the dodge button is still a dodge button? I used it consistently throughout the game, but its like a bloodborne style step-dodge and not a roll like it is in the souls games. It has a smaller timing window and is ESSENTIAL for a lot of the attack types that otherwise have too much player tracking.
Itâs not like Bloodborneâs dodge at all. It has very few iframes whereas Bloodborneâs are extremely generous. The dodge in Sekiro is only to be used in discrete situations, again, heavy downward swings or other things that would typically hit you if youâre airborne. The jump is the dodge button because itâs consistent, it has a lot of movement, and actually gets you out of the situation, in addition to dodging sweeps. The actual dodge button doesnât dodge a whole lot in this game. In my experience itâs used more as a counter than a dodge (i.e., after a huge downward swing, dodge so I can get in two attacks).
edit: and if this seems counterintuitive, well, thatâs because it is, or at least it was to me, after playing so many Souls games.
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Hmm, interesting. That reminds me of how Demonâs mistrained me for DkS1 and I stubbornly didnât think of trying new tactics when it was called for. That must today be happening on a huge scale with Sekiro.
The tactics you describe are weird as hell though, as I find endless running while locked on to be. This might be a highly iterated game that deliberately ignored traditional âpolishâ, defined a new uncanny vision and left in real janky stuff when it aligned with it. Or is it that it just tried to innovate on so much at once like Demonâs did and couldnât possibly expect to avoid jank? I cannot pin this game down.
I also find in retrospect Miyazakiâs comment that this game might be their hardest yet to be quite odd. Orphan of Kos had no puzzle/ignorance aspect to its difficulty â it challenged people who played the entire series and knew the ropes. Sekiroâs difficulty might not be fully understood by the devs themselves, because they changed so much. It might be experienced as very hard on release week, but in a few years we may look back on it as trivially easy and broken as most of DkS1 is.
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i did make a video fighting the last boss because i was so excited to finally beat him (obvious spoilers behind the link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtmUVcZMhw may end up doing more videos when i start ng+
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what? no it has tons of iframes, its just not useful for a lot of attacks because the attacks have really wide hitboxes. you canât dodge through most horizontal slashes because theyâll still hit you at the end of their animation, your step dodge is much shorter than that. You can also just straight up dash around most attacks (I fought the second ashina elite by just step dodging through every attack)
anyway Iâve already killed every headless in the game so thanks for the advice but I still consider them harder than most of the bosses just because terror is such a hold over.
Iâm legitimately unsure as well. My feelings on this game are honestly pretty mixed. There are some bosses that I adore but there are some bosses I loathe and some design that just makes me question what they were thinking. I donât know if itâs innovation nearly so much as throwing everything out. It seems like a lot of the good design decisions they made in previous games are gone and some of the bad ones are back in, and the reason as to why doesnât really make a whole lot of sense.
Thereâs punishment thatâs needless, lack of context cues for different attacks (a big red thing for all dangerous attacks is really difficult to read when the animation and startups can be as fast as they are), and a general lack of building towards combat (everythingâs just kind of a slurry - each boss will typically introduce entirely new things to you and one thing will not necessarily help you with the next thing you encounter at all), as well as hitboxes becoming extremely deceptive (this is a game where you are going to get hit by what will look like nothing to you, because the hitboxes are just that large).
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In my experience it has nowhere near as many iframes as the dodge in Bloodborne. It also doesnât cover as much ground, making it not a movement tool but a specific mechanic tool (again, huge downward swings), which is also what the Mikiri counter is - a specific mechanic tool.
It works on the Ashina Elite because of the specific mechanic of that fight (dodge left of the sword flash and counter - not a huge downward swing, but effectively the same thing - a big forward attack that has a lot of recovery).
⌠You do realize that if you hold the dodge button down you sprint, right? Itâs the best movement tool in the game.
Jumping, in comparison, I only used to dodge sweep attacks.
You do realize Iâm talking about the dodge specifically and not sprinting right?
Theyâre the same button and are just differing degrees of the same mechanical utility
But yes, as has been frequently said in this game. Donât treat it like a soulsborne game, because it isnât. It shares an engine but not many mechanics.
No, they arenât, theyâre discrete actions that are activated by different uses of the same button.
I consider holding deflect (used to regain posture) and mashing deflect (used to actually block attacks), in spite of being the same button and even the same action, to have very different purposes in Sekiro. Which is an odd thing to say but if you donât understand the difference in combat, combatâs going to be extremely awkward.
Until I started jumping to dodge things, I didnât really understand the cadence of combat, but once I started doing it when my impulse was to dodge, combat became a lot smoother and I stopped getting clipped by random stuff because I stopped trying to dodge it, thinking that it would work like a Souls title.
Alternatively Tulpa, your reactions may simply be better than mine. I am admittedly not very good at this gameâs combat, but I got a lot better when I started jumping when my impulse was to dodge and mashing deflect when blocking as two of my primary methods for approaching any given fight.
I was like, probably gonna be reasonable enough to dodge most things and jump only to counter those arcing danger attacks, but that sounds now like mindlessly following old habits, especially if youâre even arguing the exact reverse is a good idea. I shouldâve been experimenting more with the jump, seeing as itâs a core mechanic and all, even if my overtrained brain insists on seeing it as just the way to climb cliffs.
I ate far more hits from jumping than from dodging. Jump has 0 i-frames, it just gives you distance, which is essentially the same as sprinting. Spamming the block button to get erstwhile deflects measurably increases how much posture damage you take even on perfect deflects so it doesnât obviate the need to learn patterns.
