From Rainblood to Zero: The Phantom Blade Series History

The Phantom Blade series began as Rainblood (雨血, yǔxuè)雨血 YǔxuèSoulframe Liang’s original indie series that began the Phantom Blade universe.Glossary →, a short, turn-based PC game that Soulframe Liang (梁其伟) built alone in RPG Maker while studying architecture, and grew, through mobile games played by millions in China, into the 3D action game Phantom Blade Zero. Liang calls Zero “the spiritual rebirth of the original Rainblood”: the same doomed swordsman and the same rain-soaked town, rebuilt at full scale.

Timeline: every game from Rainblood to Zero

Where the sources disagree, the table shows both. Rainblood’s first release is dated 2008 by 36Kr and ChuApp but 2010 by Liang himself, which is also the year of its English version. 36Kr dates the first Phantom Blade to September 2017, while Chinese Wikipedia says 2014. No reliable date has surfaced for Phantom Blade 2. Even Soul’s countdown shifts: Rainblood gives him 64 days to live according to 36Kr, “sixty-odd” according to Jiefang Daily, against Zero’s 66. More in Why 66 days?

Soulframe Liang: the architecture student who made Rainblood

Liang, born in 1985, studied architecture at Tsinghua University and then Yale, and began making games in his third undergraduate year, according to Jiefang Daily. In his 2023 PlayStation Blog post he described Rainblood as a refuge: “The process of making it was an escape from the difficulties and frustrations life threw at me,” written “when I was studying architecture, first in Beijing, then in New Haven.” He told Jiefang Daily he was 20 when he created it.

The tools set the limits. Liang told IGN he “had to go with turn-based combat” because “of the limitations of my tools and capacities”, and that “the complete walkthrough of Rain Blood is about two hours, which is like a fragment of a longer story.” The composer Bo Caisheng found the game among free indie downloads and has scored the series for about 15 years since.

The style was already there. Liang says that as a student he was mixing wuxia, steampunk and parallel universes, and he calls Zero “a complete version of the style I wish I could’ve done in Rain Blood.” That style now has a name: kungfupunk.

From PC indie to mobile, and back

Liang founded S-GAME (灵游坊) in 2011 after returning to China, with RMB 1 million from ZhenFund’s Xu Xiaoping. Rainblood 2: City of Flame and the Unity-built side-scroller Rainblood Chronicles: Mirage kept the series on PC, but Jiefang Daily notes that China’s single-player market was then too small to live on, so the studio turned to commercial mobile games under a new name, Phantom Blade (影之刃), with NetEase’s support. Phantom Blade 2 drew pay-to-win criticism; Phantom Blade 3 topped the iOS RPG chart in 2021. Liang’s 2023 summary: “Most of these games were for smartphones and never released outside of China. Still, we’ve managed to build a fan base of over 20 million.”

Zero’s own road was long:

• 22 Nov 2016. At a Rainblood anniversary concert, a remake with an extended plot is announced under the codename 影之刃Zero.
• 2017–2021. Early concept art appears at ChinaJoy 2017; the project is paused in 2018 and revived in 2021, the year Tencent takes a 25% stake in S-GAME.
• 2022–2023. Full-scale development begins in 2022, and the game is revealed at the PlayStation Showcase on 24 May 2023.
• 2024–2025. A World Tour Demo reaches more than 12,000 players at BilibiliWorld, ChinaJoy, gamescom and Tokyo Game Show in 2024, followed by the S-Party hands-on events of 2025.
• 2026. A 50-day delay moves launch from 9 September to 29 October; on 5 August the studio announces that “development on Phantom Blade Zero is now complete.”

The studio grew with the game. By December 2025 S-GAME had about 140 staff: roughly 100 at its Beijing headquarters, about 20 in a Shanghai motion-capture and animation studio, 16 on a Hong Kong art team, plus a publishing team in Los Angeles.

Phantom Blade Zero “Year of the Dragon” special trailer: Rain and Blood

What Zero changes, and what it keeps

In an August 2025 post, Liang laid out the changes. The story keeps Rainblood’s framework, but “all character relationships and emotional motives are new”, and no prior knowledge is needed.

• The opening is softened. The girl murdered at the start of Rainblood, who appeared underage, is made older, and her killing is no longer shown.
• The betrayal plot is rewritten. In Rainblood, Zuo Shang and his wife Xuan Yu (玄鱼) conspire against Soul; that storyline is reworked.
• Fate can be changed. Yu’er’s (玉儿) father, killed in Rainblood during the “masked-faces uprising” (怪面之乱), can now be saved.
• White hair means something. Soul’s and Zuo Shang’s white hair now marks their lives draining away after each wounded the other with his ultimate technique, and their faces age with it.
• The anime look is gone. The white, pink and blue hair of the 2D era gives way to realistic faces built from scanned actors.
• A new father figure. Phantom Blade 2’s vampire-styled Bastion lord 魔天 is replaced by Mó Yuan (魔渊), played by Donnie Yen.

Continuity runs through the cast too. Soul’s face and performance come from Yucheng (煜城), a Shanghai stage actor who played Rainblood as a teenager; Zuo Shang’s performer, Zhang Xince, plays Phantom Blade 3, and Zuo Shang’s robes follow that game’s 轻羽 (“Light Feather”) class design. And the format has flipped: a two-hour, turn-based fragment has become a real-time action game built in Unreal Engine 5. For who’s who, see our character names guide.

Pangzhen returns

Pangzhen (庞镇), the town at the heart of Rainblood, is Zero’s central hub: now in 3D, “perpetually rain-drenched”, and built from scans of several ancient Chinese towns, as S-GAME showed in its “Return to Pangzhen” reveal in August 2025. The story begins on the road to Pangzhen and is told partly in flashbacks. Bo Caisheng wrote the Pangzhen music in seven-beat time to make players feel “groundless”, and Rainblood-era themes return: 《雁字归川》, 《辰虫木楼》 and 《跋扈万里》.

Do you need the old games? No. But knowing that Zero is a student’s RPG Maker project rebuilt at full scale explains a lot, from a town that never dries out to a hero who has always been running out of days.