Phantom Blade Zero Beginner's Guide: 12 Things to Know First

Phantom Blade Zero looks like a punishing action game and behaves like a generous action RPG. The early hours get much easier once you stop treating every fight as a war of attrition against your own resources. These are the habits worth forming before the first real boss.

Which difficulty should a first-time player pick?

Start on Wayfarer unless you already play action games at a high level. By the producer's own description, Wayfarer still demands a real exchange with every boss; the difference is that enemies circle and probe more than they commit, leaving you room to finish combos and learn patterns. It is not a one-hit-kill tourist mode.

Hellwalker is the same game with enemies that adapt: feints, interrupted strings, and decisions based on your habits. Pathbreaker sits between the two, but its English name and exact tuning are not confirmed, so do not plan a run around a specific number. Sixty-Six Days is not a first-playthrough option; it unlocks later and imposes a death limit.

You can earn trophies on all three lower tiers, so a first run on Wayfarer costs you no achievements. Whether the difficulty can be changed after the first menu is Unconfirmed: the confirmed material says only that all achievements are obtainable on the first three modes, not that the setting is freely switchable mid-run.

Learn the flash colours before anything else

Enemy specials are colour-coded and the answer is not symmetric. Meet a blue attack with a guard at the moment of impact; meet a red attack with a dodge. Doing the wrong one costs you the counter, the Sha-Chi refund and often the exchange.

Perfect guards do not spend your own Sha-Chi and take a large bite out of the enemy's bar. That is the single most valuable habit in the game, and it is worth drilling on ordinary soldiers before the first boss.

Do not play it like a Souls game

Holding guard is a losing strategy. Guarding drains Sha-Chi continuously, and once the bar empties you lose access to guard and the special counters, and take more hitstun and more damage. A player who backs off and waits is spending a resource that only comes back through aggression.

The producer puts the split at roughly 70 percent of a boss's Sha-Chi loss coming from your attacks and about 30 percent from defensive counters. The figure comes from an interview rather than the game itself, but the design direction is clear: you drain the bar by pressing forward, not by turtling.

Which weapon should you start with?

Your default blade, Black Scars, still has no confirmed special mechanic, which makes it a clean practice tool. When the first alternatives arrive, three are especially forgiving:

• Bandit-Bane Blade turns a well-timed heavy attack into a full Sha-Chi wipe and an execution. It is widely described as the easiest counter weapon to learn.
• Jagged Steel stacks bleed on living enemies and is excellent for clearing early areas. It falls off later, when non-living enemies stop bleeding.
• Enemies cannot fully block the Soft Snake Sword, but its raw damage is low and it rewards precise defensive counters over mashing.

Carry a second main weapon as soon as the game allows it. Switching refills your Sha-Chi, which is both a survival tool and a way to extend pressure.

Upgrade one weapon, not all of them

Upgrade materials are limited, but the Reforge Talisman resets a weapon's upgrade level and returns everything invested in it. That means a bad early investment is recoverable; it does not mean you should spread materials across five blades.

Pick one main weapon for the first region, take it to the tier that unlocks its extra skill, and keep the rest of your materials in reserve until a boss forces a change. Accessories are the same story: there are six slots, with a maximum of three from any one category, so a focused set beats a scattered one.

How do bells work?

Bells are this game's checkpoints. Touching one restores health, refills your healing supply and opens fast travel. They are placed generously: in the opening chapter you find one every couple of encounters, and there is almost always one before a boss.

Travel between bells is free. You only spend a healing item when you teleport from anywhere other than a bell — a correction S-GAME's producer made publicly after a preview video suggested otherwise. Do not hoard travel items for bell-to-bell movement.

What do the quest colours mean?

Quests are tagged by colour. Gold is the main story, purple is a critical side story and white is an ordinary side quest. Purple matters most: these chains carry lore, hidden bosses and hidden weapons, and pushing the main story past a key point can permanently change how an NPC's story ends.

The game warns you before an irreversible step and keeps a quest log of clues even if you skip dialogue, so you do not need to play with a wiki open. Still, clear purple markers in a region before pushing its main objective.

What should you do in the first region?

Explore before you optimize. The map is eight hand-drawn areas connected through Pangzhen, and progress gates on traversal tools rather than keys alone: a new Phantom Edge can open a chain, a ledge or an anchor point that was previously out of reach. Marked but unreachable spots are meant to be remembered, not solved on sight.

Spend your first sessions on three things: learning the flash colours, testing two or three weapon types, and clearing purple quests. Do not grind enemies for materials; the game is built around curated encounters rather than respawning camps.

Common mistakes in the first ten hours

• Holding guard by default and running out of Sha-Chi.
• Ignoring the second weapon slot and losing the free refill.
• Spreading upgrade materials across every new blade.
• Treating purple quests as optional content to do later.
• Assuming a boss must be beaten in one clean run; dying in phase two lets you restart from phase two.
• Buying into the "Souls-like" label and expecting i-frames on every dodge.

Related guides

• Combat system explained: Sha-Chi, parry and Ghoststep
• Difficulty modes compared
• Weapons: every confirmed primary blade
• World and regions