The video store shutter that opens Zenless Zone Zero, two years and one Steam launch later

It opens with a video store shutter

The story starts on Sixth Street in a city called New Eridu, with a pair of siblings rolling up the shutter of a run-down video rental shop. By day they run the shop. By night they work as a Proxy, an unlicensed guide who leads people into and out of Hollows, the disaster zones that have swallowed whole districts of the city. Inside a Hollow, a substance called Ether warps space and turns whatever it touches into monsters. You pick one sibling, take commissions, and go in with a squad of combat specialists the game calls Agents.

HoYoverse, the studio behind it, is the overseas brand of Shanghai’s miHoYo, the company that makes Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. Zenless Zone Zero launched on PC, PS5, iOS and Android on July 4, 2024, and the company said pre-registrations had passed 40 million before launch. Xbox Series X|S and Xbox Cloud Gaming followed on June 6, 2025, Steam on June 17, 2026, and the Xbox PC app on July 29, 2026. As of August 22, 2026 the current version is 3.1, released July 29, and because it is the second-anniversary version the free handouts are unusually generous. More on that below.

Three agents, one button for switching

This is not an open world. You pick a commission in the Sixth Street hub, play a combat stage that runs ten to fifteen minutes, and come back. The whole game lives or dies on its fighting.

You build a squad of three Agents and control one at a time. When an enemy flashes just before a strike, switching characters at that instant turns the switch into a block and a counter. Every hit fills the enemy’s Daze meter, and once it is full the target is stunned and the whole squad takes turns piling in with a chain attack. The buttons are attack, special, dodge, switch and ultimate, so there is little to memorize; timing does the work. Anyone who grew up on Devil May Cry or Bayonetta will feel at home in the first fight. Anyone who wants to hold one button and watch numbers may find the constant switching tiring rather than exciting.

Agents are sorted into roles such as Attack, Stun, Anomaly, Support and Defense, and into attributes: Fire, Ice, Electric, Physical and Ether at launch, with Wind added in 3.0 and a new attribute called Lumiflux in 3.1. Matching roles and attributes is what makes the mid-game interesting, and it is also exactly where the spending pressure begins.

Two years of changes: the grid is gone, a sky island is in

At launch, Hollow exploration happened on a grid of TV screens, moving a token square by square between fights. Players liked the combat and complained about everything in between, and later updates cut the grid back hard. Version 2.0 in June 2025 opened Season 2 with a new district and a reworked hub and interface, so a newcomer today never meets the early build.

Version 3.0 on June 17, 2026 started Season 3. A sky island region called Roscaelifer opened, the first Wind Agent arrived alongside a Fire Stun Agent, and every player received a free Agent (Pyrois) plus 1,600 Polychromes, 600 at launch and 1,000 more on July 4. Steam went live the same day with full cross-platform progression.

Version 3.1 on July 29 is the anniversary build. Every player can pick one past limited S-Rank Agent for free, together with that Agent’s signature W-Engine, and a separate 1,600 Polychromes and 20 pulls are on the table. The first Agent of the new attribute and an Ice Attack Agent joined the roster, a new permanent mode opened, and the Xbox PC version launched so progress moves between console and PC inside the Xbox ecosystem.

Where the Polychromes go

The game is free and the main story stays free to the end. Everything you pay for sits in the pulls. Polychrome is the paid currency, 160 per pull. On a limited banner an S-Rank drops at 0.6 percent per pull with a hard guarantee inside 90. The catch is that the S-Rank you hit has only a 50 percent chance of being the featured one; lose that coin flip and the next S-Rank is guaranteed to be the one you wanted. Worst case is therefore 180 pulls, or 28,800 Polychromes. Free Polychromes accumulate through events and permanent modes every version, but trying to collect every new Agent outruns the monthly membership and the battle pass and lands you in top-ups.

The line where you stop spending is clear, though. A-Rank Agents carry the story and most permanent content, and the anniversary selector hands you one limited S-Rank outright. With the line drawn at one or two favorites, a free or membership-only account lasts a long time. Accounts usually break when they start chasing the rhythm of limited banners, two per version, roughly three weeks apart.

Who stays, who uninstalls by the weekend

The people who stay are easy to describe. The commission structure suits short sessions. The controls are built for a pad, so it feels right on PS5 and Xbox. If 2000s streetwear, record shops and pop-art illustration are your taste, walking around the hub is its own reward, and the volume of animated cutscenes and character chatter is a plus if you like that sort of thing.

The people who uninstall are just as easy. Anyone expecting a wide open world is in the wrong place. There is no co-op, so there is almost nothing to do with friends. The story’s opening hours drag, and the loop of accept, clear, return starts to feel like chores around the 20-hour mark. The top difficulty tiers of the permanent modes demand specific attributes and roles, which is where the pull pressure returns.

The first ten hours take you through the prologue and first chapter, open the hub, fill out a three-Agent squad, and stop you in front of your first limited banner. As of August 22, 2026 those ten hours also deliver the anniversary selector and the 1,600 Polychromes, which makes this an unusually good moment to start. The in-game notice lists how long the selector stays claimable.

At the ten-hour mark the player is standing in the Sixth Street hub, in front of the first limited banner. The banner screen opens and closes once, and the anniversary selector takes its place: a list of past limited S-Rank Agents, scrolled up and down, one name to be picked along with its signature W-Engine. The 1,600 Polychromes sit untouched, and the in-game notice gives the date the selector expires. A game that began with a shutter going up on a video shop moves again when that Agent joins the squad and the next commission is chosen.