This post is a March 2026 transcription of this video. The text has been edited for readability & reducing repetition while preserving my original sentiment.
I enjoyed my time playing Zenless Zone Zero. We’re talking about the art and animation, the gacha mechanics, the gameplay, the story. We’re talking about a Hollow Exploration. It’s going to be a good time, but there are some major flaws that I hope Hoyoverse fixes in the future.
Art & Animation
Now, I’m about to drop the most insane statement. Zenless Zone Zero has the most insanely incredible anime art style I have ever seen in any video game. Just straight up. Sure, I might be biased due to the bright colors and the beautiful character designs, but I honestly believe that the millions if not the billions of dollars that Hoyoverse poured into this game. It shows.
When you compare it to Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact, and Honkai: Star Rail. Zenless Zone Zero is what the next generation of video games for Hoyoverse will look like. The animation is absolutely insane. If I just had to rate this game alone on art and animation. I would probably still give this game a good score.
They’ve put a lot of care in the NPC designs. From the amazing design of the coffee owner, or the ramen shop owner, or the sickly pale arcade owner, who I really… I just… hope she’s okay. There are so many non-playable characters in this game that look incredible.
The designs on the playable are just bangers. So, Noelle is my main in Genshin. I have too many figures of Rem from Re Zero. I’m somewhat of maid connoisseur so of course. I love Rina, Corin, Wolf man, Lycaon. Corin even has a little whirly gig.
No character feels like a copy of another character. The character designs are also based on the factions they are apart of. I’m not quite sure what the factions are called, but each faction is a genre of movie. For the maids, they are apart of the horror genre.
The animation for the gameplay is absolutely awesome too. Characters are not tied to weapons so their animations are all fairly unique. In my time playing Zenless Zone Zero, I cannot think of a character I didn’t have fun with.
There’s a lot of amazing things about the environment in this game too. So much effort and care went into designing this world. The cityscape is just so fantastic. I love walking around the video shop. The attention to detail that they put throughout the entire environment. Looking at the VHS wall brings me back to when I was a kid going to Blockbuster and running around the shop looking at these cool covers of movies that I couldn’t purchase because I was under 17.
It’s funny to think how many of these developers are under 30 & are excited to put in a retro VHS shop in their game, haha. Also behind the employees only door is a cool secret base with all these monitors all over the wall!
It reminded me of back when I was a kid & my friend’s friend owned a pizza shop. Anytime me & my friend went, we would have access to the employees only area, which had an arcade machine. I don’t remember what arcade game it was, but the mysterious of something cool being behind the employees only door fascinated me.
Exploring this one area and seeing all the decorations, all the detailed environments throughout this entire place. It really felt like a place that people lived in. It is something I felt is missing in other Hoyoverse games. This doesn’t feel like a game environment. It is a cool place to chill and hang out.
Also there is an upstairs, that is a dope bedroom! I was stunned. It felt like a bedroom. In fact, from my understanding, each proxy has their own separate bedroom and layout. Like, their bedrooms aren’t alike. This isn’t just like, here’s the proxy bedroom. It’s like, here’s Bella’s bedroom. And there’s also Wyze’s bedroom. And I played as Bella. And exploring Bella’s bedroom was awesome. We got to see that she was into music. She had like a guitar. She’s got this awesome CRT TV. She even has this beautifully like blank wooden wall that you get to put up pictures that you get throughout the game. It just, it felt like a place that was lived in.
What I love most is every time the game tells you to go to bed, the first thing your character does before going to bed is they sit down, they pull out their phone. And I’m like, goddamn, Persona’s got nothing on Zenless Zone Zero. Persona, you hit the bed and that’s it. Zenless Zone Zero understands what it truly means to “go to bed”. You even get to scroll through a bunch of posts and can even reply to certain commissions.
I think what’s really great about Persona games is that they put you in the life of a character and you get to be a part of that life. It’s a feeling that you’re enjoying this world as this person, which is inherently a human thing to do. It’s just that Persona has captured it in such a way that if games try to replicate it, it just feels like Persona even if it is something real humans do.
