I love Hoyoverse’s work. I’ve played everything that they have on the market. I don’t do much with Tears of Themis; not really my genre, but I’ve tried it. And I’ve played a ton of everything else. I’ve put money into each game except for Tears because I love playing the games and want more of it and more rewards from it. I applied for the betas for Zenless Zone Zero and pre-registered as soon as I could. I had it preinstalled the day that became an option. I was excited for this. I didn’t even care about the plot or any of that. Hoyoverse has been batting a thousand for me for years.
Well, now they’re batting eight hundred. (Did I do that sportsball thing right?)
Three hours into Zenless Zone Zero, I had to admit it to myself. The game was going to need a miracle to get me hooked. I was still stuck in tutorials being dragged here, there, and everywhere. I still didn’t know what the primary gameplay loop was supposed to be. I’d cashed in the pre-registration and download milestone rewards to get the guaranteed S-rank character from the beginner banner, promptly naming him “BDSM wolf boy” and dismissing him out of hand. (Seriously. He couldn’t just have an eyepatch. He had to have a weird wrap around his head that looks like something certain people would pay to wear or have him wear.)
A week into playing, I asked Ains what to do if a game I was trying to review wasn’t worth finishing. It’s not the worst game ever, but it is by far the worst Hoyoverse game, and everything about it just made me want to play their other, better ones.
The Good
Hoyoverse has put a lot of polish on this game. They’ve completely deviated from the cel-shaded style in their previous games, making the characters in this game feel rounder and more three-dimensional. They’ve put in a variety of game modes, mini-games, and shiny quest objectives on the map for you to scoop up for the dopamine hit.
And to their credit, they’re clearly trying to do some things different, to stretch their wings as it were. For the first time since Honkai Impact 3rd, I didn’t see reused characters or models — and for the first time since the same game, your player character has, well, a character. No more amnesiacs and newly-created cosmic eldritch abominations. No, now you play one of two siblings who run a video rental store, do odd jobs for the neighbors, and secretly invade the Counterside–I mean, the Hollows.
Whoops. Well, I guess that means we should talk about the less-good.
Nothing New Under The Sun
I’ve never before had the problem of comparing a Hoyoverse game against other games. When I play games by other companies, I’m comparing them to Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. I called out Wuthering Waves for looking like Genshin Impact down to the price of a roll on the gacha. But aside from pointing out the characters imported from one game to another (Raiden Mei has so far appeared three times, once as Raiden Shogun and once as Ruan Mei), I’ve never before found myself thinking a Hoyoverse game looked like anything else.
As you probably guessed, that “before” is doing a lot of work.
The plot of Zenless Zone Zero immediately reminded me of Counterside, but less compelling. Which is bizarre in both respects because Counterside itself reminded me of Blue Archive and of no shortage of other gacha games about corporations effectively taking over governmental operations. So I suppose ZZZ is impressive in that it managed to copy the parts of Counterside that aren’t also in those games.
Look. None of these games put a ton of effort into making a brand-new, highly innovative story. The story has to be serviceable. The characters have to be attractive in personality and gimmicks and design. But most importantly, the gameplay and the rewards (in the gacha and otherwise) have to be “hooky” enough to keep you playing.
Still, I expect Hoyoverse to be on top of things. Not designing characters that are so identical to other games I almost reinstalled Alchemy Stars: Aurora Blast just to screenshot certain characters for demonstration purposes. Not making a storyline that parallels another game, one that’s been around for years, so closely that I can’t help but point it out at every turn.
(As a quick aside, on the subject of all these gacha games doing the same thing half the time–these games really need to come with a checkbox at the start to say which games you’ve played before. Then they need to start skipping tutorials for things like the Spiral Abyss–I mean the Simulation Room–I mean Hollow Zero. Seriously, it’s like a battle royale stopping the game to explain the concept of a shrinking map. Just ask if you’ve played Fortnite.)
Playing On My Last Nerve
It took over four hours of gameplay to get through the tutorial. Did I mention that already? It’s hard to remember with how bad this game drags. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst crime of the game came at the end of the first big segment of non-tutorial gameplay. Just like in Genshin and Star Rail, when you hit certain player level milestones, your progress gets locked behind a progression quest. Unlike Genshin and Star Rail, this game makes you build up more than just your player level. You have to get a certain amount of observation data–which is to say, you have to do enough side quests. That was annoying, since when the first of the progression quests came up, I was still being drip-fed side quests and didn’t have much in the way of freedom. But fine. There were enough different quests that at least I wasn’t being railroaded into playing in a way I didn’t want to. I could farm up the side quests and then–
Turns out I spoke too soon.
In the middle of gathering observation data, my quest objective changed to “spend the day how you want to.” I could find no way to change this back so I could go beat the first progression quest. By this point the game had introduced a day/night cycle, which progresses only in response to certain actions. Fine, I thought. I’ll just rest until the end of the day.
