Zanki Zero - survival blobber on PC from SpikeChunsoft (Danganronpa devs)

[Perkel]

Seems interesting. Reminds me Etrian Oddysey. It is from devs that made Danganroppa.
IT also seems like weird spin on Oreishka where every party member dies multiple times and gets through kid-teen-adult-old and gets buffs when they die. So for example if someone dies as kid from poison he will have immunity increased to poison.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

So anyone tried this? Looks a bit kawai desu.

 

[Shackleton]

So anyone tried this? Looks a bit kawai desu.

Yeah, thanks for reminding me I picked this one up. Only played around 20 minutes so far and it seems an interesting premise, but rough around the edges. A bit of cringe and somewhat dodgy translation in the intro, with random moments of total weirdness. I never played Danganropa so not sure whether or not it resembles it in tone. Lots of VN stuff to start it off, and yes it is a bit kawaii desu but I think that might change later judging from the warnings about violence and gore.

It's a Grimrock type though, with square dancing and all that which might well put a lot of people off. Not got to the combat yet but read a bit about it. Will post further impressions once I've played a bit more into it.

*Edit- This is how Japanese ladies introduce themselves post-apocalypse, apparently:

Spoiler

 

[Raghar]

So anyone tried this? Looks a bit kawai desu.

I got HDD full when I tried to download. Thus I'd need to solve harder problem than winning Ethrian, I need to make room on HDD to even download and install it. I heard they committed horrible act of censorship.

I heard stuff like "didn't catch me it up like first Danganroppa, stopped playing after 20 hours."
And It's wannabe Persona/SMT clone, too primitive and too expensive for what it does. (For pirates the more expensive probably doesn't apply, but the rest does.)

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a Grimrock type though, with square dancing and all that which might well put a lot of people off. Not got to the combat yet but read a bit about it. Will post further impressions once I've played a bit more into it.

Wait. This is a real-time dance simulator?

 

[Shackleton]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a Grimrock type though, with square dancing and all that which might well put a lot of people off. Not got to the combat yet but read a bit about it. Will post further impressions once I've played a bit more into it.

Wait. This is a real-time dance simulator?

Yes, found this basic combat video:



Still worth giving it a shot. I've played quite a lot of TB recently, the square dance might be a welcome change of pace.

 

[Shackleton]

Yeah, so it's odd and not without merit. Seems like it does some interesting things with character development and there's quite a few skills to buy and level up. Not just combat skills either, there's some basic base building stuff that unlocks stuff like crafting and healing stations as well as bonuses that go with it.

Don't want to go into spoiler territory really, but it's not your standard Grimrock clone for sure. You certainly gain passive skills in an unusual way! The combat so far is just a case of holding down the right mouse button until everyone's charged and then finding the weak spot on the mob to let go of the button and do big damage and hopefully break off that weak point. Simple and quick, although not challenging at all so far even on hard. Only 3 hours in so no surprise.

The main problem so far I have with it is the characters. They're all so bloody insufferable that I want to bash their heads in with a piece of driftwood myself. There's a lot of VN stuff in here and the story setup is pretty interesting, but every time the VN stuff starts I'm gritting my teeth at how annoying everyone is. There's no real attempt to make them relateable or even vaguely like real characters so it's very hard to give a single toss about them. This is all subjective of course and ymmv, but I'm not sure I can stand another 30 or 40 hours with these annoying fuckwits. The systems, story premise and combat is ok though so going to persist for now.

 

[Nostaljaded]

Beyond midpoint impressions of Zanki Zero at this post in Random JRPG news thread but that PC release price...

 

[Punch]

So anyone tried this? Looks a bit kawai desu.

Yeah, thanks for reminding me I picked this one up. Only played around 20 minutes so far and it seems an interesting premise, but rough around the edges. A bit of cringe and somewhat dodgy translation in the intro, with random moments of total weirdness. I never played Danganropa so not sure whether or not it resembles it in tone. Lots of VN stuff to start it off, and yes it is a bit kawaii desu but I think that might change later judging from the warnings about violence and gore.

It's a Grimrock type though, with square dancing and all that which might well put a lot of people off. Not got to the combat yet but read a bit about it. Will post further impressions once I've played a bit more into it.

*Edit- This is how Japanese ladies introduce themselves post-apocalypse, apparently:

Spoiler

Does it have an official patch outside steam that adds CG and is the ?SHAPELY GIRL? included in those extended scenes? Asking for a friend

 

[Agame]

Animu and 'dancing combat'?

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I tolerate animu cancer only due to solid TB combat (example Etrian odyssey)

Animu Cancer and RT dancing? No thanks. I can safely forget this.

