S-Game is finally nearing the release of Phantom Blade Zero, and as part of previewing it one last time, I discovered this game has a whole lot of history
I’ve been tracking the release of Phantom Blade Zero for several years now, playing the game multiple times over the course of three years, from demos that felt like little more than vertical slices all the way to a multi-hour hands-on at Gamescom this year. For a time, it felt like the game had come out of nowhere; I’d never encountered Chinese developer S-Game’s previous titles, and assumed they were never released outside of the country. However, it turns out I simply wasn’t paying attention, and Phantom Blade Zero is part of a franchise known as Rainblood that’s over 15 years old and features a longtime series protagonist who has only so many days to live, while the games themselves have sought to create their own new genre and style.
Across 2010 and 2011, two Rainblood games were released, with only the first making it to the West via a fan translation apparently approved by the developer, S-Game CEO Qiwei “Soulframe” Liang, and being sold on fan sites. These titles are turn-based RPGs set in the same world as Phantom Blade, and seem to share almost no gameplay DNA with the upcoming triple-A game. In 2013, they were followed up by Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage (yes, Rain Blood is two words now), a Unity-powered hack-and-slash 2D brawler which did actually make its way to Steam and consoles—though the Xbox and PlayStation versions now seem to be delisted.
All three of these games are noticeably unpolished, but make up for it with their striking, dark and twisted interpretation of the Ming Dynasty. Following Mirage, S-game published three China-exclusive mobile games. Then in May 2023, Phantom Blade Zero, a big-budget 3D action game, was announced, followed by the release of Phantom Blade: Executioners in November, a 2D beat ’em up which came out on PS4, PS5, and mobile, though again the console ports seem to have been pulled. Both of these games share commonalities with Soulframe’s earlier releases, most notably a recurring motif of crimson blades wielded by the protagonist that stand out in the often grim and grey world; however, these games feel noticeably small compared to a triple-A game featuring Donnie Yen.
All this leads to the question: Where did the exponential increase in fidelity and scope come from? The short answer, via a machine-translated article in Chinese publication ChuApp, seems to be “Tencent.” Following the completion of rounds of funding from NetEase and the Chinese venture capital firm ZhenFund, Soulframe disclosed in an open letter in 2021 that Lingyou Fang—or, as it’s called in the West, S-Game—“recently completed a round of financing on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars” from the Chinese mega-corp for two large-scale action RPGs over the next five years. While the second of these projects, “Stellar Saga,” is still MIA, the other is the continuation of Soulframe’s long-running series. Which all brings us to now, and my four-ish hours with Phantom Blade Zero.
Something that I have noted in my previous time with this game is that while it bears some surface-level similarities to the assortment of Chinese-developed Souls-inspired games like Black Myth: Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, in practice it plays closer to a hybrid of Sekiro and Devil May Cry, fusing elements of the former’s fast, stagger-focused combat with the latter’s stylish action-game sensibilities.
This design ethos is best showcased in how the stamina bar functions. Oftentimes in games that seek to offer a faster version of a typical Souls-like combat system, I find myself frustrated by the fact that I can combo chains of attacks with flashy animations, but because each swing of the sword eats away at my stamina bar, I often find myself incapable of extricating myself from enemies’ ripostes. Phantom Blade addresses this, as your stamina doesn’t go down when attacking or successfully blocking, only when dodging or attempting to block certain color-coded attacks. Moreover, your light attacks do not take animation priority over all other inputs, meaning that if you start a swing only to realize a boss will strike you first, you can quickly hit block mid-attack to protect yourself.
This focus on offensive combat over a muddled mix of Souls-ish turtling, stamina regen, and protracted combos instantly makes Phantom Blade both more intuitive than some of its closest contemporaries and more compelling and cohesive. The design seems to be less focused on finding ways to force wuxia into a Souls game and more focused on creating a combat system purpose-built to highlight both the flow and speed of wuxia media, resulting in something I find infinitely more interesting and rewarding.
Phantom Blade’s free-flowing combat focuses on 30 primary weapons, each with its own unique moveset and properties, and 25 secondary weapons, some of which, like axes, grant you heavy charge attacks while others, like mini-cannons, are slow-firing ranged weapons. You can equip two primary weapons at a time, keeping one off-hand and ready to go; however, while you can simply swap to your other primary by hitting the D-pad, you can also work it into a combo with the left trigger. This system is interesting because the combo-weapon-change both deal a lot of damage and stagger to enemies but is also on a cooldown, meaning that if you get into a good flow dealing with a boss with a longsword, comboing away from it to your dual-blades might not actually be the best move.
