Sekiro: Refined to Perfection - A Critical Commentary

securo shadows die twice is something of a black sheep in from software's lineup in the sense that it deviates the most from the traditional souls formula that the studio is so renowned for they may share similar dna but sakura is a cousin to dark souls rather than a sibling and despite its subversion of several tried and true mechanics i think this is arguably the best game that from software has ever made above all else this game is very focused it has fewer mechanics and less raw content for you to sink your teeth into but everything that it does have has been refined into something incredibly cohesive it took a handful of core features and extracted every bit of value out of them that it could in this video i'll be commentating my thoughts over a full playthrough of sekuro covering as many core gameplay facets as i can including the combat system stealth every major level and boss fight and more this video will show the game in its entirety so if you are interested in sekiro i would recommend that you play it before watching further it's well worth your time with all that said thank you for joining me let's talk about sakuro [Music] not too dissimilar to its cousins you are put in a tutorial area soon after the game's opening cinematic and right off the bat there are a few things worth discussing here it's not entirely clear this early on but one striking difference about sakuro is that it has a much more involved story than we're used to with fromsoft for the record i'm not going to put that much time into summarizing and analyzing the story since this critique is more about gameplay but even so the ramifications of including a more concrete plotline will be immediately apparent to long-time soulsborne players there is no character creation in sekuro when you boot the game up for the first time it throws you right in no picking your class no leveling up and we no longer have a silent player character protagonist wolfe is a fully written character with his own backstory personality and motivations there are lots of reasons why sakura may be a polarizing game among fans and this is almost certainly one of them it drops most of the rpg elements that made up the previous games while they made a conscious effort to market sekuro as something different it's inevitable that you'll alienate a portion of your fan base when you deviate so heavily from what you're known for personally i try to go into every game with as few expectations as possible especially if it isn't some sort of sequel but even with that mindset i can understand why a subset of soulsborne fans may have been disappointed with sekiro it isn't a natural evolution of its predecessors the way bloodborne and elden ring have been and if you go in expecting something that resembles a souls game you're going to find it very awkward to play on the other hand i think it's admirable when a studio is willing to take risks with their products especially when you consider how many resources have to go into games development fromsoft has gained so much status over the years that even if sakuro somehow flopped they'd probably be fine but a part of me respects the game solely for the sheer confidence it has by taking its own unique ideas and running away with them the main part of this tutorial is introducing you to what those ideas are sakura's bread and butter is its combat system and there will be plenty of time to talk about that as we go but what's interesting about it right now is that this tutorial arms you with almost everything you'll need to know for the entirety of the game it teaches you how to attack guard and deflect which is what you'll be doing to win 90 of fights the benefits of deflecting in particular are clear right off the bat since some enemies here can be posture broken in just a single deflection i think its mechanics are explained pretty succinctly which is obviously good but a tutorial is a lot more helpful if you actually have things in the game to test your learned mechanics on i remember bloodborne in particular hiding its tutorial messages away in an area of the hunter's dream and for a new player it can be easy to forget all of those rules when there's nothing outside of some text pop-ups to reinforce them i like sakura's approach much better by throwing a few easy ashina soldiers at you but also pitting you against a mini boss level enemy right away yamauchi is better at showing how the posture bar works since there's more visual feedback he doesn't break posture in just a single hit or two you can actually watch his bar fill up as you fight him which makes the whole mechanic a bit more clear the tutorial and first two main areas are essentially the training wheels phase of sakura everything you're being introduced to is what you'll be expected to master by the end there's not a whole lot to see after beating the mini boss once you progress to the end of this area you encounter gennichiro in a cutscene that will set the rest of the story in motion funnily enough this is one of my favorite cutscenes in the game solely for a neat little tidbit of visual storytelling you'll notice that when wolf reaches for his sword he misses at first and has to readjust his grip i really enjoy subtle details like this that reflect the nuance of these characters it's a very human moment wolf has been out of practice for three years by this point so it's natural that his technical skill and muscle memory has deteriorated a lot