---
title: 'Phantom Blade Zero Review'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=3qNkvdSWDmc'
video_id: '3qNkvdSWDmc'
date: 2026-10-26
duration_sec: 1081
channel: 'IGN'
---

# Phantom Blade Zero Review

> Source: [Phantom Blade Zero Review](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3qNkvdSWDmc)

## Summary

Phantom Blade Zero, from a studio known for mobile games, delivers some of the most satisfying combat in recent memory. After 50 hours, the reviewer finds the action excellent but criticizes the convoluted story and technical geometry issues.

### Key Points

- **Positive First Impressions** [00:04] — Phantom Blade Zero, from a mobile-focused studio, surprisingly offers excellent combat and fun gameplay, exceeding expectations.
- **Story Criticism** [01:07] — The story is convoluted, with excessive time jumps and jargon that exhausts the player; it's not the game's strong suit.
- **Combat Feel** [02:28] — Parry and dodge mechanics feel natural within minutes, and the weapon/combo system is well-paced, making combat instantly compelling.
- **Weapon Variety and Mechanics** [03:20] — Combat requires frequent weapon switching, and swapping weapons is also a way to restore your posture meter, encouraging variety.
- **Exploration Tools and Customization** [04:12] — Additional tools like grappling hooks and bows add utility both in combat and exploration, increasing the depth of customization.
- **Map Design Philosophy** [05:47] — The game uses hand-drawn maps that provide a vague sense of location, encouraging exploration and discovery rather than following markers.
- **Geometric Frustrations** [06:15] — The game suffers from poor geometry, with the character getting caught on surfaces and invisible walls, leading to frustrating deaths.
- **Combat as a Superpower** [07:49] — The combat rhythm, aided by subtle musical cues, lets players anticipate attacks almost subconsciously, contributing to the exceptional feel.
- **Difficulty and Boss Design** [08:46] — Difficulty is well-balanced, even on the hardest setting, thanks to removing boss phase repetition, which prevents frustration.
- **Boss Variety and Performance** [10:42] — Boss fights are creative and memorable, prompting a completionist run; performance issues exist on one map but are patchable.

