At just about 15 hours into Phantom Blade Zero, I've changed out my primary weapons more times than I do in an entire Souls campaign. I quickly dropped my starter sword for a pair of dual blades and a jagged weapon that chunks damage off my enemies in showers of blood. But I didn't stick with either for long. Soon I was running around with a two-handed blade taller than my martial arts hero Soul, which sprouts a trail of magical, energy-sapping flowers with every swing. It shares a moveset with another two-handed giant that absorbs life with each hit. But I don't have time to use either one: I'm already smitten with my new twin blades, one of which I can send spinning in a circle around me like a protective Beyblade.
Somehow I haven't even touched the weapon that I took off a crazed monk that turns Soul into a drunken boxer. But I'm sure I'll have time: apparently I'm less than a third(!) of the way through a game that's far, far bigger than I anticipated when I played a chunk of it last year.
For the most part, Phantom Blade Zero's epic ambition is exciting—PC Gamer senior guides writer Sean Martin promises me that I've got about a hundred thrilling boss fights left to come. Its first dozen hours also illustrate the dangers of a long-in-development game ballooning in scope.
House of flying phrases
While playing Phantom Blade Zero I've been thinking a lot about this season's other big action game, which also spent more than half a decade in development: Capcom's revival of Onimusha. That game wastes little time in introducing its protagonist Miyamoto Musashi or the forces he'll be up again. He's brash and headstrong, taunting a group of samurai after whipping up on their master—then leading them on a Looney Tunes-style chase when there are too many to fight at once. The game punctures this silly tone shortly after introducing Musashi's rival, Ganryu, when both are murdered by demonic Genma.
Musashi's saved when he's given an oni gauntlet in the afterlife and sent back to the land of the living to harness souls with it; the rest of the game is about him deciding who and what he fights for. It's about that personal journey first and foremost, with the machinations of the game's villain spurring him along—and fantastic acting and facial motion capture do a ton of the work to make the story compelling.
In Phantom Blade Zero, by contrast, I've already lost track of the tangled web of characters, relationships, betrayals and motivations with dozens of hours to go. I've seen (and played) flashbacks to Soul's childhood, teenage years, and recent past; I've watched cutscenes about his enemy doing some Machiavellian scheming with another guy I can't name; I've read dozens of cryptic messages scattered throughout each zone that are meant to explain more about why I'm fighting puppets, dudes whose bodies have "transcended" into pure energy, monks who coat their bodies in hardened gold, and mean dogs. (Actually, nothing has explained the dogs yet).
I appreciate PBZ's attempt to start in media res and give Soul a sense of urgency—we flash back to him being stabbed through the heart, then shortly after flash forward to him getting a temporary fake heart that will fail on him in 66 days. But the flashbacks and bits of incidental storytelling often feel like infodumps from someone who's spent years writing a massive story bible and has lived with the whole thing in their head for so long that they don't realize how hard it is to follow when you're coming in with zero context.
Take these flowers, Phantom Blade Zero's way of doling out health upgrades. You'll find them scattered around each area, and finding all of them (usually around 3-6) will net you about 10% more health. Each plays 30 seconds or so of dialogue, and the writing's often vague references to characters and events I've never witnessed mostly makes me want to mash the skip button. We're far from the evocative audio vignettes of BioShock, here.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword has some plenty forgettable sidequests, too, but it also features a number of quests that reinterpret Japanese fables written by Lady Murasaki, the author of The Tale of Genji. These sidequests are great, embellished with unique art that inspired me to read more Japanese mythology. Like Onimusha's main story, they're simple and straightforward, but with just enough flair to make them compelling.
So far Phantom Blade Zero is a lot more convoluted than my favorite wuxia films, with small casts of characters and straightforward motivations—a love story, a "save the small town from a corrupt official" story, a ghost story. But when its epic sweep means I get to play with an absolutely luxurious variety of weapons, I'm not exactly heartbroken that the story is less than riveting.
Ways of the sword
In Onimusha: Way of the Sword, I started the game with sword, and I ended the game with sword. At no point in between did I wield anything but sword.
This is not a complaint. I'm not sure another videogame has done sword better than Onimusha frankly ever—the physicality of it, the dance between blocks, deflects and parries, the lightning strike of an issen—the animations and weighty physics in Onimusha combine to create a game rich in sensory feedback even with none of the complex combos of, say, Devil May Cry.
The old Capcom playbook in that vein of character action game is to give you a handful of weapons, each with a lengthy list of button inputs that create slightly different attacks; stringing them together is visually satisfying and keeps your combo counter ticking up and up. Modern Soulslikes offer way more weapons, but at the expense of that rich variety—each weapon type has a couple unique animations to its name, and that's it.
Phantom Blade Zero blends those two approaches, with the weapon variety of a modern action RPG but the feel and combo mad flourishes of 2000s character action games. Each of Soul's weapons has a fairly limited basic combo string, but also wholly unique mechanic that impacts how you use it in a fight. And each weapon has an upgrade path that adds one or two new actions to its repertoire.
The Outlaw Warblade, one of those massive two-handed swords I mentioned at the start, initially drains enemy health with basic attacks, and lets you convert your own health into recoverable damage to perform enhanced guard-breaking attacks. After five upgrades, it gains a new attack that lets you tank damage while you charge it up and instantly restores a chunk of HP if you land the hit. After 15 upgrades, it grants you an "emergency shield" for continuously sapping your own health, rewarding living on the edge.
Like Onimusha, Phantom Blade Zero's boss fights are definitely its highlights, with the arena designs and one-off mocapped stunts making it clear why this game took so long to make. The big difference between the two, though, is how much world PBZ has in and around those fights. So far I've found progression a bit more linear than I hoped, with levels that are Dark Souls-esque but with fewer surprising paths linking back to previous areas. Still, they're peppered with diversions that are closed off until you acquire certain weapons, and lots of overlooks and out-of-reach treasures that taunt you to double-check for routes you might have missed.
It's a way, way more engaging way to spend time between fights than what Onimusha offered in its hub world of Kyoto, and I appreciate that Phantom Blade Zero keeps its map very vague—there's no compass waypoint telling me where to go for a quest. So far the storytelling around these quests has been barebones, but at least I'm not turning my brain off and following an arrow to each and every one.
Instead of designing Phantom Blade's world around paths you'll tread and retread and enemy placements you'll learn to carve your way through, S-Game seems to have opted to craft a 50-hour game by buckling down and making so much stuff. How is it this big without a timesuck of an open world or infinite respawning fodder or roguelike gimmicks? Because it may be the most maximalist action game of its type we've ever seen, from its torrent of text notes to its luxurious animations. Even when it doesn't all work, it's hard not to be won over by a game that goes this all-out.