"In combat, one of the key aspects that’s important in this game is the violence of the clashing of swords." - Hidetaka Miyazaki
first, the crossing of wires. somethings wrong. your instincts betray you. this, at first glance, no longer has the same proclivities and tendencies as the rest of fromsoftwares recent output. meandering means death, hesitation means defeat, any halfwit grunt can cut through you like butter if your wits stray for even a second, and if his buddies gang up on you, youre in for a world of hurt. you’re the reaper, the shinobi ideal, but you’re more fragile than ever. this is interesting.
then - the learning, the evolution in slow tides. prodding around in unfamiliar structures. bosses can appear out of thin air, rather than the previous expectation that they'd be slotted into fog gates of yore. okay. stealth is favoured, but usually set up in such a way that there’s always going to be one stowaway to clash blades with head-on. got it. brevity characterizes the flow of the game between major skill-checks. you explore, carefully, always uncertain what threat lies around the corner that can prove to be more merciless than the last
then - the mastery. it occurs far too early. the magician’s out of tricks.
fundamentally, this is a game of contradictions. its been a while since i’ve felt this complicated about a game. let’s try exploring those contradictions.
contradiction #1: this game is exactly what i wanted fromsoftware to do. it is also exactly what i did not want them to do.
contradiction #2: perpetual tensions between systems. this is not a katana folded 1000 times but a katana dulled and made jagged, echoing a precarious split between shinobi and samurai
contradiction #3: i like this game more than bloodborne - the irony, quite frankly, is that it achieves bloodborne’s intended design goals far more effectively, and while it fails to reach the prodigious heights of either demon’s souls or dark souls 1 i’m still happy to let it settle into a quaint and snug third place. it is also, categorically, a worse game than bloodborne, or at the very least has a far less structurally sound foundation.
contradiction #4: this is the best western style action adventure game in a very, very long time. it was made by japanese developers and features a mythos entirely derived from the sengoku era and eastern spirituality
elaboration #1: leaning more heavily into the action adventure template was unequivocally the right decision. with roots extending back to artorias of the abyss, fromsoft has grown to capitalize on action to the detriment of their respective games systems, coming to an uneasy conclusion in bloodborne and actively harming the game in dark souls 3. sekiro presents a better alternative - much of its gameplay loop is oriented around stealth and optimizing deathblows with a quickening pace of bosses checking your 'shinobi' skills, but it's all very kitchen sink. the stealth is welcome, but hardly worthy of any mantle. while most of these bosses largely test the same skills as other modern fromsoft titles with a few exceptions, they're still the most visceral modern fromsoftware has ever gotten. unfortunately, that's exactly it, isn't it? you're still learning the same enemy tells even if they're more competently telegraphed and executed this time, you're still deflecting instead of rolling as your most optimal strategy, youre still bombarded by a wealth of consumables and questionable resource prioritization, you still have to deal with arbitrary skill trees that rarely, if ever, feel useful or necessary and needlessly overencumber a game that’d easily possess a stronger core without them. it’s wonderful that there’s a little bit of variance in playstyle and experimentation here - i emphasized a showdown style meant to compensate for wolf’s fragility, refusing to back down from aggressors, and a friend opted to play far more shrewdly and dishonorably, stressing the value of attrition and acting the gadfly - but it hardly feels like the changes are enough at the end of the day. these matters are compounded by its narrative, which treads on a great deal of familiar ground while imparting nothing truly memorable or unique to itself. its construction remains thoughtful and intricate, but in execution there is little that keeps me thinking about the experience in any meaningful way - when i realized that the game was content to echo dark souls 1′s themes yet again through a different cultural lens, my heart sank a little bit (this description belies the fact that i genuinely think theres a bit more going on here than such a reductive expression would imply; very different focus, similar vehicle). to reiterate, this isn’t to say what’s on offer is mediocre, and certainly there are enough tiny flourishes to keep it engaging (the folding screen monkeys fight is probably my second favourite in the game, a certain boss acting completely cowardly to kick off the second phase made me smile, fountainhead palace is probably my new favourite area in a fromsoft title), but it is rarely thought-provoking or greater than itself. sekiro is simply sekiro - modest, unassuming, predictable. a cultivation of a decades worth of design that is hardly profligate or odious, but certainly questionable, especially when so many qualms with the title are carried over wholesale as well, as though it was not enough to explore the same grounds yet again. this is easily the worst camera in a modern fromsoft game yet, and the fact that no efforts have been undertaken to fix this boggles the mind - at least, other than implementing several huge areas to compensate for this fact. despite this, the environments being so aesthetically busy can be a burden of equal proportion - this is most readily evinced in the gyoubu fight, and sometimes lady butterfly and the final boss. add to all this the constant need to reset the world state at checkpoints to advance side quests, the constant problems with collision, the bizarre progression structure at times, slightly lesser level design - the list goes on. as much as it purports to be different, it’s ultimately much of the same.
