Zenith: The Last City [VR]

If you grew up dreaming of Sword Art Online and quietly resented that VR never delivered on that fantasy, Zenith: The Last City is the game that at least tries to make good on the promise. Developed by indie studio Ramen VR, it is a full-scale VR MMORPG with a persistent open world, questing, dungeons, raids, public events, crafting, guilds, and cross-platform play across PC VR headsets. The setting is a stylized anime-inflected sci-fi fantasy hybrid, set generations after a cataclysm called The Fracture, where a dark god's influence empowers the monsters that fill the world. The lore is not going to win any awards for depth or intricate prose, but the visual diversity across zones, floating islands, undercity streets, and lush overworld areas does a lot of the worldbuilding legwork that the writing skips. The class system is one of the more interesting mechanical hooks here. You can play as a Blade Master, who activates special abilities by swinging in deliberate directions and can literally hurl a sword at enemies to open combat, or as an Essence Mage, who uses gesture-based spellcasting that forces you to physically perform the inputs. Crucially, the game punishes what the community calls "noodle arm fighting": mindless controller flailing does not register as real hits, so Blade Master swings need intentional charging between them to land effectively. On top of that, players can hot-swap between Tank, DPS, and Support specializations once every sixty seconds, which means you are never locked into a rigid role for an entire session. That is a genuinely clever design call in a genre that usually commits you to a spec for hours. The traversal system is also a standout: you can physically climb any surface and glide across distances using stamina, which makes exploration feel like something no flat-screen MMO has replicated. The honest problems are real, though. The narrative quest design is pure early-2000s MMO filler, mostly kill-X and collect-Y structures with text boxes and NPCs that exist only as quest dispensers. The writing offers almost no compelling characters, no branching dialogue, and nothing that rewards re-reading. Enemy and NPC animations are rough, loot drops appear as floating labeled cubes rather than physical items, and the UI leans heavily on flat-screen paradigms including cooldown timers that float in a HUD plane. The world is large but can feel underpopulated in areas, and the endgame content has historically been thin, with gear acquisition being a straightforward grind that lacks build complexity past the mid-game. Daily player counts, while persistent, have settled to a modest level post-launch, which affects matchmaking for group content. Motion sickness can also be a concern depending on your hardware and sensitivity, particularly with the flying and climbing mechanics. What Zenith gets right is the social texture of being inside an MMO rather than looking at one. Physically cooking food to share buffs with your party, climbing a tower with strangers during a public event, and waving at someone across a hub city are experiences that flatscreen MMOs simply cannot replicate. The community that has stuck around skews helpful, and the game carries no subscription fee. A major update called Celestial Throne expanded the world post-launch, and Ramen VR restructured the product into a free-to-play hub called Zenith: Nexus with The Last City accessible as premium content, which at least signals ongoing development interest. For RPG players whose first question is whether choices matter and whether the writing rewards investment, the answer is mostly no. But for the specific niche of VR players who want a living world they can share with others and a combat system that makes you feel physically present in the fight, there is genuinely nothing else at this scale on PC VR.

Monika · Scout Team

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