so cautious about thinking Genshin Impact was a flash in the pan—a one-off hit that I’m glad to make an exception for, as I have no interest in free-to-play RPGs aimed at a mobile-first market—that I’d keep an eye on HSR for a few weeks after its release, then quietly drop it once the initial wave of interest died down. Foolish me, though, and it ended up being one of my favorite games of 2023, with around 200 hours of playtime on my account so far.
I should go into Zenless Zone Zero with high expectations. But I’ve also heard that ZZZ isn’t as good as other recent HoYo releases. So my expectations were… complicated: I am willing to be persuaded, but I don’t expect the whole world.
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Even if you’re familiar with HoYoverse games, Zenless Zone Zero has some surprises in store for you. Going into the preview build without any hands-on experience, I found that spending countless hours playing Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3 didn’t make me as comfortable picking up Zenless Zone Zero as I thought I would. Knowledge of HoYo’s other games is useful when navigating menus and calculating gacha exchange rates, for example, but actually interacting with its world is an entirely different experience.
That’s not a bad thing: many elements of ZZZ that confused me at first ended up being the most fascinating elements of the entire game. For example: Maybe it’s just my weird mind, but one aspect of gacha games that always bothers me is how little you end up seeing of your typical player characters. Once you’ve piled some more powerful units on the roster, you’re likely to see more of the people who make a five-minute cameo in the story than the protagonists whose journeys you’re forced to follow.
But as I fumbled my way through ZZZ, I began to realize that this game is much stronger than other similar games in its explanation of who, where, and when you are in the story. When you first play, you can choose to play as Belle or Wise: the classic HoYo brother-sister protagonist combination, as a gender selection option for players. But here, whoever you don’t choose will still be an important figure in your game, becoming your colleague and confidant in the base camp, and your truly indispensable comrade-in-arms.
Genshin Impact takes a variation on this — the unchosen sibling becomes an important supporting character in the protagonist’s story, though they have their own adventures off-screen — but typically, after the choice is made, the poor gender-swapped self disappears into the pre-canon void. So seeing both of Zenless Zone Zero’s protagonists become key on-screen figures is already a pleasant surprise, and a sign from the outset that ZZZ is a game that’s not too bound by the conventions set by its genre or its parent company.
Sure, its gacha trappings are largely the same, but standardizing monetization seems to be an administrative task within HoYo; instead, the developers seem to be given a surprising amount of freedom when it comes to creativity, as the studio can basically print money with its tried-and-true formula.
In the world of Zenless Zone Zero, you can choose to play as either Belle or Wise. That’s it. While exploring the retro-futuristic dystopian cityscape of New Eridu, Belle was my only avatar in that world, and there was no way to switch her appearance to that of a random familiar with the press of a button. This lets you meet and interact with people on your roster as they go about their daily business, allowing for a more natural flow from world exploration to companion quests and side activities.
Zenless Zone Zero’s combat feels downright frantic. The fast pace is by design, not to be a barrier to entry for less-dexterous players: it’s to make the game more pleasure. It really is! One of the most satisfying moments in ZZZ is when you land a combo just right, and within seconds your character flips in and out of the arena thanks to your savvy strategic input (or great button mashing), it’s almost like the game is playing on its own.
The contrast with Genshin Impact is particularly stark. Combat in Genshin Impact, especially in the open world, can sometimes feel unresponsive—especially if you rely on free-for-alls without the latest meta-optimized team lineups—making the experience less satisfying than it should be. In Zenless Zone Zero, combat is limited to designated arenas, but that feels like a limitation that ultimately makes the mix of action and strategy more exciting.
On that note, I have to admit that Zenless Zone Zero is probably the first game I’ve played that made me actively enjoy dodging/parrying. As someone who notoriously hates all forms of dodging/parrying/blocking mechanics, preferring to take a hit or run away, ZZZ’s satisfying chime after a perfect dodge and subsequent entry into black-and-white bullet-time invincibility finally won me over. It may be a small thing, but any game that can turn me into an avid follower of this topic deserves special praise.
However, I think this clear distinction between combat and exploration characters may have an unexpected impact on the banner ad sales that these games rely on to make money. Character builders may continue as usual, but will character collectors invest as much money as they did before if they can no longer see their favorite characters outside of combat arenas – or whether they collect them at all?
