Zenless Zone Zero is My Favorite Hoyo Game

Written by Rei Caldombra 5/23/25

Hello everyone, Rei Caldombra here to talk about what is currently my favorite HoYoverse game and gacha game, Zenless Zone Zero. I think this is Hoyoverse at their best, utilizing a lot of what they have learned from the previous games and putting them in a fun, stylish and streamlined gaming experience. This game is energetic and flashy, bursting with personality between its great animations and models, unique world, and compelling stories. It does have some flaws but I don’t believe them or the more fanservicey aspects bring the game down drastically.

Remember that this is just my opinion and how I feel at the moment. These types of games have so much going on and can change a lot over time, as will your thoughts after playing them long-term. It was genuinely kinda hard to condense all my thoughts for this, but here we are. I will not be directly spoiling any part of Zenless Zone Zero’s story. And I will be making comparisons to Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail throughout this, as they are solid reference points that I can make. Many players of Hoyo games have at least tried these two, me included, and they have a lot of overlap alongside their differences. The overall design of it as a gacha game is the exact same as them too. FYI I played Genshin for about 4 years, Star Rail about 6 months, and Zenless about 8 months starting from about a month into the game.

To start, I feel Zenless is the most “friendly” of the Hoyoverse games for the average person when it comes to game design. And is great as a game overall for more casual video game players while still providing some challenging content for players who want higher difficulty.

Zenless being designed as a hack and slash that appeals to more casual gamers is a big success for me. I don't really like hack and slash type action games, particularly ones that demand meticulous timing on actions like dodging and parrying. I’ve tried Souls-likes and rarely enjoyed them. I just don’t enjoy games that require that level of dedication and repetition to learning patterns, timing etc. But Zenless’s gameplay clicks with me. It is a bit of a button masher, but I don’t think it’s that bad. I like the 3-person team + bangboo build as something both similar and different to Genshin and Star Rail. I’m not going to go super in-depth into the mechanical details, but I find the system fun. Even as someone who tends to not play these types of games. Out of the 3 games, Star Rail’s turn based is actually my favorite type of gameplay. But with Star Rail I felt it got repetitive very fast and fights went on too long. With Zenless, I feel there is more room to experiment and play how you want. It has team archetypes, but there is a solid amount of diversity. And most of the characters are at least decent.  

It does have those mechanics that can be frustrating to me, but I generally find the difficulty in general gameplay and harder content to hit the right spot. I’ve found myself enjoying Shiyu Defense far more than I expected to, which is its version of Spiral Abyss from Genshin. These are the standard hard modes that give you rewards with each reset in each of these games. This too is well streamlined and improved in Zenless. The main thing that makes Shiyu much better is that you don’t have to do all the later stages in one run. It was so frustrating in Abyss to be failing at the last stage but having to do the earlier stages that I already beat in time again and again. It feels like a waste of time and just makes me get further frustrated. This is a big pet peeve with me in gaming. The point of repeating things you fail at is for practice, so you can get better. When I am already good at the earlier stages, repeating them does not help me anymore. In Shiyu, I can just repeat the stage that I need to. This makes me much more willing to engage with it, and I actually have fun doing it. Zenless’s roguelike mode Hollow Zero is most similar to Star Rail’s Simulated Universe, and again I like Zenless’ much better. What makes these modes work really well is that they present you with challenges but with unique rewards and abilities. They truly make you feel super powerful and give you plenty of room for experimentation and strategy. I’m a bigger fan of Lost Void than Withered Domain. My favorite thing out of all of them has been Shadow Operation. These are Hollow Zero runs that have a specific theme, presenting unique challenges but also unique rewards. What’s especially cool about Zenless’ roguelike mode is that you get special abilities for your characters that can radically change how they play. Astra can go from a healing support unit that just sits on the field to shooting a laser that does a ton of damage. I really enjoy both of these difficult modes and did not grow tired of them the way I did their counterparts in Genshin and Star Rail. For people who want the game to be really hard, there is content for you that does not work for me. Simulated Battle Trial requires you to strategically pick your characters and leaves little room for error. I do not like it at all for how punishing this mode is, where even 1 attack will take away most of your HP. But it seems like that is exactly the type of thing other people like. You can keep going up in difficulty from 1 all the way to 999. If you want high difficulty that demands perfection, Zenless offers that too. This may just be a me thing, but I think Deadly Assault is a big step above Shiyu in terms of difficulty and I don’t like it either. It’s basically 3 separate boss battles that you have to share all your characters between. I do not like how it is designed. You fight each boss for 3 minutes until the time runs out, with you trying to do as much damage as possible. I do not enjoy this just being a loop of fighting the same thing for a time period. And what doesn’t help is that the bosses rarely change and they have overlapping weaknesses that makes having a diverse account feel like a weakness when it should be the opposite. I really wish they changed the bosses up more often, as the game has a lot of them. Some of them I dislike a lot, but others I like. At this exact moment, 2 of the 3 bosses have the exact same weaknesses and resistances. This can be an issue in Shiyu too, it certainly was when they spammed electric weak enemies, but Deadly Assault is far more stagnant. I may not like all of the game’s hard modes, but I see how they are more appealing to other people. One more minor gameplay mechanic gripe I can make is that with the type of game this is, you are constantly locked onto enemies during combat. Usually this isn’t a problem, but sometimes trying to attack a different enemy directly can be difficult. But overall, I think Zenless does a good job providing both easy and difficult content that suit a variety of players.

