Genshin Impact was a fantasy epic with orchestras and ancient gods. Honkai: Star Rail was science fiction on a space station crossing the cosmos. When HoYoverse announced a third major franchise — Zenless Zone Zero — in 2021, the question wasn’t whether it would be good. The question was: what kind of anime were they making this time?
The answer was stranger and more specific than anyone expected. Not fantasy. Not space opera. Street.
A Different HoYoverse
ZZZ is the first HoYoverse game that doesn’t feel like an evolution of anime fantasy. It feels like a different studio made it — one that grew up on Cowboy Bebop, Jet Set Radio, Persona, and 90s hip-hop culture simultaneously.
The character designs are louder. The colour palette is more saturated. The music swaps orchestral grandeur for electronic beats and R&B hooks. The combat is built around visual style as much as mechanical depth. The narrative voice is ironic, self-aware, occasionally absurdist in ways that Genshin never was.
None of this happened by accident. ZZZ is the result of HoYoverse deliberately building a game for a different corner of anime culture — the street fashion, the attitude, the aesthetic language of urban youth.
ZZZ launched July 4, 2024 with 50 million players in its first month — more than Genshin’s launch numbers. This was partly HoYoverse’s established audience, but also a signal that the street-culture aesthetic had real reach with players who hadn’t connected with Genshin’s high fantasy register.
The Noir Anime Lineage
To understand ZZZ, you need to trace a specific lineage of anime that runs parallel to the mainstream shōnen tradition — darker, more stylized, and built on urban environments rather than fantasy worlds.
ZZZ sits at the intersection of all of these. The Persona dual-life structure (running a video store as cover identity). The Cowboy Bebop found-family ensemble. The Jet Set Radio urban energy and orange-dominant palette. The Durarara!! faction complexity. Combined and built into an open-world action RPG.
New Eridu: The Last City
The world of ZZZ operates on a premise that is both post-apocalyptic and strangely optimistic. Hollows — supernatural zones of spatial distortion — have swallowed most of human civilization. City after city has been consumed. New Eridu is the last one standing, having developed technology to manage and survive the Hollows rather than simply flee them.
This premise does something clever: it creates a city that must function normally despite operating on the edge of catastrophe. The shops are open. The factions compete for turf. The video stores rent movies. The noodle stands serve customers. The mundane city life continues, and the Hollow threat is always just offscreen — which creates the specific tension of the supernatural urban genre at its best.
New Eridu works because it can’t afford not to. The last city on Earth has to keep its lights on — and that refusal to collapse is where the character comes from.
New Eridu is also visually designed to feel like the fantasy version of a real Asian megacity — the neon density of Shinjuku at 2am, the layered street-level commerce of Kowloon, the elevated walkways of Hong Kong. A fictional city that reads as a specific cultural reality.
Random Play: The Video Store as Narrative Engine
The player character in ZZZ runs a video store called Random Play with their twin sibling. This is their cover identity. Their actual work is navigating the Hollows as a “Proxy” — a guide who can safely lead others through the spatial distortions that would consume anyone else.
The video store conceit is more than a framing device. It’s a statement about the game’s aesthetic identity. A video store is a space where visual culture is curated — where the films, the anime, the media that shapes a generation is organized and exchanged. The game is self-consciously positioning itself within that tradition: it knows it’s built from specific visual references, and it’s comfortable naming that relationship.
The Hollow exploration is also metaphorically television-themed. You navigate Hollows through a TV screen interface, selecting options like channels. The dungeons are “watched” rather than simply entered. This is FLCL-style meta-commentary — a game aware of its own status as media, playing with the frame.
The Factions: A City Made of Subcultures
New Eridu’s social architecture is organized around factions, each with a distinct visual identity and cultural register. This is Durarara!!’s social ecology applied to a game world:
Each faction functions as a lens on a different anime subgenre. The Cunning Hares are Cowboy Bebop. Victoria Housekeeping is Black Butler with the power scale inverted. The Sons of Calydon are Tokyo Ghoul. Section 6 is Psycho-Pass. ZZZ is a city made of different anime traditions coexisting — which is exactly how the best urban anime feel.
Music as Game Design
The most radical departure from HoYoverse’s previous games is the music.
Genshin used traditional orchestration, scored region by region to match each nation’s cultural roots. Honkai: Star Rail uses cinematic sci-fi composition. ZZZ uses hip-hop, R&B, electronic, and fusion — genres that are inseparable from the street culture aesthetic the game inhabits.
The combat themes are built to feel like a soundtrack you’d hear in a Tokyo record store or a Seoul streetwear shop. The music communicates identity before the visuals do. When the ZZZ combat theme drops, it signals a world that has different cultural allegiances than Genshin’s — and a different audience it’s speaking to.
HoYoverse’s Deliberate Fragmentation
ZZZ makes most sense when you see it as part of HoYoverse’s deliberate strategy of building multiple distinct IP for multiple distinct anime audiences rather than expanding one franchise.
Each game is a distinct creative direction, not a sequel or variant of the previous one. HoYoverse is building a portfolio of anime subcultures rather than one unified brand. ZZZ is their most culturally specific entry yet — and its 50-million-player first month suggests the specificity is the point, not a limitation.
Genshin proved anime could be mainstream. ZZZ is making the opposite bet: that the subculture is big enough to be its own mainstream.
On HoYoverse’s creative fragmentation strategy