Phantom Blade Zero receives an unofficial Soulslike mode.

Before launch: high scores and unmet expectations

Phantom Blade Zero arrived with exceptional reviews. It outscored contemporaries such as Nioh 3 and Onimusha: The Way of the Sword, earning an 88 on Metacritic and becoming the best-reviewed Chinese game of all time. TheGamer awarded it a 5/5, and its player count on Steam was striking for a single-player game.

Before launch, however, some players had concerns. Some reviewers deemed the game a little easy, and some players expected Soulslike elements that the game did not provide. S-Game had abundantly made clear that Phantom Blade Zero was not a Soulslike, but the gap between the game's design and those expectations remained.

Just a few days later: Phantom Souls arrives

Within a few days, PVLW released Phantom Souls on Nexus Mods. The mod is a comprehensive conversion: it adds the punishment, respawn rules, and boss reset logic needed to turn Phantom Blade Zero into a full Soulslike experience.

Phantom Blade Zero is still not a Soulslike by design, yet its DNA is easy to read. Its Bells mimic Dark Souls' Bonfires. The game relies heavily on parrying and dodging. Its bosses are almost rhythmic. Parts of its exploration recall Demon's Souls or Bloodborne. The inspirations are clear, but the original game charts its own path.

In the unmodded game, enemies do not respawn. Death does not cost Remnant Dust, the game's version of Souls. If a player dies during a boss fight, the boss resumes at the phase already reached. It is a fantastic game, but it is not a Soulslike, and that left a few players disappointed.

The mod's changes: 25 percent, five million, and phase resets

Phantom Souls changes that foundation. Enemies return after death or after resting at a Bell. When a player kills them a second time, they bless the player with only 25 percent of their Remnant Dust, a balance measure that still keeps the respawn pressure. As in the Souls games, touching a Bell for the first time does not cause enemies to respawn; resting at it does.

The mod also ties death to Remnant Dust. Soul drops his Remnant Dust upon death and can reclaim it only if he avoids a second death. The punishment is brutal: by a third of the way through a second playthrough, the author had over five million Dust available. The rule forces early investment.

One of the biggest early complaints about Phantom Blade Zero was boss phase behavior. If a player pushed a boss to its second phase and then died, the boss would respawn at that second phase. Phantom Souls corrects that: dying in phase 2 sends the fight back to phase 1. The mod adds a death counter, while everything else remains the same.

Current stage: optional difficulty and playable characters

PVLW's early direction is clear: make Phantom Blade Zero as difficult as possible. The mod includes content that makes normal attacks and dodges cost Sha-Chi, plus a Boss Rush mode.

If players want to take things further, other options are available. One setting makes parrying and dodging harder. Another changes the controls to a Souls-style controller layout. A third multiplies enemy damage. Or players can always play as Steve from Minecraft, Nier's 2B, or The First Descendant's Valby.

The current stage is fan-driven: Phantom Blade Zero keeps its original identity, while Phantom Souls offers a separate Soulslike path built from its Bell, Dust, parry, dodge, and boss structures. The mod's arrival within days shows how quickly a small group of design changes can reshape a game's reception among players who wanted a harsher version of the same world.