The first time I played Phantom Blade Zero earlier this year, I was bad at it—which might've had something to do with jumping straight into a boss fight while I was still learning the controls. But over the last two days at a preview event in Beijing, I've gone from fresh-faced trainee to a wispy-bearded master, beating an hour-long demo's toughest fight on "Hellwalker" difficulty.
Okay, that's probably giving myself a little too much credit—because in a refreshing change from the sea of Soulslikes in recent years, Phantom Blade Zero is actually aiming to be more beautiful than bastard hard. Even on its toughest setting, it's not as punishing as FromSoftware's Sekiro or Shadow of the Erdtree. It's more generous with parry windows and stamina than TeamNinja's Nioh. And it's lighter on technical combos than Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. All that is intentional, because the pain isn't meant to be the big draw.
"In terms of the difficulty level, this is actually not that bad," said S-Game co-founder and combat director Qianli Ma in an interview with PC Gamer. "It's actually on the easier side, despite being the 'extreme' hard [mode]. The idea is that if you want to pass the level not as beautifully… the whole concept is the wuxia, kung fu style—you want to dance. So if you want to beat it in a mediocre, not-as-beautiful way, it's pretty achievable. But if you want to do it in a very beautiful manner, that's the difficult aspect."
Hellwalker certainly isn't a pushover—it took me almost an hour of attempts to clear that boss fight—but I knew exactly what Ma meant from my time leading up to the boss. In some fights, regular enemies crowded me into corners and staggered me as I tried to parry my way out, but if I died I was never far from a checkpoint, and struggling through a fight usually rewarded me with a refill for my healing flask. Death was only ever a mild setback.
But clumsily surviving those fights wasn't nearly as invigorating as clearing them with a flourish. On my third run through the demo I became obsessed with the Juggernaut, a massive curved blade that begins to pulse with a red light every time you parry with it, building up charge until you trigger a heavy attack for extra damage. When I took down a group of enemies clean, nailing parries (which trigger special counters on certain big attacks) and dodges (which trigger special counters on other unblockable attacks) I was thriving.
Even without the highly technical combos of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, Phantom Blade Zero is a sublime flow state game.
"The good part of the extreme difficulty mode, usually for everyone that's tried it, their goal is not just to pass it one time," Ma said. "Because they notice 'I didn't do it that beautifully,' and they want to perfect everything. So they'll want to achieve that by playing it over and over again and get those perfect moments throughout the gameplay."
I asked Ma for more details on how S-Game is tuning Hellwalker difficulty compared to normal. The adjustments to core mechanics are minor. The parry window, for example, is only two frames shorter. "It's a barely noticeable amount, because in the easy and normal difficulties our parry windows are so lenient that when we decrease it by two frames, that's what you expect the parry window to be in other action games," he said. Enemies do a little more damage, and you'll lose a bit more of your sha-chi (stamina) gauge when you fail to parry an attack.
The more significant changes are in enemy behavior and abilities, with bosses gaining new moves they won't throw at you on normal. But "the key thing that separates the human bosses in extreme difficulty is the idea of deception," Ma said. He used a boss fight that S-Game first showed off last year as an example.
"In normal difficulty he has some of the Soulslike elements to him: he has fixed combos, and if you fight him enough times you'll figure out his combos. But in extreme difficulty, it's a completely different direction. We tried to borrow a concept from fighting games and incorporate it into his AI. He has a standard fighting game state machine, so he will analyze the situation he's in and whether it's to his advantage or disadvantage, and that lets him do different attacks based on the situation.
"For example, we have a state we call 'lucky draw,' where if he lands a hit he'll continue a combo, but if it doesn't hit he's gonna do something else. He tries to use the result of his last attack to determine what to do next. He also has counterattacks. In fighting games if you do a perfect block you get a huge punish window, so whenever he does a perfect parry he's gonna follow up with a huge swing."
Likewise, if you parry every hit in the boss's combo, he may pick up on the fact that he's at a disadvantage and refrain from launching the finishing blow, one of the blue or red attacks you can parry/dodge for a big counterattack of your own. S-Game wants most of the game's humanoid bosses to feel almost like PvP fights on Hellwalker. Not all the bosses will be that smart—there's also a class of dumb, monstrous bosses that will be more aggressive and gain new attacks, but won't play mind games with you like a Street Fighter pro baiting out a fireball. In either case, I'm still going to need a lot of practice to take them down with style.
I'll have a lot more to come on Phantom Blade Zero in the near future, including a full breakdown of its promising demo and an interview with game director Soulframe Liang.
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