Zenless Zone Zero buries its best bits behind bewildering bunk

I’ve given up on trying to understand Zenless Zone Zero. In every other cutscene, I’m bombarded with in-game jargon about inter-knots, proxies, hollows, and w-engines that I just cannot keep straight. Meanwhile, my patience withers to dust as my eyes flit about the screen trying to make sense of the literal deluge of resources — dennies, polychromes, investigator logs, master tapes, and so, so much more — the game requires you to accumulate in order to progress. It is so overwhelming that the only time I feel a sense of peace is during the breakneck combat sequences filled with their own complicated waltz of combos, parries, and special attacks. It’s just too bad that those moments are few and far between.

Zenless Zone Zero is the latest game from Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail developer HoYoverse (previously known as MiHoYo). It combines action RPG combat with gacha game mechanics (gacha referring to the type of game where characters and resources are doled out randomly via loot boxes and other kinds of microtransactions). The game takes place in a futuristic urban setting where you play as a Proxy who controls a bangboo to guide your team of operators through a hollow to complete commissions taken from the inter-knot. And though this seems like a string of incomprehensible garbage, this is actually the easiest part of the game to understand.

Commissions work like daily quests and are categorized as to whether they’re story, combat, or exploration missions. No matter what type of mission it is, though, it seems like they all follow the same basic structure. First is the exploration part. The screen turns into a giant wall of TVs that you move your little rabbit avatar (called a bangboo… seriously) across to reach the goal. It looks kinda like a board game, with each TV representing some kind of event. Some TVs will have resources to pick up, while others hide combat encounters. If you run into a combat TV, the game changes, dropping your party into an arena with a bunch of monsters to fight.

Usually, the highly polished, action-filled trailers of most free-to-play games conceal actual gameplay that’s either nothing like the trailer or nothing more than a mindless clickfest. So, I was not prepared for how engaging ZZZ’s combat really is. It’s fast and fluid, with a bunch of different actions you can string together to execute slick-as-hell combos. Add to that the ability to switch to any one of your party members mid-combo, and it makes for an experience that could stand next to any blockbuster action RPG game. It’s a hoot landing a dodge just right to chain together devastating attacks from each party member again and again. Pure gas.

But for some reason, the game is determined to keep that gas away from me as much as possible. There are so many other elements to the game that interfere with what’s most fun. While I appreciate that you can visit a noodle shop where the food buffs your party and that there’s an arcade with little minigames you can play with your party, it all feels like too much fluff. All I want to do is lead my little bangboo around collecting items and fight monsters with my party members, and all the game wants me to do is run a Blockbuster — really.

Why am I running a Blockbuster? I have no idea, and I’ve given up trying to figure it out. The game’s insistence on throwing so much at you upfront and its inability to explain anything coherently are so bad that I don’t even know how the gacha mechanics work.

Each combat mission comes with information like the type of enemies you’ll face and their weaknesses, while your party members have their own unique abilities and affinities. The appeal, then, is to acquire as many different operators to mix and match your party so you’ll have the right tool for each job. There are scores of interestingly designed characters — like the superhot wolfman with ice powers and an exquisitely tailored waistcoat — that I don’t know how to acquire because I’m still busy fussing with what movies to rent out at my Blockbuster.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe HoYoverse is trying to curtail the criticisms a lot of gacha games get for being naked cash grabs by obscuring the function of its microtransactions to all but the most motivated of spenders. I can see the shop, but where I’m at in the way-too-long tutorial, I don’t have the faintest idea of how to use it.

I recognize that as video game trends evolve while I get older, there will be some games that I’ll never be able to comprehend. Despite my best intentions and as open a mind as I could muster, Zenless Zone Zero is that game. And if I don’t get that wolfman soon, I’m content to leave the game for the people who get it.

Zenless Zone Zero is available now on Android, iOS, PC, and PlayStation.