Illuminate a brighter future for Humanity!
What They Say:
Explore the ruins, dungeons, and islands in this post-apocalyptic world through the POV of eight protagonists as they fight for survival and search for meaning in their never-ending cycles of life and death.
Content:
Zanki Zero: Last Beginning comes from the team behind the beloved and thrilling Danganronpa series. It doesn’t shy away from that series either as everything about it wears the Danganronpa influence on its sleeve. While its story, art style, and gameplay are pretty different overall, this is a decent game to keep you busy in this unfortunate time where the future of the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series is unknown.
Zanki Zero has you take on the role of eight people in a post-apocalyptic setting trying to survive as the last humans on earth. Sound familiar? It should but the game does have its own distinct features. For one, you have the opportunity to play as a different survivor in each of the game’s chapters. In addition, it is primarily a first-person dungeon crawler while also having lots of puzzles to solve and character interactions.
Therein lies the main problem with Zanki Zero and that’s its gameplay. While I appreciate the opportunity to try something familiar but new at the same time, the game would have been much better off without its RPG-style gameplay. The world around you is grid-based and you move one square at a time. There are dungeons that you can traverse that are huge and filled with creepy enemies to fight in real-time combat.
However, the combat in Zanki Zero is very bland. You have a main attack, a charge attack, and a couple of other features but that’s it. In addition, it isn’t turn-based like the Mystery Dungeon games either so there is little to no strategy involved. Thankfully, the game allows you to turn the difficulty down where there are almost no enemies to deal with. Though it does get more challenging as time goes on, I found the combat not worth the effort and turned the difficulty down to avoid it around the halfway point.
While I strongly dislike the combat, it is a great thing that you can mostly avoid it. And better yet, it doesn’t dumb down the puzzles either. While it can make some slightly easier, I still felt like there was a strong challenge. In the midst of fighting enemies, you will also have to solve puzzles to access rooms, get items, and so on. What starts out simple like pulling a lever behind you to open the door in front of you quickly turns into lengthy, mind-bending affairs.
There are times when you need to solve riddles to find a door that leads you to an item that opens up the locked door you were trying to get into and that’s just one simple example. As the game goes on, the puzzles become more involved and really require you to think a la the Zero Escape series. Though frustrations did arise occasionally, I found the puzzles to be mostly fair as long as I didn’t have to worry about also fighting monsters.
At the end of the day, though, the true heart of Zanki Zero is its story and characters. Neither the story nor its cast does anything exceptional or completely unique but it is enjoyable nonetheless for fans of Danganronpa, Zero Escape, Ever17, and so on. The eight main characters are varied enough and don’t quite feel too derivative either.
There’s the clear hero Haruto, the childlike Sachika, kind Rinko, and so on. Each character gets enough time to develop and evolve, which is much appreciated compared to Danganronpa where sometimes the early casualties don’t have nearly as much development.
The story is similar in that it doesn’t try anything crazy but it gets the job done. It’s entertaining enough that I binged the game in a couple of nights so I could see it through to the end. There are plenty of good twists and turns to enjoy, and the ending, in particular, is the best part of the whole game. It’s worth the ride and it, thankfully, fulfills its goal without being throw away like other games’ endings. Saying any more would be spoilers so you need to see for yourself if this is an interest to you.
In Summary:
In all honesty, I don’t think that Zanki Zero is for players who are new to this type of game or are RPG fans. It seems designed strictly for fans of similar experiences like Zero Escape or Danganronpa. If you like those games, this has a good story and characters that don’t reinvent the wheel per se but bring an enjoyable experience. The real-time grid-based dungeon crawling combat isn’t good but it’s, thankfully, avoidable and the puzzles, characters, and story are worth a purchase regardless.
Grade: C-
Developer: Lancarse
Publisher: Spike Chunsoft
Age Rating: 17+
Release Date: April 9, 2019
MSRP: $59.99
Platform: PS4 (reviewed), PC
This review was done with a review copy provided by the publisher. We are grateful for their continued support.