The game is so quick and snappy to play. This can be seen in all aspects of the game. This includes the world, which is pretty small and doesn’t have much reasons to just run around in it. I can understand people disliking that there is very little exploration in this game. But that’s what I like about it. I enjoyed exploring Genshin Impact’s big, beautiful world full of hidden things to find and puzzles to do for years. But I got seriously burnt out on exploration. Every subsequent region I spent less time out in the world. I stopped actively collecting oculi because they were way too many of them. I got tired of having stamina. All of my patience for boring repetitive puzzles was worn down. Zenless’s quick, streamlined gameplay experience is exactly what I needed when it came out. I am glad it’s not full chests or puzzles that give premium currency and constantly nag at me for not doing. I’m happy to run around the world just when I want to. Or in more natural ways, like with story and trust events. Like the other Hoyo games there’s pretty much always minor events going on. Most of them aren’t relevant or anything to write home about. But they give decent rewards and usually are fun enough. You can totally skip them when you don’t feel like it. Or at least mash through the dialogue when they can get a bit wordy. Though I usually do them and actually read. 

Let’s talk about the grind, gacha games are known for their grinds after all. The daily reward system for premium currency, Errands, is the easiest and most beneficial out of the HoYoverse games in my opinion. All you have to do is log in, get coffee from Tinmaster (giving you extra energy that you can save for later or use right away), do the scratch off card and get a little money or hopefully get a little extra premium currency, and then get some free skill material from your store. In 1 minute you can get your daily premium currency (in my video I’ll have footage of this as well as my own gameplay footage for you to judge) and some free materials. This is way faster than any other gacha game I've played. And it's stuff you would want to do anyway, you’re just grabbing free materials. Nothing pointless or time consuming is forced on you. But if you want to do other things, you can get credit for errands from doing those too, like spending your energy in combat. There’s also Ridu Weekly which is like the weekly version of this. This has some of those pointless actions for the sake of getting you to do something if you want to clear the entire board, but you can get all the premium currency just from doing the previously mentioned daily activities.

So again, to get the premium currency you just need to do stuff it would be good to do anyway. You have many options of things to do, and the bare minimum takes so little time and effort. This daily system really respects your time, taking up the least amount of it to get the free premium currency. All gacha games have a system like this to get players to log in every day. But to me this is by far the best out of gacha games I’ve played.  

