©S-Game
At Tokyo Game Show 2024, I had the opportunity to go hands-on with the upcoming action game Phantom Blade 0. It’s violent, bloody and difficult, so it’s not going to be easy. But it’s the hard mode I’m most excited about.
The demo consists of a tutorial and three boss fights (plus a set of normal enemies before the first one). For each boss, I equipped different weapons – a straight sword, a long sword and a curved sword. (There were other weapons I could switch between, including the twin daggers and the wheelblade, but I honestly forgot to try them in the heat of battle.)
Basic combat is fairly simple; you use a mix of light and strong attacks to perform various combos. Then, when an enemy attacks, you can block or dodge—when an enemy attack flashes red or blue, you have the opportunity to perform a precise dodge or parry, ultimately landing a full combo behind the enemy.
This is where the stamina bar comes into play. While normal attacks do not require stamina, defensive actions do. Dodge takes a chunk out of it every time it’s used. Then, when blocking, the energy bar slowly depletes even if you’re not being attacked. When attacked while blocking, small pieces will fall off the bar after each hit. Of course, being attacked directly without dodging or blocking will cause your stamina bar and health to be significantly reduced.
However, parrying does not deplete the stamina bar (parrying blue attacks and dodging red attacks even restores the stamina bar). So I spent most of my time in the demo trying to block everything out – with admittedly mixed results. The time window for parrying is pretty tight, and I found that if I missed the first parry, I often missed the entire chain. When I fought the third boss, I started blocking all normal attacks and only parrying/dodging the colored flash attacks. This strategy works quite well.
So you might be wondering how difficult this game is. Well, as you can see in my gameplay clip (which unfortunately lacks sound due to my mistake), I didn’t make it through the demo unscathed. I faced every boss twice. Each time, I was destroyed on my first try to learn its attack patterns and came out on top on my second try.
I’d say this is the easiest difficulty sweet spot for these types of games. I can’t blindly blast my way through it on my first try, but I also won’t spend hours banging my head against the wall.
However, for those who find the normal difficulty mode too easy, the booth attendant told me that the full version of the game will also come with a hard mode that will completely change how the game is played. In Hard mode, bosses have no combo patterns to remember. They also don’t attack like crazy, but react to where you are near them and what you’re doing. I was excited to try the game when it was released.
All in all, I enjoyed my time. The game is still in the early stages of development, but the core combat gameplay is already quite solid. I look forward to seeing how it fleshes out in the coming years.