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Yes, you still need to learn that what things are blockable and what things arenât, but you have less to worry about whether or not youâll actually block them. If youâre the kind of person that has the reaction speed to not need to mash, great, but mashing has gotten me through every fight at this point, and with far less fuss than my first playthrough, where I was trying to time everything and constantly getting hit because I was blocking too late (whereas mashing ensures youâll block and get enough timed deflects to be able to regain posture before the next set of attacks - and sometimes the mash will turn in your favor and youâll get to press the advantage).
You still need to learn what can be jumped and what canât be, just like you need to learn what can be dodged and what canât be, but jumping is much better than dodging because of the distance it gives you, even without the iframes. Distance in this game matters more than anything, especially due to the deceptive hitboxes.
The red thing I suppose just a âhey donât try to block this indicatorâ. Itâs not trying to be useful for other than that (it specifically doesnât indicate which of the three it is, when it easily could have), and even seems actively distracting if youâre not blocking. I can see how it might be worse not to have it at all, but surely there must be a better way to design this if the unblockable-attack business is revisited at a more ground up levelâŚ
Well, except one of them is blockable (all thrusts are blockable) and most of them can be interrupted. Meanwhile, stuff that can do far more damage and isnât interruptible (downward smashes, for example), donât get those, because they can also be blocked. So itâs more like the gameâs indicating⌠I dunno, something thatâs more deadly than normal but also not always. But usually?
This is actually another reason why jumping is really good. With mid-air deflection, you can also block thrusts mid-air (Mikiri countering does more posture damage though), effectively negating both sweeps and thrusts from hitting you (and throws too, now that I think about it - thereâs⌠one exception to this with a boss later on, lol).
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oh my reaction times are terrible, I need to learn the patterns of the enemies before I can deflect them, so I just preferred to hold block down and not take penalty posture damage for trying to trick the system (this is how it works, if the game detects you mashing itâll fill your meter up way faster than if youâre just blocking)
Anyway, keeping your distance from all enemies and most bosses is a mistake, because you need to be close to attack and deflect, and only that prevents their posture from healing. I donât like being stuck in a 1v1 fight with a miniboss for more than a minute, and I feel like hit and run tactics reward a very tedious playstyle.
This isnât bloodborne
Thrusts arenât in fact blockable, but they are deflectable. So thatâs a situation where it helps to spam the block button hoping to get an accidental deflect (or, you know, just dodge to the side and attack)
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Anyway here are my criticisms of Sekiro:
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Itâs too much like a Souls game! Iâm ok with the mechanics for increasing vitality but Attack Power should have remained static throughout the game so that I could have avoided my situation with the Corrupted Monk in Mibu Village where I was barely able to scratch them (and they needed vitality damage to be defeated so it was just grueling) until I fought another main boss.
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The economy is all out of wack. Youâve barely got enough Sen to buy anything for the first 3/4ths of the game, where it flips around and you have too much money and nothing to spend it on. The merchants felt like a holdover more than a main part of the experience.
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Even with activision style tutorializing, only a small minority of players were able to figure out how you were meant to play the game immediately.
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The headless and the Shichimen warriors feel like theyâre leftovers from Bloodborne or Dark Souls
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The Spear Armour Removal Technique wasnât useful in any place you would have thought it would be useful. I understand that this was probably to avoid any of the megaman-style weaknesses that folks in this thread are claiming make up the majority of encounters, but I wanted to use spear armour removal at least more than once.
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Some minibosses you could avoid and others you had to fight, and I wish the logic behind this was more consistent. Its super important that you had to fight the fire cow and the foreign knight ROBERT but why was Snake Eyes in the poison pool area mandatory? That was just a roadblock for a bunch of folks.
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Because its has so much soulsborne legacy people went into it and played like they were still playing soulsborne, and had a bad time! Its a completely different genre with different mechanical concerns!
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Four endings? Iâm not going to replay the game four times! Who wants four endings? I guess Iâll youtube the other endings.
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The difficulty spikes (from my experience) were all over the place. Really easy beginning, sharply ramping up to Genichiro, effortless throughout the middle and then the endgame drops all pretenses and it becomes an intense boss-rush. Ironically, my skills improved so much that I think the first difficulty spike would be invisible on a replay
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The huge UI markers for where grapple points were, those were distracting and ugly. There were also not enough opportunities to grapple at or onto enemies during fights.
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Yâall have covered a lot of the contrast between what the jump and dodge button are capable of avoiding, in my experience jumping tends to be a better guaranteed evasion, but only in response to attacks that donât have any bit of overhead or widespread hitbox. That may be obvious but Iâm saying so because when Iâd become reliant on jumping away from things which werenât clearly side to side sweeps or straight thrusts, many times Iâd pay taking a lot of damage and be further away from the enemy. The dodge-step feels like maybe 50-60% of the distance and def less iframes than Bloodborne, so it can still be extremely effective at staying close and wailing on openings when you track the last half-second required for various enemy/boss attacks.
Really itâs a good mixture that got me through the first half with occasional deflect and posture attention, the second half I became much more comfortable with deflects to break a lot of small-medium sized humanoid opponents, and nearly all bosses. Finding a rhythm you can subtly tap more than a hard spam of block helps tons. Thatâs a weird sentence.
Headless = some of the nastiest battle swagger in any of these games, always looks like it shouldnât be too hard then that Terror spam and trying to make use of confetti really cramps things up. Will try Talbainâs tactic, I really want to clear those and the not so bad Shimichen(?) warriors before I head to ng+.
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