For anyone frustrated with but wanting to enjoy Sekiro more I hope you do in your own way, though my most humble and not boastful suggestion is, for a little while, couple sessions:
Turn off the HUD. Remove the meters and counters, items and variables. Get more of a feel for how you move, how the enemies move. Sure you might panic but keep the Healing Gourd by itself in quick select, if you want to mix it up, tool select gives visual traces on what youāre switching to.
Thatās the best way I can advise, as someone who this whole game design comes naturally to, to more quickly succeed at what it wants and possibly enjoy? If you donāt thereās no qualitative/quantitative judgement, From upped the ante where more effort of a specific kind is required from the participant.
youāre right, you get two shot & thereās no way to increase your health until you beat 4 bosses that can two shot you
the ogre and the bull are both fights where you have to dodge around and wait for safe opportunities to land a couple attacks then back off because literally nothing else works on them. i struggled with them until i realized parrying and stamina damage were pointless started fighting them like bloodborne bosses
& i still disagree that stuff like mikiri counters (which frequently result in me dodging into the tip of a spear because the collision half works) and jumping sweeps are obvious when you can easily miss the bosses that are supposed to teach them
Hmm, I wouldnāt put it that strongly. Iād say a keep-distance punishing style will work fine some of the time and not so much other of the time. One thing From does very well is encourage a different playstyle on a boss-by-boss/area-by-area basis, and some of them are in fact well-suited or at least amenable to it. The Chained Ogre for one.
These ambiguous zones where a strategy kinda-sorta-works are the most prone to train players into painstakingly optimizing a style into a local maximum (because they observe that there is a potential to succeed by executing it better). Iād say Sekiro can cause that due to tradeoffs with other game design virtues itās going for (meaningful within-game variety, and favoring soft counters rather than hard counters).
right now iām at the castle, so i have a choice between dying to a guy in a well, dying to some spear guy, dying to a general surrounded by guards, or dying to flying ninjas. i guess the last option isnāt a boss!
i guess iām just extrapolating from the pace so far and assuming itās going to ramp up. i can see why they would keep the same pace tho!
when they first tell you to talk to him he has 3 tutorials about basic actions. i didnāt do them because i already learned those from the first stage ā i assumed they were refreshers and moved on.
i didnāt run into a ācountering sweeps with a jump kickā prompt until i stumbled on a Big Katana miniboss that iād accidentally skipped before. i was going back thru the area in case there were upgrades iād missed because i wasnāt making any progress on the ogre or juzou
iām fucking sick of people telling me my experiences with this game didnāt happen
conversely, i have never beaten a Souls game. not particularly good at them. i always hit difficulty walls and bounce off out of despair, or just not wanting to deal with hrs and hrs of repeated crushing failures.
but i took to sekiro like a duck in water. ogre was pitifully easy actually. genichiro was not that bad either. in my experience.
so, like, given both of our experiences put together, thereās probably something to the āthis isnt a souls gameā argument.
yeah i was actually thinking of right around that point where i had like five or six fights in front of me and it felt like kind of a marathon, but then after that i didnāt have another pressing boss fight for many hours
obviously ymmv re: where you go next and shit but yeah
Theyāre definitely entirely different games, and arenāt really comparable. In one the dodge is good, in the other the dodge is bad, in one you can play in many ways and explore mechanics, in the other the game very much wants you to play one way and not explore mechanics so much as get used to them. Encounters progress and mechanics are much more smoothly aligned in one, they are very unevenly distributed and thrown into your face in the other, essentially acting as tests (the last boss really being a perfect example). The cameraās bad in both, so thatās consistent at least.
The stuff thatās strangest to me about Sekiro is mostly how they threw out the good ideas from previous games. From has a habit of doing this, for reasons I donāt really understand (Vials in Bloodborne, Spirit Emblems in Sekiro).
I only managed to beat the Owl when I worked out he has a bunch of attacks you can dodge into, Souls style, get straight behind him and tap him up some
I bought this game. Someone tried to cheat me out of a buncha money I donāt have so I did the sensible thing and ran out and blew the last of my cash on a video game. I wanted Super Robot Wars T but it turns out they donāt sell that at Gamestop. Have you been in one of those things lately? Nowadays theyāre like Spencers Gifts but with a few racks devoted to $3 copies of FIFA 2015. Not many games up in there. But they did have this, and I love it. I thought it would be too stressful for me in my current state but thereās so much going on I never have time to think about troubles. I bet if Iād gotten Super Robot Wars I woulda had so much time to think about troubles, what with all the animations and unit movement and stat placement and whatnot.