elaboration #2: “ There are lots of different things you can do that will help you in battle. The game is designed in such a way that even if you’re not insanely good at the game, you can figure out how to get through it if you think about it and play it smart.” - Hidetaka Miyazaki
this is true, but only to an extent. when you see an apparition type enemy or a beast type enemy, it’s a foregone conclusion what resources must be expended. similarly, other consumables are often just temporal difficulty mitigation with the exact same function as previous fromsoft games. it’s one thing for a fight to encourage strategy - it’s quite another for it to boil down to resource consumption. to be clear, it’s not as though that can’t be part and parcel of an appropriate strategy, just that the connections are despairingly easy to make - once you’ve fought one headless or one shichimen warrior, you’ve fought ‘em all and know what tools you need to bring to the table, as welcome as their inclusions are. sometimes players can make connections on their own - as with the usage of snap seeds with the corrupted monk, or the spear on the guardian ape - but these moments are few and far in between, and there are rarely any truly different fights that encourage a playstyle that breaks the mold. for instance, very few bosses make good use of stealth in this game - when so many rely on deflects, it’s hard to feel like you’re playing as a shinobi might. the only thing emphasized here in such an instance would be wolf’s frailty, which enables a resurrection mechanic that is a bit of a mixed bag, seldom allowing for neat strategies (as with the cyanide tooth) but instead often allowing a brief moment to recollect and cheesy escape opportunities in equal measure.
perhaps this complaint is a little too conceptual and is asking too much of fromsoft, but i’d like to point to the easiest example, and the worst boss in their catalogue: the demon of hatred. this bloodborne-lite boss reflects none of the strengths of sekiro while allowing for very little in the way of emergent strategy, to an astonishing degree. in the minutiae, his inclusion is considered, but in practice it’s horribly bland. even if the demon of hatred somehow made better use of the game’s concept - of being a clever shinobi - surely the most clever thing to do wouldn’t be to dart in and out of the flames of battle just to hit his nutsack. both operative ‘good strategies’ otherwise predominantly revolve around the usage of two shinobi tools, one of which is cleverly hinted at but both of which are yet again arbitrarily locked behind upgrade trees that have little to no place in a game that seemingly wants to be as combat-focused game like this. were it not for the swathes of experimentation i did at the beginning i’d find it hard pressed to say i’d have improved at the game at all because there is rarely, if ever, an expansion of design allowing for growth. the final boss appropriately tests you on every skill you should have learned over the course of the game, but if the path you took to get there didn’t foster mastery, of what use was the path? games like the original dmc used their upgrade systems to foster player experimentation and to give players a goal in the horizon to look forward to at all times, all of which dovetailed into eventual mastery. sekiro uses an unnecessary blend of skill points, sen, and upgrade materials to push skills that are often very useful but which rarely lend themselves to emergent strategy or player growth
the fact is, the game is disappointingly limited and rarely adjudicates for anything other than hit and run tactics or refusing to yield to oncoming adversity, making little to no use of bosses that could be genuinely interesting using the key concept of being a shinobi. what we have on offer is very solid, and palatable - these boss fights are quite good, but in the context of a long-running series they could be something more. the closest we have to new and interesting encounters are the folding screen monkeys and the divine dragon fight, the latter of which disappointingly resembles a zelda boss more than anything.