Zenless Zone Zero capture this very well. Exploring an environment, the city is absolutely incredible. There’s so much things to do. You could take pictures of cats. You get to see this weird cat cop. You get to see a cool ramen dude. You go to the arcade, which please, Hoyoverse, I’m asking you, let the arcade be walkable. I was born in the early nineties. I’ll admit it. Okay. I’m 33. My childhood of exploring the arcade is still not lost on me. So please just let me walk around the arcade.
Regardless, the art and animation in this game is just one of the best I have seen in any game before. And it just shows, it shows how much they care about giving the players just such a high quality experience.
It is unfortunate, right? Because Hoyoverse makes so much money and I can’t imagine any other game having this quality, this level of art and animation. So hopefully Hoyoverse won’t be the only games to achieve this level of quality, but goddamn, this is the best I have seen.
ThE VIBE, MUSIC, and UI
You could watch characters in the city going about their day to day life. They don’t instantly loop. I remember walking past an old lady and she just kept walking. She just kept walking and I didn’t get to see her for the rest of the day. Now I maybe could have been there for a bit longer to see her return, but the actual life cycle of the city characters actually moving throughout day to day. It felt unique.
The first time I met Ellen, she was just hanging around the city. She was just vibing. And I was like, what the hell? I’m wondering if they’re going to do this for more characters.
Music is also a huge part of this game. Whether you’re jumping into gameplay or combat, whether you’re exploring the city, visiting different shops, there’s always a tune. There’s always a music that fits the vibe. None of the music is ever bad in this game.
Everything just fits you existing in this space, existing in this world, going to the subway station, going to that weird spot where you see the hollow, going over to the arcade, going over anywhere. It’s just an absolutely amazingly fun time.
The UI looks absolutely incredible, but it is also confusing as all heck. I played for 15 or so hours and I’m desperately trying to figure out the different buttons.
All your currencies in the game have their own special words, I think it’s called like signal or something. It fits the vibe of this aesthetic of running a video shop. However, when you play different Hoyoverse game it starts to get confusing. I really wish they had a common word between each of their games. Let’s call the premium currency that you purchase something crystals. It allows the developers to maintain the vibe of the game while having a common word that players will understand.
One of the coolest things about the vibes of Zenless Zone Zero is bringing back my childhood. Not in a nostalgic way, I’m like, damn, that’s awesome. It’s kind of why I wish I wanted to explore the arcade more. Why I wish we had more things to do that were more nineties related.
STORY
I do not want to judge the quality of the writing. I want to focus on the way the story was told as it is a major reason why I skipped a lot of the story. The story is told to you in three different ways, pre-rendered animations, comic book cut scenes, and visual novel style.
The pre-rendered animation are incredible. This is the best that the Hoyoverse has ever done. The animation is absolutely insane. I cannot believe just how much effort goes into each of these animations. It feels like I’m watching an anime and for it to also be playable on phone! Wow! Not much dialogue, but a lot of action.
The comic book style is my preferred method of enjoying the story. The way the dialogue is paced is very easy to read. It goes by very smoothly and it’s fun to flip through different pages and seeing the actual comic book in proper panel design with proper framing. The art is very good too. A great way of telling the story while including voiceover for that extra flavoring to the story.
Lastly, is the visual novel style. Highly detailed in-game models rarely animating. This is unacceptable at this point, I’ll be honest. The reason why I’m a little bit more harsh on Zenless Zone Zero than Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact, or even Honkai Impact 3rd is because this is the fourth time in a row of telling you the story, but not showing you. It’s a poor way of giving the players story.
I feel like the dependency on visual novel style allows the developers to write & write even if this writing isn’t very poignant. I understand this is a forever game (game as a service) where they have to release content every single month. They can’t have a moment where they tell this incredible story over the course of several months. They have to achieve some hours per month goal for the players. I feel this is unmanageable when you’re doing high quality storytelling and not just writing a story.
