So, I spent about 50 hours playing the new
Hoyoverse game Zenless Zone Zero, I managed to beat the hardest boss as well as all the
current content, I tried out every character and now I am entering the daily grind loop. And I gotta say –I like this game but at
the same time, I also feel concerned about several things. So, in this video, I wanna talk about Zenless
Zone Zero gameplay, the difficulty, the endgame and a lot more, including some spicy topics. Keep in mind, my opinion here is based around
the 2nd Closed Beta Test or as Hoyo calls it the Equalizing Test, so if you’re watching
this in the future… hi and things might be different from the
global version. Now to me, this game feels like an enigma. I truly don’t know who is the target audience
for ZZZ, I mean obviously people who are fans of other Hoyoverse games such as Genshin or
Star Rail might try it but it’s no secret the game has been getting a lot of feedback
both from content creators and the general public and so with the amount of time I’ve
spent on the game, I think I can give it a fair assessment, so let me show you what the
actual gameplay looks like to get the full picture. Basically, the game is made up of 3 major
mechanics. There’s combat where you fight with your
collected characters, TV traversal that’s sort of like a mini-game and then there’s
the city and various areas you can explore with your main character. In combat, you take control of 3 characters
called Agents but only get to play 1 at a time by switching around, however, there’s
a lot of cool things that can happen, for example there’s Chain Attacks you can cause
by building up the enemies Daze meter, there’s perfect dodging and parries that can cause
various effects and you can even unleash Ultimates that look really cool. Now the other major part of the game is this
TV mode or as I like to call it TV Traversal. Basically, it’s a puzzle mini-game, where
you navigate through these TVs and have to beat missions this way. Compared to previous beta test, these puzzles
feel a lot more fleshed out, they are creative, have different objectives and can be fun…
if you’re into that sort of thing. I say this, because I’ve seen a lot of complaints
online that this mode is boring or that people wished you could just go straight to combat
and skip these puzzles. And the thing is – this TV puzzle will take
up a lot of your time, at least initially, since now that I ran out of missions to do
for this beta, I don’t see those TVs that much anymore and only the Hollow Zero endgame
challenge has them, which is something that I will talk about later in the video. Now personally, I kinda like the TV mode but
it really depends on the mission. Some of them are fun and engaging, for example
there’s a puzzle that’s like a tower defense mode where you attack incoming enemies, other
one had a quiz where you need to answer questions based on your memory and so on. However, I won’t lie – a good number of
these TV mode missions feel too long or too simple for my taste and I would get tired
of them. And you might be thinking – what is the
deal with these TVs and what do they represent? Well, the main character you play with is
a Proxy – you take control over this cute Bangboo robotic creature and you guide the
agents inside places called the Hollows. Hollows are dangerous, these supernatural
zones have basically wrecked the world and so when you travel through those TVs, you
are actually investigating the Hollows. But I dunno – every character in-game hypes
up the Hollows like its some sort of death zone of nightmares but even as someone who
has a strong imagination, its hard for me to think about the Hollows as a dangerous
place because I don’t really get to experience it visually that much, besides the combat
arenas that you can enter into from the TV and start the fights. Now the last part of the gameplay is city
exploration. You as a main character and your sibling own
a Video Rental store called Random Play and it’s located at the Sixth Street – a place
of many shops and characters that you’ll meet. You can go eat some Ramen for combat buffs,
you can visit shops to buy weapons called W-Engine, pull for artifacts which are called
Drive Discs, you can talk to this mysterious trash can to submit collectibles and so on. And if that’s not enough – Sixth Street
is just the first zone and starting from chapter 2 of the story, you also unlock a new zone
of Belobog Industries construction site. And yes you heard it right, Belobog from Star
Rail in this universe is a construction company and starting from chapter 3, you can also
visit this plaza but it doesn’t have much going for now. Now the majority of your time during exploration
will be spent running around and talking to different people. They will have some sort of side-mission available
for you and most of them are pretty funny, the game doesn’t really take itself that
seriously. What’s also interesting is that there are
some elements borrowed from the Persona series because the day is split into 3 periods – Morning,
