Watch On
When I flew to China to play Phantom Blade Zero earlier this year, I left without one key piece of information: When it would be out. The polished but walled off demo made it hard to tell how much of Phantom Blade Zero was finished, and it seemed equally possible that it would be arriving in early or late 2026. In a trailer at last night’s Game Awards, developer S-Game finally dropped the date: September 9, on both PlayStation 5 and PC.
As with Stellar Blade or Death Stranding 2, it wasn’t out of the question that Sony would negotiate a six month or so exclusive. I’m glad to see that’s not happening. The game will be out on both Steam and the Epic Games Store on day one.
The release date trailer shows off quite a bit of Phantom Blade Zero we haven’t seen before, including at least a couple boss fights and characters related to the story, which S-Games has so far mostly avoided showing. The area I played through earlier this year was big, but apparently entirely optional.
The highlight of the trailer for me is a battle against a boss who’s fighting in the drunken boxing style, but a close second is a short clip of protagonist Soul navigating a boat around a lake, with an imposing factory of some kind looming in the background. There’s not much to that clip, but it shows that S-Game is finally hinting at how big the world it’s building is. It seems like there’s a whole lot of Phantom Blade Zero we still haven’t seen.
Despite drawing some similarities to FromSoftware games with the branching world design (and their hero’s name), the developers have made it clear that it’s not a Soulslike: there’s no XP or RPG-style stat distribution, no souls to pick up when you die, and the action has more in common with a Devil May Cry than a Dark Souls.
Even in a year that promises Nioh 3, Code Vein 2, Crimson Desert, and Capcom’s Onimusha, this is the one I’m looking forward to most—though I have a feeling S-Game and Capcom may be fighting it out for the best action game award category this time next year.