over that time moreover it helps to sell how intimidating genitrio actually is he comes off as much more confident and capable than wolf does this is an actual boss battle that you can win but genitro is far too complex and difficult for a new player so it's more or less a scripted loss the outcome doesn't change if you beat him anyway the main purpose of this encounter i think is to build some tension for when you have to fight him later guinea churro is very imposing and given that he shares his last name with the ashino land you have to assume that he's a big deal around here if you do manage to get a glimpse at some of his combos it's easy to get overwhelmed at how fast and aggressive he can be i think that goes a long way in creating some nervousness in the player which will make that end payoff much more satisfying keep kenichiro in mind we'll have a lot more to talk about with him later for now this marks the end of the tutorial area wolf has his arm sliced off and before long will be brought to the ashina outskirts the first levels in the soulsborne series tend to be some of the best in their respective games both from a pure level design standpoint but also because of how they lay the foundation for the rest of the game oceana outskirts mostly continues this trend but it's difficult to explain why not because it's a bad area but because sakura has less variety in its layouts which makes it harder to discuss the unique strengths that each area has what i mean by that is many levels share the same or similar design principles with each other if you stripped away all of the visual elements of sekuro's levels you would be left with something that feels relatively samey throughout compare this to something like bloodborne which has a mixture of complex mazes like central yharnam along with very straightforward areas like hemwick charnel lane and it might be easier to see what i'm getting at if you asked me what the differences were between oshina outskirts and senpo temple for example i would mostly talk about the visuals and enemies not so much the layouts themselves you move through them in the same linear fashion to be clear this isn't a slide against sakuro because this game has a different focus levels have been a lot more streamlined and what we typically see is a series of self-contained zones full of enemies that you have to clear out before moving on to the next zone these zones usually only connect to each other one way and it's unlikely that you'll sequence break through them unless you start intentionally running past everything this sort of design reflects the stealth component of sakura's gameplay methodically clearing a room of enemies and moving on to the next in a straightforward manner isn't so unusual and it'll be easy to see the game nudging you towards that sort of mindset as we progress through the outskirts while the construction of levels is generally simpler a great level of care has been put into enemy and boss placement there's a strategic layer found in the ocean outskirts that's kind of new for this series instead of moving from enemy encounter to enemy encounter you're heavily incentivized to look for a path through each zone that allows you to stealth death blow as many enemies as possible combat is a lot more difficult when you're faced with three or more enemies at a time so it's in the player's interest to use stealth to give themselves an advantage this approach will be necessary throughout the entire game so it's wise to facilitate that mindset this early we could even see it as soon as the first mini boss there's one waiting for you pretty early on in the outskirts and it's an important encounter in terms of teaching the player how the game works outside of the tutorial astute players will hopefully notice this path to the side that makes it possible to sneak behind him and land a death blow to kick off the fight it's not exactly a hidden route but i remember on my first playthrough i didn't notice it at all so i tried going at him the old-fashioned way while you certainly can beat him like that and it may even be a very satisfying victory going for the stealth approach has a substantial effect on the fight it effectively cuts his hp bar in half that's a pretty big reward so i think the game is trying to teach you that stealth is a viable alternative to combat that you should be thinking about even in more challenging encounters like this one he also introduces perilous attacks to you which is a bit of a bold move considering that new players likely aren't fully comfortable with deflect timings at this point much like the miniboss at the end of the tutorial it's likely that you'll kill this guy through breaking his posture rather than depleting his health bar i think that by the time you kill him your objective in each boss encounter should start becoming clearer filling the posture bar is often more important than dealing health damage if you stay on the offense and prevent that posture bar from depleting you'll be able to finish encounters much faster you can interrupt his posture regenerating move by attacking to really hammer this idea down it's a well-placed fight overall and it's quite challenging if you're new but hopefully that won't be a major roadblock that leaves you stuck for several hours there will be plenty more of those later following this general is another one of those stealth zones this part of the outskirts showcases something else about sakura's level design there's a higher emphasis