Yeah this kinda looks par for the course for a game developed by From.
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the hardcore git gud gamers perfect action game rep was already tedious and wrongheaded by the time DS2 came out, and even though i enjoyed Bloodborne/DS3/Sekiro i canât help but be miffed that Fromsofts been rewarding those players instead of slow clunky knights like me
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As a clunky knight, do you like Lordâs of the Fallen?
I havenât played it because i dislike the aesthetics 
Im slightly more interested in The Surge by the same dev though, it at least has the novelty of being future/robot souls
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nooo bloodborne rewards slow clunky knights too, you just gotta use the axe to regain health as fast as youâre losing it
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The direction From games has taken is particularly disappointing considering how good theyâve been at making interesting, difficult bosses that can still be beaten by awful players - either by having weird esoteric rules to learn, by letting terrain or crowd control have a bigger importance than good reflexes, and/or having intimidation play a big part in player psychology
Bloodborne and DS3 are still accessible up to a point (DLC pushing it) but Sekiro is inconceivable for slow players
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Sekiroâs difficulty is mostly from the input complexity although this can wind up being experienced as speed: for example when we see the danger kanji, we need an extra moment to decide whether to jump, block or dodge forward. I think itâs actually a nice lateral step from the ridiculous speed of Bloodborne DLC, which was a game design dead end.
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i was just typing this kind of response. the attacks still have similar slow windups as in souls, in a lot of cases even slower, and i still get fucked up cause i have the wrong reaction to it or bad timing.
i actually spent 20 tries on the first life-upgrade dropping general cause my brain had a really hard time wiring itself to jump when seeing a sweep, even if he stood there for like a whole second prepping it.
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One of the problems is that Sekiro punishes mashing but requires controlled mashing and so itâs frustrating because the system isnât super transparent about itâs core combat.
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Agreed though the enemy tells would have to be much longer for the difficulty shift to be a truly lateral step; blindly mashing dodge as soon as an enemy reacts in BB has always been much easier in my experience than pressing the correct button at the correct time in Sekiro. The dude on the bull striked a good balance IMO but the other bosses were hell
Sekiro multiplied the parry-like options (parry being the high-skill defensive maneuver in Souls, as opposed to block / dodge which donât punish severely for getting the timing wrong) and made them indispensable during boss battles, raising the skill floor well above BB which had the leniency to include a good all-purpose dodge
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imo sekiro was a huge misstep in that classes/builds in other souls games serve almost as an adjustable difficulty level (i.e. the royalty class in demonâs because kiting is so useful, in bloodborne itâs a violent past axe user because itâs high regain makes coping with unexpected hits easier) and being forced into whatâs kind of the worst way to learn a souls game for me (fast glass cannon melee fighter) instantly turned me off?
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i think the analyses of Sekiro being like Punch-Out!! are somewhat accurate, though itâs more like Punch-Out!! if every boss was Mike Tyson.
i feel like the thing about Souls (other than 3)/BB is that theyâre hard, but generous, because they know things are kind of janky. at least, that was always my interpretation. once you get the feel for your character and how to do damage to enemies in those games, you are mostly set, whereas with Sekiro, i never really felt like i hit my stride. i definitely got better as i played, but never to a point where i wouldnât always die at least once on the majority of the bosses.
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I liked Sekiro a lot and actually took to it more easily than Bloodborne, but physical you nailed the big issue i had with these recent From games. Itâs less about the punishing mechanics or input complexity for me, and more the player disempowerment from hyper balancing everything. You can no longer sequence break to nab a big fuckoff sword in the first hour of the game, or blast everything with magic, or put on a ring that lets you equip twice as much shit. Even in Sekiro, where they at least stripped away that kind of stuff deliberately, i canât help but think: would it have been that much easier if you just restored all my HP when i get up after dying? Would it have been that broken if the sakura droplet just gave me an extra revival, no strings attached? Itâs part of why i barely touch the prosthetics outside of the ones that everyone uses like shuriken and firecrackers. Like i said the fine-tuned balance works better for me in that game than it does in like DS3, but i still want to see something a bit more messy from them again.
I donât know if itâs a âmisstepâ in the sense that theyâd been moving in that direction design-wise since Bloodborne, even if the axe gives you a different range of options from the cane/the other weapons, itâs still a narrowing of possibilities thatâs absolutely deliberate as they give you a shield very early on just to show that itâs useless. Dark Souls 3 is very similar in some ways as well.
(I agree though that I personally find it boring because I really enjoy the wide range of experiences you can have with the earlier games, the loss of the ranged magic user and the poise monsters of the earlier titles is too bad, I wish we could have seen a game from From that went in the other direction and went full barely taped-together jank.)
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Actually ive thought about it and the real issue is that From got obsessed with flashy, brutal looking grab attacks and insist on putting them in every other boss fight, even though they undermine the mechanics and are always a pain to dodge
Also they give the bosses way too much damn HP now and it sucks. Thatâs my unironic biggest pet peeve with Sekiro is that every boss takes for fucking ever to whittle down lol
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I think the lowered player builds scope in Bloodborne and even moreso in Sekiro is a price theyâre paying to make tighter action games. Having to evaluate enemy types across at least five major player types in the mainline Souls games is an order of magnitude increase in complexity and the only realistic outcome is every enemy gets less love matched with every player type.
Nioh approaches this by substantively removing the magic builds and restricting enemy scope and going faster, which covers up some sins.
Itâs possible that From has learned enough from their tight exercises that they can bring that knowledge to an increased player build scope in whatever Elden Ring is.
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A lot of this is down to personal preference, itâs become increasingly clear as I age that I consistently value wildly variant, surprising, and basically broken experiences in media above those that are polished and tight, although I can appreciate the latter for their own merits and for the craft that they require.
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It always made sense for me to think about Sekiro not as an extremely restricted RPG with only one playstyle, but more like an adventure combat game like Onimusha or maybe even DMC. In fact, I get some kind of pride and confidence to think I could maybe finally finish DMC because now I have finished Sekiro.
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Yeah, Iâm the same. Sekiro is built so well that itâs hard to ignore, and I do love it, but itâs not naturally my jam.
i prefer the previous more broken games a lot more than sekiro as well, but i still feel like sekiro isnât a misstep or wrong?
but also the difficulty is kinda catered to me and my patience at practicing having the proper reactions to stuff. itâs a lot like doing fighting games, except animations are slower so thereâs less guessing.
if it was as fast as people make it out to be i feel like i wouldnât be able to play it? like, iâve never been able to react to mike tyson, and i canât beat the final dungeon in zelda 2 cause iâm not fast enough on reacting to the enemies random behaviors. but cause sekiro only feels fast rather than being fast, cause i donât have to increase my reaction time but (slowly) rewire what my reactions are, i can do it.
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