That’s when I learned that your character will only rest once a day.
I tried to figure out how to change back to the quest of upgrading my world level–I mean, Inter-Knot Reputation. I couldn’t find a way to do it. Giving up, I went and talked to a guy with a quest marker. Going through the prompts and fixing whatever was going on with him (I literally don’t remember and don’t care) got the clock to progress. Finally! I could go to bed and get to the next–
–forced quest.
Oh, yes. In order to upgrade your equilibrium level–I mean, Inter-Knot Reputation, you have to do a completely unrelated side quest first. There is no way to skip it. You can’t do anything else. You have to accept and then proceed through a story that has nothing to do with your main story or the objective the game tricked you into thinking you were pursuing. And that side quest isn’t even good. It’s a ridiculous storyline with a few funny moments that are completely overshadowed by the sheer mountain of absolute cringe. All this just to unlock the next tier of material quests.
The game was officially dead to me.
Zzz… zzz… zzz…
Like I indicated above, there’s some good stuff here. Hoyoverse did not slack on this game. The problem is that the game gets in its own damn way, and, by extension, gets in the player’s way. It won’t let you just play the game and have fun.
Live services often have the problem of incentivizing players to play in ways that devalue the gameplay loop, or of generally trying to force players to play and enjoy the game according to the game’s schedule. That’s not ZZZ’s problem. (Well, it doesn’t help.) ZZZ’s problem is more specific and insidious. ZZZ never lets up the guardrails enough for you to genuinely just enjoy the damn game. It’s constantly pushing you away from what you might want to do, or even what it just told you to do. Even the TV gameplay, which is probably the most creative element of the game, is corroded by constant interruptions for dialogue, mini-cutscenes, and other pointless gimmicks. At no point are you allowed to just relax and play the game however you want. The game isn’t open-world, but that doesn’t excuse railroading the player.
The combat is probably the selling point of the game, and here’s the harsh truth: The combat is a watered-down version of Honkai Impact 3rd. Basic attacks do less and have less interesting mechanics. There are no weapon active skills. And the charge for ultimates is shared between the team. All of this combines to mean that you have much less to actually do, moment-to-moment, in the combat in ZZZ compared to HI3. To be perfectly blunt, when I see someone praising the combat in ZZZ, I assume they haven’t played HI3 because, if they did, the combat is nothing to write home about.
I wanted to give this game a full review. I was going to play all the way through the story content that’s been released so far and get a proper review of that content written up. The problem is that the absolute most the game could have gotten, no matter what it did in the rest of the game, would be a 5. The opening, the first 10-12 hours, are so bad that there is no way to recover more than that. If I were rating based on what I did play, it would be a 4. It’s boring. It’s frustrating. It’s bad. And I have better games to play than one I would solely be playing to justify giving it a 4.
Like, for example, any of Hoyoverse’s other games.
I agree with this post, the game is good and competent BUT it does not offer anything new or even worthwhile to players. Gameplay is mind numbingly repetitive, too long animations in the “board” gameplay mechanic (which is ironic since the devs called it that). Not to mention the 17gb mobile and 55gb on pc for a 1.0 game is just cringe by today’s standards. Factored in the 50-50 and the 90 hard pity, safe to say we can compare it to HI3rd and even HSR and GI on a gacha sense. ZZZ fails to compete with the 3 games already established by Hoyo. And the game being “battle focus” is a joke, the game is focused on anything but. unless we are taking about pulling for characters because their element is needed in a specific battle/stage that is. If you’re playing just for Muh’animations then there’s a disappointment in that area as well, they are a bit over the top but I guess it’s fine, BUT they are also few and far between that playing this game just for that is not worth it.
One caveat though is the story is definitely better, one problem in that sector, like other gachas is that stories aren’t told in a chronological sense but are told in which way you unlock them first, some are locked behind interknot levels, and a lot of events are locked behind story chapters. mixed in with bored gameplay yeah totally ZZZs alright. I could definitely go on but I’m sure I can make a thesis long yapping. I’m giving the game at least 3 months to tie up the stuff they need to. Then again this game will still succeed due to the grip hoyo have on their cult members.
I think with how the rest of Hoyoverse’s games are laid out, we may have gotten used to the open-world aspect of doing whatever we wanted to when we wanted to, but in my opinion this is just another game that has a more centralized way to complete the game, while giving you many other things to do in the process. The story isn’t a failing point just because it sounds like a cliche, and they do the story well with how the world is built. Personally I like playing ZZZ whenever Genshin feels like its getting boring, with the fast pacing of the combat as well as sidequests being realtively quick, with longer build up to a satisfying ending in longer story quests, whether it has to do something with the actual story or not