For the people who want to play casually, aka you aren’t playing every day and trying to get good builds, I think it’s the easiest to play of the Hoyo games. You do not need to spend money to enjoy this game in my opinion. You don’t need optimal characters just for beating the story. In part because a lot of it makes you play with the game’s characters rather than your own. It doesn’t feel like you need a lot of characters if you just want to play the story and pull for characters you want. You don’t need to think about the meta at all. The materials and their grinds are super straightforward and easy to do. Compared to Genshin and Star Rail, I find the material stages to be the fastest. Which is what you want, this is not the kind of thing that should be challenging. Building characters is so much faster than Genshin, it’s not even close. The game gives you a lot of materials for free through events and the process of grinding those items is not hard. I have been able to get my new characters to a satisfactory state WAY faster than Genshin and faster than Star Rail. One of the reasons why is because the exact number of materials you get is consistent rather than luck based. This means no frustration over needing to do extra runs of a boss because you got bad luck (cough cough Genshin).

Another thing is that character stories often use the game’s characters instead. Which can be fun and helps you feel more like you are directly in the events taking place. It also makes the story more accessible, as you don’t need to build characters as much. But it also has a lot of segments where you just use one or two characters and don’t have a bangboo. So it results in you having less to do and takes away from the core combat formula of switching characters. When the game makes you play as just 1 character for anything, it truly is a button masher and is not fun. But this is not a big deal in my opinion.

The only way I think this game is not friendly is how complicated the stats are. This game has multiple extra stats and values compared to Genshin. I could not begin to tell you how you’d calculate optimal builds and stuff like that, I have always stayed away from metagame stuff with the Hoyo games. And it did take me a while to fully understand everything. But you do not need to understand all these values perfectly to enjoy the game. I played for a few months before I properly got into building characters and learning how to play better. But as this is a HoYoverse game, it does have the dreaded equipment. If you want optimal stats on your disks, welcome to hell. It’s an awful grind that I did a lot in Genshin and swore off awhile ago. Building perfect equipment in any game where it is based on luck is frustrating if you want them to be optimal or perfect. If you want 80% crit rate on Miyabi and without sacrificing a lot of other stats for it, you’ll be grinding your butt off. But you are playing casually, you don’t need to stress over most of these values. You don’t need to care about the substats on disks, just get the right main stat. If you are someone like me who wants to do hard content but not tryhard over it, I think the game is not awful. It is rough to not have an off piece like Genshin does, but the game makes this issue not as much of a factor since they hand out Tuning Calibrators consistently and fairly often. Unless you are a whale and someone who demands perfection on every character you have, you can pretty consistently guarantee yourself a mainstat you are struggling to get. Which means for casual players who have fewer characters and aren’t doing difficult content likely won’t struggle at all. I am slowly trying to give all my characters their own dedicated set of disks (currently at about 2/3rds of my characters) and I have 5 tuning calibrators sitting around. Zenless put the mainstat craftable in right away and made the barrier to get them not that hard. Again unlike Genshin. When it comes to weapons, the quality of free to play ones are pretty good. Many of the signature weapons are highly beneficial and can be worth it if you have a character you are dedicated to either as a strong character or one you love. But you don’t need them, they are a luxury to go for out of dedication or not being interested in upcoming characters. Jane is my favorite character to play and I still don’t have her signature but she still feels very strong. I have not felt strapped for pulls as someone whose spending has only been a single City Fund that cost $10. I have not had awful luck but not incredible luck either. Maybe it’s just been my luck but I’ve been happy with the characters I’ve managed to get as almost entirely a f2p.

