Phantom Blade Zero is among the many high-profile games launching during October to avoid colliding directly with GTA 6, but the action game developed by S-Game was originally supposed to launch on September 9 on PC and PlayStation 5. Still, director Soulframe Liang took advantage of the game’s original release day to provide some great insight, revealing how a single playthrough at any difficulty will be enough to unlock the Platinum Trophy, but New Game+ and the Sixty-Six Days difficulty mode will reveal the true essence of the experience.
“I never thought before that in Phantom Blade Zero, my favorite modes to play would be the easiest ‘Wayfarer’ mode and the most hardcore ‘Sixty-Six Days’ mode,” Soulframe said in a Bilibili post as reported on the game’s subreddit. “When I first conceived of Phantom Blade Zero in 2018, I originally envisioned the entire game like this: an unselectable super-high difficulty, with players meeting their end after sixty-six deaths. With each restart, due to the improvement of the player’s skills, you may get closer to the ending of the game than the last time.”
Ultimately, a roguelike run like this has been deemed to be too much. While the tension coming with the possibility of losing 20-plus hours of progress would have made for excellent streaming moments, it would also have led to frustration. As such, S-Game decided to follow a more traditional difficulty system, and leave Sixty-Six Days Mode as an exclusive New Game+ mode.
“The save file for ‘Sixty-Six Days’ is separate from other difficulties. Once you touch the bell, it will auto-save, and there is no manual save. The process faithfully records all your mistakes and frustrations, and you cannot reload data before your errors, just like in life,” Soulframe explained. “If you consume all the days, you will enter an ending of regretting in the martial world, and this ending also has a short animation. After it plays, this session’s data will become history forever, and then it will ask if you want to start over.”
Such a hard challenge may have made it very difficult for most players to unlock the Phantom Blade Zero Platinum Trophy, so S-Game decided to not tie any achievement to it. “All achievements in Phantom Blade Zero can be obtained in the first three difficulty levels. Even if you play entirely as a ‘Wayfarer,’ you can still unlock all achievements within a single playthrough. Therefore, Phantom Blade Zero is a game where, regardless of whether you have the skills or experience to play this type of game, as long as you immerse yourself in exploring this world, you can obtain the Platinum Trophy in one playthrough.”
Playing through Sixty-Six Days Mode in New Game+ may not have an “utilitarian” value, but it will be like true martial arts training, and the ultimate challenge pleasure. To provide an incentive to play through the game a second time or more, S-Game will also deliver some sort of exclusive content in the form of late-game weapons that wouldn’t see much use in a first playthrough. The 55 weapons‘ own growth system will apparently also influence more than just stats, providing one more incentive.
“‘Phantom Blade Zero’ features a vast arsenal of weapons, but if you delve deeply into each one, you will discover that it has its own growth system—and often far more than just numbers. For the same weapon at level 1 and level 30, due to the improvement of certain characteristics, their operation methods and combat strategies may be vastly different,” Soulframe said.
Ever since I played the game for the very first time in 2024, I have been extremely excited for Phantom Blade Zero, and with every new bit of information, it truly seems like we will soon get to experience a game that could define the action genre for this console generation. There’s still some time until release, but I am ready as much as the many who pre-ordered the game to embark with Soul on this perilous journey.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack.
After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA’s president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3.
When he’s not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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