Phantom Blade Zero achieves its goal of creating wonderfully fluid and cinematic kung fu-style combat – but balance and quality issues ultimately dim its shine.
I wasn’t around to witness the golden age of Martial Arts cinema, but there are moments in Phantom Blade Zero that make me feel as though I’ve tumbled through a crack in time onto the set of a kung fu film. There’s one particular encounter that sticks in my mind. Approaching a group of enemies in a shaded valley, I slowly raise my sword, and the first enemy rushes at me. Fool. I perfectly parry the blow, performing a slow-motion somersault to land behind him and plant my sword firmly in his back. The next guy comes running in, and I kick him in the face while simultaneously stabbing the previous enemy in the throat. A third joins the fray – this one on horseback – so I boot him off his horse, and use his steed to trample his helpless friend into the dust. Then, at last, there is silence.
This is Phantom Blade Zero at its absolute peak: cinematic, free-flowing, and full of surprises. Its combat channels the seamless motion and creative choreography of the very best kung fu films, with some frankly astonishing combat animations that seem almost limitless in their ingenuity and variety. It’s a game of extraordinary beauty, with jaw-dropping landscapes and hugely ambitious combat encounters. If only – if only! – it could maintain this incredible level of fluidity in all areas of its epic tale.
Our adventure takes place in a fantastical, wuxia-flavoured world called the Wulin: a martial underworld where vicious ne’er-do-wells seem to be running riot, and generally making life miserable for regular people who are just trying to live their lives. Truly, a world miles apart from our own. You play as Soul, a warrior and outcast member of an organisation called The Order. Having played through the entirety of the game, I’m still not entirely sure what The Order stands for in terms of values, but I’m sure they originally meant well. I’m also not really sure what I can tell you about the story – we’ve been asked not to discuss anything that happens in the prologue – so you’re all going to have to use your imaginations here. I can tell you it involves betrayal, a protagonist with limited days to live, a revenge mission, and various malevolent entities from another world. All the standard ingredients you need for a fantasy epic, really.
To warn you in advance, it doesn’t take long for Phantom Blade Zero to start dumping an absolutely dizzying number of character names, bloodlines, cults and various feuding sects on you. The way the world lore is delivered – often through reams of text in collectible scrolls dotted around the Wulin – is definitely not one of Phantom Blade Zero’s strengths. Most of the game’s characters have much to say about nothing, offering various platitudes, truisms and declarations of values that are hard to connect with the underlying story. My advice is to just let everything wash over you, and you’ll eventually pick up on the main plot points. While the narrative content leaves much to be desired, the storytelling does include some absolute visual treats – even utilising a traditional Chinese art form to do so. Unfortunately I can’t actually praise this in full, because we were also asked not to discuss these elements in our reviews.
Anyway, I think we all know why we’re here, and that’s because the main draw of Phantom Blade Zero is its combat. The FromSoftware influence is evident in so many aspects of this game, from the series of ‘bell’ checkpoints scattered throughout the world, to the multi-stage bosses that, yes, can deliver one-shot attacks. Regardless of your weapon loadout, the most important thing you can do in a boss battle is correctly dodge red attacks, and parry blue ones. It’s the single most effective way of breaking a boss’s guard so that you can enter a punishment phase, and finally get your heavy-hitting moves in. It’s kinda like high-octane Sekiro. So if you’re not a fan of this dodge/parry combat style, this might not be the game for you.
Perhaps Soulslite would be the better term for Phantom Blade Zero, as there are a lot of clever adjustments here that allow for much speedier combat than other Soulslikes would permit. There isn’t a traditional stamina bar, but instead a resource called ‘sha-chi’, which depletes when you block or parry enemy attacks and when you use heavy attacks. It’s a nifty way to allow players to use quick attacks, sprints and dodges without costing stamina. Tied to this is Phantom Blade Zero’s two-weapon system, which promotes regular switching between main weapons. If you’re running low on sha-chi using one weapon, simply swap to the other and – ta dah! – you have a fresh sha-chi bar to work with (although there is a slight cooldown to prevent total abuse of this mechanic).
