Plenty of action RPGs treat their cities as a menu: a hub you pass through on the way to the next fight. Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) works differently. New Eridu is a lived-in place with its own clock, its own aesthetic, and a cast you get to know by wandering through it. Here is how the game makes city life feel like part of the adventure, based on the version available as of late October 2026.
Why New Eridu Feels Lived In
A city built around a job
ZZZ casts you as a Proxy, a guide for hire who provides mapping and direction inside Hollows, the supernatural disaster zones that have swallowed most of the world. You pick one of two siblings, Wise or Belle, at the start of the game, and the one you don’t choose stays in the story in a supporting role. To cover their illegal Hollow-guiding work, the pair run a video rental store.
That setup matters for exploration, because it gives the city a purpose. New Eridu isn’t just scenery between missions. It’s where the Proxy lives, works, and picks up commissions, so walking around feels like part of the job and not a pause from it.
A retro look with a lot of life
The game’s look does a lot of the work. Although ZZZ is set in a futuristic city, it leans on a retro and analog style, which the story explains as modern technology being vulnerable to corruption from Ether. Characters use flip phones, the video store rents out VHS tapes, CRT televisions show up everywhere, and arcades serve as a main form of entertainment.
The developers have said they wanted New Eridu to feel lively and buzzing instead of depressing, even though much of the outside world is implied to be destroyed. That contrast is a big part of its appeal. You’re exploring a city that has survived a catastrophe and kept its sense of fun, and the neon, screens, and street life make a walk through it worth taking.
A day with a rhythm
ZZZ also gives the city a schedule. The game runs an in-game clock that divides each day into morning, afternoon, evening, and midnight, and you can explore the overworld to meet Agents at specific times and build affinity with them. The team has cited Digimon World as an influence on that clock system.
This changes how exploring feels. Instead of just reaching a marker, you plan around when someone will be somewhere, and relationships grow through ordinary routines. The city becomes a place you return to because of the people in it, not just because the next story beat is there.
Exploration and Combat That Share One Attitude
How exploring the Hollows has changed
The Hollows have been one of the most debated parts of the game. At launch, the game used Array Mode, often called “TV Mode,” in which you explored Hollows by steering a Bangboo avatar across a grid of tiles that looked like television screens. The mode got mixed reception, and it was phased out of regular gameplay after the version 1.2 update in September 2024. It can still be accessed in some activities, such as Hollow Zero: Withered Domain.
The developers have kept adjusting the exploration side since then. The version 2.0 update in July 2025 optimized the hub world design and the interface, and the game keeps adding new ways to play. Version 3.3, “Journey to the Sky,” which released on October 21, 2026, adds mech combat to the main story, where Proxies pilot combat mechs to infiltrate enemy bases in disguise. Critics weren’t uniformly sold on ZZZ at launch, but Eurogamer called its combat and day-to-day exploration exciting and its world setting unique and immersive, and the game’s willingness to change in response to feedback is part of why it keeps improving.
Combat that matches the city’s attitude
When exploration turns into a fight, the game keeps the same stylish tone. Combat is real-time and third-person, with a party of three Agents and one Bangboo. You control one Agent at a time and can switch freely during combat, which feeds into mechanics like Chain Attacks and Anomaly Effects. Well-timed switches can also trigger a Defensive Assist to block an attack, and enemies build up Daze until they’re stunned and take extra damage.
The developers have named Street Fighter as an influence on the animation, and you can see it in how Agents move. The result is combat that feels like an extension of the city’s personality: fast, flashy, and built around timing.
Story and Progression
Story told through commissions and seasons
The narrative ties it all together. ZZZ is a live-service game, with updates called Versions arriving roughly every six weeks, and each Version adds Commissions that follow your chosen Proxy through New Eridu and the Hollows. Larger story arcs are organized into Seasons. The current Season 3 chapter centers on the conflict over the sky island of Roscaelifer, which keeps expanding the world beyond the city streets.
Progression, and where a ZZZ top up fits in
ZZZ is free to play, so you can enjoy exploring New Eridu without spending anything. But like most live-service games, it has resources that speed up progression. Polychrome, the premium currency, can be used toward the Signal Search system through which you obtain new Agents, and the game also offers a season pass-style reward track called the New Eridu City Fund.
If you’d like a few extra pulls or the pass to round out your roster, a ZZZ top up through LootBar, a game store that supports top-ups for many titles, is one option alongside the game’s own store and platform stores.
Whichever route you choose, buy only what you’ll actually use, set a budget, and check the current terms and delivery details of the store you use. And never share your account password with anyone, no matter how reasonable the request sounds.
Conclusion
What sets Zenless Zone Zero apart is that its city, its clock, its story, and its fights all point in the same direction: toward a stylish, lively place that rewards the time you spend in it. New Eridu isn’t a loading screen between battles. It’s the heart of the game, and with updates like version 3.3 still expanding what you can do, there’s good reason to keep exploring.
