5 Best Starter Weapons in Phantom Blade Zero

This is the weapon I tell literally everyone to start with and I'm not gonna pretend to be objective about it because it's just the correct answer for new players honestly, it's the first sword you find sitting right there in the training grounds of the prologue area and you literally cannot miss it even if you tried, basically the damage is medium so it won't melt bosses in ten seconds but it also won't leave you slapping enemies for five minutes which is the exact kind of balance you want when you're learning how the combat flow works and how to manage Sha-Chi and all that, and the speed is fast enough to sneak hits between enemy combos and the recovery frames are really forgiving which means you can whiff an attack and still have time to parry the counter instead of eating damage for free which is something a lot of weapons can't do. Sha-Chi generation is solid with the three-hit light combo filling about 1.5 bars so you can use your first Phantom Edge every 12 to 15 seconds of active combat which honestly feels great once you get into the rhythm of parrying and dodging and maintaining pressure on the enemy. And the upgrade path is honestly the most forgiving in the game because evolution materials for swords are the most common drops in the first two zones so you can hit +2 before the third boss without any grinding or farming or farming routes or anything like that. The parry windows on sword moves feel slightly wider than other weapon types too and I'm not sure if that's intentional design or just good animation readability but either way it helps a ton when you're learning the timing on blue attacks and figuring out which direction to dodge red ones and etc

Found in the Abandoned Garrison about 20 minutes into the game and if you keep dying to those armored soldiers in the courtyard just switch to this and your life will immediately improve I promise, honestly the range advantage is the whole reason to use this thing because you can poke enemies from outside their melee range and against those early-game shield soldiers who are an absolute nightmare for sword users you can chip them down without ever entering their attack zone which feels almost unfair and kind of cheesy but in a good way you know. The heavy thrust has a slight lunge that closes distance and it feels a little awkward for the first ten minutes of using it but then it becomes second nature and you wonder how you ever played without it, the main weakness though is low damage per hit which means boss fights drag on way longer than they should so you're trading speed kills for safety and against some of the later early-game bosses that's actually a totally worthwhile trade because surviving is better than doing slightly more damage and dying halfway through. Spear evolution stones are rarer than sword stones though so plan to hit +1 around the third boss and +2 around the fifth which is slower than the sword upgrade path but the safety you get in return and the ability to poke from range and avoid damage entirely kind of makes up for it

This is the first elemental weapon most players find and it drops from the Serpent Cultist mini-boss in the Whispering Grotto which you'll hit maybe an hour or so into the game, and it applies a poison DoT on every third consecutive hit which sounds underwhelming on paper but in practice it absolutely shreds bosses with large health pools. The poison mechanic works like this: three hits builds one poison stack capping at five stacks and at five stacks the enemy takes damage equal to roughly one light attack every two seconds for ten seconds which doesn't sound like much until you realize that's essentially a free heavy attack worth of damage while you're dodging or healing or doing literally anything else. The trade-off is base damage is lower than Jagged Steel so if you can't maintain constant pressure you're actually doing less damage overall and this weapon really really rewards nonstop aggression and punishes passive play hard, but the Sha-Chi synergy is kind of broken honestly because poison ticks count as landed attacks for Sha-Chi generation which means your bar fills even during dodge windows and against slow bosses you basically have infinite Sha-Chi

Purchased from the wandering merchant in the Crossroads Bazaar for 3000 spirit coins and honestly it's the fastest attack speed in the early game but the damage per hit is the lowest of any starter option so you're basically trading single-hit power for hit count which is a very specific playstyle. This weapon is an absolute Sha-Chi machine because the six-hit light combo generates almost two full bars which means you'll be firing off Phantom Edges and Killer Moves more often than any other weapon type and if you love using special moves this is definitely your weapon. But the parry risk is real and punishing because the long combo strings mean you're committed to attack animations for longer than is safe and you cannot cancel out of the fourth fifth or sixth hits so against enemies with fast counter-attacks this gets you killed more often than it should. Boss performance is really mixed honestly because it melts bosses with large punish windows but struggles hard against aggressive bosses that don't give you time for full combos and you'll find yourself getting interrupted halfway through your hit strings constantly

I'm putting this at number five with a very serious warning because this weapon will kill you more than enemies will and I'm not exaggerating, it's slow and every swing is a commitment and the recovery time is brutal and if you whiff a charged heavy you're basically standing there with a sign that says please hit me. But when it actually works it really really works and there's nothing more satisfying than chunking a boss for 15 to 20 percent of their health bar with one charged heavy. The highest per-hit damage of any early weapon and charged heavy attacks can literally one-shot basic enemies which feels amazing when you pull it off. The stagger is the real reason to use this because heavy swings stagger most early-game elites in just two hits and you can chain-stagger certain enemies to death without them ever getting an attack off which is honestly hilarious to watch. But the learning curve is brutal because you need to memorize enemy attack patterns and predict what's coming since you can't react on the fly and every swing locks you in for roughly 1.2 seconds which is an eternity in a game this fast. The best pairing is the Steel Thread Phantom Edge to immobilize enemies before winding up a charged heavy and this combo alone makes the weapon viable for boss fights where you'd otherwise never have time for a charged attack