Evening and Midnight. Some missions can only be started or progressed
during one of these periods, sometimes you can even set the schedule by yourself inside
the DMs, which is pretty interesting. To me, this daytime mode feels like a gimmick
for now but I get it – it’s trying to simulate a daily life for you. Because for example, sometimes you’ll get
special invites to hang out with one of the Agents, to boost their Trust with you, so
like they might want to hang out with you during the Evening and if you miss it, then
you have to wait until they are ready again. So yeah, that’s a Persona vibe although
not as punishing. Also, during Midnight I think almost all the
shops close down, so you can’t go inside them and do things like buy stuff or pull
for artifacts and you need to progress the day. But one major thing you will notice is that
you only get to control your main character – the agents that you obtain from the gacha,
well you can only see them in combat but not when just chilling out and exploring the city. To me, this is a bit of a bummer – I get
what they are trying to do here, since you can easily find a lot of the Agents just hanging
around the city, you can talk to them and even improve their trust or obtain a new mission,
which is cool but still, it would have been nice to just run around with my obtained S-Rank
agents around the city. So now, you might be thinking – just what
is Zenless Zone Zero about? Well, the story that I’ve experienced so
far has no main plot, no stakes and no big villain group. Instead, you just kinda live a double life
of a shopkeeper / Proxy and you get reached out during every chapter by a different group
of agents. Chapter 1 is all about re-acquiring some kind
of mystery box for the Cunning Hares agents, you know the ones that you see plastered all
over the ads, while in Chapter 2 you assist Belobog agents to locate the 3 missing machines
they need to operate with. Now I’ll admit it – Chapter 1 for me did
not feel interesting, it was quite honestly all over the place but in Chapter 2, the goal
of retrieving the 3 machines and learning more about Koleda, who is the leader of Belobog
was actually really good and I think at that point I understood that Hoyo this time around
isn’t trying to introduce a major plot point immediately, at least for now maybe. And I get it – when you look at Genshin,
the goal is simple – save your sibling, so there’s a finality to that and I think
no company that makes gacha games wants to have a finality in their stories because then
that means you either need to stretch out the main plot or come up with bigger stakes
for the 2nd arc, which I can imagine is not an easy thing to do. But yeah, visually the game is insanely polished. Like, the animations feel super elastic and
the stories are told in 3 ways – you either have comic strips, cutscenes or just dialogues
in this stylish manner between characters. But damn, the cutscenes here feel like Hoyo
dumped a ton of money into it, every time a character talks, its very clear what emotion
they are expressing, the movement is fluid and overall, it’s an eye candy experience
whenever you get to witness a cutscene. The same could also be said for combat animations
– they are fast, fluid and insanely gorgeous. I also have to shoutout the soundtrack – Genshin
and Star Rail have some amazing beats and Zenless doesn’t disappoint in this department
either, I mean you are after all listening to it right now. But one major thing that completely changes
with Zenless compared to Genshin or Star Rail is that you actually need to spend the equivalent
of resin or trailblaze power to jump into any of the commissions. In this game, it’s called Battery Charge,
so yeah, it’s your usual gacha energy system and while you can talk to NPCs in the city
and start the missions, the majority of them will require you to go to your Hollow Deep
Dive System located at the Video Store and this is the place where you get engage with
the TV Traversal and combat gameplay. It usually costs between 20 to 40 Battery
Charge to start the commission and you can have a maximum of 180 Battery Charge that
recharges 1 point every 6 minutes, so while there’s more of it and recharges faster
compared to Genshin, you still have to keep in mind you cannot do the story if you don’t
have enough Battery Charge to spend. And look, I get it – I know that a majority
of gacha games require you to spend energy in order to play the story but Hoyoverse literally
got rid of this convention both with Genshin and Star Rail, so it boggles my mind why this
decision was made for Zenless. And the thing is – the rewards you get for
spending Battery Charge are pretty mild, if we talk about the actual daily loop. The two major ways to spend it right now,
besides story content is by either completing Rally Commissions or by doing VR Trials. Rally Commissions are these long combat arenas,
they have various cool one-time secrets you can discover, like starting a secret boss
