Phantom Blade Zero Combat Director Says Difficulty Comes From Wanting to Look Beautiful in Combat

Keeping to its previous statements that upcoming action game Phantom Blade Zero will be closer to Devil May Cry than Dark Souls in gameplay, CEO of developer S-Game, “Soulframe” Liang, has spoken about how the title can also be finished by players who don’t care about looking good in its combat system.

When it comes down to the kind of gameplay that players can expect from Phantom Blade Zero, combat director Qianli Ma, in an interview with PCGamer magazine (via GamesRadar), spoke about the core concept of the game being wuxia by way of kung fu, and the combat making players “want to dance”.

To achieve this, Ma noted that design decisions made around the combat in Phantom Blade Zero ultimately meant “to a certain degree giving up the accuracy of input to bring out the fast-paced combat.”

This also means that players who can tap into this “dance”-like flow state will likely be able to pull off slick combos when taking on foes. For those that might want to just focus on finishing the game, however, the combat won’t get in the way. “If you want to beat it in a mediocre, not-as-beautiful way, it’s pretty achievable,” Ma explained. “But if you want to do it in a very beautiful manner, that’s the difficult aspect.”

The concept of having a game’s difficulty largely come from prompting players to improve how they play the title without outright raising the difficulty of the game itself is quite similar to what we’ve seen in Capcom’s Devil May Cry and PlatinumGames’ Bayonetta franchises. In both of series, players can finish the games just fine, but the true challenge tends to come from wanting to get better scores in the games’ performance rating systems.

S-Game had spoken about Phantom Blade Zero not being a Soulslike back in June, 2024. In an FAQ about the game on social media, the studio stressed on the fact that its plans never involved “making another Soulslike”. Rather, the studio is more focused on delivering a combo-driven game where the combat can be hectic and rewarding at the same time.

“As of now, those who have tried the demo should have a solid idea that it’s not a Soulsike game,” said the developer in the FAQ. “It’s worth stressing again that ‘making another Soulslike’ was never part of the plan. We want combo-driven, heart-pumping combat that is hectic, rewarding and exhilarating.”

That’s not to say that Phantom Blade Zero won’t have any influences from FromSoftware’s Souls franchise, however. In an interview back in April, the studio spoke about being inspired by the level design of Dark Souls, particularly praising the interconnected levels of the older games from FromSoftware’s outings.

“On the Souls-lite level design side, we are definitely a fan of and inspired by the pre-Elden Ring, interconnected, tight level design,” said a representative from S-Game. They also mentioned that Liang studied architecture at school, “so the level design is something that’s very important for us and we want to have very robust levels, have a lot of depth to them, very dense.”

Phantom Blade Zero doesn’t yet have a release date. It is being developed for PC and PS5.