Phantom Blade Zero Bosses: How Many Players Beat Each One

A spoiler note before the tables: S-GAME marks its boss achievements as hidden on Steam, and the names below come from that hidden list. The two ending achievements are mentioned but their bosses are not named.

Screenshot: Phantom Blade Zero Steam store page (S-GAME)

How many bosses are in Phantom Blade Zero?

At least 50. Director Soulframe Liang tied the count to the arsenal, since nearly every main weapon and Phantom Edge drops from a boss, as both KeenGamer and Analytics Insight report. KeenGamer's full roster counts 62 boss fights once repeat duels such as the five Gold-Masked One fights are listed separately.

Steam tracks far fewer of them. The game has 66 achievements, and 18 of those are tied to defeating a boss or a set of bosses. The rest cover story beats, side tales, weapon skills and collectibles. So the data below is a sample of the roster, not the whole thing, and that matters for how far you can push it.

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Phantom Blade Zero bosses by share of Steam players

Order numbers follow KeenGamer's roster. Game8 and Fextralife put the same bosses in the same early regions, though Game8 lists The Hunt before Hua, Deadly Betrothed. Percentages are Steam's global unlock rates, pulled on November 1 from the Steam Web API and matching the Steam Community achievements page.

The two ending achievements, All Dreams Must End and With Heart and Blood, both sat at 0.5%.

Where players actually stop

The story achievements give a clean early curve, because nobody can skip them. Steam showed 92.4% escaping the pursuers on the Main Road, 75.3% through the Outpost and 61.4% out of the cave behind the waterfall. We left the Mirrorwood achievement (32.8%) out of the curve: fewer players hold it than have beaten Bai Chilian (35.1%), who comes after the maze, and no source we found says exactly what triggers it.

The main bosses carry the rest. From The Hunt (65.8%), the last Weeping Creek Valley boss in the table, to Bai Chilian (35.1%) at the end of the Crimson Forest, the field drops 30.7 points. The next two stretches, to Mu Xiaokui in the Village of Lu and then to Flame in Pangzhen, cost 13.4 and 13.0 points, less than that combined. Inside the forest, Hua Qianxiao to Bai Chilian alone loses 31% of the players who had beaten Hua Qianxiao, and Peng Meng to Bai Chilian cuts the field to less than half.

The obvious reading is that Bai Chilian is the wall. We'd push back on that. The step from Peng Meng to Hua Qianxiao, the first Crimson Forest boss, is 26.3 points, bigger than the 15.9 from Hua Qianxiao to Bai Chilian. The road to Bai Chilian also runs through the Mirrorwood Depths portal maze near the end of the region; Game8's quest walkthrough and games.gg's puzzle guide both put the maze right before her fight. The more interesting question is how much of the Crimson Forest is a long chapter rather than a hard duel, and the data alone can't split the two.

Screenshot: Phantom Blade Zero Steam store page (S-GAME)

Optional fights lag main ones, even when they come first

Two pairs show how much "optional" weighs on these figures. KeenGamer marks Hua, Deadly Betrothed as optional and The Hunt's second fight as main. Hua comes first in KeenGamer's order, yet fewer players have beaten her than The Hunt. Further on, the Chief Disciple of the Seven-Stars in the Mandate Encampment comes before Flame but trails it by about three points; KeenGamer calls the Chief Disciple optional and Flame main.

Game8 also files both Hua and the Chief Disciple under its optional bosses, so the two guide sites agree. In both pairs the pattern holds: a fight that the critical path lets you walk past loses players a main boss does not.

You can also see that players aren't skipping combat as a whole. 80.2% have performed a Chain Assassination, more than the 77.3% who beat Peng Meng, and 37.1% have triggered the Bloodthirst Frenzy on the Outlaw's Warblade, a weapon Jing Ye drops in the Crimson Forest.

The counter-case: this is a clock, not a skill test

There are good reasons not to read these numbers as a difficulty ranking. Three of them carry most of the weight.

First, time. The snapshot was taken about three days after the October 28 launch at 7 PM PDT. Liang has put the main story at 20 to 30 hours, and KeenGamer's trophy guide puts a full platinum run at 30 to 40. Almost nobody has had that many hours yet, which explains the 0.5% ending rate better than any boss does.

Second, the denominator. Valve doesn't publish what these percentages are out of. If it is every Steam owner, people who bought the game and haven't launched it pull every figure down. Either way, nothing from PS5 or Epic is counted. More than 470,000 people were playing on Steam on Sunday morning UTC, so these figures describe a large crowd, but only one storefront's slice of it.

Third, the difficulty menu. Every achievement can be earned on Wayfarer, the easiest mode, and difficulty sits in the pause menu, per KeenGamer's trophy guide and the vi.ki wiki. Some reviewers even found the game lenient in places, including boss fights with multiple phase checkpoints, Kotaku's roundup notes; KeenGamer explains that a checkpoint after phase one means a death in phase two restarts phase two. A percentage that low on Saw It Through tells you how few have arrived, not how many bounced off.

Screenshot: Phantom Blade Zero Steam store page (S-GAME)

What the numbers are good for

They do settle one thing for anyone stuck in the Crimson Forest: plenty of players are stuck there with you. The 30.7 points the table loses between The Hunt and Bai Chilian is more than the next two stretches combined. Bosses don't respawn and can't be refought freely, and free roam after the story lets you clear leftover bosses before New Game+, so an optional duel you skip now, such as the Chief Disciple, will still be there.

We'd watch two numbers over the next week. If Bai Chilian climbs toward Hua Qianxiao's figure as players catch up, the Crimson Forest was a long chapter. If the gap holds while Mu Xiaokui and Flame climb, it's a real difficulty spike. For dates, platforms and editions, see our Phantom Blade Zero release date guide. If you want more boss-heavy action RPGs after this, our Bylina review and Kristala review cover two smaller ones.

References

• Steam Web API: global achievement percentages, Phantom Blade Zero
• Steam Community: Phantom Blade Zero achievements
• Steam store: Phantom Blade Zero
• KeenGamer: all bosses and their rewards
• KeenGamer: trophy list and platinum roadmap
• Game8: list of all bosses in order
• Game8: Whence the Weeping quest walkthrough
• games.gg: Weeping portal puzzle solution
• Fextralife wiki: bosses
• Analytics Insight: director teases 50-plus bosses
• vi.ki: difficulty modes
• vi.ki: how long to beat
• Kotaku: review roundup