I AM THE PARADOX I AM THE ENGIMA I BEAT THIS GAME AND THINK IT IS VERY STRUCTURALLY GOOD AND I AM GOOD AT IT AND ALSO.
I did not like it very much.
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Look i am simply saying i would like to see less comments to the effect of âwell if you didnât have trouble with this maybe youâre just super good at action gamesâ or âyouâre trying too hard to like thisâ or âdonât even come at me with your defenses not all from games are perfect okâ i think we all want the same, less tense tone out of this conversation 
that kind of take is befuddling to me because i have taken to this game pretty well and do not consider myself an amazing or even especially patient player lol. Dark Souls 3 kicked my ass and i hate that game, i thought it was actually too hard and not very enjoyable. Thereâs gotta be something else going on here, you know?
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also find returning to NG and NG+ and crushing the first 10 hours of the game in an hour very very interesting.
I still think mobcontrol freaking blows.
Newer From Software games give me a feeling of exploring mechanics and being creative and Sekiro feels much more like mastering one mechanic (or a small set of mechanics) in a given set of contexts. Sekiro can be described, while not wholly accurately, mostly accurately, as being a game about being good at deflecting attacks. The Souls games and BloodBorne arenât that singularly focused.
I think speedrunners have gotten really creative with the game, but they do with every game and itâs mostly exploiting the stranger aspects of the game, those a person wonât typically discover unless theyâre willing to spend thousands of hours with it. Which is probably why most of us just prefer to watch them rather than try to perform at their level.
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Yeah I started a new NG this weekend for the Shura ending and my personal experience was the only bosses that took more than 2 tries were Genichiro (curiously, especially after crushing him in the tutorial! I was overtrained on the black sword version I think) and Snake Eyes Shirafuji.
I accidentally deleted my last post because phone. 
I think most of those responses youâve paraphrased were mostly put to you (and others) out of frustration like âOK, whatever, how about this thenâ after you appeared to insist on meeting this thing more than halfway
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I fix
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Snakes Eyes is my fucking jam a real quick 20 second fight. That it is a real trouble for you is interesting!
The Sekiro discussion is weird! We are all in these tiny untouchable bubbles of our seperate experiences of the same game.
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Bloodborne is a game about iframe dodging though⌠itâs more focused if anything.
I admire the mechanics in this game much more than Bloodborne. Bloodborne mostly just stripped down Souls mechanics to a style you could (and I did) already play in Souls. They talked a big game about aggression in Bloodborne and there wasnât much substance behind it â exploiting regain was a trap more than anything. This game actually does deliver the incentivized aggression and also better stealth/aggro and mob control mechanics (like Puppeteer!) than ever before.
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time for the character battle tournament between Rosa Luxemburg, Tommy Douglas, Zhou Enlai, and Diogenes
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Puppeteer makes me secretly happy because itâs when I went from, I bet they played Assassinâs Creed and Batman and sped up the stealth to the pace of Mordor, to, oh wow they did play Mordor and they want to rumble!
Iâd like to probe your thoughts on Hirata Estate. I havenât made it to round 2 so I assume youâre talking about the boss pace, or maybe the fragmented intended order at that point in the game?
Given the overwhelming aggression and power of stealth normal enemies are a rather minor threat next to bosses, lending this game more of a boss rush feel despite having generous amounts of standard environment. But at the point of Hirata, the player is still learning to fight grunts, and the split courtyards are an interesting and safe-ish playspace for a ninja to provoke, make a mistake, and hightail away.
Many of the Hirata bosses seem to give people trouble, and Lady Butterfly particularly seems ill-gauged at that skill level â long and tough and with a wide move vocabulary.
But the rest of that level is just spectacular in its movement, scenery, variability (From is used to picking a single mood and color palette for a zone and the transition from river to houses to bamboo to intense burning estate grounds is particularly well done), and storytelling (one of the best pieces of direct storytelling Iâve seen so far in this very straightforward, but still appropriately vague and reserved game).
