// KOTAKU — GAMING
Phantom Blade Zero’s Fast-Paced Action Took 15 Years, Two RPG-Maker Games, And A Whole Lot Of Money To Bring To Life
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 pri