on vertical movement thanks to your jump button and the new grappling hook the ashina outskirts has a lot of plateaus and trees for you to hop around on it feels very three-dimensional in that sense elevation gives a new angle to your stealth techniques since aerial death blows are a very helpful tool for jumping into the fray with an immediate advantage and sometimes it's easier to stay hidden while high up as opposed to on the ground elevation is used pretty much everywhere throughout the game so once again the outskirts are good at training you to use all of the tools that you're given this could also be viewed as another way that the game is making use of its unique features more complex terrain is made possible by the ability to jump and grapple to points that would otherwise be inaccessible and that works well in tandem with the whole stealth system it's hard to imagine the ashina outskirts working in a dark souls game without some pretty heavy alterations to the terrain i conveniently ended up dying for the first time in the small stretch of land soon after this so let's use that as an opportunity to introduce the death system i would consider death a part of the overarching healing system in the game much like the bosses wolf essentially has multiple health bars if you die with a node of resurrection power available you can revive with half of your health and continue fighting you don't truly die unless you die without one of those nodes i find it to be a bit of a strange system and while there aren't any major issues with it it feels like something that rarely has a major impact on how you play it's essentially just an extension of your health pool one part of resurrection that i can appreciate is how it helps instill a bit of anxiety if you're running around without any nodes or if you're fighting a boss and have to use up one of your nodes early on in the fight it raises the stakes of your situation which can make victory or finding safety a lot more satisfying which is a feeling that from software has always excelled at creating at the same time i don't really see how that's any different from beating a boss with a sliver of hp left or without any healing charges left both of which still happen in sekuro and lead to similar feelings of gratification it's something that i don't have particularly strong feelings about either way even though the ability to resurrect is pretty integral to the story the consequences of death are worthy of some more criticism but that's something that we'll get to much later the next major fight ahead of us is the chained ogre which has to be handled very differently to everything else so far thrusts sweeps and grabs are the main archetypes of perilous attacks in the game and he's all about that last one he teaches perilous attacks a lot more forcefully since his grabs require a full well-timed dodge to avoid instead of just a jump moreover building up his posture is pretty difficult given that there's fewer opportunities to deflect so it's likely he'll die due to health damage unlike other mini bosses you've faced so far this is one of the more dark souls he encounters i think the ogre is fine mechanically apart from some awkward camera shifting that can happen on certain moves particularly with his kicks what i'm more unsure about is the placement of this fight especially in the context of everything else you've been doing so far you've had to learn a lot in the outskirts how stealth death balls work how to deflect maintaining pressure to build posture how to use the terrain to your advantage among many other things it's been very trial by fire which works for this type of game but only to a certain degree the chained ogre goes against a lot of other lessons you've been taught up to this point you can't stealth death blow him through normal means and most of his attacks aren't meant to be deflected the easy answer here is that the chained ogre exists to teach you that dodging is still a viable way to avoid damage if that was their intention it's a misguided move on the part of fromsoft because of how it can facilitate some bad habits very few enemies in this game are best handled through dodging yet to a new player this fight would suggest the opposite that dodging is equally viable to be clear you probably can beat every boss by relying on dodging and movement but you probably wouldn't have a very good time trying to do so it's a very mixed message and i think this fight would be better suited for when the player is more comfortable with deflecting and posture with the ogre down we can progress to the next stealth zone and this one is a large open area instead of a more narrow streamlined pathway which means that slipping in without being seen is pretty unlikely because of that you may start noticing that the stealth system in this game is surprisingly lenient with a bit of patience it's easy to make the ai forget about you if you've been spotted there's a lot of enemies on the lookout in this part including another mini boss in the center so it's relatively intimidating at first but if you take advantage of that leniency it's not actually so bad whether this is something that bothers you or not depends on how willing you are to suspend your disbelief for the sake of gameplay after all it looks a bit ridiculous to kill someone in plain sight and have the ai forget about you if you just run off and hide for a couple of minutes despite how much it may break realism i think it works in the game's