This is particularly useful when you want to get some heavy hits in, or if you need to prevent your guard from being broken, which happens when your sha-chi runs low. Another welcome adjustment is that the parry and dodge windows feel really quite generous, which is essential when enemies attacks are coming at you with such speed. If you need to do a last-minute parry, you can cancel nearly any of your moves to do so, which prevents that infuriating problem where you end up locked into an attack juuust
Then there are the weapons themselves, which are incredibly flashy and give you access to some genuinely exciting abilities. One sword requires you to tank up on booze, then allows you to send the weapon flying around through the air to attack enemies at range – an enjoyably silly moveset which may not be the most effective build, but which is still fun to play nonetheless. Later you get pole-like swords that can charge through enemies, twin swords that rotate in orbit around you, and a weapon that can summon flowers out of the ground to drain an opponent’s sha-chi. There’s definitely a process of mastering these weapons and understanding how best to use their abilities in combat – particularly because each has its own unique combinations that are gradually unlocked as you find upgrade materials around the world. Eventually, you find quest items which allow you to ‘soul temper’ weapons to unlock their most powerful latent abilities, which can suddenly transform an underpowered weapon into something really quite viable (hello again, drunken sword). There’s also a class of secondary weapons, known as phantom edges, which are intended for use as additional tools you can draw on in battle to solve problems like high boss guards or unblockable attacks. I constantly experimented with weapons to get a feel for them, and was able to fine-tune my build so that I had a loadout for dealing with large numbers of enemies, and another loadout for breaking boss guards. I got into a real rhythm with the combat, and knew exactly which order in which to pull my moves to maximise my damage.
Against regular enemies found around the Wulin, these weapons feel extraordinary. The combat achieves that perfect kung-fu flow state, and you can bounce around between enemies parrying their blows, lowering their guards, and opening them up for executions. I adore how generous Phantom Blade Zero is with these executions – hit a QTE at the right time, and you can take out two enemies at once. There also seems to be a never-ending supply of these animations: Soul will often use the enemy’s own weapons against them, meaning you’ll still be finding brand new execution moves 30 hours into the game. It makes the combat constantly surprising, giving variety to the encounters and encouraging you to be aggressive to unlock these deadly finishers. On the regular pathfinder difficulty, the normal enemies feel really well-balanced – you get that sense of flow, but it’s absolutely still possible to mess things up if you go charging in without the right loadout, or without priorisiting ranged enemies first.
Against boss enemies, however, these once-powerful weapons are suddenly defanged. During my playthrough, a very high proportion of the bosses felt spongy – especially on pathfinder mode, but even if you lowered the difficulty to wayfarer, which is supposed to be the fun ‘rampage through the game’ difficulty setting. The weapons which felt so effective against other enemies suddenly became toothpicks against these bosses, even during their punishment phases. Successfully parrying or dodging was rewarded with a very minor dink to a boss’s sha-chi, instantly giving you that sinking feeling that you’re in for a very long, repetitive fight.
In a Soulslike game, low damage is normally a hint to start experimenting with your build or to try different weapons to see if you can find the ‘key’ to a boss fight, but Phantom Blade Zero is not very good at communicating exactly what these might be. As an example, one early obligatory boss fight sees you fight an enemy with a spiked shield, and attacking said enemy causes you to start bleeding. It’s obvious that you need to break the shield, and that you need to use one of the game’s secondary weapons to do so – but when you use the axe phantom edge, very little happens, and that lack of reactivity caused me to go back walking through the world thinking I’d missed something. Turns out I was on the right track, and just needed to keep spamming the move or do a ‘charged’ version of it (which the game doesn’t exactly encourage, as the wind-ups for these charged phantom edge moves are so long that they’re normally not viable in the middle of a fast-paced battle). In another case, a phantom edge which shoots water – and is specifically described as being effective against fire types – did absolutely nothing against a fire type enemy. I often didn’t feel rewarded for testing these different phantom edges, and the sponginess of the bosses, particularly in the early to mid game when your build options are limited, made a lot of these battles feel artificially lengthy.
