REVIEW: ‘Phantom Blade Zero’ Is A Chinese Epic On Par With The Greats

S-Games’ Phantom Blade Zero feels tailor-made for me to fall in love with. A wuxia-inspired story, this action-RPG focuses on building a world, its tragedy, and its hero. While the world and its combat are akin to something you’d find in a Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, or Tsui Hark film in scope, scale, and beauty, S-Game has also looked to the prolific dark fantasy archetypes and designs that easily feel at home in the work of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga or Yuji Kaku’s more recent bio-horror fantasy manga series Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku. 

With stunning beauty, an emotive score, and martial arts inspiration for over 30 weapons (all mocapped and animated with the creative guidance of the magnanimous Donnie Yen), Phantom Blade Zero is a handcrafted masterpiece. In development for some time, the title is ambitious in just about every way. From the combat and interconnected level design to the stunning character designs and their tragic stories, this video game feels at home in the wuxia canon right alongside the films made by the greats I mentioned above, without blinking an eye. 

But that isn’t because S-Game has made a cinematic game. Unlike others we see that aim for cinema and fall amongst the library of walking simulators, Phantom Blade Zero meets its audience through mixed media animation and emotive storytelling that is built on the core concepts of wuxia, not just the thrilling action choreography that American audiences know about the genre.

Don’t get me wrong, the dedication to high-fidelity visuals that allow you to see the redness in the corner of a character’s eyes and your reflection as clear as day in slightly bloody water is clear. Many of the cutscenes would look right at home among some of China’s best animation teams like Nezha II‘s Coco Cartoon or The New Gods series’ Light Chaser Animation. But those visuals mean nothing without substance beneath them. 

Through the little details in an environment or lore discovered in the game’s Memory Flowers (blue flowers you collect that reward you with different buffs and tell you a story of a character you’ve encountered or will), books (that you collect page by page in the world), and even how the characters refer to each other in passing, S-Game has crafted a game that begs its player to venture deeper into the story.

Phantom Blade Zero’s key success is that its interconnected level design isn’t just there to replicate the map systems soulslike players are used to. The interconnected nature of each new area is key to a world that wants you to stay curious and explore more, see more, and take a vested interest in the characters you are going to encounter over your 60 hours of playtime (this is about how long it took me to get the Perfect Ending and the maps mostly completed within a few percentage points).

Phantom Blade Zeros is a “kungfupunk” world. 

In the game, you play as Soul, a man with 66 days to live thanks to his wounded and recreated heart. Your goal is to make it to Pangzhen, find a new heart, and in the process unravel the mystery and dark secrets that have conspired for power and control over good and evil as you know it. To do this, you travel through multiple zones, fight many bosses, and meet people along the way shaped by the choices of those far more powerful than they are. 

From a storytelling perspective, the vast story of generations of conflict and power struggle is epic in scale. The different narrative branches you explore all capture the hallmarks of Eastern Fantasy but distill down to the core concept of humanity. Humanity strives for control, but it can also strive for goodness. The choice you make to pursue one or the other casts you in your role.

For Soul, in a typical wuxia sense, he is a no-one. He has no idea who his real parents are, but he knows he is different. With his propensity for great power, Soul is raised by his shifu alongside his sworn brother, Zou Shang. As boys, they were raised to serve The Order, and now, they’re at odds. With a nonlinear storytelling approach, the game uses Crane Bells, a variant of the fast-travel checkpoint Bells you ring every time you find a new area. 

Each Crane Bell offers players a different slice of the story. Some you have to find through curious exploration, and others are mandatory for the story. But they all carry a piece of the emotional weight that makes the game succeed. Jumping from “One Day Before” to “10 years before” or “three years before,” the memories you experience pull you into the larger conspiracy and the tapestry of betrayal you have to navigate.

But more importantly, the nonlinear approach is a stylistic choice that can fail in video games more than its cinematic counterpart. But here, this approach steeps every step forward in mystery, to a point that you find it hard to put the game down. Additionally, the strength of the story’s dialogue, especially where smaller characters with few lines of dialogue are concerned, is something that has to be applauded. 

No matter how absurd some bosses get or how supernatural the situation becomes, everything you experience stays grounded in being human. The drama and tragedy on display, whether in the main story or in key side stories, would be at home in any C-drama or film. That said, Phantom Blade Zero’s approach to storytelling doesn’t just ask you to engage with its narrative by watching each cutscene. At every turn, S-Game gives the player a lever of interaction that uses video games as a medium without replicating cinema.

Phantom Blade Zero is fit alongside any cinematic epic, but it never feels like a watching a movie.

Still, what kept me engaged was how easily Phantom Blade Zero’s quest structure and level design made me want to keep exploring. Everything in the game stokes your curiosity. You unlock a new area, another log, and the curiosity fire. The developers tell the story through multiple avenues. 