favor more often than not and i'm perfectly satisfied with the implementation here if we were pursuing something more authentic we would see enemies holding aggro indefinitely until they find you or at least holding aggro for a lot longer than they do now perhaps they would go as far as to chase you out of their area entirely if that were the case it would really break the pacing since it would either require you to fight waves of enemies at a time which the game isn't really built for or make you run far away from an entire zone just to lose aggro before coming back and doing it all again fromsoft has actually done something kind of like this in elden ring which demonstrates how frustrating it can be in that game you can't open the map if something is accurate on you and enemies hold aggro a lot longer than they do in sakuro it can often feel like you're completely isolated with nothing in sight yet there's still some pesky enemy that you ran past earlier that you just can't shake for some reason which really kills your gameplay momentum it may be more realistic but that rarely translates to fun gameplay every game has to make those sorts of compromises how much can we stretch the believability of a mechanic before it breaks immersion too much it can be a delicate balance but sakura strikes it well stealth remains strategic and engaging throughout without compromising so much on realism that it twists into something silly the last thing to do here is another fight against a general it's pretty much your last chance to practice attacking and deflecting before the first major boss as we move into the underbridge valley i really want to give praise to this upcoming sequence with the great serpent sakura doesn't have a whole lot of quote unquote spectacle moments it wows you through gameplay most of the time instead of through story environments or other more aesthetic focused things but one of the most visually and thematically stunning encounters you have is with this great serpent passing him is relatively straightforward the serpent can't detect you when you're in the grass so you just have to look for the right opportunities to slip by without being noticed it's a lot more memorable for the fear factor this section is brilliant at invoking a feeling of predator vs prey slipping into the caves where the serpent can't reach feels very frantic almost like running away from a killer in a horror movie there's a brief sense of relief even though you haven't really overcome the powerlessness of the situation your goal isn't to fight back it's to escape unscathed one of the coolest moments in the game is when you hide in this palanquin and need to slice your way out the serpent's eye descending on you is super intimidating at first but as soon as the death blow marker fades in there's a sudden shift from a quiet stealth section to a chaotic escape from a flailing beast i honestly can't do the sequence just as through explaining it on video the first time i went through this area is still pretty clear in my memory it's such a visceral moment with the serpent screams echoing through the whole canyon and with all the blood raining everywhere i especially like how it barges its head through the last cave once you've made it to safely and it wildly snaps its jaws like it's desperate to get you it's very animalistic it should be fairly obvious by this point that the game dabbles in the supernatural quite a bit but even so the great serpent is probably one of the last things most players would expect to see in sakura much less something they would expect to actually deal damage to it's a great way to shed some light on how a cult of the world really is there isn't much left to the outskirts one more stealth zone that's easier to navigate than the last one plus an enemy that you can eavesdrop on for some hints to the upcoming boss fight he's mourning the death of his horse that he accidentally startled through some kind of gunpowder explosion which is nudging you towards trying out the firecrackers prosthetic tool that you can buy from a vendor earlier on in the level this has always been a staple in these games how they rarely tell you things directly so you have to take whatever loose information is presented to you and come to your own conclusions it's something that's long been appreciated about fromsoft how they won't spoon feed you with information or secrets when it's used right it rewards perceptive players who can pick up on those subtleties and dialogue and translate that into solving some other in-game problems it's something that i think lots of other games could draw inspiration from and at that i think i've said everything that i've wanted to say about the outskirts this is not my favorite level in the game but it definitely has the most to dissect since it's essentially one long very elaborate tutorial between the numerous stealth sections challenging mini bosses and a lot of variety in its encounters there's more fresh ideas here than in any other level as an introduction to sekuro it succeeds very well we'll top this discussion off with the game's first major boss who is waiting for you just past this fortress [Music] despite his cavalier appearance and attitude gyobu oniwa is a deceptively easy fight his posture doesn't regenerate that quickly relative to other bosses and there's lots of opportunities to build it up if you take his swings head on that's the very important lesson being taught here that no matter how big and powerful an attack