fight but at the end of it, you get materials for advanced character skills and more importantly
you get materials to pull for the Drive Discs which are the artifacts. But, here’s the funny part – it costs
100 Battery Charge to complete a Rally Commission, so like more than half your max energy and
the last stage gives you 60 of these Plating Agents which is equal to 12 Disc Drive pulls. By using this artifact gacha system, there’s
a good chance to get S-Rank Discs and if you salvage them, you can then save up enough
to pull for just S-Rank discs which is pretty cool, especially since you can select which
set to pull for with increased odds. But like the artifacts, each Disc can have
different main stat and here, you can actually pull for a specific Disc with main stats BUT…
it costs double the materials. So, imagine a scenario – you wanna do a
10 pull for one specific Disc main stat, this will cost 100 Plates, which is about 166 Battery
Charge if we consider the last Rally stage rewards, so literally all your energy for
the day, especially considering it still costs 100 to enter a Rally. However, once a day you can drink this coffee
for 60 energy with various farming buffs, so that’s a plus. But at least for now to me this feels like
Zenless wants you to spend your daily energy quickly but on the flipside, the grind is
pretty short if you want a quick daily loop. As for VR Trials – its just a stage where
you select enemies from these cards, which you can collect from exploration and then
depending on the setup, you can quickly farm up materials like money, character and weapon
ascension mats as well as experience, which is a pretty interesting and gives you unique
control of how you want to spend your Battery Charge for the day, especially considering
that the coffee you drink for the day can influence the drop rate of certain materials. Now all this farming means the game is hard,
right? Well, it’s a bit complicated. Like, legit the first 20 hours the combat
felt braindead easy, I could just mash buttons randomly and still clear everything without
breaking a sweat. However, we are talking about story mode and
side missions – this is a Hoyoverse game, when was the last time you felt like it was
difficult to do this type of content. But I think for this type of game, which relies
on you reacting to enemy attacks, it’s a bit like gaining bad habits since the endgame
challenge called Hollow Zero will actually force you to start thinking, so you won’t
be able to just spam stuff and need to react, something that you might have decided to not
practice during story mode. But, I could be biased here because in this
beta, we’re getting tons of free resources, leveling up characters is super easy and I
don’t expect the devs will actually give you free packages containing S-Rank weapons
and characters as well as tons of materials. So yeah, maybe the game will be a bit harder
on global, since the characters compared to the beta won’t hit as hard and take more
damage from enemies. Although things like enemy attack patterns
that tell you when you can do a perfect dodge or assist are kind of easy to execute, it
has very generous timing, all you have to listen to a specific sound and look out for
a yellow light. So I honestly don’t know what the actual
difficulty of the game is but I am pretty sure Hoyo wants to obtain a large and active
playerbase with any of their games, that’s why they are literally the biggest gacha games
company in the world, so people who don’t care about challenging content but want to
engage with the story, will most likely have a really easy time clearing those story and
side missions, especially considering that if you die with your characters there’s
three revives you can use to resurrect your team which just solidifies my point and honestly
that seems fine but I also understand the need for people who seek challenging combat
but need to wait until they unlock Hollow Zero mode. Still, if you make the first 10 to 15 hours
so braindead easy, will people actually stick with your game? Because it’s not just the combat that makes
the game feel slow – it’s also the Hollows you explore through the TVs. Like, for me personally, it took a lot of
willpower to get through those TVs but I am used to this kind of thing – outside of
YouTube, I actually play tons of board games as you can see my massive collection here
and I only mention this because there’s this really annoying argument that you’ll
often face in a board gaming community and that you need to play the board game for an
X amount of times to fully appreciate it. This is legit the most stupid thing because
– oh you don’t like this game after 5 hours? Well actually you need to play it for 40 hours
to really understand the finer things it offers. No, its bullcrap – if a person doesn’t
feel engaged with a game within the first few hours, why would they want to continue
until they get to the so called good stuff? And heck, they might not even like the good