Another criticism the comparison of an anime to a video game. Both can take hours of your time, but Zenless Zone Zero spends those hours mindlessly talking, not necessarily building up the relationship or story between characters, not engaging in a interesting plot line, it really just felt like filler. And so I dropped off.
To a lot of people out there who are free to play, I’m sure a lot of you also pirate anime. So at that point, you’re basically determining whether you want to spend three hours playing a game with story that doesn’t have much of an impact unless you get to the main points of the story, which takes a few more hours, or to just watch a 24 episode anime.
That’s like nine hours long and gives you the complete satisfaction than the story that you’re currently playing. That’s the mentality I have and I cannot judge whether the story is good or bad. The criticism I have for the story is the way it was delivered. So I do want to make that clear. These are impressions of 15 hours of playing through the game. And although I did not play through the entirety of the story, at least from what I played, I just didn’t appreciate how the story was delivered.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay is one of the best in any free-to-play game. It even compares to some greats like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. It’s funny watching people play the game because they all play it in such different styles.
Everyone has their own character that they enjoy, as this game progresses, will people stick to metas or just play characters they enjoy. For me, I’m building up my maid team. I’m struggling to get the wolf boy, but I got my two maids who I really like and it’s freaking fantastic. They’re so much fun to play. I’m so grateful that the maid characters that I currently have are a lot of fun to play because I would be so sad if they were terrible to play as because then I wouldn’t be playing them. But that’s what I mean. The gameplay is a lot of fun.
Regardless of whether you’re doing like playing Snake or you’re playing like a Dig Dug clone at the arcade, or whether you’re just doing combat trials or exploring the city, there’s always so much fun gameplay to do. And what I really love about the gameplay, and I mentioned this at the very beginning, but the W engines are freaking awesome. Because much like Star Rail, the abilities that boost your attack power aren’t based off your weapons. So you don’t have to worry about having characters with the same boots or something. They’re all just helping you buff the character, but not necessarily changing the character’s aesthetic.
This allows the actual developers to have such unique looking styles, such unique looking art, characters, the way they move, the way they fight. Everyone is so different. Everyone is so unique. It’s very funny watching some of the community talk about secret moves for the characters. Because when you look at other fighting games or more combat-oriented games, like character action games, people don’t call your combo moves secret moves. But the Zenless Zone Zero community are not familiar with those games. For example, the community would refer to Anby’s uppercut or down-attack move as a secret move, but that’s really just a combo.
I guess the game doesn’t explain that very well & it is a move that doesn’t have a button on screen to indicate it. Either way, I do find it cute for the community to call it a secret move! I do hope other games continue to implement these unique combo attacks
Zenless Zone Zero also has my favorite counter parry system. When you swap in characters, if you swap them as an enemy is attacking, it performs a parry. And it’s so hype! One of my favorite combos in the game is when you counter an enemy, swap to another character, they jump in & attack then another counter & swap & attack. It’s this chain cycle of characters swapping in for a special attack, swapping out, swapping another character in for a special attack, countering. It makes you feel like a badass.
And the sound effect for the countering sounds so good. Let’s just take a listen.
This is one of my favorite aspects of the game. It’s just the counter system. It’s not only simple to use, but it gives you a great purpose for swapping characters many, many times. Even in a game like Honkai Impact 3rd you can get away by just playing one character & briefly swapping, but Zenless Zone Zero is constantly forcing you to bring in characters for crazy combos and crazy strikes. It’s the counter that really encourages this playstyle.
It’s very funny that around the same time Wuthering Waves came out & I was planning to make a video on it. I enjoyed the combat a great deal, but ever since I played Zenless Zone Zero. I never looked back, haha. It has captured my heart with the way they do counters. It’s just absolutely insane. I am hoping that the game gets harder, because this game is a little bit too easy even on challenge mode.