looks you can deflect it if it's not a perilous sweep or a grab you can deflect every attack in the game i actually can't think of any exceptions to that right now my guess is that most players won't be confident enough in their abilities yet to approach gyobu with this mindset which makes him seem a lot harder than he is fortunately he forces you to build that confidence since he'll do the initiation most of the time lots of his attacks involve him charging at you and the best way to counteract that aggression is through deflection it's hard to run away and sneak in hits since his horse is just as mobile as you are chasing each other around the arena just prolongs the challenge in my mind this is the smartest thing about the fight the way that it builds up the player's confidence and eventually makes you feel like a champion when you've worked out how to respond to gyoubu's assertiveness sekuro doesn't have a traditional level up system which means that the only way to get better is through practice grinding exp to make a boss easier isn't the thing anymore as such the game can't really rely on numbers to create a feeling of progression and has to find ways to refine the player's skill instead which is a lot more challenging but to me a lot more rewarding the whole get good meme has really devolved from its original meaning into what is more or less an insult but this fight really captures what that phrase is intended to convey it's not trying to say that you suck it's saying that victory is achieved through practice and dedication he really can and must get good at sakuro there are no shortcuts and there are no crutches that lead to victory i struggled a lot with gyobu my first time but i felt a little bit more competent with each death and that culminated in a very sweet victory when i finally did win that's a really precious feeling and sekuro's bosses foster it constantly another one of gyobu's biggest strengths is how clearly his attacks are telegraphed the game is good about this across the board but he's a particularly strong standout there's quite a lot of variety in his moveset and every spear swing is unique enough that they can be identified just by their startup animation so that you can respond accordingly having clearly telegraphed attacks like this is a key piece of the puzzle when creating bosses that the player can study and master after all you need to be able to consistently tell what the boss is doing so that you can test and formulate counterplay to them in sakura's case this usually entails identifying whatever attack is about to come out and preparing to settle into the proper deflection rhythm needed to maximize their posture gain there's a bit of trial and error involved in finding that rhythm but it's very maintainable once you enter that state which makes these bosses all the more satisfying the only major criticism i have against gyobu is that he doesn't always play nicely with the camera the camera is a recurring problem in several mini boss fights but it's surprisingly good against a lot of the major bosses just not this one you can lose your lock onto gyobu if he sprints past you a certain way and if you get too close underneath him it'll try to pan upwards a lot and get caught in the ground poor cameras have plagued 3d games since pretty much their inceptions so i imagine it's something that's very challenging to get right from a developer's perspective but it's frustrating nonetheless especially with fromsoft since they've had multiple games to try and perfect it i do think they've improved with each iteration but fights like this clearly demonstrate that there is still some work that can be done i used to think that gyobu was too difficult for an early game boss but i've turned around on that after practicing him thoroughly for this video he's the last thing that hammers the game's lessons into your head because the gloves come off once you get to ashina castle it's quite fitting for his role in the story as the castle gatekeeper isn't it sakuro has a very strong lineup of boss fights and gyobu is a great way to kick things off with him defeated we'll do a bit of backtracking to get to the next level there's a woman about halfway through the outskirts who gives you a bell charm that can be used at the dilapidated temple doing so opens up access to the hirata estate you can make a strong argument that this is meant to be the real first level of sekiro since it's actually a lot easier up to a certain point i'm still partial to doing the outskirts first since it trains you better for the game in a more subtle way but there's not really a wrong answer here i enjoy the stark difference in theme and atmosphere this place has compared to the outskirts hirada is much more somber and oppressive with the shift to nighttime and a constant downpour throughout the region there's something much grittier about it the bandits here are more barbaric and less composed than the ashina soldiers and the destruction of the walls and houses throughout shows just how much this place has been pillaged visual variety is one of the game's more noticeable weaknesses so any breaks from the more typical sengoku era castle architecture is definitely welcome it's also unique in terms of level design for being arguably the simplest area in the entire game this is another reason why it may be more suitable as the first area the bulk of this place is just one straight shot right up to the main building and i mean that very literally you are