Welcome to New Eridu — Where Humanity Rises Anew!note
Zenless Zone Zero is an upcoming Urban Fantasy Roguelike Action RPG Gacha Game in development by miHoYo of Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail 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 to 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. The second "Equalizing Test" was released in late November 2023. The third "Amplifying Test" was announced in mid-March, with the game slated for release in 2024.
Visit the official website here
. See the 2023 teaser trailer here.
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.
- Art Evolution: Compared to miHoYo's previous titles, Zenless Zone Zero's animation quality is considerably better with how fluidly and expressively each character moves in cutscenes.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Justified. When the protagonists first start fighting Ethereals, they're unprepared to do so, barely able to push a couple back as they flee. As the story, and presumably their stats, increase, so does their ability to fight multiple beasts.
- 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.
- The End of the World as We Know It: Being modeled after the Noughties, it is expected to see ZZZ be set in a classic 2000s post-apocalyptic world. Hollows are supernatural dimensions of space-time that acts as Monster Spawn Points known as Ethereals. New Eridu is one of the few civilizations that survived and industrialised in this new age.
- 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.
- Jiggle Physics: Any female character in the game who is even modestly endowed will tend to bounce around like gelatin to the slightest movements. This is especially visible during cutscenes and for characters like Nicole, Grace, or Rina. There’s also jiggle physics for Von Lycaon’s shapely legs, most prominently in the character select screen.
- 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.
- Period Piece: Of the Noughties. Not only do half of the characters wear clothing appropriate from the 2000s (i.e. cargo shorts, double-sleeve shirts, skinny jeans, crop tops, 2000s MP3-esque headphones, hip-hop fashion etc), but the aesthetic just screams 2000s. We are talking about the music being entirely 2000s-era funk-pop and heavy-synth with punk-rock decals decorating the entire world. The buildings being of the dirtier and grimier brutalist concrete blocks that grounds ZZZ away from the usual Mihoyo "clean polish architecture", which also characterizes the 2000s Darker and Edgier departure from the 90s. Likewise, computers and TVs are CRT monitors with a distinctive "boxy" 2000s look whilst the cars have that identifiable curve-box SUV-style design from the early 2000s and late 90s. Moreover, Blockbuster-esque DVD rental stores are present in the setting as well as graffiti art and the Skate Punk sub-culture. Even if one discounts the aesthetic, ZZZ has the atmosphere that makes the game feel old or from a different generation. If one looks at the promotional artwork for ZZZ, one can be forgiven to mistake ZZZ being released in the mid 2000s.
- 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.
- Retro Universe: The world of ZZZ is clearly modeled on the 2000s, something that is deliberately invoked by Hoyoverse themselves. A lot of the technology present borderlines 21st century Zeerust and the fashion and social culture is a good two decades in the past as of this time of writing.
- Revisiting the Roots: A meta example for miHoYo - after releasing an exploration-based Wide-Open Sandbox (Genshin Impact) and a turn-based RPG (Honkai: Star Rail), Zenless Zone Zero marks the return of the 3D Stylish Action games they were known for beforehand.
- 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.
- Turn of the Millennium: As mentioned above, ZZZ is set in a world similar to ours circa 2003-2005. The technology, fashion and aesthetic present looks both familiar yet dated which, given the quasi-post apocalyptic 2000s The End of the World as We Know It setting, is completely appropriate.
- Urban Fantasy: While the game's technology level is largely Noughties-retro with a few 'futuristic' inventions 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 androids 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.
