Zenless Zone Zero review

Zenless Zone Zero adopts a zesty Hi-Fi Rush/Jet Set Radio Future style of neon-accented sci-fi urbanism. This is a place where skateboards are a decorative item, born-to-become-merch bunny-robot mascots wander the streets, and lots of dialogue is delivered via DM. It's all a stylishly meaningless pushback on glossy businesses with political power: The graffiti is superficially artistic but has nothing to say, and the gigantic tech company sets up shop and then gives out neat trinkets. Corporate military-like officers might be quite nice and helpful, actually.

Zenless Zone Zero is a reskinned revenue stream designed to target a similar-but-different audience to MiHoYo's other unstoppable gacha-style games Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. It's been created to capture a gap in the market. 

I'm not surprised. Gacha games like this are by design wallet-opening merch machines in disguise. The aim is to get me coming back every day to do a few things that make me feel good enough to consider using the shop, and to like the characters enough to be interested in any TV shows, albums, and action figures that might show up along the way. But because this will be for many of us our second or third experience of this too-familiar hamster wheel of #content from the same company, it rings hollow. Zenless Zone Zero is raw marketing in game form, everything designed around trends, targets, and demographics. 

Every character worth talking to runs or frequents a trendy shop, and they're all too cool to conform to the whims of this vague shiny dystopia's towering megacorps trying to grind ordinary people down. The playable cast cover a wide range of appealing (and tropey) personality types and visual preferences, from cold and calculating to loud, impeccably polite to shy. You like shark girls? There's a shark girl. Prefer broad-shouldered furries? Then enjoy the overall-wearing bear-man. Need a younger guy with model-perfect abs? Don't we all.

It's all bright and colourful and