following a single road that leads to the actual estate there's minimal divergent paths and it doesn't have the same verticality that the outskirts does i wouldn't call sekiro a relaxing game by any stretch but very simple levels like this can be a nice way to break up more strenuous sections and provide something that's less tiring players that might have been overwhelmed by everything they had to learn in the outskirts would be relieved to come to the estate and find that most things here are a lot more manageable i think it serves that role better as opposed to being the tutorial level but it's nice to offer that choice to people who prefer starting out with more simplicity combat encounters are simpler throughout the estate too at least until the very end the bandits here are a lot easier to deal with than the oshina soldiers since they fall pretty easily to r1 spam it's much rarer to see them deflect against you that's compensated by enemy layouts being handled differently most encounters with these bandits are when they're in larger groups i don't think you're meant to use stealth that much in hirata estate the clumps of enemies are bound to spot you eventually no matter how much you try to remain hidden since they're so easy to kill difficulty is done through potentially overwhelming you with groups of weaker enemies rather than more focused encounters with stronger enemies or mini bosses hirata does the former and outskirts to the latter two opposite approaches one of the many bosses towards the end being a fight against a small army reinforces this idea even further generally speaking most people would probably agree that sakura is at its best during tense one-on-one sword fights where you can focus all your attention on taking a single opponent down the presence of gang fights and hirata might seem contrary to that but i do think they have their place there's quite a bit of split-second decision-making here when you're trying to take down a horde of weak enemies should you focus on the archers first or just deal with their projectiles while spamming down the melee guys how can you use the death blow animation i-frames to your advantage things like that it may be less sophisticated than you're used to but the chaotic nature of these fights can still make for an enjoyable experience plus i think having so many of them sprinkled throughout the area feeds into the crisis that's happening here after the early areas there's a more concrete teaching moment with the shinobi hunter mini boss who you defeat through the mikiri counter this is how you respond to thrusting perilous attacks and it's super satisfying to pull off but i distinctly remember finding it very awkward to do when i was first learning and i would be curious to know if that's a shared experience i think what can trip you up at first is that you shouldn't be holding a directional input when you press the button unless it's squarely towards the enemy it'll either throw off your positioning or put you into a dodge that overrides your counter you also do not need to be as precise with the timing as you do with deflections i think the mercury counter will work for as long as wolff is in the dash startup animation i wouldn't say this learning curve is a fault of the game since the mercury tool tip is concise and correct but i also don't think these are very unreasonable mistakes and that can lead to frustration over not getting it like most things in second row it's something that has to come with practice at any rate the mikiri counter is basically the last major combat mechanic that you have to learn after this mini boss you're equipped with the tools to handle every single enemy in sakura the purpose of perilous attack seems to be a way to add some variety in potential responses to moves you now have deflecting mercury counters jumping dodging and prosthetic tools at your disposal encounters will boil down to mixing and matching all of these things in interesting ways coincidentally if you want to put all of those things to the test there is a special enemy that can be found soon after the shinobi hunter if you take a short detour there is a hidden path along the river that leads to a temple being guarded by one of the ministry ninjas who is a mid-game level enemy this is basically the equivalent to the black knight in undead berg or the executioner in central yharnam an enemy placed early on that you can kill right now even though they're meant to be fought later i've always enjoyed fights like this as an optional way to challenge yourself and it's an especially nice change of pace here since this guy is a challenging one-on-one encounter after dealing with all the ganks early on i like these ninjas quite a bit but they can be incredibly difficult for new players he attacks with a lot of kicks that have less obvious telegraphs compared to large sword swings but you need to learn how to deflect as much as possible he has good posture recovery and higher raw numbers by virtue of his mid game prestige there is a weird trend with a lot of ninjas in this game though many of them take place in really bad arenas that either don't play nice with the camera or don't give you enough wiggle room to handle everything properly this is actually one of the better ones even though it can be a little small his kicks can send you backwards which results in a lot of unintentional movement on your part so you do have to make a conscious effort not to go flying off the cliff i don't mind this