The story of Zenless overall is simpler and more low-key compared to other games like Genshin and Star Rail. But just like what I said with the world, this is exactly what I want. Overall the story is solid. I’m not a huge fan of every story decision they’ve made, but I like the overall story. Genshin has not managed its many overarching stories super well in my opinion. There is at times too much detail, too much going on to remember, too much time between things being revisited. While each region’s story was usually at least decent, sometimes the stories felt too self contained. Sometimes it felt like each region was in a bubble, which I think is counterintuitive to a game where you are meant to run around a connected world seamlessly. Zenless doesn’t face this issue because it is smaller, it is tight knit. With that comes a story and world that is more cohesive to me. I like how down to earth it is and how it is immersed in the urban setting. I love details like the people of each area having their favorite hangout spots, goofy mascots everywhere, local legends, and stuff like that. Characters from different factions are constantly interacting with each other. And just because it is not as dense or wide in scope does not mean it lacks in very gripping stories. Many of the characters' stories are very well written and emotionally gripping. This game balances goofiness and heavier content well but leans more on the lighter end most often. But the really dark aspects of the story tend to really hit, such as Trigger’s backstory and Rina’s. But on different ends. There is a good variety of backstories between being main story related or not and dramatic vs low key. I like how it is handling these things so far. If Found Family tugs at your heartstrings, then I think you’ve gotta give Zenless a try. All of the factions of Zenless have strong elements of Found Family within their stories. I love all the factions and how they each feel like their own kind of weird but happy family.

The twin proxies are my favorite protagonists of the Hoyo games. One trait that makes the siblings different from the other Hoyo protagonists is that they are entirely noncombatants as of writing this. And I love that, this is very different from other games. I like that they are weaker characters who support the agents as “the guy is the chair”. I am cautiously open to this changing as I think it probably will, but I would rather they stay as physically weaker characters in-universe. Sure, you can have them train so they can hold their own. But I don’t want them taking down ethereals single handedly, I like that they have to rely on the agents for their safety in dangerous situations. It helps a lot with the tension. What also helps a lot is that the twins have a full backstory from the start, and that they want to keep those secrets. It’s interesting to see the main characters be the usual friendly and good-natured people you expect from protagonists in these types of games, but also have that bit of apprehensiveness and guard they put up around people. I also love that the main characters are siblings who actually stay together constantly. The sibling dynamic is a very strong factor to why the story works for me. I love how every story event ends with you talking to your sibling. This is a great form of narrative repetition that makes your sibling feel important to you as the main character and creates that warm homey atmosphere that the game has with the proxies. You really buy into how much they care about each other. The smaller world works really well with these protagonists, as we are one of the things that brings these characters together. But unlike how Genshin can feel, we aren’t the only ones bringing characters together. There’s some stories that have you play entirely from the perspective of characters other than the twins. It's nice and helps it feel less like the entire world revolves around them. This game’s smaller scope and its good execution of that has done so much towards cultivating a strong community within this world that you really get attached to. To further talk about the world while revisiting the earlier point of its small scope, I love the way it has been built. It is a great mix of urban mixed with sci-fi elements. I especially love how the danger of the Hollows is framed both as a normal occurrence people are used to while simultaneously being terrifying. It balances this very well. You can go from a story about how a character was shaped by the horrible events of a hollow then go out and then see how people have used the effects of the hollow to better their society and fight back against it. It shows how humanity can stand strong together against horrific powers they don’t understand, but also how human greed will lead to people abusing those same powers. It has brought up some very cool ideas and compelling stories so far, and I’m interested in seeing how it moves forward. 

Now let’s talk about characters in general. Overall Zenless has my favorite character designs, in terms of their individual designs themselves and the variety of types we see. I’m not as harsh on Genshin’s overall design philosophy as some people, but they can get very busy, repetitive and not be fitting for their roles in the universe. Zenless does not suffer from this to me, but Genshin and Star Rail have a lot more characters than Zenless so keep that in mind. But what is undeniable is that Zenless have a wider scope of designs compared to the other games. Zenless goes all the way with proper mechanical and anthropomorphized animal characters. We have normal humans, humans with mechanical body parts, Billy who is a full-on robot, characters like Jane who just have elements of animals like a tail, and then characters like Ben who are practically just the animal with human intelligence. The variety in character design gives the cast so much more room for being unique and memorable. It’s true that Zenless is seriously lacking in its quantity of male characters, I cannot deny that. If Genshin is around 1:2 male to female, Zenless is about 1:3. We should have way more male characters. But at least the quality of said characters are really great in my opinion. Overall I think the characters have great personalities and most of their stories are at least decent if not great. The last character-related point I’ll bring up is the game’s mascot, Bangboos. I don’t have any issue with them. Basically they are chunky little robots clearly inspired by minions. I think they are cute more often than not and usually not annoying.

