Chinese Mythology & Folklore in Phantom Blade Zero

Chinese mythology (中国神话, Zhōngguó shénhuà) is the vast body of myths, legends and folk beliefs that runs from creation figures such as Pangu and Nüwa, through Daoist immortals and Buddhist hells, to the village gods still carried through the streets at festivals. Phantom Blade Zero does not retell any one myth. Its developers say they mined living folk ritual instead — masks, puppets, processions, lion dances — and rebuilt it as kungfupunk.

Is Phantom Blade Zero based on Chinese mythology?

Not in the way its famous rival is. Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science, 2024) adapts Journey to the West, a 16th-century novel of gods and demons. Phantom Blade Zero is original wuxia fiction set in the Phantom World, a fantasy China of martial artists, machines and the occult, and its hero is a mortal assassin, not a god. Soulframe Liang drew the line himself in an interview with Jiefang Daily:

如果说《黑神话：悟空》是对佛教文化和物质文化的再现，那么我希望可以对民俗文化和非物质文化遗产进行传承。 — “If Black Myth: Wukong re-presents Buddhist culture and material culture, then I hope to carry on folk culture and intangible cultural heritage.”

It helps to see “Chinese mythology” as several layers, only some of which the game touches:

For the setting question in full, see Is Phantom Blade Zero based on real Chinese history?; for the head-to-head, see Phantom Blade Zero vs Black Myth: Wukong.

The folk traditions the studio names

Liang gave Jiefang Daily a specific list of traditions that appear in the game, recast in kungfupunk form, alongside imperial ceremony. Each is a real, living practice:

Nuo masks, opera faces and the rule of the mask

The oldest mask on that list belongs to nuo (傩, nuó), the exorcism rite. The Rites of Zhou describes its officiant, the Fangxiang shi, in an outfit that would not look out of place on a Phantom Blade boss:

Nuo is still performed. Also known as “ghost theatre” (鬼戏), it has been on China’s national intangible heritage list since 2006, with entries from Jiangxi counties such as Wanzai and De’an, and at Spring Festival masked dancers still go door to door in villages around Nanfeng, Jiangxi.

Opera turned the mask into paint. Peking opera, born when four Anhui troupes came to Beijing for the Qianlong Emperor’s 80th birthday in 1790, encodes character in face colour: the warlord Cao Cao wears an all-white powdered face, the sign of a man who never shows his true face. Sichuan opera went further with bian lian (变脸, biànliǎn), face-changing, in which a performer switches masks in an instant by wiping, blowing or pulling, to make a character’s inner turmoil visible. Its secrets were passed down within families, traditionally only to men.

Phantom Blade Zero builds a moral rule on this. Art director Michael told Gamersky that masks symbolise the disguise, confinement and repression of the jianghu, wrapping each character’s madness, obsession and inner struggle; almost every fallen villain appears masked, while the “unmasked” stand for xia who keep to their conscience and their code. (Liang has also joked that masks save facial-capture work.) Our reading: nuo inverts neatly here. In the old rite, putting on the mask turns a villager into a god; in the game, the mask marks the fall.

Puppets and processions: ritual theatre turned uncanny

Chinese puppetry began at the graveside. The Tang encyclopedia Tongdian says of the earliest puppet plays:

That ritual aura never quite left. Marionette troupes descended from the Fujian tradition still perform to drive off evil, and the game leans into the creepiness: the August 2026 State of Play showed “an abandoned warehouse filled with hanging puppets where a dark ritual seems to be taking place”, Chinese previews mention puppet-type enemies that shrug off bleeding, and in the Seven Stars fight the Chief Disciple’s surviving students work him like a marionette on crimson threads.

Phantom Blade Zero - Year of the Snake Gameplay Trailer 2025

Deity processions, youshen (游神, yóushén), are ritual theatre at the scale of a whole town. Temple gods are carried out in sedan chairs to tour the streets, inspect the territory they rule and sweep away evil, trailed by drummers, stilt-walkers and lion dancers. In Fujian they were established by the Song dynasty at the latest, and they could be terrifying. When plague struck Fuzhou in 1642, villages staged processions for the Five Emperors, plague gods housed and fed like magistrates; townsmen painted themselves with ghost faces, and decorated boats were launched to carry the epidemic out to sea. A local record sums up the year:

In southern Fujian, rival processions that met on the road were known to come to blows. Liang names Fujian deity processions among the game’s sources, but we have not seen a specific scene confirmed, so treat any one-to-one match as speculation for now.

Red threads of fate

The game’s most visible motif comes from a love story with a knife in it. In a Tang tale by Li Fuyan, preserved in the Taiping guangji, a young man named Wei Gu meets an old man reading by moonlight in 628. He is the Old Man under the Moon (月下老人), keeper of the underworld’s marriage registers, and his bag holds red cords:

Wei Gu is shown his destined bride, a toddler in a market, and sends a servant to stab her. Fourteen years later he marries a beautiful girl who always wears an ornament between her brows to hide a scar. Fate holds. Note the detail: the original Chinese cord binds the feet, not the little finger of later retellings.

Art director Michael says Phantom Blade Zero’s red threads work on both levels: they literally suspend and bind characters and objects, as with the snake boss and the Chief Disciple, and abstractly stand for the jianghu’s entanglements of love, hate and fate. S-GAME’s 2025 S-Party in Beijing was staged at the Shougang steelworks strung with thousands of crimson threads.

Kunlun, the Seven Stars and the Dharma-ending age

The game’s Chinese store tagline reads 在失序末法的武林中以身证道，以命寻心 — “in a disordered, Dharma-ending Wulin, prove the Way with your body and seek the heart with your life.” Mofa (末法, mòfǎ) is a Buddhist term: after the age of the True Dharma and the age of its Semblance comes the Final Dharma, when the teaching survives only in decay. To “prove the Way with one’s body” (以身证道) is to realise it through lived, physical practice — a phrase that lands hard in a game where factions modify bodies with Sha-Chi.

Chinese coverage describes the Seven Stars swordsmen as “stepping on the seven stars” (脚踏七星) to form their array, which a single “unified brain” AI controls. Wuxia readers will think of Jin Yong, whose Quanzhen Daoists fight in a Big Dipper formation in The Legend of the Condor Heroes — a comparison, not a developer claim.

Making a Chinese Nuo Opera Mask｜中国传统傩面具的制作全过程

Folklore as raw material, not scripture

Black Myth: Wukong asks players to know a novel. Phantom Blade Zero asks them to recognise a texture: the bearskin and golden eyes of the nuo exorcist, the funeral puppet, the plague procession, the cord tied around an ankle. None of it is retold faithfully, and the developers never claim it is. That is the wuxia way — take the gods and ghosts of the village and put them in the hands of mortals who fight.