i tried it for awhile and i couldnât get the timing down
lol at me getting frustrated at dropped inputs on this fight
I screamed so much (in this thread) at the camera of this fight.
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Despite Isshin being a very titular last boss kind of character, I still found Wolf to be a much more satisfying end fight. Dying to Isshin was never as satisfying, and having to spend so much time getting to different forms always meant that you had this feeling of âeverything changingâ from form to form. If the fight was a progression, and not just multiple boss fights wrapped into one, I think it would have worked a lot better. As it is though, youâre basically fighting 3 very different bosses every time you go through Isshin. Fighting those forms separately produces a satisfying catharsis, but together (particularly with Genichiro) feels like padding, trying to make something hard for the sake of being hard.
My first playthrough was spent avoiding Genichiro for about 35 hours, which was also roughly the amount of time required to rehabilitate my Souls habits and approach to the game in general. Also considering how the game is structured/gated it still made for generous exploration and fights to seek out, and when I did finally scale the castle for a bit of CLANG CLANG DEATHBLOW I was more than ready.
In hindsight I probably had more prayer beads than the average player at that point, but by the end you wouldâve encountered plenty of those red-armoured mooks with virtually the same moveset as Genichiro.
Or: it took this many words to say âGenichiro is my favourite aperitifâ.
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Putting off Genichiro and getting all the surrounding prayer beads definitely makes him a lot easier. I actually struggled with him a bit on my second playthrough when I decided to tackle him with the bare minimum of beads instead. (Another reason is that I was overtrained on his Way of Tomoe moveset and his original moveset requires quite different tactics.)
I also got stuck for an hour on Great Shinobi Owl on my second playthrough for the exact same reasons. Even as I steamrolled other major bosses like the ape and corrupted monk because they were exactly as I remembered them.
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I discovered a pretty cheap exploit for Owldad (mostly charge-thrusting his jumping attack, also doable when he uses bombs) but getting carried away with it usually earns you a nasty counter.
This now reminds me that I havenât tackled him in the burning temple, where his moveset becomes Kitchen Sink+More Kitchen Sink.
Genichiro as part of the last boss fight is barely a speed bump. By the time I finally beat Isshin, Genichiro was down to less than 30 seconds of violence, always gave me a good ego boost to stomp that guy before I had to put up a real fight
I beat Sword Saint Isshin on a PC with an ebay engineering sample Xeon processor that kept throttling to 1.2GHz randomly and trashing my framerate.
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Yeah, and from a pacing perspective thatâs basically my problem with having to re-fight Genichiro in the Isshin fight. Genichiro was a bit of a challenge initially, but he wasnât what I was interested in and the transfer of him to Isshin is jarring, has an intervening cutscene, and just damages the pacing of the rest of the fight. Again, Owlâs a much more satisfying endpoint because of the clear progression in the fight and a real sense of growing with each fight, whether itâs the first or second phase.
I think the endpoint of Isshin is a lot more visually impressive of course, as most endgame boss fights in a From game are now, whether itâs DS3 or Bloodborne. But if Iâm being honest, Friede from DS3 actually reminds me a lot of Isshin in terms of transition design. Itâs a âmoreâ boss fight design, with relatively little translation of strategy from phase to phase.
I disagree there, each stage of the genichiro-isshin boss fight expands on the vocabulary and required skills of the player. But its got a certain continuity of turn taking and paying attention to spacing thats specific to isshin as a whole. Genichiro has those charge up attacks and odd attack rhythms that prepare for the first two lives of isshin, and the final isshin only changes insomuch as you can no longer stay close to the boss.
Mm⌠Iâm pretty sure I remember beating the stages of Isshin by staying close to him at every stage. If the game teaches you anything itâs that staying close to the boss is almost always better than being far away. I think the last two stages of Isshin, basically the stages where he has the gun, represent a continuity. Genichiro and Stage One of Isshin are similar much more in name than in the fundamentals of the combat. Stage one of Isshin at least has a few things that carry into stages two and three, but Genichiro in my experience felt completely separate from the Isshin fight, and by the time I beat Isshin, felt more like filler than anything else. Iâd say Isshin has some odd attack rhythms, particularly with his charge attacks (they often seemed to go off later or earlier, and I later confirmed that those charges have some degree of RNG by watching speedruns), but Genichiro was a very regular fight in terms of patterning. Itâs actually very reminiscent of Emma and Ashina fight (and Emma is assuredly an entirely different, extremely disconnected fight from Ashina). Ashina is much more regular in patterning, Emma is extremely random (lots of speedruns die to her quirky style of fighting). Meanwhile, I find Genichiro to be an extremely regular fight and Isshin to be less regular (though immensely more regular than Emma). I like the dichotomy between Emma and Ashina, but the dichotomy in combat between Genichiro and Isshin just never struck me as a good fit (maybe because Genichiro is too easy? I dunno).
