Defense and Dodge Mechanics

Defense Mechanics Fit the Faster Combat Feel

Q:

Can Phantom Blade Zero’s defense mechanics keep up with its faster combat feel?

A:

The game’s defense system is interesting. I call it “underlying adaptive defense,” and it was likely designed this way to match the combat style.

How the Mechanics Work

Put simply, you can press guard during a normal attack, a Sha-Chi attack, a dodge, or hitstun. The guard immediately cancels the original action, replaces it with a block, and negates the damage.

Alternatively, you can press guard before you start an attack. The guard then sits in the background and remains active. It does not interfere with the attack that follows, and it triggers the moment an enemy attack reaches its hit check, negating the damage.

Open question: when guard cancels the original action, does it happen the moment you press the button, or only when a blockable enemy move reaches its hit check?

That determines whether you must press guard before the attack begins, or whether pressing it during the attack animation also works.

When to Use It

Learn this system well and you gain insurance and a recovery option in many attack and defense situations.

Against a strong enemy, the following recovery cases can become mandatory.

Scenario 1: If the first hit of a short enemy combo connects, press guard as quickly as possible to block the rest of the string. Otherwise the full combo can take a large chunk of your health.

Scenario 2: After the gauge breaks, switch to your other weapon as soon as possible. Guard becomes available again.

Caveats

That said, this system will not keep Soul safe at all times. Guard is unavailable while the gauge recovers, red-light attacks cannot be guarded, and there are a few more points to watch.

Scenario 1: Some of Soul’s moves may not be cancellable by guard or dodge, and Soul is not safe while performing them. In the Lion Dance fight from the State of Play show, the Wind-Thunder Twin Swords ultimate that closes the sequence neither interrupts the enemy nor grants invulnerability. To keep a high-cost move from being cancelled by accident, it most likely cannot be cancelled by guard or dodge either. When you use moves like these, keep clear of the enemy’s attack.

Scenario 2: Spend Sha-Chi carefully. Holding guard drains Sha-Chi, so if you want more insurance in reserve, spend sparingly on offense. A Sha-Chi attack can be cancelled, but its Sha-Chi cost is paid when the move starts and is not refunded on cancel. If you are unsure how long a damage window will last, either skip the Sha-Chi attack or use it early.

What Guard and Dodge Do Against Each Attack Type

How do ordinary enemy attacks, red and blue-light, and black-light play out under each guard and dodge option?

Dodging

Dodging works much the same way against most enemy moves, so these results go together.

• Spamming dodge will most likely not give you full i-frame coverage through a very long chain. In earlier builds, both consecutive step-dashes and the Jade Twin Rings’ blink had gaps in their i-frames. Double and triple flips have been added since, but gaps are probably still designed in.

• Time a dodge correctly and it avoids damage from almost any move.

• A dodge costs no Sha-Chi and does not affect the enemy’s Sha-Chi, whether it succeeds or fails.

Dodging a red-light is not just an escape: land it perfectly and it triggers a Ghost Step counter too — circle behind, Sha-Chi refunded, the same payoff as a precise guard on blue. A late or early dodge only avoids the hit and gets nothing, and the difference between the two colours is one layer only: blue can be blocked, red cannot.

Guarding: Ordinary and Precise

The items below spell out, move type by move type, the results of ordinary guard and of precise guard.

Against an ordinary attack, neither guard type costs you health. An ordinary guard drains Sha-Chi, scaled to the weight of the move. A precise guard leaves Sha-Chi unchanged: no gain, no loss.

Against blue-light, neither guard type costs you health. An ordinary guard drains a large amount of Sha-Chi. A precise guard restores a large amount of Sha-Chi and triggers a Ghost Step counter.

Black light is a newer mechanic still under study. The available footage shows only that a precise guard prevents health loss. Sha-Chi is cut to a sliver, just enough to keep the gauge from breaking, no matter how much Sha-Chi you had.

Against red-light attacks, guard does not work. A hit costs health and drains Sha-Chi.

Enhanced Guard and Dodge

Some weapons enhance guard or dodge. For example:

• A new sustained guard ability (a soft sword cuts through threads).
• More room for error on guard and dodge (the Jade Twin Rings’ dodge; Twin Hooks may have a counter stance).
• Bigger payoff from a precise guard (Bandit-Slaying Blade, The Fanatic’s Broken Blade).

Reaction Cues

Q:

Some attacks in The Hunt and Huangyinzi fights come from off-screen, but a qi pillar also appears around Soul. How should you read and answer a move like this?

A:

At some point, clear elements begin to appear within the pillar. Those elements are the player’s only cue for a precisely timed answer.

Designed correctly, they work like a starting gun. When it fires, you act: no jumping the start, no delay.

When Reaction Cues Should Appear

A cue must appear no later than 0.25 seconds before the hit check. Human reaction is a full observe-decide-execute chain, and in single-player combat games, 0.25 seconds is a fair baseline. If the cue appears too late, the player cannot respond in time.

The earliest a cue can appear is the baseline reaction time plus the answer’s i-frames, counted back from the hit check. That could be 0.25 plus 0.3 seconds. If it appears too early, the player reacts, starts the answer, and runs out of i-frames before the hit check arrives. That is how you get caught in recovery.

What Can Serve as a Reaction Cue

Reaction cues are a big topic and the design centerpiece of read-and-answer combat. Put it bluntly: if a game gets reaction cues wrong, players will abandon its read-and-answer combat. This page will not go deeper into the subject; here are the possible types.

A cue can be the start of a specific motion (a “motion” cue), a pause or slowdown at the start of a wind-up (a “stillness” cue), a glow or flash, a sound, a change in an external effect, or a slow or medium-speed charge, projectile, or circular sweep whose path you can read ahead. In short, it can be a reaction cue as long as it is clear, appears only in the valid window, and makes sense to players.

(The “stillness” cue is especially easy to overlook and misread.)

An enemy’s fighting style usually corresponds to its main type of reaction cue. You can try to guess from its look and weapon before the fight, but more often you only learn it by fighting.

The Special Case of Short Combos

Short combos are a special case. It is hard to give every hit an effective reaction cue. Designers usually place cues on only a few hits in the string, such as the first and last.