Phantom Blade Zero director Qiwei Liang has been pretty insistent that his upcoming fantasy action game isn't a Soulslike, even if you won't understand what you're looking at until you play it for yourself. And to really distance the game from a genre Liang said there are "too many" of, the lead dev recently broke down how some bosses actually borrow from fighting games instead.
Speaking to the newest issue of PC Gamer Magazine, Liang spoke about how one boss in particular, called Huangxing, changes in the game's harder 'Hellwalker' difficulty mode. "In normal difficulty, he has some of the Soulslike elements to him: he has fixed combos, and if you fight him enough times you'll figure out his combos." Sounds like the classic souls formula of 'die, die, die, learn, win.'
"But in extreme difficulty, it's a completely different direction," Liang continues, and here's where it gets interesting. While designing the boss encounter on that Hellwalker difficulty, the dev apparently "tried to borrow a concept from fighting games and incorporate it into his AI."
On Hellwalker difficulty, Huangxing will "analyze the situation he's in and whether it's to his advantage or disadvantage," just like most fighting game's AI, "and that lets him use different attacks based on the situation." Liang continues to explain that "we have a state we call 'lucky draw' where if he lands a hit he'll continue a combo, but if it doesn't hit, he's gonna do something else. He tries to use the result of his last attack to determine what to do next."
So, yeah - your typical Soulslike strategy of learning attack patterns and responding to them like it's a science won't exactly work here. Huangxing might just zig where you expect him to zag.