I just used the shield to block him on those tricky attacks, chipped away at his health and made sure to nail the lightning parry thing.
the pistol is Isshinâs weakest attack and trivially easy to deflect and punish, whereas all the spear based attacks that you canât Mikiri are extremely difficult to dodge at close range and hit hard enough that a mistimed block will fill the stagger meter quite fast.
Thatâs why all the safe strats are âkeep your distance and fight opportunistically, hit and run.â
I consider the best spacing to be âfar enough that the only attack likely to hit is the one you can mikiri counter or the pistol.â because then spear isshin is basically helpless
I mean, thankfully on playthrough one you donât need to be precise on blocking (it helps, but itâs far from necessary). I found being close to Isshin worked much better when I fought him, after trying the ranged strategies unsuccessfully. That said, I also rarely used Mikiri Counter because I never knew if it would work or not.
I guess we had a very different approach when fighting him.
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I beat the game! Hunting for that very last pearl was a real pain in the ass, but I finally found it hidden in the rafters of the castle. That last necklace must have made a huge difference, because this time I beat Sword Saint Isshin in like 3 tries! I would still rate it as a middling fight, but at least it wasnât impossible any more.
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Though really it was probably mostly this effect:
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Iâm pretty far in this game but I know I am living on borrowing time. The fast fighting speed and myriad of defensive options to choose from are just too much!
I cannot even beat those mini-boss samurai generals fairly even after taking down all their mooks and half their health with a stealth blow. I still have managed to get past the earlygame by relying on cheap tricks (or clever options, depending on how you look at them) but I know these wonât cut it against dudes like Genichiro
I think people might have more trouble with this than Souls less because they need to unlearn Souls and more because the game demands different skills from the player, Souls being more about spatial awareness (and exploration) and Sekiro more about fast reflexes and reading attacks. People can be good at one and bad at the other!
The game really lost me when it started punishing me for doing a Mikiri counter when it already feels like an almost impossible feat. Come on
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Genichiro is actually a really good teaching boss for this game, as tough as he is heâs very rigid and predictable (until he isnât, spoiler). It sounds like youâre probably playing like i did the first time, scrambling around and using items and prosthetics to get the edge. I think thatâs a totally valid way to play! even though i personally had a good time with Sekiro right away, the core combat mechanics still didnât really âclickâ until i fought Big G. I would say itâs worth trying him a few times to see if it helps.
A good thing to keep in mind is that trying to deflect too early is always better than trying to deflect too late. Get right up in dudeâs faces and do the âsword wiggleâ (tap L1 repeatedly) until you kinda get the rhythm of their swings down. Itâs more forgiving than it seems.
Also, anytime you get an opening try to hit em. Even if they deflect, you can do the deflection back-and-forth and it âresetsâ their patterns, makes the bosses more predictable.
people were contrasting the structure of this game favourably to Bloodborne and in particular the âgatekeepingâ of the Gascoigne fight (which fwiw i do think is weird design and suspect that there was originally intended to be more than one way into the Cathedral Ward) but honestly i wish that it had firmly established much earlier what core skills it truly expected of me, opposed to being able to pretty much fudge my way all the way to Mibu Village, then facing Genichiro like âthe hell, what am i even supposed to do hereâ
(i didnât find Hanbei a lot of help either)
oddly i found myself performing consistent Mikiri counters right away once they were introduced, but i think thatâs because it was already second nature for me to nervously tap the dodge button after getting a couple of hits in. thatâs definitely a habit i had to un-learn after Dark Souls 3!
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I think Sekiroâs biggest problem is that you start the game as the amazing rice paper man and even though this means youâre supposed to learn by dying/fleeing a lot, doing that is inherently demoralizing (and the story doubles down by making NPCs sick when you die so it feels worse). Some of the early boss placement is also weird as fuck. I hate where they put the ogre boss and can imagine how many people it puts off by having a mandatory grab-heavy fight so early on.
Idk i have definitely come around to thinking Sekiro should be a little easier, at least early on. And it should have just had a fucking difficulty select lol
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