Similar feeling happened with Wuthering Waves. There is this great satisfaction of fighting enemies that are way harder than you are. However, at a certain point, you then start to realize that, oh, you’re not high enough level. You need to level up. You need to grind materials. You need to do all these things. And that kind of ruins the fun of skill-based combat.
And 15 hours into Zenless Zone Zero, I’m starting to feel the material grind. It’s a little bit unfortunate, because this game has a lot of skill-based components. The Hollow Zero Exploration mode is super cool to test your skills out on extremely difficult enemies, but it is clear when you hit a level/material wall in the game. This is not a skill-based game.
And that’s the part where I feel a bit hurt, but I get it. That is just a whole part of a gacha game. They need to have all these systems in play to keep you constantly playing. It’s not like a game like Final Fantasy 16 or Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, where it’s basically skill-based. You can level things up to make things slightly easier, but ultimately, you can just play the game at level one and still have a good time.
That challenge can’t ever exist in a game like Zenless Zone Zero because eventually you do no damage.
Also the bangboos are really cute. I don’t know why they’re called bangboos. It’s just so close to Bang Bros. I’ll just be honest. So the gameplay, absolutely amazing. That is a 10 out of 10 gameplay. I have no complaints, except for one.
Hollow Exploration
I understand why the developers made the Hollow Exploration. It’s a way to break up the gameplay from your fighting to your hub areas to just exploring the TV. They give you these different play styles to kind of pacing of the game & story. Avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness.
When I was going through this story, the best part about this game is the fighting and exploring the environments. But oftentimes, the game just throws you into the TV. It rips you from a cool moment into a boring one. Even the dialogue feels filler. It doesn’t lend much to the actual main story. Sure we got set bombs for a train and all that stuff.
But they are just telling us the story rather than showing. It breaks up the pacing too much and I don’t hate the Hollow Exploration. I just want it taken out of the main story.
The Hollow Zero Exploration is still a lot of fun. Keep it the same as it is. The exploration side quest stuff, keep as is, that’s totally fine. It’s only when it’s involved in the main story where it falls apart. Some sequences in the game throw you into a 2 minute fight then back into a 5 – 10 minute Hollow Exploration. And you have to wait till it loads!? The Hollow Exploration even has a fast forward button, which to me, indicates that the developers realize how annoying & unimportant it is.
It’s a big reason why if I got into the story of the game that I probably would drop the game because I’m like I don’t want to keep going through the main story if I have to jump into the TV all the time.
gacha
I’ve explained how confusing the the gacha currencies are. I’ve also made a post about if gacha is gambling & this game is free-to-play. They give you trial characters so you don’t ever have to worry about pulling for characters while going through the story.
And Zenless Zone Zero is doing nothing different that Honaki: Star Rail or Genshin Impact. However, I wanted to look critically at the gacha mechanics in the games that I’ll be talking about because they do exploit players. It is the reason why these companies are able to make so much money. I’m also not asking for people to boycott. Even I will not be boycotting these games. I will continually play gacha games, but I do want to be more responsible and not motivate people to feel the need to pull for characters because the amount of money that is required from you to spend is absolutely ridiculous.
I know a lot of people will say that it’s fair. It’s one of the fairest free-to-play gacha systems out there. But that’s still $240 for 90 pulls. And the bundles and the free pulls only masks the actual value of those pulls to convince you that you don’t have to spend.
But in my experience for Genshin, I probably put in more money than that. I’ve spent nearly $500 to $600. That’s like not even whale statuses, not even dolphin status. You know, I’m probably still a krill in the ocean by how much I’ve spent in Genshin. At the same time, those $600 could have been spent playing better games. Games that I would enjoy much more comparing time spent.
I hate to see people get exploited. And you could say they’re weak. You can make all these excuses, but we’re all in this world together. There’s already so much hate on the Internet. Like, why don’t we share a little bit of love? Why don’t we have some happy good vibe? And if the least I can do for a small creator like myself is to save one person from making a pull that they would regret or having them spend money that they shouldn’t be spending, that’s something worth trying.
