Phantom Blade Zero is out now, and players have flocked to what developer S-Game calls its “kungfupunk” world. 2026 has been a great year for action games, and Phantom Blade Zero stands out from the rest due to its focus on emulating the look and feel of wuxia stories, the Chinese genre that focuses on highly stylized martial arts. Director Soulframe Liang said he wanted to “create a playable kung fu movie” with Phantom Blade Zero. As part of a preview event hosted by S-Game in China last month, Polygon spoke with him in a group Q&A and a one-on-one chat.
That preview event also included a visit to the developer’s Shanghai motion capture studio, where the press heard from combat director Yang Liu. Liang has been creating the world of Phantom Blade Zero for 20 years, beginning with the RPGMaker game Rainblood: Town of Death and continuing in two more Rainblood games, a few Phantom Blade mobile games, and the free-to-play Phantom Blade: Executioners. The action-packed Phantom Blade Zero is a new endeavor for him, being his and S-Game’s first big-budget, AAA game.
That ambitious goal is “why we struggle so much,” Liang said. To help create that playable kung fu movie, Liang and S-Game brought a bona fide kung fu star on board: Donnie Yen, who’s starred in the Ip Man series, John Wick 4, and many, many more action-packed films. Mutual friends introduced them, and initially Soulframe and Yen didn’t plan to work together.
Yen was excited for Phantom Blade Zero and happy to see a Chinese developer taking on such a project, as previously “the best kung fu game[s] [were] made by Japanese companies or French companies,” according to Liang. He quickly learned that wasn’t the case. The studio wanted to rely on “his experience and skill, not only his face.” Yen is credited as a creative consultant on the game, influencing the game’s kung fu aesthetic and principles.
He also plays Mó Yuan in Phantom Blade Zero, a character wearing a golden mask who pops up periodically, and at one point even fights in a cutscene while cradling a baby. Yen was filming projects like Caine (his John Wick spinoff film) during development, and so he would fly into Shanghai on weekends to help direct combat and record mo-cap for his character. Yen has a team of 15-20 people helping out, including The Furious director Kenji Tanigaki as an action director.
Liang called Tanigaki an “apprentice of Donnie.” Liang said “everything was surprising” in terms of what Yen and his team brought to development. They helped S-Game evolve Phantom Blade Zero from a “traditional” action game with a wuxia aesthetic into one that actually makes players feel like a wuxia hero. Applying wuxia fundamentals to Phantom Blade Zero presented a formidable challenge for the team, “because we're trying to do something brand new.” In comes Master Yang.
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