The Phantom Blade Zero Triple Threat quest is one of the earliest side quests you can pick up, but you won't complete it until almost the end of the game. Starting with a pretty tough boss, followed by many hours of nothing, this quest suddenly picks up once you reach the Mirage Estate. There's a lot to do, it's a bit complicated, and it doesn't help that if you've not got a particular weapon, you can't get all the quest rewards either, so here's how you complete the full Triple Threat quest in Phantom Blade Zero.
- Defeat the Phantom Blade Zero Three-Faced Puppet in the Weeping Creek Valley rift.
- Keep playing the game to eventually reach the Mirage Estate. This takes many hours and is a significant point-of-no-return, so I strongly advise exploring every region thoroughly and completing other quests before proceeding to the estate, such as opening the Phantom Blade Zero Crimson Manor and defeating the Phantom Blade Zero Blizzard Blademaster.
- While playing the game, turn Sanguine Reach into Blazing Edge with Soul Tempering. Sanguine Reach is a two-handed weapon you should have picked up very early in the game in the Weeping Creek Valley Mandate Outpost. You need two items which combine to form the Flaming Grip, which is the necessary Soul Tempering item for Sanguine Reach:
- Scorching Flames: Defeat Zhu Yuan, The Searing Blade at the bottom of the Lake Meigu Sha-Chi Tower, reached using the lift at the tower's south upper entrance.
- Quenched Flaming Grip: Defeat the Phantom Blade Zero Gold-Masked One at three different Long Pillars.
- Explore the Mirage Estate by following the main quest. You'll get to a point where you must find an opera ticket to get through a door, eventually leading you to a puppet training ground.
- Defeat Yuding, No.12 Crescent Blade Puppet.
- Before leaving the boss arena with the opera ticket, go up the wooden steps to the upper platform and collect the Memory Flower of the Aberrant Three-Faced Puppet. This finally reveals the identity of the Three-Faced Puppet to be three sisters – Steel, Frost, and Chaos.
- Find the other two Aberrant Three-Faced Puppet Memory Flowers. Both are further ahead in the Mirage Estate, marked on the map, and are pretty much on the main path so are easy to find.
- Fast travel to the Mirrorwood Entrance Bell in the Crimson Forest. The now frozen Mirrorwood also lets you access the Sha-Chi Tower where you can complete the 'A Severed Mindseal' quest.
- Proceed through the Mirrorwood as you did the first time you went through the Crimson Forest, until you get to the boss fight arena where you fought Bai Chilian. You'll find the Three-Faced Puppet waiting for you here.
- Defeat Yucong, No.34 Twisted Puppet using Blazing Edge. This is a two-phase fight where phase 1 is essentially a repeat of the very first Three-Faced Puppet fight. The puppet gains new freezing and chaos flame moves in phase 2, but isn't that much harder to defeat. Be aware that if you don't use Blazing Edge, the quest will end after this step, and you'll miss out on one of the Triple Threat rewards.
- Defeat Steel Yucong, Frost Yucong, and Chaos Yucong. This third phase only activates if you beat phase 2 using Blazing Edge and sees the Three-Faced Puppet split into three separate puppets. Mu Xiaokui and her guardians joined to help, making the fight significantly easier, which might have been because I spoke to them at the top of the Crimson Forest Sha-Chi Tower and did the Phantom Blade Zero Heart of the Fist quest.
With the Three-Faced Puppet gone for good, that's the end of the Triple Threat quest in Phantom Blade Zero – finally! As a reward, you get Freezing Chaos, a very good one-handed sword that lets you switch between the powers of the three puppets. And if you beat the third phase, you also get Chaos Iron Fragment II. This combines with the first fragment from completing four Long Pillars to give you Chaos Twin Daggers, which you can use to Soul Temper the Sanguine Twin.
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