As someone who leans more towards the collector camp and only tends to properly build a few select units, I find myself wondering if I’ll bother with ZZZ’s gacha as much as I did in Genshin and Star Rail. Although, to be fair, I’ve already put a lot of effort into collecting everyone in the Golden Age horror-themed Victorian housekeeper faction, so maybe my worrying about HoYo here is pointless (yes, I’ll be primarily playing as the ghostly French maid Rina, and no, I’m not going to answer other questions right now.)
Zenless Zone Zero seems like a new favorite game because it has had extra time to develop. Now for me, the question is no longer whether ZZZ is a good game, but who is the target audience for this absolutely fun game. forAfter all, HoYoverse already has a broad offering with its four existing live-service games: Honkai Impact 3rd for old-school waifu collectors who love NieR; Genshin Impact for fans who like ambitious open worlds and high fantasy, like an endless Zelda; Honkai Impact 3rd for players who like turn-based JRPGs and/or space opera narratives; and Tears of Themis for those who wish Ace Attorney was a good dating sim.
We’ve reached a tipping point where it’s hard to even keep up with updates to all of these games, let alone enjoy them. Zenless Zone Zero feels like it will force a lot of players to choose the HoYo games that really appeal to them. Who exactly is ZZZ talking to that these developers haven’t served them well?
I think the answer is nostalgia. Zenless Zone Zero quietly seems to be aimed at a slightly older average audience than HoYo’s other titles. The game was even originally planned to have an adult age rating, though some of the themes that weren’t so suitable for children have been cut – which has led to accusations of censorship in some quarters, as the jitter physics are one of the things that have been toned down (although really, having seen the latest version, I can’t imagine what they were like before – were the only complaints about women getting smacked in the face by breasts when they turn too fast?). Still, the game’s appeal to children of the late 90s and early 00s is clear in just about every aspect.
Lead producer Lee Jin-woo is a die-hard fan of Digimon, Street Fighter, and DJMax—and while those series have survived into the modern era, they still exude a distinct millennial nostalgia for those who lived through them. The urban fantasy setting also reflects the cartoonish romanticization of inner-city life in the early 2000s (it’s worth noting that this millennial immediately began to recall Urbz: The Sims in the City and My Sims Agent while wandering around New Eridu).
Zenless Zone Zero’s protagonist works in a video rental store; the enhanced gear is designed to be inserted into a personal CD player. I remember retrofuturism looking like a 1960s space-age dream, but it seems that the early 2000s glorification of cyberpunk (“high-tech underworld,” but the technology is not much higher than reality, and a decent working life is certainly not too low) is now mainstream.
Of course, you don’t have to understand ZZZ’s retro appeal to appreciate it. I heard the team gently correct some people who had mistakenly attributed much of their inspiration to Persona 5. Despite its dystopian lore, ZZZ has a unique, bright turn-of-the-millennium hopefulness at every turn, reflecting an almost teleological belief that, while things are still a bit bad right now, they’re bound to get better — an assumption about the world that may be quite alien to those whose childhoods were marked by the 2008 financial crisis and everything that followed.
To me, this is where ZZZ’s deeper retro appeal lies; but given Western millennials’ general reluctance to engage in gacha games, this clever undercurrent will likely go unnoticed by Gen Z viewers, for whom the contrast between the visually cheerful metropolis and the narrative’s claim that its inhabitants are oppressed and miserable may ultimately be confusing. I guess you might have to be there, mate.
Despite being billed as an action-RPG, exploring New Eridu feels like the main activity in ZZZ, with combat being a secondary focus that’s largely hidden away so it can be ignored until you’re ready to dive in. Unlike Genshin Impact or HSR, you’ll never find yourself being dragged into a combat encounter without explicitly seeking it out, and even the daily login activities are focused more on simulating city life than dealing damage to enemies.
If you tend to be a bit nostalgic about memories (real or imagined) of the millennium, but have embraced current trends like always-online and live service games as the modern face of the industry – and of course, can easily manage your spending limits in the face of gacha – then my experience suggests that Zenless Zone Zero has a lot on offer to tempt you.
