While this is the first game in the Zan spinoff duology, this game is a summary of Utawarerumono Mask of Deception, which is the second game of the Utawarerumono trilogy.

While you can play Mask of Deception without having played the first game of the Uta trilogy, you shouldn’t try to play Zan without having already played mask of deception. Because when I say summary, I mean summary. Like, you read cliff notes of cut scenes of the original game level of summarization going on. This is very much a game that is intended as fan service for people that beat Mask of Deception and want more time with the characters and are interested in the new gameplay.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s good mindless fun. I don’t see any reason why someone that thoroughly enjoyed Mask of Deception wouldn’t enjoy this game.

Conditional "no" for this one. The port seems functional for the most part but there are some flaws that are hard to overlook, thankfully some of them should be easy to fix.

• Let's start with the elephant in the room: pricing. This port is insanely expensive (at least in Euros and US Dollars) despite being a late port of a short game (and we're talking short, like 6h short). [Update: I said "3-6h short" before, but my point still stands, very short for the asking price at least if only considering the main story. And even 20 hours-ish for 100% is not very impressive.] The only reason I bought the game at launch was to check the technical state of things after the absolute disaster that was Aquapazza, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not already thinking of a refund.
  I can forgive the mainline games being expensive because they are long and high quality, just like I could forgive Zan 2 for being full price since it's its first worldwide release and it outshines its predecessor on all points, but Zan 1 should absolutely not have been released at that price on Steam. It's practically begging for people to skip it until there's a heavy sale, or to expect a flawless port given the little the game has to offer.
  
• The game targets 60 fps but never locks to it, instead it seems to hover in the 57-59 fps range at all times even on hardware that is absolutely overkill, and it seems there are frame pacing issues too. If the problem is just the game's framerate limiter, this should be easy to address, however if it's because of how the engine itself works it may prove more difficult to overcome. Just tried with SpecialK's framerate limiter and "sleepless render thread" option and I got a stable 60 fps. So it is indeed an easy fix.
  
• Resolution is all over the place. 3D elements seem to render between 720p and 1080p, UI elements are low-resolution for the most part (especially text) but some are shockingly higher-res (some text that uses different fonts than the default) to the point I wondered if the game might be outputting to native 1440p somehow. However it sounds more likely that it's 1080p upscaled to 1440p. Allowing proper arbitrary resolutions shouldn't be hard to do, and it would really help the port shine and look much cleaner than its console counterpart.
  
• Button glyphs are displayed based on the current control scheme, most likely via Steam Input. Unfortunately, it's impossible to customise and pick a specific set of button prompts unlike in the mainline games. Also PlayStation glyphs are DualSense ones even with a DualShock 4.
  
• The original PS4 release had very wide text, while it seems to be half-width here. Even the icon to indicate you can press a button to advance the dialogue is thinner at times. Not necessarily a bad thing, but odd enough to mention.
  
• I've encountered a small reproducible bug (no pun intended) in the scene after the first stage where the dead Gigiri's body just suddenly disappeared instead of fading out. Also weird shadow bugs (reproducible too), not sure how to describe that without actually showing it.
  UPDATE: After comparing footage found on YouTube of both the PS4 and PC versions, the latter has many more inexplicable graphical issues if not downgrades (ranging from worse texture filtering, or perhaps texture quality, to broken water rendering and reflections working differently). They should be fixable, but it's a mess.

TL;DR: This port is to me a 4/10 on the basis that it is almost close to being 1:1 (which would be 5/10) but has some many minor issues to iron out. It could be a 6/10 or above with proper fixes and improvements (I'm looking at internal resolution in particular here). But then there's always the price, and... I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, this is commercial suicide.

Game is alright, a decent port of Zan from the PS4

Though it could be improved on. In-game text resolution seems off and I've heard some experience frame rate issues of not being locked to 60. Otherwise nothing that would really affect the game

Getting this to re-experience one of my favorite stories in a different form and hoping for Zan 2 to come quick!