Announcement trailer looked sick. Gameplay reveal was underwhelming to me, but the game kept looking better with every new video. I'm excited now.

Sony is partly funding, marketing, and helping with the development, but the game isn't part of their China Hero Project. It's a closer situation to the Korean Project Eve (Stellar Blade) except Phantom Blade was already backed by Tencent before Sony's limited involvement.

China is just built different. The huge successes of Wukong and console-tier gacha games are sparking a fierce domestic competition that will take the world by storm. Sony should have nabbed a studio or two while they still could. They did try to acquire Leyou but of course Tencent the party-pooper outbid them lol.

Some people really underestimate the push Sony has made in China. It's funny that when ZZZ was "censored" after a patch (uncensored since) a lot of people blamed Sony when Sony happily took the job of internet punching bag to present Genshin "the zelda clone" to the west and now a lot of people enjoy the game on pc, mobiles and consoles. But it paid off, Genshin has generated a lot of money and presence for Sony in China.

The China Hero Project has also been interesting, the games have been small and most people don't even know they were backed by Sony but it has created a lot of interest by china developers. Sony is also smart to not asking for complete exclusivity and letting them release on pc, not messing with the country pc ecosystem. They also haven't asked for publishing right on pc, they only have the publishing rights of the two most promising games from the project. Lost Soul Aside and one game from the most recent generation of projects accepted.

Phantom Blade Zero isn't from this project but it's another story of an unknown chinese developer studio in the west who is amazed by the possibility of being partners with Sony.

Going back to Lost Soul Aside, it really is the prodigy child of the project. It was a generation 1 project and one of the only 3 games Sony doesn't own but have/will publish on pc, so it feels like this is going to be the culmination of the project, they started the project for games like Soul Aside.

One of my predictions (for fun) of this year is that the game will be good but will suffer from a lot of internet heath thanks to unrealistic expectations and the fact that PlayStation publishes it on both PS5 and PC.