sort of thing if playing around the environment can be an added challenge and it's done pretty well here but there are a fair number of bad arenas or terrain that can make otherwise interesting encounters unnecessarily frustrating i'll be sure to talk about those as we come across them killing him allows you to loot the temple safely which is holding the missed ravens feathers prosthetic tool i've neglected to talk about the prosthetic tools and there's a stretch of downtime here so now would be a good time to discuss this system the prosthetic tools have grown on me over time but it's easy to ignore them for the most part since they're very rarely required to win fights some of them have wide general applications that makes them worth using regularly while others can be extremely situational and because of that pinpointing their intentions with the prosthetics has been a little bit tricky there are a handful of tools that i've never found a good use for outside of dealing with one or two enemy types the axe is actually a good example of this it absolutely obliterates enemies with shields and there's no other quick way around them so it's really your best option outside of that though it's so slow especially compared to standard attacks that i've never found a practical use for it meaning it's been relegated to a shield breaker and nothing else the final lazoo light axe upgrade seems like it has the most applications but it's so far in the game that there's little opportunity to use it unless you do new game plus runs on the other hand things like the shuriken the firecrackers and the loaded umbrella are consistently useful across the entire game the firecracker is arguably the strongest since it can stun almost anything even when they're in the middle of an attack which gives you free opportunities to heal if you need it the shurikens are also a very reliable gap closer when you unlock the follow-up attack for them and the umbrella is a great way to deflect attacks that you can't get the timing down on or attacks that can stun you even after a normal deflection i've stopped using the firecrackers because they feel a bit too strong but you'll see me use the shurikens and the umbrella throughout the game giving some of them such narrow specialization isn't necessarily a negative and to be honest i'm kind of glad they're designed this way so as not to distract from the swordplay mandating their use on a wider variety of enemies could have made them feel a lot more one note especially if it defined the encounter after all the shield guys are only remembered for being the guys that get one shot by the axe their identity is based around a single relatively simplistic response they're also balanced in the sense that proper prosthetic use can give you an advantage without completely turning the tides in your favor they don't have the same dramatic influence on fights like summoning or over leveling canon in the previous games it preserves the spirit of sakuro while still allowing for an easier option for example soon we'll be seeing how the shurikens can knock airborne enemies down which is something that can be used in this area's boss fight to great effect while still requiring proper timing and knowledge to use properly after i beat the game for the first time i felt more compelled to experiment with prosthetics which is why i like them more than i used to they offer a layer of creativity if you're willing to practice a fair bit channels that specialize in high level second row gameplay can show just how far this goes there's a surprisingly large skill gap that makes watching these things a treat that being said in a game where every combat mechanic has its place it feels a little bit odd to have something so polished be so easily ignored each of the tools serves its niche well and with all the fluid animations and sound effects there's no doubt that fromsoft put quite a bit of work into them which is why i think it's a shame that they only really start to shine if you play the game more than once you feel less incentivized to use them on your first run since getting good at deflecting trumps the need to get good at using prosthetics the upgrade system for them is a little bit rigid so perhaps lightening the restrictions to upgrade some tools may help alleviate this problem a little bit particularly in the money department there are quite a few high ticket items vying for your sin in the early game with things like gourd seeds and prayer beats costing well over one thousand money is a pretty valuable resource since you lose it on death and that can result in the prosthetic upgrades shifting lower in your priorities ultimately contributing to them being ignored more i wouldn't mind them being at least a little bit cheaper than they are now by this point we can move into the final section of the region as we enter the estate proper there's another series of horde encounters here which i always remember as leaning a bit too hard into the whole overwhelming enemy layouts thing your best bet is to try to lure them away from the group but that doesn't always work the greatest and it doesn't help that there are archers who will constantly pull you with arrows while you're fighting what i think is more frustrating is that all of these enemies are placed right before a mini boss fight where you deal with another horde encounter and i like the upcoming mini boss but it's really no pushover placing all of this stuff between the idol and the boss is a little