When we dove into Where Winds Meet last year, one thing was clear: Everstone’s wuxia-based world permeated the very foundations of its gameplay loop. As a character whose destiny was going to be forged through steel on a long and winding road, that premise and martial-arts-focused systems made it stand out.
It still does a year later; there’s no doubt about it. But in the interim, a new contender for the gaming world’s metaphorical wuxia throne has entered the fray. Soul’s mission might not be as sprawling and vast as the one on offer in Where Winds Meet, but we’re wondering if that’s the right goalpost for a comparison between these two similar, yet fundamentally different, experiences.
Join us as we see how the two titles can measure up against each other, and whether Phantom Blade Zero can take the top spot as the wuxia experience you should choose.
A Wuxia World For The Win
It’s probably a good idea to begin with everything Where Winds Meet gets right. We’re taken back to our first month with the game last year, and the sheer wonder we felt at the way it was designed around existing in it as stylishly as you could. Self-expression underlined its combat and traversal, working well alongside a world that didn’t shy away from its inspirations, but embraced them to sell us a game that quickly became too hard to put down.
The way traversal mechanics evolve the more you engage with the world around you is a great example. With your familiarity in any given region directly tied to how convenient it is to traverse the vast landscapes it entails, Where Winds Meet automatically convinces you to invest your time in the world that’s been meticulously designed to keep you coming back for more.
Fancy moves from Lightness skills are great ways to make you feel like you’ve earned them, with wall runs, mid-air dashes, Meteor Flights, Cloud Steps, and even walking on water becoming available to you as you keep going. You soon begin to feel like the world is merely an elaborately designed stage that exists to let you pull off every fancy move at your disposal as you make your way to your next goal.
The same goes for combat. Let’s forget about the sheer spectacle of unleashing your Martial Arts and skills with your weapon of choice, and focus on how frenetic most encounters turn out to be when you’re out and about in the world. Early combat encounters might feel like clunky affairs where you rely on your dodges far too often, but nail a few parries and your confidence begins to grow.
That then translates to fights that feel like you’re giving everything you have to survive, with the resulting encounter looking and feeling like something out of a movie. That’s hitting the wuxia nail right on the head as far as the combat is concerned, and it’s helped along by enemies who come at you with intent and a fair bit of strategy in the open world.
Pick a fight with a boss, and you’re immediately tested on your knowledge of the mechanics you’ve learned so far, and how well you can weave your offense and defense together into a cohesive strategy that sees you prevail. It helps that several boss designs tie in very well to the game’s overarching wuxia themes.
Take the Shadow Puppeteer, for example. Sheng Wu’s puppets are a reflection of a traditional art form, twisted into a ruthless yet efficient fighting style that sees him use them to shoot off sweeping attacks that you’re hard-pressed to stay ahead of and respond to. The Ghost Master is equally challenging, although his use of poison and stealth ties to other ancient martial art forms and works well with Sheng Wu to demonstrate variety as well as a solid understanding of the source material and creative ways to draw from it.
Through it all, there is a very high quality of animations that makes each fight and attack very readable, and with a relatively accessible skill ceiling, Where Winds Meet immediately cements itself as a title whose combat is easy to learn, but hard to master. That’s a detail that’s very important thanks to Phantom Blade Zero’s own approach to catering to differing thresholds of challenges.
The weapons you’re fighting with are equally important parts of the experience, and it’s not every day a game lets you use an umbrella in the way that Where Winds Meet does. Its many expansions and content drops have seen it expand the arsenal of killing tools you have at your disposal, and that each one manages to feel distinct and deserving of mastery is an achievement in and of itself.
With all that’s been said about it, it might seem like Where Winds Meet has the advantage of time and its sheer scale over Phantom Blade Zero, but we’re hesitant to write off what’s looking like a more focused, intense take on the genre.
