Hizuki Yui Returns to Zenless Zone Zero After Two and a Half Months, Recap in Hand

NEO-PORTE — Hizuki Yui of Neo-Porte went back to Zenless Zone Zero on Wednesday after a gap of about two and a half months, playing Chapter 3 of the main story’s Season 3 for the first time and carrying it through a five-hour stream to a cliffhanger in which a girl drops out of the sky onto a beach.

Yui said she had caught up with the game’s latest story last time, then waited for the next update and “waited too long.” She opened with a recap of about 14 minutes that she had written up beforehand, covering the specialist terms that come up in the story and what happened in the previous chapter. She said she expected viewers to have forgotten the plot, and that the recap was for her own benefit as well.

“Two and a half months or so went by. Isn’t that bad?” — Hizuki Yui, opening the stream

In the chapter, Rin and her friends traveled to the city where the alloy at the center of the plot is made. Wreckage recovered from a giant monster turned out to be a device built to control such creatures, and the characters came to suspect an insider was helping the culprit. Chasing a man who looked like Serpico, a childhood friend of Rin’s who had died, they followed him by boat to an island, where Yui played a stealth sequence past armed men from the Tops faction and read out the mechanics as she learned them. The group then freed Nicole, Anby and Nekomata, who had been held captive. When a long description of a character’s combat controls stumped her, Yui asked chat for a one-line summary, and viewers answered that holding the skill button was nearly all it took. She followed the advice in the next fights.

At the end of the island arc the lookalike told the group that their attention on the island had left the sky city exposed, and the characters learned that all flights there had been halted. Later, in a quiet scene by the sea, Rin heard a long-kept secret about what the city’s three rulers really are. The chapter closed with a girl falling from the sky into the water and washing up on the shore. Lindvern, one of the rulers, recognized her as the medical assistant who had been knocked out behind a door early in the chapter.

After the story, Yui talked about the game’s character banner. She said she rarely plans her pulls and usually draws for characters she falls for while following the story. She told viewers she would keep playing at her own pace, would not drop the game, and would open each stream with a recap whenever a gap between story updates opens up.