Motion capture and choreography

Overview

The combat animations in Phantom Blade Zero are built on a foundation of motion capture performed by real martial artists and choreographed by professionals from the martial arts film industry. S-GAME invested heavily in motion capture infrastructure and martial arts expertise to ensure that the game's combat feels grounded in real technique. The studio's approach treats motion capture not as a convenience shortcut but as an essential creative tool for achieving the martial arts authenticity that defines the game's identity.

Kenji Tanigaki

Kenji Tanigaki, the acclaimed action choreographer known for his work on the live-action Rurouni Kenshin film series, served as a lead choreography consultant on Phantom Blade Zero. Tanigaki brought decades of experience designing fight sequences for cameras, understanding how to make martial arts movements read clearly to an audience while maintaining technical authenticity.

Tanigaki's contribution was primarily in the design phase: working with S-GAME's combat designers to establish the visual language of each weapon's fighting style, ensuring that attack animations convey power, speed, and technique through their motion rather than relying solely on visual effects. His film background was particularly valuable for the game's cinematic combat sequences and boss encounter choreography, where the camera work and movement design needed to achieve the visceral impact of a martial arts film.

The Rurouni Kenshin films are notable for their commitment to realistic sword combat choreography, avoiding wire-fu excess in favor of grounded, physically plausible action. This sensibility aligns with S-GAME's design philosophy of starting from real technique and enhancing from there.

Master Yang and the martial arts team

The primary motion capture performances were led by Master Yang, a martial arts master who coordinated a team of over 20 kung fu practitioners for the project. Each performer was selected for their expertise in a specific martial discipline, ensuring that the game's diverse weapon types would each be animated by someone who genuinely understands how that weapon is used in real combat.

The team included practitioners of jianfa (Chinese straight sword), daofa (Chinese broadsword), gun (staff), qiang (spear), and various unarmed styles. For weapons without direct historical Chinese counterparts, such as the game's more fantastical designs, the team adapted techniques from the closest real-world analog and modified them to suit the weapon's fictional properties.

The Shanghai motion capture studio

S-GAME built a purpose-built motion capture studio at their Shanghai headquarters specifically for Phantom Blade Zero's production. The facility uses an optical marker-based capture system capable of recording full-body motion at high frame rates, essential for capturing the fast, precise movements of martial arts forms.

The studio was designed with enough floor space for two-person combat captures, allowing the team to record attack and reaction animations simultaneously. This approach produces more natural combat flow than capturing attacker and defender separately and compositing the results. When Soul's sword strikes an enemy and the enemy staggers, both animations were captured in the same session with real performers reacting to real impacts.

Facial motion capture was handled separately using a head-mounted camera rig, allowing performers to deliver facial performances that match the intensity of their combat actions. This dual-capture approach (body and face in separate passes) allows each to be performed at maximum quality without the limitations that combined capture imposes.

Weapon-specific choreography

The defining principle of Phantom Blade Zero's motion capture pipeline is that each weapon type has its choreography designed and performed by a specialist in that weapon's discipline. The goal, as stated by director Soulframe Liang, is to make every weapon feel like it was designed by someone who actually fights with it.

This means that the game's straight sword has a distinctly different movement vocabulary from its broadsword, not just in the shape of the swings but in the footwork, the weight shifts, the guard positions, and the transitions between attacks. A martial arts practitioner watching the game can identify which discipline each weapon draws from, because the movements are performed by someone who trained in that discipline for years or decades.

The weapon-specific approach also extends to enemy and boss animations. Major boss characters have their own fighting styles captured by dedicated performers, giving each boss a distinct movement personality that the player can learn to read and respond to.

Key details