## Transcript

looking almost too good to be true. Especially coming from a studio that's best known for its mobile games. That's why it's just about the biggest compliment I can pay it that after 50 hours performing picture perfect kung
fu, it's exactly as fun to play as it looks. This effortlessly smooth action game has some of the most satisfying and well-tuned combat I've played in a long time. a surprising number of secrets to discover and quests to complete [music]
in each of its beautiful levels and a never-ending supply of clever [music] encounters full of unbelievably awesome moments. Its convoluted story and may not live up to that incredible action, but it nails just about
everything else, and there were only a handful of moments where I wasn't absolutely thrilled to be slicing my way [music] through the ranks of the Wuin.
straight out of a Wuja epic. As a metal as hell martial artist of mysterious as hell martial artist of mysterious origins with only 66 days left alive to exact your revenge, you set out on an odyssey across the ruined lands of the
phantom world, facing off against all manner of beast and badass along the way. The story here isn't Phantom Blade Zero's strong suit, as it tries to do a bit too much, shoving in a whole bunch of mystical jargon, dozens of
characters, and a needlessly complex timeline, very little of which ultimately pays off anyway. In the first couple hours alone, so much time is spent toggling back and forth between present day, several years ago, several
months ago, and several days ago that I was exhausted by all the exposition before I'd even faced my first real boss fight. That said, there are enough likable characters along the way, especially your unflapable hero named
Soul that I was usually able to forgive it for occasionally wasting my time with unnecessary flashbacks and lengthy explanations. explanations. >> I long to follow you to that world.
time exploring the world and squaring off against enemies big and small. And Zero wants you to spend most of your attention on this part of the adventure. And that's a good thing, too, because by God is it good. It only took a couple
minutes for the precise parry [music] and dodge mechanics to feel natural. And the nuanced but not overly complex system of weapons, combos, special abilities, and upgrades are rolled out and an extremely smart pace. All of
which are easy enough to slip into like a tailored set of flowing wooa robes. I'm a complete snob when it comes to the feel and pacing of combat in these types of games. So, the fact that this immediately felt like reuniting with an
old friend made it instantly compelling, and it's one of those intangible things and it's one of those intangible things that's very hard to get right.
does the combat feel good right away, it does so across dozens of weapons, each game doesn't just encourage you to change up your weapon loadout at regular intervals. It actually requires you to mix things [music] up since swapping
your active melee weapon is one of the ways you can restore your posture meter with a single button press. And since many enemies, particularly bosses, can with certain attacks. You'll be swapping between different options with
regularity, [music] forcing you to commit multiple move sets and special abilities to memory. Conveniently, Phantom Blade Zero makes it extremely [music] points invested in leveling up weapons.
with a set loadout [music] anyway, especially since you always seem to find the exact tool you need right before entering an area or encountering a boss where it would come in handy. For example, I noticed that I found a water
cannon weapon only a few feet away from an area that led to a firebased boss. an area that led to a firebased boss. Nice.
additional tools like grappling hooks and bows, which have utility both in combat encounters and outside of them since you can use them to reach certain barriers that are otherwise impassible. There are also trinkets that offer
damage increase when you're at full health and a skill tree with perks that let you do things like execute a dodge while in midair or increase the number of healing items you can carry. There's a surprising amount of depth to the
things you can upgrade and the ways to customize exactly how your woolen more time than I typically do in these kinds of games just testing out different weapons and swapping my equipment around as a result. At the
very least, it's worth doing so just to see the unique execution animations when see the unique execution animations when you finish off trash enemies. all out as you get your steps in across Phantom Blade Zero's eight maps, [music]
too. Each one is filled with foes to take down, side quests to complete, chests to loot, and secrets to discover. A surprising amount of the places to go and people to meet are completely missable, including the entirety of a
getting trained by none other than Donnie [music] Yen as the mysterious gold masked man, which is actually one of Phantom Blade Zero's strongest subplots. >> No shame, no shadow,
yet it moves through all. That's the path to know. While most of the side quests are pretty straightforward missions to go somewhere and collect some stuff for a small reward, they gave me more reasons to spend time exploring
every nook and cranny, which I was happy to do. And unlike lots of modern games filled with icons on the screen telling you exactly where to go and what to do, Phantom Blade Zero instead makes use of handdrawn maps that only give you a
vague idea of your location in relation to key landmarks, allowing you to explore and fill in the gaps on your own.
mucks up this journey, it's that Phantom Blade Zero suffers from some pretty bad geometry. Soul gets caught on surfaces all the time, and even the tiniest bumps in the road can stop him dead in his tracks, which is pretty hilarious for a
guy who can jump 40 feet in the air while doing 19 back flips. Not only over the place that make exploration janky at times, especially when platforming sections ask you to get to a specific ledge [music] only for you to
discover there's an invisible wall and you fall to your death. I died nearly 200 times over the course of my playthrough, and roughly half of those getting caught in the environment until I was able to get myself killed or
reload my save file. In one case, I even lost about 20 minutes of progress when my supposed marshall master couldn't escape some bushes.
makes fights where it happens feel [music] so lame. is mine. >> Phantom Blade Zero's superpower, the
magic trick it performs time and time again, is its way of making you feel like you're the only person in the world badass enough to withstand its utterly insane flurry of swords against godlike monsters like it's nothing. The truth is
that the melee dance of combat encounters is just so finely tuned with every attack telegraphed just enough to give you exactly [music] the time you need to react, aided by an almost imperceptible musical rhythm that grants
you a certain level of precognition for what's going to happen next. Once I synced up with its tempo, I started anticipating attacks before I consciously registered them, leading me to perfectly block some lightning quick
attack I hadn't seen before. There's nothing specifically special about my reaction time or skill with action games. Rather, it's a testament to how incredibly well-balanced and smartly designed these unbelievably sick fights
are. It's without question the thing Phantom Blade Zero does best, and it's [music] from the opening sequence all the way to the final battle.
Zero's difficulty is how consistently it feels exactly right. Not too like you aren't in danger of getting your butt kicked. challenge from games like this, and so played Phantom Blade Zero on its hardest
difficulty exclusively, but found myself beating just about every major boss fight in two or three tries, plus a good chunk that I cleared in one go. And I didn't mind that one bit. It meant that I rarely saw enough of a boss to know
every tool in their murder belt. And refreshingly made me feel like the one to be feared rather than the other way around. It's pretty damn cool to enter a room and watch a 10-ft tall badass with an eight-pack swing around a blade and
think, "Oh man, this guy's totally screwed." Part of the way this Goldilocks level of difficulty is achieved is due to the interesting decision to not make you repeat phases of a boss fight that