S-Game doesn’t just rely on weighty cinematics. With Memory Flowers, Crane Bells, Book pages, audio in specific locations, and hidden areas you only discover when you open them, you engage with the world. Every little thing you do in Phantom Blade Zero unfurls another petal, revealing the world meticulously constructed at your feet. You engage with the story through combat, reading, listening, and watching the game play out. 

A massive game, all of this exploration would be for nothing if the developers hadn’t also made the progression feel natural, no matter how many detours you take. After the first zone, it’s clear that the maps have been constructed to return to, and with everything marked for your return when you’ve unlocked a new skill or found the right key, you can’t help but keep backtracking. Progression feels natural, making it easy to keep reaching for more story content.  

You want to learn more about the character you met in passing. You care to see the love story of two lovers separated by circumstance, or learn about the tragic past that turned the boss you just fought into the monster you only know as such. As the tragedies reveal themselves, the humanity in everything starts to shine through. 

One of the primary characteristics of Wuxia storytelling is that it is both set in historical China and features humans fighting and dealing with other humans. That key piece of storytelling is also what makes Phantom Blade Zero succeed. Even though it’s fantasy, human desire and greed for power run underneath each inhuman thing you face.

Love, betrayal, brotherhood, hope, and power all drive the game’s characters in equal measure. The puppets you fight are controlled by someone human; their deeds are not their own. The abomination or two that you fight are mutated through experimentation. But the human undercurrent keeps the game grounded when storytelling eccentricities mount. 

Phantom Blade Zero’s storytelling and visuals reveal how deeply the team studied the sandboxes they use. And yet, it never feels derivative, always innovative. Ambition in concept and perfection in execution, there is absolutely nothing I would change. Phantom Blade Zero is a Chinese epic that captures the beauty of humanity and the grotesquerie of power in a way that only wuxia storytelling can. In that way, the developers have also captured why wuxia, despite its unique Chinese lens, is also universal in its themes. 

Curiosity drives you to see more of Phantom Blade Zero’s world. Exploration never feels like you’re grinding through fetch quests and collecting a few small collectible-based quests; it’s hard to tell the difference between the mainline story on the game’s golden path and the side stories you encounter. You’ll naturally finish most of the side content while progressing the main story, so every bit of movement across the world feels natural. 

Exploration is easy, because S-Game has done everything to feed your curiosity. 

When I started the review period for Phantom Blade Zero, I wasn’t sure how much more I could write about it. With my six-hour hands-on preview coming in at just around three thousand words, the thought of this review was terrifying.

Could I find something new to talk about? And, well, with nearly ten times that amount of time played, the answer was yes. More specifically, another shining jewel in the game’s crown is its combat system, and it opens up significantly once you realize how important it is to be creative. 

While Wuxia and Cinema drive the game’s core narrative and philosophy, player agency and choice drive its combat in a way I haven’t experienced outside Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile series. Like natural exploration, your curiosity to experiment with new weapons should be embraced when you play Phantom Blade Zero. The core of the game’s combat is picking a loadout of primary and secondary weapons, Soul’s two Phantom Blades, and two medicine choices. 

With over 30 weapons and Phantom Blades (best explained as a special ability in the form of a weapon imbued with power and soul, with limited charges), mixing and matching them alone is a process. However, while sticking to one loadout is possible, experimenting with new weaponry from defeated bosses is a key way to discover what works best against specific enemy types or with your playstyle. 

Additionally, the accessory slots are broken down into Offense, Defense, and Support, making their own world to explore. As for medicine, you can choose pure health options, or options that regenerate health while focusing more on mitigating combat status effects or buffing other abilities you may have.

Finding synergies between your weapons, Phantom Blades, accessories, and medicines lets you progress through the game in a way unique to you. And for the curious, it feels like there is always just one more Blade to find from a hidden boss somewhere, no matter how many times you run through a map. Choice is an important part of the game’s narrative, and the choice to do good while receiving nothing is central to a wuxia hero.

And for the game, it’s clear that S-Game wanted to give players ample choice in how they play. This also translates into the weapon progression system that runs through three sisters: Forge, Jewel, and Myst. Once unlocked, players can upgrade their weapons using Remnant Dust (the in-game currency) they collect by fighting enemies, exploring, and turning in quests. 

Player creativity and choice are the signature focus for Phantom Blade Zero’s systems. 

Weapons and Phantom Blades can each be upgraded to level 30, with a secondary augmentation also available through a process called Soul Tempering. Your weapons alone can make the game easier by the end. As for accessories, they can be upgraded (polished, as they call it in-game), but each cap is set by the item’s effect. For example, mitigation will never surpass a certain amount, and the same goes for damage buffs, so accessories can be managed without removing all of the game’s challenge. 

Additionally, players can control the difficulty level (of which there are three) at any time. Players can tune the game to suit their style and compensate for things they may not be the best at. For me, I don’t believe I changed out the accessory that expanded the window for perfect parries and perfect dodges.

