It takes a lot to rattle the people who will show up to play, and then stick around for, a game as outwardly horny as Zenless Zone Zero, the urban action RPG from Genshin Impact studio HoYoverse – which, genuinely, is very fun if you can look past the gacha baggage and aren't bothered by (or actively enjoy) the loud-and-proud sexualization, and I wouldn't blame you if you don't. For some people, it turns out the line is somewhere in the territory of "three feet shots within 18 seconds of a character's reveal."
Curiously late into the current update, HoYoverse recently released the first teaser for upcoming S-Rank character Seed, who we now know to be a small woman piloting a big mech that arguably would've made for a more interesting character design.
Plenty of players are speculating about how her role as an Electric Attack-type character may overlap with existing fighters, but another element of her debut animated short has dominated conversations: HoYoverse really, really lingers on her feet.
Seed's animated teaser is 18 seconds long, and in that time we see not one, but three shots of her feet – two very up close, with one of them jump-scaring viewers just two seconds in, and another showing a lap view of her somehow piloting this mech with her toes. Zenless Zone Zero has always been the most sexualized and fetishistic of the big modern HoYoverse games – maids, furries, and various character archetypes abound – but even ZZZ players didn't have Quentin Tarantino-grade foot shots on their bingo card.
"They're not even hiding it," reads a top comment to a Reddit post sharing the Seed teaser.
"I just know Tarantino is among the ZZZ devs but I can’t prove it," reckons another.
"Power creeping the foot meta," says one player, referring to the 1.0 character Grace, whose story appearances and in-game namecard have also been defined by feet.
"ELECTRIC. ATTACK. FEET," another player observes in a separate post.
A year into the game, it is kind of impressive that Zenless can still shellshock players who've come to expect designs and animations that are about as subtle as a brick to the windshield. For context, there's a character called Trigger, and her chestpiece has a gigantic metal trigger on it.
Separately, Seed's reveal has rekindled evergreen discourse over character and body diversity in this type of gacha game, with some folks expressing disappointment that the mech fighter ended up being – you guessed it – a slim young woman. Some people may find comfort in the fact that there are signs of a big, buff wolf dude on the way.
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