 

[newtmonkey]

This looks like absolute shit

 

[Shackleton]

This looks like absolute shit

It's not absolute shit, it does some interesting things with char development and base building that's not in your typical blobber and the story looks like it might be 'ok'.

However the 'dying different ways' to gain passive skills introduces a level of autism I'm not prepared to deal with. Add in the terrible characters, non-rebindable keys and pretty simplistic exploration and you've got a recipe for uninstall.exe.

Just got too many games to play to put up with games that irritate me as much as this one does.

 

[Shackleton]

To finish with this thread and explain why I said 'non rebindable keys' were a big pain, just look at this example of /facepalm design:

The key to open the inventory when you've clicked on something is R. R also closes the inventory BUT ONLY if you don't have the pointer hovering over any item. If the pointer is over an item, that item is destroyed with no confirmation box. The key they really would prefer you to use to close the inventory is space for some godforsaken reason.

Items you've destroyed, (they call it 'thrown away' which is misleading because they disappear from the game world entirely, not thrown in front of you), appear from time to time by the shore, but fuck that noise. The final straw was when I realised I couldn't build my kitchen because the stack of 5 vines i'd built up had been accidentally thrown away.

Yeah, fuck that.

Edit- I'm retarded. What I thought I was doing with the vines was giving them to another character by holding them over their icon and clicking. However, vines are actually marked as 'food' as well as crafting ingredients, so in actual fact the chars were eating them. I'm still annoyed by the UI, but I restarted, skipping all the dialogue and I'm getting used the keys now.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

To finish with this thread and explain why I said 'non rebindable keys' were a big pain, just look at this example of /facepalm design:

The key to open the inventory when you've clicked on something is R. R also closes the inventory BUT ONLY if you don't have the pointer hovering over any item. If the pointer is over an item, that item is destroyed with no confirmation box. The key they really would prefer you to use to close the inventory is space for some godforsaken reason.

Items you've destroyed, (they call it 'thrown away' which is misleading because they disappear from the game world entirely, not thrown in front of you), appear from time to time by the shore, but fuck that noise. The final straw was when I realised I couldn't build my kitchen because the stack of 5 vines i'd built up had been accidentally thrown away.

Yeah, fuck that.

It is not destroyed. It is moved to the inventory of the backup team. You can switch between the inventories (main team and backup team) with "a".
However you are right. the control binding/logic is absolutely the worst in the history of games. The devs were seriously on drugs.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Also it seems that when you put an object on the ground it does not disappear, but it will stay there indefinitely. Your trash is persistent, you can stack things in strategic points, as you can do in other western RT blobbers, such as Grimrock or Dungeon Master.

 

[Shackleton]

To finish with this thread and explain why I said 'non rebindable keys' were a big pain, just look at this example of /facepalm design:

The key to open the inventory when you've clicked on something is R. R also closes the inventory BUT ONLY if you don't have the pointer hovering over any item. If the pointer is over an item, that item is destroyed with no confirmation box. The key they really would prefer you to use to close the inventory is space for some godforsaken reason.

Items you've destroyed, (they call it 'thrown away' which is misleading because they disappear from the game world entirely, not thrown in front of you), appear from time to time by the shore, but fuck that noise. The final straw was when I realised I couldn't build my kitchen because the stack of 5 vines i'd built up had been accidentally thrown away.

Yeah, fuck that.

It is not destroyed. It is moved to the inventory of the backup team. You can switch between the inventories (main team and backup team) with "a".
However you are right. the control binding/logic is absolutely the worst in the history of games. The devs were seriously on drugs.

I just checked and you're right. Which has confused me even more as now I wonder wtf all my missing stuff went?! Oh well, not losing any sleep over it.

 

[Raghar]

Well a microreview:

In the first screen we are treated like obvious criminals because Zanki Zero violated convention of not being stupid as BD movie producers and place warning about illegality. Second screen looks like made by mentaly disabled.
Then they commited another bad idea. In start before you find garage, but instead of allowing the environment feels right, they add name of developers as big text into the air.

Then of course you have a cringy stories of Japanese middle class fully employed males and females who acted as morons, and this happens without excessive paranoia of Dangan Ronpa, and without monobear interactions.
Rest of the VN is a really outdated persona like exploration.

The worst part on that game were these tapes. (BTW it feels bit weird when you see the first message when starting the game, and then see some stories of main characters, which are ripped off from other works of art.)
Japanese commercionalism at its high level.

All for gentle price of 60$.

 

[Raghar]

Extend TV sketches with Sho and that sheep are actually nice. The actual content not so much, that's average stories written by Japanese, played as shadow theater. But Sho and sheep commentaries are funny.