i love sekiro, as it felt like it took the precise combat focus of bb/dks3 and actually built a game around those ideasfirst. but wow i could really do with every boss not having at least 2 phases.
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I’m the same way — now that I’ve reached middle age and consumed 1 billion pieces of art and media, “memorable,” however it’s achieved, has become the quality in a work that trumps all others for me
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I see the “die twice” aspect of Sekiro as precisely a compensation for how quickly almost everything can die in it. On the one hand no manner of unexpected bullshit can one-shot you as the player. On the boss side, the in-field bosses can obviously get their first life backstabbed out of them, but also the majority of boss phases can be cut to pieces in less than a minute with a posture-breaking style.
Some bosses like True Monk and Genichiro are vulnerable to posture break from the getgo, but the really interesting bosses for me are the ones like Lady Butterfly and Sword Saint that combine high vit with really fast posture recovery. They punish a full vit style by taking forever and they also punish a full posture-break style by instantly recovering back to square one the moment you lose any momentum. But the trick is that their posture recovery speed is already reduced down to almost nothing at 80% vit. So to wipe them out quickly and reliably you need to learn two ways of reacting to their attacks, a dodge-sideways-and-slice-vit in the opening, and then a deflect-and-ichimonji style to finish them off.
I think this variable-posture-recovery-speed mechanic is like the key to Sekiro as a whole, the final piece that makes the mess of new mechanics click, and if I would make one criticism it’s that it’s not explained or emphasized enough. It’s mentioned once or twice in early tutorials, then it’s indicated by this red/yellow color change in the UI which isn’t that striking, and each boss has a different version of it which makes it tricky to actually internalize over the course of the game.
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I loved sekiro’s combat and clicked with it instantly.
It’s considerably more forgiving than bloodborne was and it doesn’t need good reflexes at all (cf I have garbage reflexes, I can’t even finish the BB dlc but I even beat Sekiro’s tedious Souls-style optional boss)
This is 100% correct
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There absolutely should have been Sekiro DLC where you get to play as Robert’s dad.
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omg
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Yeah, any game that encourages or at least provides for some lateral thinking is always going to be something I jive more to. The fact that the Souls series has progressively become more NOT that, is something I struggle with a lot, and probably why I continue to go back to Demon’s Souls but have a hard time with any of the newer games, DS2 aside.
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so i’m curious, in what way did this click for you? did you just get a feel for it by trial and error or were you especially observant of the UI or help tips?
i’m just passionate about clear tutorialisation so i’m interested in what different people may find intuitive
Everytime i look Sekiro is $60 and it’s like… I don’t even like video games that much
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One of the things I have to admit to myself that for as much as I agree that almost every visual design change in the remake has been for the worse when compared next to each other, I mostly did not even notice how interesting some of the original ones were when I actually played it myself. Probably due to the low resolution and the budget 720p TV I was playing it on at the time. While it’s neat to see how people have managed to get so ridiculously close to the original models to be able to get good screenshots of them that actually shows off their details I’ve been pretty consistently surprised by how they actually looked.
Does anybody remember FakeFactory any more? I’ve been actually surprised by how I haven’t seen anybody anywhere compare it to those. It was even determined to add vegetation all over!
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Procedurally I made a point to myself to try to learn the game as a blank slate rather than importing old habits from previous From games. This might not be wholly necessary, but it did feel like the game was telling me every step of the way how the combat was supposed to flow. The undead tutorial npc right by the shrine carried me the rest of the way, because I went and did all his tutorials before exploring the world (because each tutorial would leave me wondering about a new thing I noticed in the UI)
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as someone who figured out how to play Sekiro and enjoys it, i genuinely don’t know how or when it “clicked” with me and cannot confidently point to any moment post-tutorial and pre-Genichiro where it was teaching me anything besides “lol this game hard”. Genny was the fight where the combat system made sense to me, period. i enjoyed the parts before that but i was thoroughly just along for the ride, not feeling like i was slowly mastering anything
I also fought hanbei a bunch and felt like i had a confident grip on the combat system upon doing so, and then got utterly wrecked by the first samurai general in ashina outskirts. So idk
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I really think the ogre fights needed to be moved or even just cut from the game they suck shit and teach nothing useful whatsoever besides “lol grab attacks are terrible why does fromsoft keep doing them”
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I would say the same about Headless, but at least they are optional and super freaky when you encounter them.
To contribute, I felt that Sekiro was like the first time a lot of the discussion about Fromsoft games and difficulty had a handle on something. I was incompetent with the game’s one mechanic (parry) for a brief amount of time, but long enough to appreciate how much of a brickwall it placed on the path to experiencing the pleasures of the game. Generally, the most reactionary takes about how hard Souls games are and how they require difficulty sliders is something I’m not sympathetic with because I know, as an adept player of these things, there are many ways to get ahead. But Sekiro was kind of shocking to me because of this difference. It felt properly inaccessible to an extent.
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Grab attacks rule. Don’t let 'em getcha!!
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At the very least they could’ve not put him next to a chasm he can hurl you into
(And here I was saying that in Sekiro nothing can ever one-shot you…)
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this is an example of that understated Fromsoftware humor hehe I love it. so many jokes about misadventure at the player’s expense.
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me after killing patches on sight
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i’ve heard this before, and maybe i’m simply unamused because i played sen’s fortress and know they can do it better
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