stuff when they are finally there, after all, gaming experience is highly subjective. So, what I am trying to say here is that,
yes – early game of Zenless Zone Zero, at least to me, feels too slow and you really
need to find something to focus on in order to get through the braindead easy combat and
often exhausting TV Traversal. It could be the story or side missions that
you’re curious to learn more about or it might be the city that you want to keep exploring. For some, of course it could be that the combat
loop, even if its not that challenging at early stages of the game, it could be enough
to start practicing team builds and techniques so you can prepare for the Hollow Zero mode. But, what does the Hollow Zero mode offer? Well, It’s a rogue-like experience, that
shares a lot of similarities with Star Rail’s Simulated Universe, you choose a party of
5 characters you own but then start with only 1, then as you move along the TVs, you recruit
some of those chosen characters and pick up various power ups which are pretty fun, at
least for now. I am not gonna lie – the first stages are
still pretty easy, so you have to wait until you progress your account level and unlock
the 5,000 point challenge because, this is where things get interesting. So, there’s this boss at the end, this big
pink creature – like I actually died to it quite a few times and I was finally forced
to learn its attack patterns. There were things like seeking missiles you
need to dodge in specific way, attacks that you should perfect assist with your team and
there’s even this cool AoE attack it does that will almost instantly kill your character
and the only way to survive is to quickly hide behind one of these barriers that show
up for a moment. This is where I had the most fun – to learn
and adapt to a big bad boss and utilize your whole team. What’s even better – once you beat this
challenge, now you can enable up to 5 modifiers the next time you attempt it, and each modifier
increases your Risk level from Low to Extreme. So, for example, one of these modifiers will
mutate the enemies and turn them into more powerful forms, which to me sounds super cool
and right now I am stuck on this mutated boss that I can’t beat mostly due to lacking
better gear. And honestly, I am busy making this video
so I can’t focus on fully clearing Extreme difficulty but I have already seen people
who did clear it, so I am really curious to see how long it will take for me to beat this
hardest challenge that we have in the beta right now. But yeah, this Hollow Zero mode will probably
be the main endgame activity for you to play with your characters, although I have a slight
suspicion that it will eventually become similar to Simulated Universe, where it’s more of
a grind than a challenge and you just do it as a weekly activity, collect the rewards
and carry on. But I am really hoping Hoyo introduces other
endgame activities, cause that would be awesome, since the combat in this game is pretty addicting,
at least to me. And speaking of which – I think the combat
is pretty balanced. For someone who just wants to experience the
action without too much thinking – you can do it, it’s not that hard to counter enemies
and setup combos, while those who want to practice some cool techniques, it’s also
possible. For example, grouping enemies, using one character’s
skill and then quickly switching to other while the skill is deployed are just a few
tactics that I was utilizing, although I have to say that some characters feel a lot more
complex in a good way, compared to others. Like, as much as I love Billy, he was my favorite
from the previous beta test, his complexity wanes compared to Ellen’s, who is now my
most favorite character to use because there’s so much going on with her kit compared to
Billy’s or even any other character’s. And it’s not a coincidence, she’s a featured
S-rank agent for the beta, so you have to pull for her and I can imagine in the future,
the game will keep on introducing more and more complex agents into the game but I hope
this doesn’t mean characters from standard pool become irrelevant. I am only mentioning complexity here because
after playing the game for so many hours, the combat does tend to become repetitive
and using a fresh new character or building different teams seems like a crucial thing,
at least for me. But yeah, if you want to learn about combat,
in my previous video I talked a lot about it, you can check it out here, although one
big change compared to last beta is that character elements instead of their attack types counter
enemies. You see, every character has an attack type
and element but in this current beta, enemies are weak to certain elements, while previously
they were weak to attack types. I dunno, maybe I am missing something here
but this leaves me with a big question – what’s the point of the attack types, besides building
team comps based on these passive buffs characters have, like for example including 2 Slash Agents
to give benefits for Ellen and so on. And also in terms of team building complexity
