Phantom Blade Zero’s Best Bosses Are Now Playable Characters, Thanks to One Modder

Ten days after launch, three of Phantom Blade Zero’s bosses are playable characters, and the Bai Chilian mod has already passed 23,000 downloads.

The work comes from QOutlaw on Nexus Mods, who has converted Bai Chilian, Yuding and Mo Yuan into player models that replace Soul. They land on a modding scene that moved fast out of the gate, having already produced full Soulslike overhauls, cheat menus and an imported Sun Wukong.

Bai Chilian came first and remains the headline. She closes out Crimson Forest, the game’s second area, across two phases: a grounded opening where she calls ribbon snakes into the fight, and a second half where she turns possessed and attacks from strings strung around the arena. Collect every memory flower tied to her and one of Soul’s allies joins the fight. The mod ships her base form along with her outfits and her voice, and pairing it with the White Serpent and Crimson Viper swords is the obvious build.

Yuding - No.12 Crescent Blade Puppet followed. That encounter sits late in the campaign and carries some of the sharpest animation work in the game, and the weapon it drops is a contender for the strongest of the thirty on offer. It is a less recognisable face than Bai Chilian, which is most of why the mod reads as a deeper cut.

The third turns Soul into Mo Yuan, the masked man behind the Loong challenges. Donnie Yen plays him, he sits at the centre of the overarching plot, and reaching the true ending runs through him. The rundown comes from TheGamer’s Sam Woods, who scored the game 5/5 at review and reckons installing any of the three is enough to make a New Game Plus run feel like a different game.

Playable-character mods are the only kind I bother installing, because they change how a game feels to move through instead of changing how fast the numbers climb. Mo Yuan is the one I would load first, and the Donnie Yen of it is only part of the reason. I would take a second run as the character the first run was built around pointing at over any difficulty slider the genre has to offer.

The scene is this busy because the audience is enormous. S-GAME announced on the game’s official X account that Phantom Blade Zero had sold 4 million copies across all platforms inside 72 hours, which is the kind of install base that produces 23,000 downloads on a single character swap within days. Wishlists had passed three million before release, and pre-orders took the top of Steam’s global sales chart within a day of opening on August 12.

The PC numbers tell the same story. SteamDB logged a launch-day peak of 430,000 players on Steam, putting the game third on the most-played list behind Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 and ahead of PUBG, Apex Legends and Cyberpunk 2077. That peak climbed to 833,921 over the following days, and those figures cover Steam alone, leaving out the Epic Games Store and PS5. Steam reviews currently sit at 89% positive and the PlayStation Store rating is 4.71 out of 5.

Critics arrived at a similar place. Reviews called it the best action game of the year when the embargo lifted on October 26, with an OpenCritic Top Critic Average of 91 across 30 reviews and every one of those critics recommending it. Metacritic settled at 88 from 31 reviews, with 97% positive, 3% mixed and nothing negative, and the same 88 on both PC and PS5.

One score broke the pattern and started an argument. A 60 out of 100 kept the game off a Must-Play badge on Metacritic, and players responded by arguing that Eurogamer has no love for Chinese games, pointing at identical 60s handed to Black Myth: Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers against a 100 for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The complaint widened from there to the same reviewer scores given to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Control Resonant, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse and Final Fantasy Resonance. The write-up itself praised the combat as fluid and cinematic while calling the balance and quality issues enough to dim it.

Phantom Blade Zero is a wuxia action RPG from Chinese studio S-GAME, built in Unreal Engine 5, in a setting the developers call kungfupunk, mixing martial arts, steampunk and mysticism. You play Soul, an assassin framed for killing the head of his order and left mortally wounded, kept alive by a healer for exactly 66 days and spending them hunting the real killer. It launched on October 29 on PC and PlayStation 5 at $59.99 for the Standard Edition and $69.99 for the Deluxe, after a 50-day delay from an original September 9 date, and it stays a PS5 console exclusive for a year.