A Fight To Save Your Soul
It’s clear that player expression is an important facet of any wuxia-based experience, and we’re thinking it’s a place where Phantom Blade Zero could pull off a very welcome victory. Of course, it’s important to remember that the new game’s success doesn’t necessarily translate to the failure of Where Winds Meet, which tackles an entirely different genre altogether.
But as far as the combat system in Phantom Blade Zero goes, what we’ve seen of the game definitely has the chops to rival what’s on offer in Where Winds Meet. While the beginnings of your journey in Winds see you learning the ropes of martial arts in the hopes of achieving mastery, a narrative framing tool that works in that game’s context, your time with Soul is different.
He’s already a master Assassin, proficient with the weapons he uses and the ones he’s set to gain along the way. He’s angry, and he’s on a mission with high stakes, which means he isn’t going to hold back, and neither should you. As far as lending context to every fight goes, it’s hard not to pick up on the kind of stakes S-GAME has laid out.
But what about the fights themselves, and the ways in which you navigate the world to guide Soul to his next battle? It’s too early to tell, but Soul definitely has style and substance in the ways he interacts with the world, while the game’s animations are looking quite good so far.
If we were to run with the assumption that the final release sustains that level of quality across eight large maps, the result is an experience that is focused, well-paced, and detailed enough to help you not notice that it’s still not as massive and full of life as what’s on offer in Winds.
Soul runs along walls, climbs chains, and does flips and dodges that certainly match the style we’ve already seen from Winds, while Phantom Blade Zero’s novel approach to combat might tip the scales in its favor. The blending of your offence and defence is probably the biggest, and most impactful, departure from Winds.
You see, Winds continues the tried and tested trend of separating offensive and defensive manoeuvres, just as so many of the best combat systems over the last few years have done. Yes, you get to cancel offensive moves in favor of parries or dodges, but your defenses aren’t woven into your offensive tools.
That’s different in Phantom Blade Zero, with so many previews pointing to a combat system that encourages weaving in parries and dodges into combos as your enemy unleashes attacks without foregoing the momentum of the said combo. That you get to weave in defensive moves in the middle of your offence is certainly innovative, and is already making waves as a very entertaining take on wuxia-inspired battles.
Speaking of wuxia inspirations, Phantom could match Winds in terms of how well it’s using the genre to generate scenes and spectacles that stand out. The Lion Dance Puppeteer we saw is a great example to compare to the Shadow one from Winds, a showcase of how traditions and lore have been guiding lights for the art style and visual direction of both titles. Which one you prefer is going to come down to personal tastes, which is a compliment to both of them.
Of course, those same previews have expressed concerns about the difficulty of rank-and-file enemies, which could make the world feel oddly empty once you dispatch them. That’s made even worse by the fact that enemies don’t respawn once you clear them out. Yes, you could choose the Hardcore option to offset those concerns, but that would mean forcing yourself into a challenge that’s looking quite punishing to anybody not using the game’s systems with intent and strategy.
Lastly, it’s quite likely that the arsenal of weapons and Phantom Edges that Soul is going to get his hands on could beat anything that Winds has given us so far. Take the dual blades that function almost independently of each other, or the presence of cannons and flamethrowers for Soul to let loose with.
But there’s still an important question left unanswered.
Can Soul Edge Ahead Of A Well-Established Rival?
We must take into account that Winds has had a lot of time to prove itself and establish a player base that love its offering. It’s done that by offering several facets of a riveting experience that Phantom is yet to prove it has.
Winds has proven it brings variety, useful weapons, and a combat system that gives you everything you need tos tay responsive under pressure, while ordinary encounters can often be as thrilling as the last boss you took on. Phantom Blade Zero could fall behind on the challenge its basic enemies offer, but on all those other parameters, it seems poised to put up a very entertaining fight.
That’s a good thing, and all that remains is to see if it’s able to sustain the level of quality it has shown us over the course of Soul’s adventure, which would allow it to be a very satisfying take on wuxia, and one in which we, the players, are the driving force behind the spectacle of it all.
That’s something you don’t get too often, and we’re glad to have a second offering in a genre we’re very intrigued by.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