Think I made the right choice.
I was initially trying to marathon this thing so I could sell it ASAP but now Iām marathoning it cuz I just fucking love it. All Iāve done since Saturday is work and play this and thatās a good balance, to me. Iāll seriously miss it when Iām finished. No, I wonāt play NG+. Even though I want to. This is a Danger Game.
Replace ādotaā with āsekiroā ok.
I came in here to post this. Sekiroās rhythm is the closest Iāve seen to a 3D Punch-Out.
This dawned on my yesterday when I finally realized I should be running a whole lot more in combat. Yes, dodging and parrying and jumping and poking to provoke counterattacks are key but running is too as it makes some fights way easier and it should have been covered in the fucking tutorial. I didnāt know you could do it until I was pretty deep into the game! It was one of the first things I tried and it didnāt work! The tutorial guy never mentions it! I just saw it during a loading screen and went āwhatā.
I had a hard time adjusting to Dark Souls and Bloodborne when they came out. When I heard folks were struggling with this I figured it was a similar deal. But I didnāt have much of an issue with Sekiroās very early game. I did hit a wall later though. My experience was pretty similar to Physicalās and there was a point where I was like āHoly shit I understand why folks would not want to put up with this bullshit.ā But now I have a handle on things and I can actually pinpoint all the moments where I learned something new and overcame an obstacle and I feel a little bit of pride over it so I think this is a masterpiece.
I just wish Iād gotten a handle on things a little earlier. I made some wrong assumptions or learned the wrong lessons and while I think the tutorial dude is fine there should be a fucking manual. Just put all those tooltips in a fucking manual.
Also yeah the camera often sucks but the fact that these games still drop inputs blows my fucking mind. Iām not the only one who experiences this, right?
Yeah, I talked about this earlier in the thread. The dodge is a much more situational tool in Sekiro, rather than a go to for defense. Itās used mostly for big downward swings, to get behind or to the side of the boss, which allows you to take one or two swings after their attack. The go to defensive option in Sekiro however is deflecting, combined with running (and in most cases, running is typically more advantageous than dodging as it actually will get you fully behind your enemy and allow you to take more swings than if you were to just dodge - discovered that fairly recently after watching some speedruns). Jumpingās also typically better than dodging if youāre moving backwards as it allows you to mid-air deflect (which can block thrusts) and avoids sweeps, as well as gives better distance.
Dodging is really best for the Mikiri Counter. The more I play, the more it feels like that is its primary purpose.
My first half through I felt this happened on a handful of occasions and reminded me of some seriously dropped R2 pulls in Dark Souls, stamina available in the middle of some crucial response and suddenly Iām standing still getting wrecked - my mind was already on where I was supposed to have landed it!
But the past 40 hrs I havenāt experienced it again. If itās present probably a much, much smaller degree.
the i-frames on dodge are a bit tricky to feel out but on my NG+2 Iāve actually started dodging through attacks more often just because the timing window is sometimes better than deflecting.
Lord let me come in to stir the hornets nest for not liking a From game. I think I hate this game.
I hate the mook battles
I especially hate group mook battles
I hate having to deal with mooks while fighting bosses
The Snake was me yelling at my video game that I have played too many video games already.
I hate how unclear the game is about what a is a wall and what is a barrier.
I think the music is real boring typical AAA orchestra but maybe there is also a take flute.
I appreciate everyone helping me but I am also fed up with the vague bullshit. When you add in the barrier that I am playing it in Japanese and the game is entirely in medieval Japanese. I am pretty good at Japanese but that doesnāt mean I am familar with Sengoku era military jargon or the dialect of a courtesan. I canāt keep track of the 15 different ways and statusās they refer to the prince! Or whatever haircut boy is. Kudos on the localizers if yāall can follow the plot I have an easier time with Judge Eyesās legal and yakuza jargon.
I suspected I wasnāt going to like this and I donāt like being right.
I think the input buffer on certain moves is smaller than it usually is; the deathblow out of a parry is noticeably wonky, probably because the sync action setting it up isnāt set up properly, and attacking out of jump seems to accept input much later than similar animations.
Because they donāt let you cancel out of attacks as generously as western action games, they need to keep the input buffers relatively short to avoid false confirmation from mashing to start the prior attack, pushing them into these situations where the window isnāt ready for input the player intended.