This is one of my main gripes with the game, but this is also where things get… interesting. Two days before the review embargo was due to lift, developer S-Game released a 67GB update targeting performance and bugs, along with boss, enemy, ability and weapon stats. “These changes aim to make the difficulty curve feel smoother, both in boss fights and as you progress through each area,” we were told. Obviously, this did not give me time to replay the entire game to see if the changes made a difference to the overall experience. I did return to some old save files and found that the sponginess remained present in several boss fights – especially those early obligatory ones – so it appears to still be an issue. It’s possible that the launch build will allow player parries, dodges and weapons to feel a little more effective against bosses – but alas, I can only write about the version of the game I’ve played.
Despite the variety of animations and move sets used by the bosses, a lot of these battles also seem to fall into a fairly strict defend/attack pattern where you don’t have much opportunity to disrupt enemy movesets. But that’s not to say all boss battles feel exactly the same. Those with multiple smaller enemies allow you to feel like you’re doing more damage, while some of the most memorable battles break out of the standard pattern to bring in something totally different. One boss fires missiles horizontally like a bullet hell, while another sees you dance on top of poles while exchanging cannon fire with your enemy. The latter was absolutely fantastic: visually stunning, unexpected, and a moment of pure unadulterated fun.
Of course, an essential part of any Soulslike/lite is noodling around the world to find upgrades and blow off steam between boss fights, and praise should go to the exploration aspect of Phantom Blade Zero. The world map is formed of traditional hand-painted ink wash paintings, with mists that part to reveal new areas with each bell you discover. These beautiful maps only hint at what you’ll encounter in each area: you have to find your way through by observing the landscape and spotting hidden pathways on foot. There are plenty of ‘aha’ moments where you finally find the way up to a distant chest on a cliff that you’d spotted a while back. The Metroidvania elements of the game similarly build anticipation for being able to return to an area, with the phantom edge weapons you unlock through the main story later giving you access to previously-locked areas. S-Game does occasionally overcook this by placing too many closed doors next to each other: on entering the game’s main city, I encountered a cluster of seven locked areas within the first few streets, which was a bit dispiriting. No room at the inn for poor old Soul, it seems. My advice is to really take your time in your initial exploration of an area, and not rush to the next region until you’re fairly certain you’ve explored as much as you can at that stage. It’s hard to see from the world map what you might have missed – and because enemies don’t respawn, retraversing through these levels later on can feel weirdly empty.
Phantom Blade Zero has some extraordinary highs, but a gradual build-up of niggles eventually starts to weigh on you during a playthrough. It’s a death by a thousand cuts, of things that really should have been caught during play testing. There’s an essential key that’s easy to miss because it glows orange and is placed next to a fire of the same colour. It’s easy to get caught on geometry, and you end up doing much of your fighting against walls when you push your enemies there with long-combination attack patterns. On several occasions bosses hopped outside their arenas to attack me from behind invisible walls – a sort of reverse cheese that I really didn’t appreciate. Certain sidequest missions misdirected me on the map, leaving me going around in circles when it turns out an entirely unrelated quest needed to be completed first. I experienced some severe frame rate dips in certain areas of the game, too – not ideal for a fast-paced action game. These nuisances do stack up, and although S-Game said it has addressed the escaping bosses, performance issues and the quest guidance fails in its latest patch, it’s hard to say conclusively whether all of these issues have been fully resolved. The frame rates do seem to be better since the update, but that annoying side quest loop is still in place.
All of which leaves us with quite a tricky picture. This game is exceptional in so many areas – the animations, the beautiful environments – and when the combat works, the sense of flow is incredible. Street fights with multiple opponents feel so cinematic and so satisfying, allowing you to be truly creative and expressive with your fighting style. Then you walk into a boss battle and feel all that power fade, like you’re waiting your turn to get hits in with a wooden sword. This slows the pace of the early to mid game in particular, and I wish S-Game had been prepared to speed us through to the real meat of its gameplay a little faster. Combined with the other smaller issues and niggles – plus the pretty unremarkable narrative and lore dumps – it just takes the shine off what is otherwise a very impressive action title. Who knows, maybe another patch or two will even things out. Because there are some incredibly fun weapons to play with here… if only they had been sharpened.
A copy of Phantom Blade Zero was provided for this review by PUBLISHER.