Hardest Bosses

The Gold-Masked One is the boss players most often call the hardest in Phantom Blade Zero, with 256 of 534 votes in Game8's reader poll on Nov 12, 2026, while Game8's editors rank Yucong, No. 34 Twisted Puppet first and PCGamesN's guide writer picks Lei Dang. Steam's counts show that the optional fights stop few players, and that the first weapon boss, Peng Meng, is where runs end.

The Gold-Masked One is the boss players most often name as Phantom Blade Zero's hardest: he held 256 of the 534 votes in Game8's reader poll when we read it on Nov 12, 2026, more than four times the next name, Bai Chilian with 56. The outlets do not agree with the vote or with each other. Game8's own editors, in the list above that poll (updated Nov 7, 2026), now put Yucong, No. 34 Twisted Puppet first, and PCGamesN's Tom Hopkins wrote of Lei Dang in Mirage Estate: "I found this to be the toughest boss fight in the game." All three are fights you can skip or leave for later, and S-Game has named no hardest boss; the only one it has made easier is Hua, Deadly Betrothed, whose grab comes less often on Wayfarer and Pathbreaker since the Nov 4, 2026 patch (S-Game on Steam). Names of late bosses follow.

3:22 How hard "hardest" is depends on who is asking. In gameranx's Oct 26, 2026 Before You Buy video, Jake Baldino says of the standard difficulty, "I did find it to be a good fair challenge", with "some bosses that'll really push you that take a couple of times to beat", and adds that the bosses, not the ordinary enemies, "are where the fun and the challenge lies".

Next: how to beat the poll's winner, and when to come back for him, what changes if you drop to Wayfarer mid-fight or how far Steam players have got, step by step.

Game8's ten, and what Steam says about each

Game8's list is in its order, as read on Nov 12, 2026, with its reason for each in its words. The last column is the share of Steam players holding the achievement that covers the fight, from Steam's global counts on the same day; some achievements cover more than one fight, and three of the ten have none.

Rank	Boss	Kind	Game8's reason	Steam players, Nov 12
1	Yucong, No. 34 Twisted Puppet	Optional	"the secret third phase that has them split up into three separate entities"	28.0% beat all four Great Puppets
2	Blizzard Blademaster	Optional	"one missed parry can freeze you and let him deal a one-hit attack"	31.9%
3	Mo Yuan, the Bastion of Mo	Optional	"take a fundamental aspect of battles and pushes it to its limits"	29.4% finished Bloodline Awakening
4	Zuo Shang, the True Long	True Ending only	"the introduction of dragon attacks, which are unblockable and difficult to dodge"	26.1% hold With Heart and Blood
5	Dusk the Puppeteer	Optional	"summons a near-perfect clone of himself when he reaches half health"	No achievement
6	Yubi, No. 21 Swordfighter Puppet	Optional	"one of the most aggressive set of attacks"	28.0%, with the other three puppets
7	Bai Chilian	Required	"her elusive style of weaving in and out of the battlefield"	66.5%
8	Mu Xiaokui	Required	"a test of reflexes"	59.0%
9	Hua, Deadly Betrothed	Optional	"a wide variety of moves that make her very difficult to defend against"	75.2%
10	Wu Lengshuang, the Soft Sword	Optional	"controls the pace of the fight, directly punishing aggressive play"	No achievement

Game8's third entry is its name for the masked fighter of the Long Pillars, first met in Weeping Creek Valley, whom its poll and our guide call The Gold-Masked One; his fights belong to the Tale Bloodline Awakening, and who is under the mask is on Mó Yuan. The fourth is the hidden last fight of the True Ending path, a second meeting with Zuo Shang.

The list has moved. When we read it on Oct 31, 2026, two days after launch, it led with the Gold-Masked One, then Yubi, the Aberrant Three-Faced Puppet, Hua and Wu Lengshuang, all early fights. A week later the top two are late-game bosses that few had reached by then, Hua has dropped from fourth to ninth, and the Aberrant Three-Faced Puppet is gone from the ten.

The poll only knows the first half of the game

The 534 votes were spread over 17 options: The Gold-Masked One 256, Bai Chilian 56, Yubi 50, Hua, Deadly Betrothed 40, Mu Xiaokui 30, Hua Qianxiao 22, Iron Fiend and Jade Dancer 19, Wu Lengshuang 18, the Aberrant Three-Faced Puppet 13, and single figures for The Hunt, Blaze, Chang Hong, Wu Xuan, You Loong, Master Bi Hai, Zhuo Bi and Yuzan. It is a vote by whoever visits the page, not a sample, and it offers none of the late bosses: Yucong, the Blizzard Blademaster and Lei Dang cannot be chosen at all. Read it as the hardest boss of the first half, where the Gold-Masked One can be walked into hours before Soul is ready.

What Steam's counts add

No achievement measures deaths, so Steam cannot say which fight takes the most tries. It can say who got past.

The optional "hardest" fights are not what stops people. On Nov 12, 2026, 28.0% of Steam players had beaten all four Great Puppets, Yucong among them, and 31.9% the Blizzard Blademaster, against 26.3% who had beaten the last required boss. More players have cleared Game8's two hardest fights than have finished the story.
Hua is skipped by almost nobody. She is optional, yet 75.2% had beaten her, a point more than the 74.0% for Hua Qianxiao, the required boss of the next region.
Lei Dang sits at 29.2%, beaten by fewer players than the optional Blizzard Blademaster, though he also comes later, in Mirage Estate, and nearly everyone who beats him goes on: 28.8% had passed through the Estate.
The early wall has stopped moving. Peng Meng, the first boss who drops a weapon, stood at 85.2%, up only 0.4 points from our Nov 9 reading, while 95.1% had escaped the pursuers on the main road just before him. From Bai Chilian onward, every boss rose by two to almost five points in the same three days.

We think the boss that ends the most runs is Peng Meng, not any name on the lists above: about one Steam player in ten got through the opening and has never beaten him, and that share has all but stopped shrinking, while every later gap is still closing as players catch up. Steam cannot tell a player who gave up from one who refunded or simply stopped, so this is our reading of the counts, not a measured quit rate.

We think S-Game's next balance change to a boss goes to Bai Chilian on Wayfarer and Pathbreaker.

Confidence: Possible. Check by: Jan 2027.

Why we think so: she is the only required boss in the top three of the reader vote and the highest boss on Game8's list that every player has to beat, and the Nov 4 patch showed the pattern, an early boss eased on the two lower settings with Hellwalker left alone. What would prove us wrong: no patch note naming Bai Chilian by the end of Jan 2027, or one that changes another boss first.