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yah, lady butterfly was amazing, my complaints about the other bosses aside. that fight asks a lot of the player with how varied it is, but i was able to figure out what iâm supposed to do just from npcs and actually fighting her, and while i havenât quite been able to beat her, i never felt frustrated
ah! I had the opposite reaction, the second health bar felt like a stab in the eye. I had worked out a few tactics that made me feel pretty good but were all very slow while the game was clearly indicating that I was going too slow a lot of the other messaging pushed me towards that as a plausible, if ten-minute long route.
Then the compound anxiety over Dragon Rot and running out of Snap Seeds just dug the boot in
I was glad to see the sun on the other side, though
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i think for me it was how they really sell her whole Thing, so her having 1 bar & popping back up made sense from the Powerful Illusion Ninja. plus, pulling that after hours getting you used to being the only person that can do that was really funny imo
I felt Hirata Estate has no encounter design. Itâs rooms and hallways full of basic mooks, you can slaughter them with whirlwinds or stealth them or run past them, and none of it matters. A few of the mooks are actually tanky although they are also half-naked and those are the ones that get you killed.
And the level is too long for the relentlessly grimdark atmosphere and the dissonant music â you are saying the area is good for playful hangoutitude but there is nothing playful about the aesthetic. How am I supposed to laugh about getting attacked by chickens in the middle of Kristallnacht
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Estate on the whole? I have to apologize a little up front since I donât want to sound too terse but I immediately think about dropping in from cliffs, to a wide long bridge with a patrolling guard or two, then one near the main gate with dogs around.
Itâs cleanly laid out to take in a variety of ways, the quickest being just jump in the water swim up to the right and then deal with a dog and one lone guard. You can also just hop up and over the roof without grappling either.
Immediately after, a long hall/street with one patrolling, a couple archers and one more in the mix. Spaced out with the last placed behind a corner to the left for mild surprise.
Itâs all finely paced, and also immediately skippable!
I think some of the critique on dissonance in this game comes from an expectation of method and guidance vs freeform approach and âleft to your handlingâ.
I do think a disproportionate number of my issues with the game â certainly enough that Iâd be more inclined to overlook the rest without them â come down to production issues along those lines. and I like to think thereâs a difference between âdemanding polishâ and valuing coherent production, but Iâm getting pretty demanding.
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Yeah, her presentation is excellent (that room!) and the illusion theme are really great.
Regarding the level, Iâm a sucker for Fromâs style of semi-open levels, going back to the various blight towns, Bloodborneâs forest, and anything with apparent complexity that gets cracked through familiarity and path-tracing (Iâm a Thief level design fan over anything, really). Sekiro seems to be mostly about Assassinâs-style encounter camps with fairly proscribed stealth routes discoverable through retries and wild approach power through verticality.
Hirata lacks the verticality but allows the player to skip over the walls, which seems a key tool in teaching player power. The beginning enemies are grouped as melee units on patrols which can be pulled or hit two at a time, thereâs dogs to complicate right afterwards, and then they introduce archers down long sightlines to teach these crowd-control bits.
The basic bandit design is in keeping with Fromâs tendency towards early-game soldiers: 3-4 basic types with strong stat differences and moderate attack pattern differences; their groupings are meaningfully different at this point and they canât be trivialy stealthed.
They have a few custom-scripted encounters that are fairly flexible. The approach up to the late bridge, with archers able to set the road traps on fire, is exciting and pushes hard towards the river route which feels appropriate and nudges towards the spatial-connecting understanding that feels very rewarding.
They tuck in the enemies that feel like custom 1-shots: the Taro troop on the bridge, the monks in the forest, the Imperial ninja at the pagoda; good foreshadowing that have the effect of Black Knights-like mini bosses at this point.
And then they cap with the large-scale battles in the courtyard that push a very different style. While itâs not the tight âdeal with itâ early design of Resident Evil 4âs village or Bloodborneâs effigy pyre, it has some related overwhelming aspects that I like as an action-game opener.
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The path and bridge after Shinobi Hunter is where I went âhooboy are these mooks boringâ and just ran past them. And there wasnât a boss at the end so that was fine. Youâre describing the intent of the encounter design, but it plays out as a meaningless mush, a superficial fascimile of a level.
And like someone said above about the patrolling guy with a torch next to the shield dudes. I guess the âdesignâ is to wait till his back is turned and deal with them separately? But that is just a waste of time, it works just as well to rush in and hack them to pieces, or run past them, or whatever.
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