Zenless Zone Zero Version 2.0 finally launched in a different location, with new characters, and some unexpected choices.
Welcome to new shores on the Waifei Peninsula, the latest location to open its doors to Proxies. After exploring the likes of Lumina Square and the Blazewood backdrop, we were ready for a whole new region of the world as part of the first major version update in HoYo’s urban adventure.
After recent reveals and teaser updates, we stepped off the cable car expecting a huge welcome, and the boardwalk certainly bristles with activity. It’s evident that we’re not in New Eridu anymore. Gone are the pristine city streets and the regimented order of Sixth Street, and instead you’re met with a mix of habitats and public spaces that feel much more lived in.
There’s a mix of old and new. Between the shrine entrances and town gates, the populus can be found perusing street stalls and open shopfronts, while the architecture is functional but not exactly pristine. Take a wander down the side streets, and you’ll find a myriad of broken cobblestone, street signage, and shopfronts still in a state of disrepair. The whole entrance to the area feels like a statement about both the draw of the big city and the lack of permanence when faced with the power of the Hollows.
It’s an interesting concept, if actually expanded. In the end, those first steps into the Waifei Peninsula feel decidedly shallow. Get off the boardwalk, and what stands directly ahead is about all you’ll find. The vendors available are stand-ins for Sixth Streets’ and you’ll be able to access most of the same services, even down to the coffee stand. Yet you won’t find even the breadth, complexity of characters, or environmental design that I really wish we’d seen. In essence, Waifei Peninsula is fine. It’s also largely forgettable, which I really feel is a disappointment.
So why stay here? Well, there is some work to be done. Take a right after you’re done perusing the local shops, you’ll find the local shrine. More than just a location where you can find a reskinned daily scratch card system, you’ll also find the core gameplay loop for grinding through more content, rebuilding Subian Temple.
Enter the shrine, and a Bangboo named Belion will treat new faces to a tutorial and a guide on how to restore this prestigious, but worn down, locale. Discovery, crafting, and selling provides a core gameplay experience that leans heavily on the Bangboo, using these weird little critters to craft items and sell them for the sake of the shrine. It all seems a bit odd, but the core of this idea is to push players back into the Hollow for materials.
It gives us a reason beyond the Inter-Knot to engage with the new Hollow Areas and understand how to move through the world in a new way.
A Whole New Overworld
While we’ll be tackling Hollow Zero and its like a little later, the most obvious changes to Zenless Zone Zero Version 2.0 are the Hollows. Detailed here as the Aerospace City, the Hollow areas have ditched the instanced zoning, alongside the TV Mode of earlier versions.
Now, they’re closer to full free form exploration. You’ll be able to port in and out of these areas, picking up quests, finishing them off later, exploring at will, and even switching out teams in the middle of a run.
Heck, I even crashed out of the game and came back into a Hollow area to complete a mission. Quests in here lean into the promise of exploration, asking players to find materials for the aforementioned Shrine Restoration and completing plenty of search and collect quests. It does, however, feel like a first stab at something that’ll get there eventually.
Maps feel linear, despite the free form exploration. Quests are, at least for now, largely collection based, interspersed with combat encounters that feel more free form but largely don’t give me a reason to care. There are some dispersed environmental mechanics, using a special sight, solving puzzles, or changing the environment.
Yet, none of these feel challenging. As a result, none of the four stylized dungeons feels spontaneous, certainly when I tried it, and doesn’t seem to justify the effort put into the free form exploration quite yet.
On the other hand, stepping into these Hollow you’ll be met with a mix of new mobs and a miasmic threat that do, at first at least, feel somewhat more engaging than the quests. The cinder block aesthetic that makes up these new zones finds construction workers and civilians set among a creeping corruption that changes the face of the enemy.
These miasmic creatures come equipped with their own poisonous capabilities, spewing wretched purple ooze that can change combat but more importantly impact your team. Further in, you’ll find environmental puzzles that are linked to this miasma, mobs that can produce their own spawns, and more. All of the design intent here appears to be to engage players and make things more difficult or predictable based on your combat decisions.
In essence, this does make combat more engaging for some. Players with a fully invested squad or more recent character pulls are going to find that they can tear through these enemies before they become a threat, either breaking their various bars using Sheer Damage or just brute force. That’s the thing, in Version 2.0 character choice does matter.
New Characters
Likely the most immediate change to Zeneless Zone Zero is the introduction of Yixuan. The most significant of the new agents, she pairs particularly well alongside Ju Fufu and Pan Yinhu, who we will get to later. Whether you choose to pull for Yixuan is going to largely be based on whether you have the S-rank characters that are compatible. As this isn’t a deep dive I’m not going to detail the specifics, but I tended to play her alongside Astra, filling up the final team slot with Trigger, or Miyabi. You’ll note that none of these are legacy characters.
Power creep is beginning to settle into Zenless Zone Zero and, while it’s promising that some legacy characters are being reworked, the Sheer Damage that Yixuan can do, eliminating enemy defences, is an invaluable skill. It’s not just compelling. It could be invaluable. If you’ve got any realistic chance to pull her, get rolling, it will make the entire experience going forward easier.
Ju Fufu and Pan Yinhu are an oddly matched pair of allies. While you won’t get to pull Ju Fufu yet, you will be able to try her out. She continues to draw on tropes of small explosive characters with a similar personality that we’ve already seen, but Pan Yinhu is an altogether different beast. Whether his slow movement and attack feels odd against the pace of the other new characters or maybe it’s because the other pulls are S-rank making him feel less than optimal, I’m not entirely sure.
What I do know is that Yixuan and Fufu feel like the most compelling, even when combat gets kind of intense.
With Great Power Comes Particle Effect
If you do pull for Yixuan, Fufu, or Pan Yinhu, it will make a significant difference in your combat capability.
As long term players may have noticed, characters in Zenless Zone Zero are becoming more significant in an off-field status. Specifically, when Astra arrived in game, we started seeing character stay on-field after switching between them, and that’s continued with these three. You’ll notice them actively lingering on the field thanks to a range of mechanics, blowing up enemies and generally causing chaos. What that does mean is we’re also seeing more flashy effects in game. More visual spam, and the sort of carnage that isn’t going to the combat experience exactly optimal in many respects.
With just a few hours played in Zenless Zone Zero Version 2.0, I feel like the Waifei Peninsula has a lot more to offer and so does Zenless Zone Zero. What they’ll need to do for the player base is to make free form exploration worth the effort. Expand the zones, make it more than a simple collection quests, build in greater verticality and give more reason to explore. There’s potential there, and it’s fun to see a new zone, but this feels like the foundation of something new as opposed to a revolution.
Zenless Zone Zero Version 2.0 is out now, across iOS Android, PC, and PlayStation. You can play for free by heading over to the official website or keep it Gamespace for more on the latest update.
