If someone says that thereâs only one way to play this game and that one way sucks, I am not going to stop myself from saying âthatâs not trueâ
I didnât beat all of the bosses in every possible way to beat them, but I have had the pleasure of discovering new strategies long after my first playthrough which expanded how I thought about the toolset this game gives me. There is no fat on this game, and every aspect of it has been intentionally and consciously designed (except for the secret endgame boss)
I also donât think this game is particularly janky. It feels like the tightest design From has ever put out. Every element is designed to teach you how to play not just passably, but well.
Hirata estate felt immanently dangerous my first time through. I felt like I was going to a place I wasnât supposed to, way too early. It felt massive and sprawling and non-linear. Kind of like a much more successful version of the forbidden woods from bloodborne (which while promising a sprawling nonlinearity, only offered a curvy line of progress). I progressed all the way until I died to Juzou the Drunkard, and that was when I was booted out of the memory and the dragonrot began. Hirata estate on my first playthrough felt like a massive labyrinth of opportunities and secrets.
The encounter design was an excellent training wheels (especially because of their relatively higher xp rewards at the beginning of the game) for how to approach stealth and group encounters in the game. It taught me a lot about how the AI works, what order to optimally take out enemies, when to run and when to stay and fight, etc.
I could come up with a number of ways to improve the Estate for this or that reason, but none of the enemy placement seems loose other than the central inferno, where youâre most forced to have a brawl of slash and dash between enemies, their behavior and standing with Juzou at the door, pretty fitting given the main plunder/raze/get the child event going on.
Itâs definitely closest to the Soulsborne plane of goings on; a temporal stage for a memory passed through our two main characters - also showing us some sort of betrayal or clan-break between Lady Butterfly and Sekiro. Itâs great with thin explanation but what exactly was going down that night?
youâve said this several times and it has actually succeeded in persuading me that I like their other games in part because theyâre not overly tight
I donât agree, the tightest From game is Dark Souls 3 IMO (except Camera King). This game is back to the levels of jank of their pre-Bloodborne games with the exception of five or so pristinely designed boss battles. It would be strange if it was polished given the amount of mechanical innovation in it
One way to phrase why I think Hirata Estate is bad is that itâs like Painted World level design transplanted to a game where that doesnât result in any particular gameplay dynamic
Iâm not sure what you mean by jank, to be honest, youâve mentioned it a lot but I donât share many of your gripes about the game on a mechanical level
Anyway, the reason I feel like Hirata estate basically works is that it looks and feels like a Tenchu level in a 2019 game
Tulpa if it were anyone other than you I would think they were deliberately failing to perceive the majestic pirouettes of the Ballet Ogre but Iâm not sure weâre even using âjankâ consistently at this point
Chained Ogreâs tracking speed for the dropkick, jump-grab, and occasionally kick are roughly put 15-20% excessive.
White Robe Shin Huntaâs weapon hit detection and moveset are too much like late game tricksters for his placement w/out reliance on Mikuri.
Long Arm Centipide/Giraffes are a-ok with me but move and attack in a way accentuated purely just to get a certain response from the average player, which is fine and completely justified but there is jank within.
All versions of Lone Shadow piss me off but I canât call their advantages jank, they are well crafted to expertly kick me around.
But anyway, I should add that I thought Ashina Castleâs level design was brilliant. Itâs maybe the fullest expression of Fromâs love of fortresses so far. Itâs such an intimidating, multilayered approach with some bottlenecks, and some crannies and side paths (which themselves are surprisingly fortified), it introduces a progression of inspired enemy types, and you open the front door from the inside in the classic From fashion and fight a culminating midgame boss at the peak. A very pure expression of what I like in videogames and they arenât even finished with it at that point.