– it seems like Mono teams are pretty popular right now, since there’s this thing called
Attribute Anomaly that you can build up on enemies, so for example Ice agents can Freeze
enemies and shatter them for big damage, while Physical characters can cause Assault which
interrupts the enemy, causes a lot of damage and reduces Physical resistance for some time. If I am not wrong, enemies can have attribute
anomaly built up from several agents of the same element, so that’s why Mono teams like
Ice or Physical are dominating Hollow Zero as of making this video. But one thing I’d like to mention is that
the game does offer a training mode with a ton of options, so you can easily test your
character builds, especially considering we have some stats that is known very little
about, like Penetration, Impact and Attribute Mastery, so this is going to be a godsend
for content creators and theorycrafters. Because due to various mechanics in the game,
I can easily see multiple ways how you can build a character, for example, you could
have one of them specialize in applying the elemental effect on enemies faster, the other
one could be good at increasing enemies Daze for faster stun and chain attacks, while the
3rd member could be a hard hitting damage dealer. But yeah, I guess one more important thing
to mention would be the gacha system. I think the rates are about the same as other
Hoyo games, however you can pull from the banners either a weapon, a character or a
bangboo. These little robotic creatures are super cute
and kinda act on their own as a 4th member of your squad, they provide powerful buffs
like increasing certain factions Critical Rate by an insane amount and they also have
some kind of an ability that triggers automatically once in a while, like restoring your character’s
energy, so for example, just look at this Butler I got – this little guy makes you
a breakfast to boost your energy, it’s super cute. BUT – there is one big concern regarding
Bangboo’s – since they have their own rarity, that means the game could potentially
introduce three featured banners, so like an Agent’s, the weapon banner and Bangboo
banner, so this means more summon currency you need to spend if you want the best version
of your featured agent but there’s also the fact that at least in this current standard
banner, Bangboos are mixed together with weapons and agents, so you can pull any of them, although
for now, the only S-ranks you can pull are just the Agents but it’s harder to pull
for A-rank agents because both weapons and bangboos are in the same pool. Overall, if you stayed till the end of the
video or maybe you just skipped to my thoughts – here’s what I think about Zenless Zone
Zero. I think, it’s a really fun game if you put
the time in but I hope Hoyo fine tunes the first 10 to 15 hours of the game. You don’t have to make it super difficult
but put more emphasis on teaching the game to players, instead of just letting us mash
the buttons randomly before getting to actual endgame. For example, there was a great challenge I
encountered at some point, where you only can defeat enemies with chain attacks and
a single hit from an enemy also defeats your character, so it was fun to experience combat
in a new way. I mean, there’s like 20 different things
I had to learn about TV puzzle mode, why not do the same and teach players about combat
more as well? And I am sorry to say this guys – but unless
the developers are desperate, the TV mode is not going away, its too integral to the
story and too many things revolve around them. However, they can either make TV Traversal
shorter or yet again, keep innovating on the puzzle solving aspect like compared to previous
beta. Either way – I personally enjoyed the game
very much, especially because it has an amazing controller support, so my Xbox controller
kept rumbling and reacting to various character and enemy animations, basically I think right
now this game feels like a fully blown console title that doesn’t cost you a dime to try
it out once it goes global but at the same time, I also hope Hoyo takes the early game
feedback very seriously because this is where people decide if they want to continue playing
and it doesn’t take an analytics team to know that. Right now, I want to believe this game is
for somebody who is willing to do puzzle solving and also enjoys fast-paced combat which to
me seems like a pretty niche target audience, however since this is a Hoyoverse game, some
might play this game for the story, others might want to just hang out in the city and
enjoy the slice of life events, so I dunno I think we’ll need to see how well the game
fares after few months when it launches. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video, I’ve
been working on it for like a week now, it’s my longest video I think, so I’d really
appreciate it if you could press the like button and subscribe to my channel because
for sure I will be making ZZZ videos once it goes global. Thanks for watching and see you next time…