elaboration #3: this is a point continuing on from elaboration #2. the posture system is admittedly quite good, and as i’ve posited once the pure adrenaline of combat is at an all-time high because to do well in combat you have to be willing to risk life and limb. in bloodborne, the rally system was very flawed and rarely pushed one to get up close and personal as they should - there were far too many opportunities to slink back and manipulate the artificial intelligence into performing a short-reaching attack so that you could heal maybe one or twenty times, and hardly any meaningful tradeoffs present included to increase depth. here, a better balance is struck, closer to what these games should have looked like in the first place. you start off with minimal health gourds, and you only get 10 as a maximum; a limited number of pellets that are often easy to run out of supplement your ability to heal, either in a desperate pinch or to mitigate chip damage. while it’s easy to say the pellets are unnecessary, i find their inclusion worthwhile at least to a degree simply because of their limitation - you only ever have 3 at a time, and for a great duration of the game they’re not easy to stockpile.
elaboration #4: despite everything i’ve just said - this is the most charitable interpretation i could have towards this game. and i do sincerely mean it. there’s something to be said for the game that is perennially flawed, and yet i’d choose it over most others. this is one such game and for a time, figuring out its rhythms and secrets is both highly worthwhile and highly satisfactory. its jokingly alien soldier-esque structure and cavalcade of more linear sequences of threats to dispatch makes for something more engrossing than it should be, something better than the sum of its parts. this concoction could not be more appealing by contrast, especially when measured against its milquetoast contemporaries: god of war, assassin’s creed, tomb raider, uncharted, and so on and so forth. with one entry alone fromsoft has proven themselves capable of creating an action adventure title in a similar vein that is more focused, compelling, and dynamic than any aforementioned title, which is something worth discussing that i feel is left out in discussion surrounding this title. it’s a difficult quality to encapsulate or articulate, though, so i’d understand the hesitance to begin engaging with this element of the game.
what sekiro represents to me is that there's more work to do, but this is an interesting and engaging way to cap off fromsofts recent output. i've soured on them fairly recently and it's nice to see that they're somewhat capable of at least some new orchestration - i can only hope that when elden ring is released, it will be far more experimental.
first, the crossing of wires. somethings wrong. your instincts betray you. this, at first glance, no longer has the same proclivities and tendencies as the rest of fromsoftwares recent output. meandering means death, hesitation means defeat, any halfwit grunt can cut through you like butter if your wits stray for even a second, and if his buddies gang up on you, youre in for a world of hurt. you’re the reaper, the shinobi ideal, but you’re more fragile than ever. this is interesting.
then - the learning, the evolution in slow tides. prodding around in unfamiliar structures. bosses can appear out of thin air, rather than the previous expectation that they'd be slotted into fog gates of yore. okay. stealth is favoured, but usually set up in such a way that there’s always going to be one stowaway to clash blades with head-on. got it. brevity characterizes the flow of the game between major skill-checks. you explore, carefully, always uncertain what threat lies around the corner that can prove to be more merciless than the last
then - the mastery. it occurs far too early. the magician’s out of tricks.
fundamentally, this is a game of contradictions. its been a while since i’ve felt this complicated about a game. let’s try exploring those contradictions.
contradiction #1: this game is exactly what i wanted fromsoftware to do. it is also exactly what i did not want them to do.
contradiction #2: perpetual tensions between systems. this is not a katana folded 1000 times but a katana dulled and made jagged, echoing a precarious split between shinobi and samurai
contradiction #3: i like this game more than bloodborne - the irony, quite frankly, is that it achieves bloodborne’s intended design goals far more effectively, and while it fails to reach the prodigious heights of either demon’s souls or dark souls 1 i’m still happy to let it settle into a quaint and snug third place. it is also, categorically, a worse game than bloodborne, or at the very least has a far less structurally sound foundation.
