Luxia Le

In July 2024, up-and-coming Chinese game developer MiHoYo released its fifth worldwide title, Zenless Zone Zero (CN: 絕區零). This new title follows MiHoYo’s previous four games, Honkai 3rd Impact, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Tears of Themis. So, how does Zenless Zone Zero hold up against MiHoYo’s other games and the many other games on the market? I’ve finished all the current content. So, let’s assess this game in-depth.

Genre

Zenless Zone Zero is a game that encompasses several different genres and combines them into a seamless and cohesive package. While playing this game, you’ll encounter action, puzzles, social, adventure, and gacha gameplay. There are a handful of playable characters and several that are slated for release in the future. The primary method of obtaining playable characters and stat-boosting equipment is through the gacha system (Signal Searching) and through in-game raids that drop materials and gear.

Payment Model

The game is free-to-play and funded by microtransactions, which are primarily used to purchase additional pulls in the gacha system. If other MiHoYo games are a predictor, there will be purchasable skins in the future to give existing characters fresh looks. These skins will likely be tied to events and holidays, but some skins may be released outside of seasonal and event times.

There are three types of currency used for draws and four different draws. The premium Signal Search is split into two categories, one for characters and one for an equipment type known as W-Engines. Both of these draws use the same currency, Encrypted Master Tapes. You can earn Encrypted Master Tapes from events and MiHoYo will occasionally give tapes away. The primary method of getting Encrypted Master Tapes is to buy them using the store currency “Polychrome.”

The “Stable Channel” is the permanent draw. It uses Master Tapes, which are a different currency from Encrypted Master Tapes. Like Encrypted Master Tapes, Master Tapes can be purchased with Polychrome. However, this is unadvisable as it is better to save Polychrome to purchase draws for the premium draw, which contains limited characters.

Finally, there is the Bangboo Channel, which allows you to draw additional playable Bangboos to add to your team. Each Bangboo has unique traits that help you in battle and their own attack skillset. The Bangboo Channel uses a currency called Boopons.

Consumer Friendliness

Zenless Zone Zero is not the most consumer-friendly gacha on the market. If you jumped on the bandwagon during the launch event you got 20 free draws for the launch and the 50 million downloads campaign. However, 20 draws is nothing in the scope of the game. You are guaranteed an S-rank Signal every 80–90 searches, depending on what draw you’re pulling on. Additionally, if you draw on the premium draw, you are guaranteed the banner character every 180 searches. However, to access a character’s full potential, you need to draw the character 7 times and draw their unique W-Engine 5 times. Just for the character potential, that’s a maximum of 1260 draws. That would cost 201,600 Polychrome, which is significantly less than the 10,000-odd they gave us from the start of the game.

In terms of buying a full-potential character. You would be looking at well over $1,000 to max out your favorite anime girl (or boy.) It’s totally unreasonable to expect anyone to do that beyond people who are mega-rich.

One upside for the consumer-friendliness of the game is that the “pity” system carries over between banners. The game uses two types of pity, hard pity and soft pity. Hard pity means that after a certain number of draws, you are guaranteed to receive a highest-rank character or weapon. Additionally, ZZZ has a two-factor hard pity where after every 80–90 draws you are guaranteed an S-Rank signal, and if the S-rank signal you receive is not the banner character your second S-rank is guaranteed to be them. Both of these pity types carry over between banners of the same type. So limited character banners carry over to the next limited character banner and limited W-Engine banners carry over to the next limited W-Engine banner.

Events

The game hasn’t had many events, but so far, they’ve been fairly generous. The first limited event gave away an A-Rank Bangboo and a handful of Polychrome, among other resources. We can expect other events to follow a similar model. Given the sample size is small, and things could change. However, it does seem that players will have a consistent source of free Polychrome. It won’t let you full-potential characters all the time, but you will have enough to draw every so often and receive guaranteed characters.

Is the Story Any Good?

I wasn’t overly enthralled with the story. It was good. I won’t go as far as to say the story wasn’t good. However, it was kind of slow in places where it felt like it shouldn’t have been. This could be, in part, because of Inter-Knot Level requirements for certain missions. I do find that I get a bit mentally fatigued when a game locks story content behind level requirements. To me, it feels like an artificial lengthening of the game. However, despite this, I enjoyed the story greatly and am excited to see where it goes in future updates.

Are the Events Worth It?

It’s hard to say if the events will continue to be worthwhile. Sometimes with gacha games, the developers kneecap events if they’re “too” good since providing good rewards in events disincentivizes players from spending big bucks on draws. However, the events that have been run so far gave relatively good rewards. The reward returns are not as strong since the bar for maxing a character is so high.

Is It Worth Playing?

The biggest draw of MiHoYo games in general is that you can kind of just ignore the gacha and use it as a tertiary aspect of the game if you want. It is 100% possible to beat the story without drawing at all, and even if you do want to draw, it isn’t necessary to fully max out characters to win fights. Sure, the fights will take longer if you don’t have your character’s Cinema and W-Engine maxed out, but you won’t be completely gated from accessing the game simply because you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on anime girls.

Overall, I would say ZZZ is worth playing. I know this is kind of a weird opinion, but I actually really enjoy the gacha element of the game. It can be disappointing not to end up with the characters you want, but I just enjoy the Skinner box of “press button-receive serotonin” that gacha systems provide. However, part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that I don’t necessarily need the best characters fully maxed out to play the game. If I needed to spend 201,600 Polychrome just to play the game, my opinion would be far different.