Danganronpa veterans' new game coming westward
Zanki Zero: Last Beginning is Live, Die, Repeat but with clones.
The Danganronpa series of games allowed for all sorts of Saw-esque adventures and bizarre romances. Producer Yoshinori Terasawa and game designer Takayuki Sugawara, veterans of the Danganronpa series, have a new kind of survival game, and it is coming to the west without the kind of delay their games have normally experienced before localisation. That game is Zanki Zero: Last Beginning.
Zanki Zero takes us to a weirdo vision of The End. The ruins, dungeons, and islands of a post-apocalyptic world are seen through the POV of eight protagonists as they fight for survival and search for meaning in their never-ending cycles of life and death. As the press blurb explains:
God created the world in seven days. It only took one day for humans to destroy the world. Life as we knew it sank to the depths of the sea...until yesterday. We do not yet know the broken world and the reasons left behind there. An earth where ruins drift about. Buildings, houses, light posts. Cars, traffic lights, asphalt... Modern civilisation was destroyed, becoming nothing more than debris wading in the sea. New ruins drift one after the other before the protagonist, who lives on one of those decaying islands.
--8 Clones, 7 Deadly Sins, Infinite Lives - Play from the POV of one of eight protagonists in each chapter and explore the dungeons, towers, and islands to uncover the deadly sins of their past.
--Survival of the Fittest - Hunt for materials and food while fending off monsters in real-time battle environments, but don't forget to go to the bathroom (seriously, it's bad for your health and fatal for your party).
--Live, Die, Repeat - With only 13 days in one life cycle, each clone's stats, abilities and capabilities differ from youth to old age. Depending on how you die, you can even earn bonus upgrades for your next life cycle. Take advantage of each life cycle to the fullest!/blockquote>
Danganronpa's first entry came out in 2010 with the most recent release in 2017. We've written about it at length here and also over here. The visual novels range from cutesy click ’em ups to often unromantic romances, many of which have been making their first appearance on PC via Steam, sometimes years after their original release.
Check out Zanki Zero's Steam page right here.
Time travel, the inability to die, and a vast apocalyptic conspiracy all sound right up my alley. Looking forward to it.
