As far back as 2009, FromSoftware has been doing one thing very well: making games that push you to the very limits of your abilities as a gamer. From Demon’s Souls through the Dark Souls trilogy and Bloodborne, the developer created a brand-new genre and fine-tuned it to perfection, much to the chagrin of other companies that have tried to copy the formula with less than stellar results.
In its latest release, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware takes that genre and tweaks it yet again by giving you slightly less freedom, asking you to “git gud” once again—this time with a very specific set of rules. Does changing the formula create an experience on the level we’ve come to expect from a FromSoft game? The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is yes, if you’re willing to learn.
Straight away, let me just say that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to talk about a new FromSoftware game without constantly trying to compare it to their other more well-known releases. The company has created a unique play style that, after 10 years, people have come to expect from with each subsequent release, with tweaks and updates as they go. And while Bloodborne and the Souls series had their share of differences, both in visual style and in gameplay, they were still very closely related. You could jump from one to the other without too much of a learning curve and still find success. This idea transfers to Sekiro as well for maybe the first third of the game, but after that if you haven’t been picking up on the game’s attempts to teach you to play the way it wants you to, you’ll have a hard time finishing it.
While Sekiro doesn’t exactly throw mind-blowing new mechanics at you to wrap your head around, the ones it does present to you—specifically deflecting and death blows—need to be mastered by the time you reach the end of the game. Deflecting is important for a number of reasons, the biggest of those being how Sekiro handles health and defeating enemies. Enemies have two health bars of sorts: the bog-standard health that can be whittled down to defeat them and a posture bar you need to break in order to deal a lethal death blow. The more you attack an enemy, forcing them to block your sword, the higher their posture gauge goes up. Once their posture gauge fills up completely, you can deliver a death blow, which either kills them outright or depletes the number of death blows required to kill them once and for all. All standard enemies only require a single death blow, but bosses (including minibosses) will often require at least two or three.
Unrelenting attack can be an easy way to quickly fill an enemy’s posture bar, never letting up your attack and forcing them to block all your incoming sword strikes until their posture is depleted, allowing you a quick death blow. Now of course this is easier said than done, but it is aided by the lack of a stamina bar. Dark Souls and Bloodborne dictated how much you could do at any given time, either running or attacking among other activities, by forcing you to use stamina. Sekiro does away with this mechanic, allowing you to jump and run and attack as much as you can or need to in order to complete a task. Overwhelmed by enemies? Jump over their heads and run to safety. You don’t have to worry about running out of stamina at the wrong time and being caught. The flip to side to this is even though you can attack relentlessly, enemies are just as equipped as you are to deflect your attacks and deal a death blow to you once your own posture gauge is full.
The biggest, and most obvious, new feature in Sekiro is the ability to freely travel vertically by way of either jumping or using your new grappling hook. Now I know jumping was possible in the other SoulsBorne games, but it worked about as well as trying to run and jump in real life, so it doesn’t really count. Sekiro is entirely built with your grappling ability in mind, both for general exploration purposes and for battle. But before you go thinking you can start swinging around feudal Japan like a Spider-Ninja, know the game is very particular about where and what you can grapple on to. Grapple-able spots are highlighted with a green dot indicating when and where you can grapple to them, but the differentiation between one rooftop and another or which trees you can and can’t climb are entirely up to the game and can seem random in some locations. This can also become a bother when two or more grapple spots are in close proximity to one another and the game switches the one you are looking at midjump, resulting in either a fall death or landing in a group of enemies on whom you were trying to get the drop.
Speaking of death, this wouldn’t be a FromSoft game without dying, a lot. But unlike in the SoulsBorne games, your punishment on death is a little different because of how Sekiro handles experience and leveling up. In previous games, you had a chance to get back any lost experience (Souls or Blood Echos) by returning to where you’d died and reclaiming them—unless you died again on your way to where you left them, in which case they were gone forever. In Sekiro, when you die, you permanently lose half your money and half the experience you have built to your next skill point, with no chance of reclaiming either. This be very punishing, especially in the late game, when it takes a lot of experience to reach another skill point, only to be set back by a wayward jump or mistimed deflect.
The skill-point system is another new addition, and at times can make the game feel more difficult due to it replacing the sense of progress and growth with your character. Slain enemies will still grant you experience, but rather than being able to turn that experience into more strength or dexterity, you bank it into skill points that can be used to unlock new ninja abilities, ranging from new sword attacks to regaining more life while healing. For me this definitely made the game more difficult because if you find yourself up against a particularly difficult boss, or if you have yet to really master the game’s deflecting mechanics, you can’t simply go off and grind a few more levels in vitality or strength before attempting the boss again. You simply have to learn the bosses’ tells and attack patterns and figure out the best times to attack versus simply parry all their attacks in hopes on breaking their posture. “Git gud or don’t succeed” seems to be Sekiro’s mantra.
At the end of the day, I found myself struggling to undo 10 years of habits based on Dark Souls mechanics that were very deeply ingrained in my brain. My constant efforts to play Sekiro like Dark Souls led to my failure on more occasions than I could even count. Holding my guard while attempting to strafe around an enemy in order to administer a backstab like I had done so many times in the past was always met with a swift defeat, and more often than not story bosses I came across essentially acted as roadblocks for the game to test what I had learned so far. Eventually what I learned was that I was too stubborn to learn what Sekiro was trying to teach and instead had to rely on a friend to get me through the more gatekeeping sections. (Thanks, Mitch!)
That being said, Sekiro can be a very rewarding experience, and there is a lot to like about it. From the setting to the graphics to the sense of pride and accomplishment you get from finally getting the hang of its combat, you will want to succeed at this game. Oftentimes my feelings would wildly swing from wanting to open my window and shuriken the disc as far as I could and never play again to single-minded determination to complete a difficult section so I could see more of what the game had to offer. (Though by the end I began to question just how much of a master ninja the main character was simply because he did not break into a full Naruto run while sprinting.)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was released on March 22, 2019, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.
*Originally posted on Twin Cities Geek on May 4th 2019*