I have played Phantom Blade 0 three times, at three events, across two continents, over the last two and a bit years at this point, and every time I get done with my demo, I just want to go back and play more. There are a lot of games like this nowadays. Going to Gamescom or Summer Game Fest, it’s easy to wind up with a schedule where a solid third of the games you play are soulslike action games, but bar maybe Lies of P, I don’t think any of them have clicked as quickly with me as S-Game’s “kung-fu punk” action game.
Phantom Blade’s wuxia-inspired combat not only flows with style and elegance, but it also has a harsh brutality to it in the form of finishing moves. Dancing between enemies, parrying hits, as they hurl countless slashes in your direction, looks like it’s straight out of an Ang Lee film, but still feels good to play. All this is bolstered by a bleak world where the only sign of life that remains is remnants of bloody duels.
I could do this all day
Having played it so many times, and having seen change over the course of two years, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what makes Phantom Blade feel so good, and I think I have finally figured it out. There has been a really interesting trend in third-person action games over the last five or so years, and that’s that a lot of them have the same elevator pitch when it comes to gameplay: Dark Souls, but faster.
Source: S-Game
I understand why this has become the most common way to riff on the genre-defining gameplay FromSoftware has perfected. George Lucas’ “faster and more intense” directorial mantra is an alluring game design north star in a lot of ways. However, having now played more soulslikes than I can count, it rarely works. Games like Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Wukong and more, all don’t feel great to me for the same reason. You’re given a moveset that sees you enact a flurry of attacks, but these attacks drain stamina that is slow to recharge.
Slow recharging stamina makes sense in slow soulslikes, where you can take the time to process managing your stamina, choosing whether to roll or strike. However, in these faster games, your attacks being tied to a stamina bar means you usually either run out of stamina mid-combo, or you have attacked too much to be able to dodge. In both cases, it usually winds up with you getting killed simply for engaging with what should be a fluid combat system.
Lessons from a master
It is weird that this is such a prevalent problem in these games, considering FromSoftware itself solved this problem almost half a decade ago with Sekiro. In that game, you could swing and dodge as much as you wanted, and instead what you were managing was both your enemy’s and your own posture. This meant you never got hit because you had attacked too many times and couldn’t dodge or block anymore. You got hit because you mistimed a parry or dodge, or let your posture break. The game didn’t punish you for attacking, something you needed to do to fight; it punished you for actual mistakes.
It’s this system that Phantom Blade 0 has leaned into for its gameplay. You still have a stamina bar, but that only drains when you sprint, dodge, or parry. You can let fly a furious onslaught of blades with no fear of getting tired, and as a result, the gameplay becomes something of a management race. How quickly can you hit a blocking enemy enough times to break their guard, while also intermittently dodging or parrying their return volley of strikes? Compared to other games that positioned themselves as being inspired by wuxia combat, fighting in Phantom Blade really does feel cinematic.
Wuxia combat in film often tells a story, one character makes their move in a way that tells you what kind of person they are; are they brutish and harsh or precise and considered? Then, after deflecting every incoming strike, the opposing character responds; it’s a clash of character traits if nothing else. Wuxia fights are as much a debate in physical form as they are combat. Think of the mental battle in 2002’s Hero, where the entire fight plays out in the two combatants’ heads first before being settled by a single strike.
Phantom Blade 0 allows its characters and enemies to embody this style of fighting by pacing fights like conversations. Your enemy goes, then you respond, and it goes on like this until one of your wills is broken and you can fell your foe with a swift strike.
Feels just right
All this is to say that Phantom Blade 0 feels right. It feels like wuxia in a way that a lot of other games that have used the art form as inspiration have struggled to capture. Phantom Blade 0 doesn’t just capture the aesthetics of wuxia, but the feel of martial arts films like House of Flying Daggers. Beyond the audio design of clashing blades and the fluid animation, the thing that makes Phantom Blade 0 so good is the pace of fights.
Source: S-Game
It also helps that the “kun fu punk” art design is sick as hell. The drab colors of a world seemingly caught in a perpetual downpour of rain are punctuated by splurts of bright red blood as you perform finishing moves on stunned enemies. While the different colored trailing lines of air being displaced by blindingly fast blades keep your eyes focused on the action and able to discern if a boss is performing an attack you should dodge or parry.
Obviously, there is still a lot we don’t know about Phantom Blade 0. The game’s story has only been teased in trailers, it is hard to absorb much of the tone on a loud showfloor, and we haven’t had enough time to experiment with the different weapons to be able to tell if they affect gameplay in any real sense. However, despite that, now that I am back home and writing about Phantom Blade 0 again, all I want to be doing is toying around with its combat system and playing more.
This preview is based on a PC demo played on-site at Gamescom in Germany. The final product is subject to change.
