HoYoverse’s action RPG title Zenless Zone Zero is going places, literally. After a huge plot revelation in the game’s previous few story bits (pre-2.0), the siblings Wise and Belle have to travel to Waifei Peninsula to find out more about their lost teacher, as well as learn their recently-unlocked powers from a mysterious shifu named Yixuan.

I wish I could tell you more about the narrative, but the 2.0 media preview build we were given had a lot of its cutscenes and dialogue gutted out and replaced with “Stay Tuned” and “…” to avoid spoilers. What I can tell you is that the gameplay in the 2.0 version of ZZZ is a lot more streamlined, a lot more user-friendly, and features pretty awesome gacha characters.

Teacher, Teacher, I Declare

Let’s get to the meat of this 2.0 update. The new Yunkui Summit folks in the character banner are Yixuan and Pan Yinhu. Yixuan is a new 5-star character Ether element character who fights using a new archetype called Rupture, which uses Sheer Force to negate enemy defenses, equalling big damage. This scales to her Hit Points; the more life she has, the bigger the Sheer Force value is.

She pulls this off by using her unique mechanic Auric Ink; this damage type builds up on enemies hit by it, leading to triggering Corruption, which leads to continuous Ether damage. This combined with her Rupture fighting style means quicker dead enemies with her sweeps of attacks and her raven familiar acting as some sort of extension for her combo attacks. She also has a pretty cool Ultimate which gets more powerful the more Adrenaline you consume via her EX Special Attack. Keep spamming that EX, and you’ll dish out a much cooler Ultimate which involves her spirit Raven.

Pan Yinhu is a defense-heavy character who dishes out physical damage and has a lot of counterattacks from his dodges. He can also take a beating, and has an area-of-effect Ultimate that can help deal with surrounding enemies. While not the most interesting of playstyles, he is an A-Rank character and would be easier to roll for in the current banner than Yixuan.

The other addition in this faction is Ju Fufu, a tiger Thiren who is cute as a button but has super-fast attacks. While not available in the current banner, she is playable in most of the 2.0 story segments. She can apply Suppressing Tiger Cauldron buffs on her teammates after she’s tagged out for added offensive, and also has fast attacks when she’s in the fray. Think Wolverine from the Marvel Vs Capcom fighting games but in a Chinese half-cat lady asskicker.

Whether you’re a fan of furries or love hot-looking teacher figures, there’s a lot of zest and fashion drip in these new Yunkui Summit characters. They have their uses and deal loads of damage if put in the right setup -the ideal one being these three in the same team of course. But at least the first two, Yixuan and Pan, can synergize with most A-ranked agents if you want to deal heavy Ether damage or have support characters who can complement Yixuan’s method of damage-dealing.

And trust us when we say you’ll be getting a lot of new opposition in the way. The new dungeons in the 2.0 update introduce new Miasma debuffs, where the area gets covered in poisonous clouds that damages you and your agents via filling up a special meter on your end. Once that debuff meter is filled up, your team gets a good chunk of damage. Most stages will have special Hollow enemies that try their best to lay out Miasma to your face, so your strategy would be to dodge and evade as much as possible before you take on more damage than you can handle.

Proxy Power

The new dungeon areas also let you use Wise and Belle’s new “scifi magic” powers, where they can either trace sources through a magic line, make objects materialize or disappear through a magic rift, or close off evil miasma tears to open up barriers formed by these special Hollow plants. These are the extent of the puzzles in ZZZ 2.0; you’ll have to either make new platforms appear for the agents to cross over, or open up a gate by closing off three to four miasma tears, then use your scifi magic powers to destroy the head miasma bulb. At the very least, it does break up the combat routine while not taxing your brain too much.

In fact, this whole Hollow segment of ZZZ 2.0 is made better due to the fast travel points you can unlock and teleport to, like in an open world game. Rather than having short chunks of stages, ZZZ 2.0 has new extended stages in the new Waifei Peninsula Hollow regions that go on like mazes with their own self-contained puzzles, sidequests, and superbosses. It’s pretty open-ended and definitely shows that this is a step-up from the tile-based maze gameplay we got in the 1.0 base game.

There’s a temple restoration minigame where you help out some denizens fix up the Suibian Temple and drum up business. You restore parts of it through simple menus, craft objects, and sell them for money to make improvements to spice up the ancient place. It’s one of them time-based free games where you have to go out and do combat and exploration stuff so that you can reap the rewards after a set amount of time. It does add colour to the game, but it’s just another checklist in getting more rewards.

Long story short: I’m digging this big update. Is ZZZ 2.0’s gameplay & streamlining a huge step in the right direction? Definitely, though it remains to be seen if the rest of the Waifei Peninsula gameplay will carry on in future updates. For now, this is a nice bold step for HoYoverse in making ZZZ a lot less, boring, narrow, and shallow.