A little too much really without an inbetween area. Thats ninpo and Iâll believe it! (also I read it as Emmaâs shortcut between castle and temple biz)
Yeah me too but NPCs in these games have always teleported around ahead of you and this is like a âthe turtle that carries the earth is carried on another turtle, of courseâ nonexplanation
That is kinda the problem with all the in-between boss encounters. The mooks are just mooks, and serve no discernible purpose that I can tell aside from flavor. And while they are flavorful theyâre also quite annoying when fighting mini-bosses. The stealth also just doesnât provide enough opportunity to make stealth an interesting way to play the game. You canât actually play the game in a significantly stealthy manner (like knocking out all the enemies with sleep darts or other stealth tools or something, or using a whistle to draw enemies away, etc.), because your only option is to attack and the second you attack somebody youâre no longer stealthy. None of the tools nor the jutsus really help with this either.
Stealth is tacked on, the thrust of the game is the boss combat, which makes the non-boss encounters just feel like filler. One of the things that was enjoyable about the Souls games, particularly Demonâs Souls, was that random enemies could be really threatening, due to placement, environment, relative mobility, and numbers combining to create situations you had to be creative to get out of. There are so many ways to get out of any situation with mooks that theyâre no real threat unless you let them become one (by which I mean, not doing the tried and true running away the second you begin to get attacked by more than one at a time, since Sekiro, like every other From game, has no good way to handle any fight with more than one enemy at a time).
Most of what Iâd call a typical From game at this point is still present in Sekiro - at least one major idea thatâs pretty new (for From) that was poorly thought out, a few ideas that were overly thought out and are stifling in their implementation, luscious environments, and a handful of encounters that youâre going to be talking about for a long time. What I think is missing that was previously present is a system that encourages creative problem solving.
you literally can do this. The finger whistle lets you lure enemies away 1 by 1. If youâre hugging a wall when you use it, theyâll come within range of a stealth kill that doesnât lose your stealth status. I used this a lot in the late game (especially second hirata estate) to make particularly nasty groups more manageable.
In addition, the puppeteer jutsu provides a whole different way to approach mid-to-late-game minibosses. Instead of killing every enemy before fighting the boss, you just puppeteer as many as you can and it becomes a totally different kind of fight.
I realized, very late in the game, that if you grab the vault over skill, you can puppeteer enemies that you broke the posture of instead of just killing them, which lets you keep your puppeteer chain going.
blood cloud is pretty fun too, particularly with vault over
iâm really surprised at criticism of mook encounters, particularly in early game areas, based on them being trivial to bypass or plow through-- this is the case in literally every one of these games and i donât remember it ever being a sticking point before. theyâre always more interesting the first two or three times through
hirata estate is easily one of the best areas theyâve ever done imo
and iâm also confused at the use of the word jank here, i never would have imagined anyone calling sekiro jankier than any of the souls games
man every time i think this thread has cooled off i wake up to 70 new posts
The push and pull between regular levels being mostly pretty easy (even relaxing) because of how powerful your ninja skills are, and boss encounters being these deadly sword dances, is one of the weirdest things about Sekiro. iâm kinda into it but almost it feels like youâre jumping (and/or grappling) between two related, yet different games
Except this requires spirit emblems, meaning whistling isnât something you can just âdoâ (unless youâre calling your boss, which apparently it then works from infinite range). And given the point at which you get that ability, itâs fair to say that itâs a lot less relevant by the time you do get access to it.
Thereâs a reason most people say only a few of the tools are relevant, and the reason is because their only practical application lies in combat, and more specifically, as it applies to bosses.
If knocking on a wall in Metal Gear Solid cost you rations, people probably wouldnât be knocking on walls all that often. I use this as an extreme example, but youâre asking players to take from a limited resource pool when they are intentionally saving those resources for what they know will be bosses ahead, which means few will use those limited resources (and given spirit emblem restoration outside of resting is unreliable, this only further exacerbates the issue).
Youâre asking players to be mind-readers, to know what resources they will or wonât need for the area ahead before theyâve actually explored the area. If there were proper context, a player could use their resources at the appropriate times, but thereâs no context for when those appropriate times are short of a few specific instances, such as enemies with shields (and there arenât many of those to begin with). Most will simply choose to err on the side of caution (i.e., not use resources unless in a boss or mini-boss fight) in a game where resources are extremely important.