contradiction #4: this is the best western style action adventure game in a very, very long time. it was made by japanese developers and features a mythos entirely derived from the sengoku era and eastern spirituality
elaboration #1: leaning more heavily into the action adventure template was unequivocally the right decision. with roots extending back to artorias of the abyss, fromsoft has grown to capitalize on action to the detriment of their respective games systems, coming to an uneasy conclusion in bloodborne and actively harming the game in dark souls 3. sekiro presents a better alternative - much of its gameplay loop is oriented around stealth and optimizing deathblows with a quickening pace of bosses checking your 'shinobi' skills, but it's all very kitchen sink. the stealth is welcome, but hardly worthy of any mantle. while most of these bosses largely test the same skills as other modern fromsoft titles with a few exceptions, they're still the most visceral modern fromsoftware has ever gotten. unfortunately, that's exactly it, isn't it? you're still learning the same enemy tells even if they're more competently telegraphed and executed this time, you're still deflecting instead of rolling as your most optimal strategy, youre still bombarded by a wealth of consumables and questionable resource prioritization, you still have to deal with arbitrary skill trees that rarely, if ever, feel useful or necessary and needlessly overencumber a game that’d easily possess a stronger core without them. it’s wonderful that there’s a little bit of variance in playstyle and experimentation here - i emphasized a showdown style meant to compensate for wolf’s fragility, refusing to back down from aggressors, and a friend opted to play far more shrewdly and dishonorably, stressing the value of attrition and acting the gadfly - but it hardly feels like the changes are enough at the end of the day. these matters are compounded by its narrative, which treads on a great deal of familiar ground while imparting nothing truly memorable or unique to itself. its construction remains thoughtful and intricate, but in execution there is little that keeps me thinking about the experience in any meaningful way - when i realized that the game was content to echo dark souls 1′s themes yet again through a different cultural lens, my heart sank a little bit (this description belies the fact that i genuinely think theres a bit more going on here than such a reductive expression would imply; very different focus, similar vehicle). to reiterate, this isn’t to say what’s on offer is mediocre, and certainly there are enough tiny flourishes to keep it engaging (the folding screen monkeys fight is probably my second favourite in the game, a certain boss acting completely cowardly to kick off the second phase made me smile, fountainhead palace is probably my new favourite area in a fromsoft title), but it is rarely thought-provoking or greater than itself. sekiro is simply sekiro - modest, unassuming, predictable. a cultivation of a decades worth of design that is hardly profligate or odious, but certainly questionable, especially when so many qualms with the title are carried over wholesale as well, as though it was not enough to explore the same grounds yet again. this is easily the worst camera in a modern fromsoft game yet, and the fact that no efforts have been undertaken to fix this boggles the mind - at least, other than implementing several huge areas to compensate for this fact. despite this, the environments being so aesthetically busy can be a burden of equal proportion - this is most readily evinced in the gyoubu fight, and sometimes lady butterfly and the final boss. add to all this the constant need to reset the world state at checkpoints to advance side quests, the constant problems with collision, the bizarre progression structure at times, slightly lesser level design - the list goes on. as much as it purports to be different, it’s ultimately much of the same.
elaboration #2: “ There are lots of different things you can do that will help you in battle. The game is designed in such a way that even if you’re not insanely good at the game, you can figure out how to get through it if you think about it and play it smart.” - Hidetaka Miyazaki
this is true, but only to an extent. when you see an apparition type enemy or a beast type enemy, it’s a foregone conclusion what resources must be expended. similarly, other consumables are often just temporal difficulty mitigation with the exact same function as previous fromsoft games. it’s one thing for a fight to encourage strategy - it’s quite another for it to boil down to resource consumption. to be clear, it’s not as though that can’t be part and parcel of an appropriate strategy, just that the connections are despairingly easy to make - once you’ve fought one headless or one shichimen warrior, you’ve fought ‘em all and know what tools you need to bring to the table, as welcome as their inclusions are. sometimes players can make connections on their own - as with the usage of snap seeds with the corrupted monk, or the spear on the guardian ape - but these moments are few and far in between, and there are rarely any truly different fights that encourage a playstyle that breaks the mold. for instance, very few bosses make good use of stealth in this game - when so many rely on deflects, it’s hard to feel like you’re playing as a shinobi might. the only thing emphasized here in such an instance would be wolf’s frailty, which enables a resurrection mechanic that is a bit of a mixed bag, seldom allowing for neat strategies (as with the cyanide tooth) but instead often allowing a brief moment to recollect and cheesy escape opportunities in equal measure.