Others may have the 25% HP boost active from the time they find it, or the accessory that gives players added damage for using a two-handed weapon. Ultimately, though, Phantom Blade Zero puts the choice in the player’s hands. But you can also choose a different path and pick less mitigation or hand-holdy accessories.

And if you want to up the difficulty, you can take a stab at the game’s new gameplus, which takes the game’s highest difficulty (Hellwalker) and adds a mechanic tied directly to the narrative. With 66 Days mode, Phantom Blade Zero becomes an almost roguelike experience. With the ability to die only 66 times, tied to the number of days Soul has to live, everything changes. The pace of your play changes, how often you sneak, and even your loadout. 

All that said, figuring out how you want to play in Phantom Blade Zero can be an exercise. While the game does feature perfect parries and perfect dodges, this is very much not a soulslike. The game doesn’t focus on failing and improving incrementally. Combat bolsters the story, but it isn’t the only thing players experience.

Instead of punishing players for button-mashing a parry or dodge, the combat system we see in Phantom Blade Zero is grounded entirely in the Chinese martial arts concept of flowing, well, like water. Offense and defense happen at the same time in Chinese martial arts, and that lives on in Phantom Blade Zero’s combat. You can block while still attacking, and finding those moments in your block to attack is just as priceless as nailing a perfect parry. 

Additionally, the game’s boss mechanics play with the idea of forward movement without stopping, plus thoughtful approaches with well-timed blocks and dodges out of the way. Each boss encounter is a dance you learn the steps to. But your interpretation of the dance may not match the one the S-Game developers imagined, or the one your friend is playing at the same time. That variance is special, and the creativity and curiosity it builds in the player is astounding. 

Every detail feels handcrafted through a love for wuxia. 

We can’t talk about the game’s combat without talking about the beauty that comes to life with each attack. With Donnie Yen’s work on the title as a creative partner, one of the last masters of Chinese martial arts and cinema, the dedication to combat animations has few equivalents in gaming. The only competition is NetEase’s live-service title, Where Winds Meet (which also works with a martial arts great, Yuen Woo-ping)

The dedication to great combat included shooting mocap sessions for every weapon’s animations and, more importantly, using both male and female martial artists to capture the nuances. This means every weapon in the game had its own motion capture sessions. Additioanlly, if a woman wielded that weapon in the game (oh, which, there are many), her body moves with it differently than Soul’s. 

With live martial artists for both, during our time at the preview event, we learned that S-Game worked with both men and women stunt performers and martial artists, all from Donnie Yen’s troupe.  One of the best things about Hong Kong and Chinese wuxia and action cinema is that women aren’t cast to the side. Instead, a long lineage of Chinese women martial artists has brought their craft to film, most notably Michelle Yeoh.

Here, the focus on the nuances of movement and weight distribution with weaponry speaks to how S-Games views action. It’s not just combat; it’s storytelling. Soul may be using the weapons and having learned their forms, but the story attached to them still belongs to the character he took them from.

This shows up in certain animations (my favorite is the Drunken Master-style choreography for one weapon) for the male bosses, of course. But it stands out sharply for weapons we would usually gender as more feminine.

The game also honors the long history of women in Chinese martial arts cinema. Villainess, hero, or something tragically in between, the women we meet in the game are driven by their own desires and emotions, and they get as much development as the game’s other characters. And that’s the reality: no role feels too small for the NPC you meet, with dialogue you won’t forget. 

From the fight choreography to the worldbuilding lore, script, and 2D-mixed media cinematics, everything about Phantom Blade Zero feels like a handcrafted ode to storytelling, action, wuxia, and Chinese imagination and creativity. With its attention to detail and dedication to telling a true epic story, S-Game has created a game that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than wuxia. 

Phantom Blade Zero is the next Game of the Year.

Phantom Blade Zero balances all of its aesthetic identities perfectly because of the wuxia worlds and heroes that came before. In this Chinese fantasy genre, we find the depth of morality, creativity, and genre-blending beauty it holds. Phantom Blade Zero is both, easily found next to House of Flying Daggers, as it is right next to Incantation (2022) or Ju-On. 

Its horror excels from score to scene, with screeching battle strings intensifying the encounter as a red thread cuts through the environment, something horrid being controlled. But its drama feels at home here, with one sequence set to romantic music in a wide-open field where lightness is the focus. Both exist together and make a unique experience on their own. 

A beautiful and horrific game, Phantom Blade Zero has everything to be both the game of the year and to be a gateway to wuxia for new audiences. It’s an epic story of betrayal and conspiracies while also being about love and brotherhood. It brings unique, interesting combat systems and progression that put players’ creativity first, while its exploration mechanics and traversal elements make you more curious with each new zone.

With a dense story and robust lore, Phantom Blade Zero feels like a world that has existed for decades, lived in and loved, but maybe that’s because of wuxia, or because this is exactly the kind of game that you can just lose yourself in. Phantom Blade Zero is a masterpiece.

Phantom Blade Zero is set to release on October 29, 2026, on PlayStation 5 and PC.