We always imagine things from our perspective, many of us save up for a pull, but there’s a reason why Hoyoverse makes millions and millions of dollars. It’s not because of the people waiting for their free pull.
As someone who has been a react YouTuber, I’ve been complicit in being excited about a character. I freak out about how a character’s ass jiggles, but that reaction probably affirmed to someone that they need to pull for that character including myself. My reactions are genuine, but they have consequences and I don’t want to participate it in anymore.
I don’t criticize anyone for being free to play nor spending money. Y’all just enjoy the game and have fun. This game is extremely good and I appreciate you all taking the time to read this post!
Ranking Character Designs
Now to rank these characters designs!
Rina: Triple S because she is my second favorite character and she’s adorable. She’s got these cool old ghost guys with her. It’s really cool. Her design is awesome and I love the classic maid dress that she has. Also she’s got a big plot.
Anby: My favorite of the three main characters that you are first introduced to. I play her a lot. I’m not a huge fan of the fashion choices, but she is pretty cool. The headphones are really a vibe. I do appreciate the like high contrast green that she enjoys wearing. I think that is a really unique color that you don’t see very often in character designs. I will put her at an A.
Corin: S, She is an amazing character. She is one of the only loli characters in this game that isn’t sexualized, which is an A+ in my book and she also is adorable. She has a cute little Teddy bear that looks like it’s going to kill you. She has a bunch of pins all across her body most likely representing a doll and I also really like her maid outfit as well.
Ben: Obviously, an S rank character. He is just a ginormous bear and he looks so freaking cool. So Ben, congratulations. You are S rank. There’s nothing else to say. He is just a cool bear.
Nicole: She is my least favorite of the three main characters. And the biggest reason why is that aside from her assets, there’s really not much going on in her design. It just looks very generic. So I’m going to go with C.
Billy: B, the reason why we’re choosing B for Billy is not just because he is Billy, but he has a really cool outfit, really cool design. But when I look at his body, it reminds me of Boothill. And although I really love Boothill. He is one of my favorite Honkai: Star Rail characters. But then it makes me question, why is he like this? His outfit is very interesting, but why? The colors are really nice, but why? His hair looks really cool and I love how gigantic his revolvers are.
Anton: We’re throwing Anton in C. The reason why is because I think Anton is the type of character who will bully me in high school. He is way too cool.
Sokaku: B, she’s a cool blue demon girl. That’s really it. I mean, we just need more demon girls.
Piper: Loli…no thanks, no rank.
Nekomiya: The FBI is going to throw you in jail. So no rank.
Kolenda: Also another loli. But she has the endorsement of Ben and is a cool character, but that’s all based off her lore & not design. So no rank.
Lycaon: Triple S character. He is also my favorite character in this game. If you’re going to say I’m a furry, then yes, you are correct. He is absolutely hot. The hottest character in this game, period. Next to Rina, which is why they’re both at the triple S rank.
Grace: A, I love her design. She’s got the cool-ass, like gigantic, almost… It feels like they wanted to go with a welder mask, but the mask was like too much. So they just went with the visor part of the welder mask. It’s very cool. I love her weapon, looks super dope. She also has big assets, which is really great. It’s not a requirement, but it’s always appreciated. I also love her utility belt. It represents her working in a construction field, which is cool.
Ellen: Is our first limited time pull character. I will be ranking this character because you can no longer pull for her at the time of this post. And I think she has a cool design. She is most likely representative of Jaws and the issue I have with Ellen is very similar to Anton. She is just too cool in a bad way where I feel like she’s trying a bit too hard to be this rebel. Like why are you here working as a maid? So I put her at C.
Zuyon: At the time of this post, she will be available to be pulled on so to avoid encouraging people, I’m just going to put her at C.
Agent 11: I thought she was related to Anby because their character designs were so closely similar. Aside from like the color differences, but Agent 11 is just a cooler version of Anby so A.
Luciana: Another sexualized loli…no rank.