Zanki Zero is a survival dungeon crawler, where a group of clones must explore islands related to their past in order to solve the mystery of why the earth was destroyed. It’s a survival game because you have to manage each character’s stamina, stress, and even their bladder. Each island is full of puzzles that seem to be weirdly translated making them unnecessarily complicated. There is an option in the English version to take all the monsters out of the dungeons leaving you to just worry about the puzzles and bosses. If you take the enemies away however, then you will get worse loot that could help you upgrade your base island. There is usually one new enemy for each area and a boss. The bosses are related to the specific clones’ upsetting backstory. The clones only have 13 days in their life cycle, so while progressing through ruins if they don’t die from combat then they will die of old age. When a character does die they need to get revived by the “Extend Machine” back at your base. When revived they become children again. Each life cycle has its pros and cons that you need to keep track of, for instance children can’t carry as much as adults and also don’t hit as hard. Every ruin/dungeon has an urban explorer atmosphere that is actually aesthetically pleasing. If only the subject matter wasn’t so sickening.
This is a game that is really hard to recommend to anyone. I went into it excited because I’m a Danganronpa fan and was told Spike Chunsoft had some of the Danganronpa team working on it. While Danganronpa is heavy at times, I feel like it was definitely toned down compared to Zanki Zero. Although the mystery did make me curious, the payoff was not good enough to excuse the icky content.The gameplay can also be a boring grind, causing me to take 3 years to finish this game. A strategy that I heard for this game was to play through the dungeons on the easiest difficulty, beat the boss then go back on the highest and grind them for resources. It is nice to see a dungeon crawler in a modern setting. Plus the characters are very quirky and interesting just like in other Spike Chunsoft games. It’s a niche game and if a disturbing anime dungeon crawler seems right up your alley, who am I to stop you.
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