Zenless Zone Zero Daze is the bar that actually decides your fights, and filling it hands you the safest moment in the whole game. HoYoverse brought the urban fantasy brawler to Steam on 16 June 2026, and version 3.1 landed on 29 July. PlatinumGames answered the same design question years earlier in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and reached the opposite conclusion.
Both games freeze the action to reward you for breaking an enemy. Only one of them can go wrong.
How Zenless Zone Zero Daze turns into a Chain Attack
The bar is not a health bar. As the wiki explains, an enemy gains Daze from the hits it takes, scaled by the move used and by the Impact stat of whoever throws it.
At 100% the enemy becomes Stunned. That state stops it moving and, more importantly, raises the damage it takes by a fixed percentage. So the Stun window, not raw damage, is where a fight is really won.
Land a heavy attack on a Stunned enemy and you trigger a Chain Attack. Time stops, portraits appear, and you pick the Agent you want to bring in. The wiki describes it as a quick-time event that fires once the Daze bar maxes out and glows rainbow.
Then comes the line that matters most. The chosen character “is invulnerable while using this skill”. Nothing can punish you during the reward.
Your Bangboo can join in too, taking a Chain Attack slot in place of an Agent. Better still, the game ships with a Chain Attack Mode setting in the Other tab of the options menu. Leave it on automatic and the Chain Attack simply fires itself once a heavy attack connects with a Dazed enemy.
Metal Gear Rising asked you to aim instead
Platinum Games built the same beat and then charged you for it. Entering Blade Mode drops Raiden into a bullet time state so he can cut precisely during the action, which sounds like the same gift.
The difference lives in what you do next. Wikipedia describes the reticle as “a transparent blue plane which can be moved and rotated freely, tracing holographic orange lines across the surfaces of targets to indicate exactly where they will be cut”. You draw the cut yourself.
The payoff needs real accuracy. Zandatsu only works when you slice an enemy “through a small indicated red box during Blade Mode”, and doing so “fully restores Raiden’s health and energy”. Hit the box and you walk away healed. Miss it and you simply cut a robot in half.
On top of that, the slow motion costs you. Blade Mode drains Raiden’s energy, and once that drops far enough the game stops letting you use it at all.
One reward is safe, the other can fail
Line the two up and the split is stark. Both games break an enemy, stop the clock and offer a spectacular finish. After that they part company completely.
Revengeance treats the reward as a second skill test. It costs a resource, it demands precision under pressure, and it gives nothing back when you fumble the angle. The hardest input in the fight arrives after you have already won the exchange.
HoYoverse removed every one of those risks. There is no meter to spend, no aim to hold and no way to blow it. You choose a portrait, you cannot be hurt, and the game will even choose for you if you never touch the setting.
Neither approach is lazy. They just trust the player with different things. One design wants your hands, while the other wants your team building.
Why Zenless Zone Zero Daze rewards planning
Because the payoff never fails, the skill moves earlier. You cannot squeeze more out of a Chain Attack through execution, so everything depends on reaching the Stun window quickly and having the right Agent queued behind it.
That pushes the real decisions into Impact stats, squad order and rotation. Revengeance asked you to get better at a moment. This asks you to get better at arriving at one.
If you enjoy watching studios rebuild the same idea, our Beast of Reincarnation Bloom Arts vs Dead to Rights Shadow covers another menu that slows time, and our Arkham Knight Fear Takedown vs Red Dead 2 Dead Eye looks at two more takes on stopping the clock.
Frequently asked questions
What fills the bar fastest? Moves with high stagger value, boosted by the Impact stat of the Agent landing them.
What does the Stunned state actually do? It stops the enemy moving and raises the damage it takes by a fixed percentage.
Can a Chain Attack be interrupted? No. The wiki states the character stays invulnerable for the duration.
Do I have to trigger it manually? Not unless you want to. The Chain Attack Mode option in the Other tab lets the game fire it automatically.
You can find the brawler on its Steam store page, the combat rules quoted above sit on the game’s community wiki, and the Blade Mode details come from the Platinum Games title’s Wikipedia entry.
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