Finally we’re going to move on to the big gooner elephant in the room that I haven’t touched on yet. If you don’t care about this discussion, just skip this next paragraph. It can be a hot button issue that a lot of people are either very passionate about or don’t care at all. I just wanna give my thoughts around this specifically with Zenless as it is basically part of its identity in discourse. I will be simplifying things to the dichotomy of straight men and women for this topic as that’s how it's usually discussed but please know I recognize the whole spectrum of people who enjoy hot fictional characters. 

Out of all the Hoyo games, this one is the one most directly trying to be sexy. The character designs, the physics, and the camera put emphasis on the characters. While what I just said before is true, the game does not go too far in my opinion. It’s not equal, don’t get me wrong. In this game specifically I don’t see it as problematic. Just because there are more intentionally attractive characters doesn't automatically mean the loss of substance and that's all there is to enjoy. A game having fanservice doesn't mean its sole purpose is to go all the way to getting people off. I do like the attractiveness of the characters who appeal to me in that way. But I also like the characters who appeal to me in other ways and don't appeal to my tastes and fetishes. I don’t think the characters that are meant to be sexy are completely devalued or solely centered around that as characters. I mentioned how we have straight up robots and furries too. This wider scope of character design can also play into the gooner game allegations, but it’s not like you have to view those characters in a fetishy way. Jane and Pulchra are certainly intended to be sexy and appeal to specific fetishes, but you’ve also got characters like Soldier 11 and Corin who I feel don’t really have sexualization to them. It is important to note that they’ve also gone out of their way to make the male characters sexy as well, not just the female characters. Fanservice for the traditional female audience is also present to a degree. There are less male than female characters but denying that most of them also don’t appeal to fetishes or aren’t meant to be sexy is just incorrect. The male characters also have dialogue, trailers, art etc that are meant to appeal to the viewer as an object of attraction. You would have to completely ignore Lycaon and Hugo especially, with them also being a very intentional ship appealing to yaoi fans. Have you seen the butt buff they gave Vlad and the jiggles his has? You get wipeout screens and animations that show off his butt just like Jane and Vivian. I won’t try to argue this isn’t a hornier game than the average gacha. But how do I feel? I don’t really mind and will admit that I’m a degenerate who likes some hot anime characters from time to time. I also think it’s funny to get a wipeout screen with a character’s ass in focus. I don’t mind if there is some more sexual connotation to the game when it comes to the adult characters and when these aspects don’t eclipse other elements of the game. Which to me it doesn’t. Saying Zenless is a gooner game you are meant to play with one hand that is exclusively intended for straight men is a huge exaggeration to me. You don’t need to find anything in this game sexy to enjoy it. The gameplay, story and overall writing for the characters is good to me. But if sexualization of characters is something that you are particularly conscious and critical of, I can understand not wanting to play it. I’m not saying you’re oversensitive if you dislike more fanservicey games like Zenless or things like that. I just think SOME people can fixate on it too much and treat any games with sexuality in it as harmful and/or empty of substance by default. Personally I don’t think Zenless is doing any harm. But if this is something you like or don’t mind then this game will appeal to a wider scope of people through its characters than most gacha games in my opinion. 

