Fans of wuxia combat are eating well these days. It seems a new game in the genre gets announced or released every few months. Recently, Phantom Blade Zero got some attention thanks to a discussion of its Hellwalker difficulty, and how it bucks the trend.
PC Gamer interviewed Qianli Ma, the combat director of PBZ at studio S-Game. The conversation brought forth an interesting point regarding how the game handles its extreme difficulty and where the challenge actually rolls in.
Specifically, it appears to go more for style points than grit points, so to speak. The kung fu action game (apparently floating the idea of a “kungfupunk” or “wuxiapunk” as a genre) might actually be of more interest to Devil May Cry 5 or Sekiro players than to Soulslike fans, something that is not very common recently.
It won’t be literal style points, you won’t have a ticker to call your combo amazing, but, given the game’s influences, just beating the boss is nowhere near as good as beating the boss while looking cool as hell. And it makes sense.
Not only is Phantom Blade Zero going to be very fast-paced, but the flair of animations and cool sh…tuff your weapons can do will probably encourage people not to cheese the bosses, but to style on them. We can probably expect some really cool videos to start flooding in once combo masters get their hands on the game properly after release. In the meantime, here are 22 minutes of solid gameplay to put on another tab.
Of course, the Hellwalker mode will have its own share of complications outside of trying to get a good spectacle out of the fight. However, they will apparently be based on skill more than on math, because its enemies will fight smarter before fighting harder.
While on earlier difficulties bosses will have a bit of that Souls-boss DNA in them, with fixed combos you can learn, here they are much more interested in mixing things up thanks to advanced game AI. To quote PC Gamer’s interview:
“For example, we have a state we call ‘lucky draw,’ where if he lands a hit he’ll continue a combo, but if it doesn’t hit he’s gonna do something else. He tries to use the result of his last attack to determine what to do next.”
Qianli Ma also referred to adopting some ideas from fighting games, which is why the bosses will try to dynamically adjust to the situation. They might even, reportedly, deny you a counter by not launching the final strike in a sequence you parried perfectly.
Letting bosses do some mix-ups will go a long way towards mimicking the feeling of fighting the most dangerous prey, but it’s not the only thing the Hellwalker difficulty will be doing. The interview mentions some tweaks to parry windows, but the default ones are allegedly so generous that Hellwaker simply brings them down to frame-ranges other games use for their own parry mechanics. We’ll see.
For now, Phantom Blade Zero looks incredibly stylish, with weapon switching, freeform level exploration, and seemingly some elements of Metroidvania, as new weapons might open previously unavailable locations. It’s all very intriguing, and, sadly, it’s currently unknown when PBZ is launching. What is known, is that It’ll be available for PS5 and PC.