Zenless Zone Zero is an upcoming Urban Fantasy Roguelike Action RPG in development by miHoYo of Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact fame first announced in May 2022.
In the city of New Eridu, humanity has successfully implemented the technology that would allow ordinary people to live safely alongside Hollows — black abnormal spherical dimensions that appear out of thin air, swallowing everything they touch. A great many people want to enter the Hollows for their own various reasons, and the "Proxies" — a special professional who guides people in their exploration — are their indispensable partners.
As a Proxy, players assemble teams of three to explore the Hollows, with each step providing random events, be it supplies, buffs, or enemy encounters, but as the expeditions drag on, a "corruption" meter rises, which slowly stacks more negative effects. The question then becomes whether explore a Hollow more thoroughly at the risk of hampering their run to the point of failure, or trying to quickly seek an exit while missing out on extra rewards.
The first "Tuning Test" was available for PC and iOS in early August 2022.
Visit the official website here
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The game contains examples of:
- After the End: The website describes New Eridu, founded after the outbreak of Hollows, as the only place known to have the technology to control them and the last oasis in a "disaster-ridden world".
- Alliterative Title: Zenless Zone Zero.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Ether, which the founders of New Eridu discovered how to extract from Hollows, is the reason for the city's prosperity and unique technologies. However, overexposure to Ether causes people to lose their ability for conscious thought, eventually transforming into Corrupted.
- Eldritch Location: Hollows are extradimensional spaces that look from the outside like giant black bubbles swallowing everything they touch. Inside Hollows, spacetime is distorted, monsters called the Ethereal attack anything that moves, and those trapped within eventually become Corrupted.
- Hotter and Sexier: The game has already shown to be much more open to sexualized designs for characters than past miHoYo games, on top of very detailed jiggle physics. In the Tuning Test, some people had even noticed fully detailed underwear underneath Belle's skirt.
- Hub Level: Sixth Street, where Random Play is located. Players can explore the area and visit various shops to buy and level up equipment for future expeditions into Hollows, meet various NPCs who may provide side quests, and manage Random Play's movie rental service. Even the playable characters may appear at random to comment on various sights.
- Mascot:
- Metal Slime: Certain map nodes will notify players that a Golden Bangboo is hidden there. If a player can find it and defeat it, it'll drop tons of currency, but it will constantly try to run away or retaliate with attacks that cause long knockdown periods.
- Ominous Multiple Screens: Fitting the game's TV and film motif, dungeon crawling through the Hollows takes place on a large grid portrayed as a wall of TV screens. Players will move their Bangboo icon from one to the next, with each screen showing what random event will occur when landed on.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Because of the questionable legality of Hollow-diving and the many incentives that drive unlicensed and unauthorized people to go under or around the government's attempts at regulation, trios of agents can be composed of some very odd allies of convenience. You can have professional soldiers like Miyabi of Hollow Special Operations teaming up with Corin Wickes, a maid from Victoria Housekeeping Co., and Koleda, a violent construction worker from Belobog Industries. Their day jobs usually aren't some sort of secretive cover or a front for financing undercover organizations, either, they're just moonlighting as agents for the rewards.
- Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Of the known cast during the first Tuning Test, female characters with animal traits (Nekomata, Miyabi) are just Little Bit Beastly, who look like regular human girls besides their ears, while male characters (Lycaon, Ben) are full on beast men.
- Urban Fantasy: While the game's technology level is very futuristic, with things like robotic prostheses, highly intelligent AI companions, and extremely powerful inter-dimensional communications devices that allow the Proxy to interact with their clients being extremely commonplace, many of the characters are seemingly ripped straight out of medieval fantasy series like Japanese oni, Little Bit Beastly "demi-humans," and cyborgs claiming they're "knights." Despite fully-automatic assault weapons being available, several characters tend to fight exclusively in melee range with swords and knives or less technologically advanced firearms like double-action revolvers.