While the combat of Phantom Blade Zero feels distinctly un-Soulslike, the same cannot be said for the world. The press release for the game highlights that Phantom Blade’s interconnected world is “inspired by Soulslike map design.” In lieu of a traditional, highly detailed video game map, you’re instead provided with hand-painted, ink wash–style charts of the area painted on Xuan paper and scanned into the game. This more abstract map is paired with level design that often doubles back and reconnects to other areas in a way most reminiscent of the first Dark Souls game.
It’s not surprising that S-Game acknowledges FromSoftware’s genre-defining franchise in official press materials, because its fingerprints are everywhere in the world design. Beyond just the interconnected map, Phantom Blade’s version of the Ming Dynasty is a world of decay and plague that feels very much at home in the video game pantheon of “mysterious, doomed and cursed worlds inspired by Demon’s Souls.” While at times environments can look washed-out, it feels like a conscious design decision that highlights the decline of this warring region. Flashes of steampunk industrialization give Phantom Blade an additional bit of life and serve as an interesting way to diversify the visuals. It also gives S-game plenty of room to showcase monstrous enemies that are grotesque due to inhumane and ramshackle mechanized corruption instead of the genre-standard mystic rot that sometimes feels overdone.
Bosses demand the kind of pattern recognition typical of Soulslike bosses over the fast reaction speed you might be used to from a Ninja Gaiden or DMC. There’s still plenty of blocking, parrying, and clashing of swords to build stagger, but these encounters require that you outright avoid certain attacks over simply finding ways to deal with them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I did find myself enjoying the frenetic push-forward nature of encounters with groups of standard enemies over the more considered pacing of bosses. Dealing with bosses’ relentless, unblockable attacks that force you to focus on positioning over fast reactions feels like a strange deviation for a combat system designed to reward getting up in enemies’ faces.
While I was generally sold on nearly everything Phantom Blade Zero presented—the world is interesting, the combat is fun and layered—I did find the story comparably dry. The game’s protagonist, Soul, is featured in all three Rainblood games, and the new release seemingly retells certain parts of them. In the first Rainblood, Soul also had a limited number of days to live, having had his heart pierced by a cursed blade, which either means that Phantom Blade Zero retells parts of Town of Death, or Soul has a chronic cardiac penetration problem.
On three of the game’s difficulties, this countdown is purely narrative; however, you can opt to play on an extra-hard mode which ties this plot point into the gameplay, counting down a day each time Soul dies in battle. This ticking clock is pretty much the only part of the otherwise pretty standard revenge plot that hooked me, and hearing that it’s been relegated to a difficulty setting most players will probably avoid kind of strips it of most of its stakes. While there is some level of intrigue generated by Soul’s limited time to live, the rest of the characters that I encountered during my time with Phantom Blade were far less compelling, opting mostly to espouse platitudes on darkness, personal codes, and vague ideals.
The only real standout in the cast is Mó Yuan, portrayed by Donnie Yen. The star of the upcoming John Wick spin-off Caine, Yen also apparently consulted on the game’s action alongside stuntman and choreographer Kenji Tanigaki. While I love plenty of Yen’s action movies, the casting of the martial arts superstar does little to flesh out the experience beyond a brief moment of me going “oh, that guy” when he shows up.
Phantom Blade Zero fascinates me. The sheer escalation in scale from Soulframe and S-Game’s earlier works is hard to overstate, and while it’s tempting to get out there early and celebrate something like that, polish, bombast, and scope don’t always equate to quality. After my most recent hands-on with Phantom Blade, I’ve found myself going back to the RPG-maker footage of the original Rainblood. It’s a somewhat scruffy passion project, with a near-endless supply of charm and grit. Phantom Blade Zero is plenty promising; however, it feels like some amount of that original game’s soul may have been lost in translation over the 15-year journey and the hundreds of millions of dollars. As it stands now, while I remain interested in yet another big-budget action game coming out of China, I think I am going to go track down one of those fan sites and start a playthrough of a Chinese turn-based RPG from 2011, because Town of Death seems cool as hell.