perhaps this complaint is a little too conceptual and is asking too much of fromsoft, but i’d like to point to the easiest example, and the worst boss in their catalogue: the demon of hatred. this bloodborne-lite boss reflects none of the strengths of sekiro while allowing for very little in the way of emergent strategy, to an astonishing degree. in the minutiae, his inclusion is considered, but in practice it’s horribly bland. even if the demon of hatred somehow made better use of the game’s concept - of being a clever shinobi - surely the most clever thing to do wouldn’t be to dart in and out of the flames of battle just to hit his nutsack. both operative ‘good strategies’ otherwise predominantly revolve around the usage of two shinobi tools, one of which is cleverly hinted at but both of which are yet again arbitrarily locked behind upgrade trees that have little to no place in a game that seemingly wants to be as combat-focused game like this. were it not for the swathes of experimentation i did at the beginning i’d find it hard pressed to say i’d have improved at the game at all because there is rarely, if ever, an expansion of design allowing for growth. the final boss appropriately tests you on every skill you should have learned over the course of the game, but if the path you took to get there didn’t foster mastery, of what use was the path? games like the original dmc used their upgrade systems to foster player experimentation and to give players a goal in the horizon to look forward to at all times, all of which dovetailed into eventual mastery. sekiro uses an unnecessary blend of skill points, sen, and upgrade materials to push skills that are often very useful but which rarely lend themselves to emergent strategy or player growth
the fact is, the game is disappointingly limited and rarely adjudicates for anything other than hit and run tactics or refusing to yield to oncoming adversity, making little to no use of bosses that could be genuinely interesting using the key concept of being a shinobi. what we have on offer is very solid, and palatable - these boss fights are quite good, but in the context of a long-running series they could be something more. the closest we have to new and interesting encounters are the folding screen monkeys and the divine dragon fight, the latter of which disappointingly resembles a zelda boss more than anything.
elaboration #3: this is a point continuing on from elaboration #2. the posture system is admittedly quite good, and as i’ve posited once the pure adrenaline of combat is at an all-time high because to do well in combat you have to be willing to risk life and limb. in bloodborne, the rally system was very flawed and rarely pushed one to get up close and personal as they should - there were far too many opportunities to slink back and manipulate the artificial intelligence into performing a short-reaching attack so that you could heal maybe one or twenty times, and hardly any meaningful tradeoffs present included to increase depth. here, a better balance is struck, closer to what these games should have looked like in the first place. you start off with minimal health gourds, and you only get 10 as a maximum; a limited number of pellets that are often easy to run out of supplement your ability to heal, either in a desperate pinch or to mitigate chip damage. while it’s easy to say the pellets are unnecessary, i find their inclusion worthwhile at least to a degree simply because of their limitation - you only ever have 3 at a time, and for a great duration of the game they’re not easy to stockpile.
elaboration #4: despite everything i’ve just said - this is the most charitable interpretation i could have towards this game. and i do sincerely mean it. there’s something to be said for the game that is perennially flawed, and yet i’d choose it over most others. this is one such game and for a time, figuring out its rhythms and secrets is both highly worthwhile and highly satisfactory. its jokingly alien soldier-esque structure and cavalcade of more linear sequences of threats to dispatch makes for something more engrossing than it should be, something better than the sum of its parts. this concoction could not be more appealing by contrast, especially when measured against its milquetoast contemporaries: god of war, assassin’s creed, tomb raider, uncharted, and so on and so forth. with one entry alone fromsoft has proven themselves capable of creating an action adventure title in a similar vein that is more focused, compelling, and dynamic than any aforementioned title, which is something worth discussing that i feel is left out in discussion surrounding this title. it’s a difficult quality to encapsulate or articulate, though, so i’d understand the hesitance to begin engaging with this element of the game.
what sekiro represents to me is that there's more work to do, but this is an interesting and engaging way to cap off fromsofts recent output. i've soured on them fairly recently and it's nice to see that they're somewhat capable of at least some new orchestration - i can only hope that when elden ring is released, it will be far more experimental.
Mur96
2 years ago