through a first phase that just makes the bad guy mad and then get killed after he turns into an even more hulked out psycho, you'll pick back up at the out psycho, you'll pick back up at the top of that second phase.
to replay the first phase of a boss fight a dozen times just to get to to the point where multi-phase boss fights in general can get on my nerves these days. By removing this annoyance entirely, it got rid of a potential
friction with some of these encounters. It also allows for more freedom in how moments where a boss uses a cheap move that one-shots you instantly if you get hit by it. Normally including instakkill
moves like that is a good way to send me into a rage, but because my progress was almost never set back far enough to bother getting mad about, I felt a lot more lenient toward that kind of thing. I mean, let's face it, that crazy attack
where you get impaled on a giant spear, then set on fire and smashed face first into the floor, probably should kill you right away. So, it's pretty neat that Phantom Blaze Zero found a way to make a devastating moment like that exciting
RATHER THAN IRRITATING. >> NOWHERE TO RUN.
throughout the 50 hours it took me to reach credits, as I fought dozens and dozens of bosses, I was continually surprised by the creative enemies it threw at me. Sure, there's the occasional big guy with a big axe or
dude with a sword you swear you fought already, but these are by far the exception, not the rule. >> [groaning] >> At one point, I found myself wearing a lion dancer mask, jumping around on
poles to collect heads of lettuce to power up my fire blast. And in another section, I fought a posy of warriors who worked together as one unit to throw preposterously intricate attacks my way. The main threat to my life there was
getting caught with my guard down because I was too busy cackling. The boss fights are so consistently interesting, memorable, and numerous that I felt utterly compelled to seek out each and every one of them, which
led me to turn this first playthrough into a full-on completionist run just to into a full-on completionist run just to avoid FOMO. Zero a little over a month ago, one of my primary concerns was how it would
perform. And thankfully, the version I played for this review had a far more consistent performance. the frame rate was much steadier with only a few times [music] I can recall ever noticing issues during combat. That said, there's
one map in particular where the frame rate was consistently pretty terrible, specifically on a part of the map where something seems to not be working right. could pretty easily be identified and fixed. So, I'd be surprised if a patch
doesn't [music] arrive at or shortly after launch, but it's worth shouting out since I suspect there are other lingering issues hiding about.
action games I've played in a long time with standout [music] combat that never came close to feeling old across 50 hours of playing. It all takes place in a sharp, unique world that I adored spending time in. despite the fact that
just about everyone and everything in [music] it wanted me dead. Its tale of betrayal and revenge mostly plays it extremely safe and some unfortunate invisible barriers and technical hiccups can cause minor frustrations, but the
overwhelming majority of my time with this stunning, incredibly well-tuned this stunning, incredibly well-tuned adventure was downright awesome. Blade Zero, to talk a little bit more about his tastes in the genre. Cuz
Travis, you've reviewed action games for us before, but you also review a lot of things from farming sims all the way up to Souls likes and all that jazz and everything in between. So, I want to get a taste of your tastes, you know, like
what do you like in this genre? What are some of your favorite action games? Uh what do you gravitate towards in terms of speed, play style, all that stuff? Yeah. So, uh, the action games have a special place in my heart because, as
playing like really challenging games where, uh, you're kind of always on your the cool thing about an action game is that it's the exact opposite of that. A good action game is you feeling like you're the final boss and you walk into
you are so toast." Like, you don't even know what I'm about to unleash on you. And so it can be pretty cathartic when you spend a lot of your time um you know you hop into a game like this and you're just like, "Oh man, I can't wait to
unleash [music] this insane uh combo on you and uh you and the ways [music] that you can interact with their effects and all that that fun stuff. So um that's why that's what I love about this genre is that
it's just a pure power fantasy. >> And that's not to say that this game is easy or not challenging. It's just it's the difference like you said the power fantasy versus having to cut fight back, right? Having to come from below and
fight up. You are you are >> strong and fighting down. >> Yeah. And this game, it has a couple superpowers, but one of its superpowers is that like you walk into a room and no matter how badass your opponent is, the
entire time you're just like, "Dude, you're screwed." Like, I I got you. I know I know like how this is going to go cuz I'm just the coolest warrior who's ever existed. Um, and also the the to your point with the it is not a super
easy game, but it's also not really a hard game. It's like [music] a extremely fairly balanced game where they do certain things like one I talked about in the review, they they don't make you repeat phases of a boss fight. So, if
you start on the second phase. And it's like little choices like that that actually have a huge impact because it means you're not like spending a ton of time in every encounter like perfectly learning the moves. you can kind of like
worst case scenario is like you're dying halfway through, restarting halfway second run. Like it's kind of like that. >> What's a good point of comparison? We because, you know, these games stand on their own. they shouldn't live or die by
what has come before or what other people are doing. But this is sort of an interesting one to me because I I when I saw some of the early trailers thought it was going to be more soulsy, you know, in that vibe of the slower pace
and the the the more conservative action. Um, and that doesn't sound like exactly what it is, but it's also not, you know, going the hard the other direction of like DMC or Bayonetta stuff where you're going insane and doing
combo meter stuff either. It's not full stylish action. two. But I would say that it's closer to a DMC uh if you had to pick one of those there's a lot plenty of times where you're not really able to get on the
perfect guards and stuff like that, but like enemies are coming at you insanely fast. They're swinging at you like 30 times in 3 seconds. And so you're able to get to that point where you go on the offensive a lot sooner. And the game is
just faster in general. So, I would put it a recent uh example that I think it it comes somewhat close to is Onimusha uh Way of [music] the Sword. And then um it's it's closer if you were going to compare it to a Souls Light game. It's
it's definitely closest to Sakuro, which is a game I really loved that is a little bit more uh offensive, although it it it certainly has, you know, the parries. And this game does, too. Like, you basically have to be able to parry
even that rule isn't true because there's weapons that get around that mechanic altogether. This game is very cool is what I'm saying. Uh [laughter] but uh they uh they yeah it's definitely a more like fast-paced like you can just
definitely not like approaching a group of mob enemies and being like all right me. It's like no I'm jumping in. I'm pulling off some crazy stunt flipping in the air slicing like three dudes in half at once. And uh it it is it is kind of a
pure power fantasy once you really get good at it. And and that's uh it's quite more soulsy. So well Travis, thank you so much for talking with us a little bit Phantom Blade in general. If you want another action game review from Travis,
his last one was Valor Mortise, which is a very very different kind of action game, but another interesting one there. And then for a different type of action game as well are we just reviewed Dragons Dogmas 2's Dark Arisen DLC. So
you can check that out. And for everything else, stick with IGN.