It only took me three playthroughs but I finally like this game! Still has a lot of baffling decisions sprinkled throughout, though, which isn't new for a Fromsoft game but this game is far more rigid in terms of there being a "correct" way to approach encounters so it only magnifies these issues when they appear. Soulsborne games (and ESPECIALLY Elden Ring) usually have a billion different ways you can break the game over your knee if something is really giving you trouble, but most of the time in Sekiro if the game throws something at you that's bad and sucks you have to actually engage with the thing that's bad and sucks, and that's bad and sucks.

Though once you learn exactly how to deal with everything the game can throw at you and you get even remotely decent at consistently deflecting attacks, the game just turns into total cheese. I replayed the game for the first time in four years and beat nearly every boss and miniboss in one try, and even things like Demon of Hatred and Sword Saint Isshin only took me three tries each. On one hand it feels good to be able to floss on the game to this extent, but once you hit this point it can also kind of feel like you've gotten everything you possibly can out of the game, since despite the amount of prosthetic tools and combat arts you have at your disposal, most are just not worth using and the ones that are worth using are often very situational, so you don't have much room to experiment, much less play the game with different "builds" like you can in Soulsborne games. It doesn't help that you need to complete the game twice if you want to unlock all of the prosthetic tool upgrades, and you'll have to do hours upon hours upon grinding to unlock everything in your skill books only to realize that the only combat arts worth using are still Ichimonji and Mortal Draw.