Zoning out
Many years ago game designers advised their peers tomake their prototypes “juicy”.
The menu screens, the maps, the free-to-play storefront, everything.
It is all very juicy.
It is pumped with juice, but only in the same way supermarket chicken is pumped with water.
You might save some trapped residents, find a lost hierloom, or search for a missing delivery driver.
The character action battles are as cool-looking as anything in the genre.
At special moments you could switch characters to perform smoothly violent transitional combos.
Unfortunately, most of your time is not really spent fighting.
At least, not in the story mode of the early game.
So what is the game, if it isn’t the fighting?
To stealan old question, where does the game reside?
For all the stylishness of the world, there is remarkably little of it to explore.
The most enjoyable environment is the city block where you do errands (more on that later).
ZZZ doesn’t get that far.
Yet ultimately, my time in the Zenless Zone (Zero) has left me feeling uninspired.
There are a lot of easy-to-miss details and menu cul-de-sacs where yet more loot can be claimed.
But for whatever reason that is not psychologically compatible with the gacha.
It’s a bit like getting step-by-step unboxing instructions from a really fussy drug dealer.
This is not necessarily the death knell for a video game.
Plenty of great games are all menu, all the time.
Zenless Zone Zero uses these same principles to encourage the player to live too often in a menu screen.
To me it feels like a deeply superficial world.
