Trust me, you’ll need this.
Zanki Zero: Last Beginning is fresh off the market (and the review press), but an easy game, it is not. So, if you’re unlike me and actually want to know what you’re doing before you get elbow deep into the game, give this a read, and keep my five helpful tips in mind.
The characters who aren’t fighting can’t be affected by item weight limits.
To an extent, anyway. Basically, with a team of eight, you’ll end up with four characters in the back that aren’t participating in combat. The game does tell you this early on, but in case you missed it – those four characters, while they do have a set amount of weight they can carry, won’t be affected by going over the weight limit. If you overload one of your main characters, they’ll stop and won’t be able to move, but the reserve characters won’t. So feel free to throw all your food at them when you’re dungeon running, because it’s absolutely going to come in useful, and you’ll want to collect stuff in the dungeons as well. But all the main guys can carry that.
Speaking of your inventory, you can stack (most) items on one slot.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to everything, and what pattern this has, I don’t quite know, but some items can be stacked over the one square when arranging them in your inventory. Though this doesn’t negate the weight limit (which, sensibly and incredibly annoyingly, is much lower when they’re in the child life stage), it does mean you’re able to free up some more space and store all your food in one panel.
Hoard all the Strengthener you can pick up.
At least on the second difficulty level, the game seems to be fairly generous with it, but this is another thing you’re definitely going to need it. Strengthener, as you can probably tell by the name, is used for upgrading both weapons and armor, and you’ll find out by roughly the third dungeon that picking up the stuff you find on the floor isn’t going to cut it against most of the enemies from there on out. Grab all the newest weapons you find, throw the Strengthener in the warehouse, and upgrade as soon as you can, lest you get overwhelmed, and quickly.
Rest whenever you can, but make sure you do it where it’s smart.
So, for whatever reason, food only restores Stamina, but annoyingly, not Health. Instead, you have to pick the Rest option from the inventory screen and regain hit points over a short period of time, though doing this will also decrease Stamina. There’s also the risk of, when resting in dungeons, is having an enemy sneak up on you while you’re incapacitated (as the screen goes black upon a rest). The best way to do this is either to rest in a Safe Room (but there aren’t a whole lot of those), so my best advice is to find a room that has no enemies to start with, or find one to clear out, and make sure there’s a door to shut behind you. As far as I could tell, this means enemies can’t follow you in (since the AI can’t open doors) and you can rest and reorganise for as long as you need.
Charged attacks are your best friend.
And this will seriously make the game a whole lot easier for you, with one simple tip; hold down the square button, and watch it go round. Hold down and repeat three more times, until you unleash it on the enemy with four times the power instead of one. The game doesn’t exactly make it clear how to do this, but it makes boss fights go by a lot quicker, even with the cooldown times.
Got any more tips for us? Let us know in the comments.