While the models and animations do lend themselves to sexiness a lot of the time, it does not mean they are not great from a general standpoint. The characters have so much personally come through in how they move. The characters feel far smoother to play as than Genshin in my opinion. Animations tend to be very fluid, and there is a ton of detail put into them. This is especially notable in the cutscenes, they are so much more expressive and dynamic than other Hoyo games and gacha games in general. Even if they can be a bit overanimated sometimes. But the style they are going for is more exaggerated. The comic book cutscenes can look really great too. When it comes to the models, Zenless is not stuck with the awfully small amount that Genshin and Star Rail have. Every single character has their own model. This is a massive jump in effort and attention to detail from these developers compared to the other games. This deserves serious praise because sadly constant reusing models and refusing to make new ones is the norm for HoYoverse. When it comes down to the visual presentation, I have to praise the Wipeout screens too. They’re a neat way to end fights and it's fun seeing what kind of shots you can get. The game is well designed around the characters flashy and expressive moves. The great animations for the characters really shine with the wipeouts, as they are meant to pose for them. Sometimes you catch the characters looking silly, and sometimes they look really cool. But it’s very intentional. Here are 2 of my favorites I’ve gotten.

Let me break it down for you Mark.

Jane finishing a boss with a slide under with afterimages.

Please don’t disrespect the quality of this game’s models and animations just because they happen to sometimes make the characters look sexy too. The soundtrack for this game is also very good.

If there’s any 1 character I would recommend to pull the most, it's Astra. I feel she has the most value from a holistic perspective as a player. Most dps characters with a great build can be a great dps. But no one provides the quick assist style she does along with her very strong buffs and healing (as of right now in game she is the only healer). She feels very impactful on the team and very fun. If you want the strongest character, it's Miyabi to me. Her damage is crazy, she has a big aoe and she groups enemies. She makes grinding basic stages for materials even faster than it already is. These are the two characters that come the most recommended. My Zenless wife is Jane, I’m a total Jane simp. Call me a typical gooner if you want, she’s so hot. And best boy is definitely Ben, I just really love him. But I genuinely like most of the characters. I think all 3 of the Hoyo games I’ve mentioned started with strong characters. I hope the good quality of likeable and fun characters continues as the game progresses, and we continue to see great and varied designs.

For anyone who keeps up with all the Hoyo games or looks at the data behind gacha games, you probably know that Zenless Zone Zero has not picked up traction quite like Genshin Impact and Star Rail have. It makes me a bit sad that the Hoyo game that to me respects the player the most and has the most passionate and receptive game developers is the one with the least success. My feelings towards the developers are far more positive than most gacha games. I feel the genuine desire to improve the game much more than just their desire to make money. They could be far stingier with free stuff but they don’t. I feel they’ve been more receptive to the players than the other games. I do think they have a bad habit of overcorrecting, but I appreciate that they really do feel like they are listening and trying to change the game based on feedback. They at least try way harder and do it faster than Genshin. What would I like to see from Zenless? I would like a way for players to borrow a character from their friends like in Star Rail. 

Overall, I feel Zenless Zone Zero is a really great free to play gacha game and is currently my favorite. I stand by it successfully appealing well to both casual and harder-core gamers with its fun gameplay. It has solid writing, an interesting setting, good worldbuilding, likeable and well-designed characters, great animations, and executes on being a “sexier” game better than others. I think it took the lessons learned from Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail and implemented them well here to make a game that was exactly what I was looking for after being burnt out on those games and their flaws. I hope Zenless Zone Zero continues to keep me engaged and having a fun time. If anything I said sounds appealing to you, I recommend looking past a lot of the exaggerations and overgeneralizations people have made and giving it a try for yourself.

With that, I’m going to bring it to an end here. Honestly it is really hard to finish writing about games like this because there is just so much you could go into and things can change so far. There are channels dedicated solely to gacha games that are able to be sustained for years because of the sheer amount of stuff to discuss with these huge, constantly evolving games. And with those constant evolutions your opinions can radically change. So when speaking broadly in a review sort of format, I have to get myself to buckle down and finish. Because I just kept thinking of more I could say and feel like it could go on forever based on adding new things and my opinion changing as more time passes. This is already one of the longest things I’ve done. If you’d like to hear more about my thoughts on gacha games I’ve played or more on Zenless, please let me know. I have actually played the previously mentioned hornier gacha game known as Nikke and a LOT of Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle. Thank you for reading!

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