Zero Comboing Phantom to Pieces
49For this combo showcase, it’s Phantom’s turn to get thrown into Zero’s blender. With an assortment of quick, stylish strikes from the Z-Saber and Triple Rod, along with some precise movement, you can dispatch the elusive Guardian deftly. However, despite being a quick bout, there are a lot of details pertaining to Z1’s combo system that make things trickier than they appear.
In the past, I’ve noted that Z1’s combo system demands more dexterity than its successors. This fight against Phantom exemplifies this fact. True to his name, Phantom spends large portions of the fight intangible; you have limited opportunities to inflict large amounts of damage via combos. In contrast to a fight like Harpuia’s, where the primary challenge is timing your dash jumps properly, here, the difficulty mostly centers around pressing your attack buttons with strict timing to allow the animations of the Z-Saber and Triple Rod to flow between each other at the earliest possible moment. This is far easier said than done; Z1 has less interest in accommodating hasty players—such as myself—with a propensity to input attacks too early. However, Phantom’s quickness presents a paradox to players where you’re forced to attempt to chain strikes together at a pace that is faster than you’d normally like from a reliability perspective.
Before moving onto more details about the fight and combo system, it’s imperative to note that Phantom is a unique case in Z1. The decision to place him at the start of the stage means that RNG will be 100% consistent, Z3 style. It’s for this reason that, even though Phantom lacks pattern exploits like Harupia and Leviathan, you can still choreograph the fight and push your combo sequences to the limit.
The goal of the fight is to force Phantom into attack patterns that keep him vulnerable for a sufficient amount of time. He starts the fight with a dash; attacking him here will inflict knockback, providing a very short chance to land hits before he jumps and begins his mirage attack. Since Zero’s ground attacks leave him standing still for a few frames, you won’t be able to pursue Phantom quickly enough. Therefore, the best way to initiate the combo is to hit Phantom with the middle frames of a spin slash as he dashes toward Zero. By doing this, you can simultaneously inflict knockback on Phantom and move toward him.
In this case, since my opening move is to jump over Phantom and hit him with the backswing of the spin, he gets sent lurching further to the left instead of getting pushed to the right. Moving Zero mere pixels away from Phantom when landing and nearly taking contact damage is required because of the fickle double slash. Furthermore, it’s imperative that you start the spin slash somewhat early so that the animation fully ends before landing, thus eliminating any possibility of landing lag. Whatever you do, don’t press the attack button twice or more in the air. Doing so seems to almost inevitably incur tons of landing lag; Zero won’t be able to follow up with his ground slashes quickly enough. Being patient and waiting until Zero is grounded before double-tapping the Saber button with a specific cadence is the play to make.
To briefly touch on this aspect, Z1’s free-form combo system is a result of various attacks being given the property of granting either short or long duration invincibility frames on bosses; there is no combo value system to speak of here. An unfortunate consequence of this is that, if you swing too quickly from the wrong position, the double slash will often frustratingly whiff. You could counteract this by pacing your swings, but against Phantom, that’s not an option, so getting in close proximity is needed to give the animation of the second slash enough range to hit, regardless of your timing.
By far the most infuriating part of the opening combo is following the poke with another slash. Normally, this isn’t too challenging; in fact, later in the fight, you’ll see me loop double slashes and pokes with no issue. The problem here is that I have the knowledge that Phantom is going to jump, so I often subconsciously slash too early. Also, going for a double slash instead of a dash slash is optimal for damage; my route is specific to setting up the ending.
After that, it’s a game of getting flashy with pogos and spin slashes. Pogoing the mirage is suboptimal in terms of damage, but it’s irrelevant since, from this point, I have enough openings to shred Phantom. Other fun moves include the double poke as he ascends on his shuriken, along with the double spin slash hit on the way down. As you can see at the end, I have to wait to let Phantom jump again so I can get the rolling slash finish. The beauty of mastering the opening combo is that you’re given a buffer later; even if you miss a few attacks, you’ll still be able to win quickly.
Thanks for watching! Comments and questions are welcome as usual.
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