bit harsh because if you die doing this whole process becomes part of the run back i'm not a huge fan juicer the drunkard is pretty good there's a ton of enemies surrounding him but the game gives you a way to deal with that and it's not through stealth you can talk to an npc standing nearby who will fight with you and i'd say it's not mandatory if you want to do this fight head-on if you want to keep it purely one-on-one you can do so by kiting the ads around to kill them without the boss interfering but that's easier said than done you are kind of more rewarded this way since killing the adds opens the door for a stealth death blow on juzo if you're willing to de-aggro him and it's a valid tactic but i've elected to just fight with no gummy here the effect is similar in the end anyway he can hold aggro that lets you deal with the small guys much more easily and by time he dies it'll probably just be you and the boss left interestingly this is the only time in the game where you have something that resembles npc summoning otherwise it's a feature that's mostly been abandoned which i think is for the better as for the drunkard himself he remains one of the few enemies in the game that i still have a difficult time with even after practicing so much there's not much rhythm to this fight like there is for most others he has a lot of delayed attacks where the actual hitbox comes out so quickly that you just have to learn the timing from windup to swing and do your deflections that way these games have always had stuff like this to some degree and so long as it isn't used excessively it can be a nice mix-up that requires you to be a little bit more proactive instead of reactive the other challenging bit about him is that he's the first boss that can inflict poison one thing i'm not sure how i feel about is the fact that he can still apply poison buildup even on attacks that you deflect it suggests that you're supposed to dodge instead but his sword attacks have such a wide arc and pretty decent tracking to punish that approach it is a bit strange that even once you do learn his timings you still get punished for landing your deflects they're meant to be how you reverse the damage and that rule is broken in this fight perhaps he does this to teach you how status buildup works but if so i think there would have been better ways to do that there are poison geckos and oshina that might have been able to achieve this applying status effects through deflection just seems a bit unfair and even without it he would still be very difficult that aside it's a solid fight definitely a step up from most things in hirada which is a sign of what's to come juzo is pretty much the last thing standing between you and the area boss all that's left is a short section through the main building the encounters here are all pretty simple so i don't think there's much to say there just some more standard bandits that are easy to stealth past as such that about concludes our discussion on hirata estate it's a bit weaker than the outskirts in terms of encounter quality but it's still a good area in its own right and with how separated it is from the rest of the world it's definitely unique i quite like it overall coming up next is lady butterfly there are quite a few ways that difficulty can be measured in video games moveset complexity raw damage or health numbers and other such criteria each measurement is going to result in different things for different people but that's what makes discussion around bosses interesting it's very common for players to have a wide range of experience against bosses in games where difficulty is emphasized it's especially interesting to think about this phenomenon in sekiro where there's very little customization we all play with the same moveset against the same bosses with the same conditions yet the bosses one person finds difficult could be vastly different from that of another person it speaks a lot to how deeply subjective experiencing a game is regardless of how strict or concrete the rules are everybody is wired differently and i think one of the reasons that the souls games are so talked about is because of how well they bring that individuality to the surface i'm bringing all of this up because lady butterfly is the boss that i personally find the most memorable if we're going purely by deathcounter she was the hardest for me there are others that i consider harder nowadays since they still give me trouble but she took me well over three hours to beat on my first playthrough and i still remember how happy i was to finally beat her because that was my big click moment when the flow of combat finally started to make sense most human-sized enemies including her have a rhythm that you need to get a handle on in order to win moreover it's up to you to take the initiative this time unlike with gyobu who would engage with you freely lady butterfly's posture bar is more difficult to fill up because it has a faster recovery rate and her combos are generally much more difficult to deflect gyobu also won't block or deflect against you while human enemies like her will which narrows your opportunities to get her vitality down an enemy's posture bar can effectively be thought of as a second health bar that runs in tandem to regular vitality once their posture fills up they'll take a death blow it's an equivalent to reaching zero hp unlike a traditional health bar though the enemy will heal posture over time if you don't maintain pressure against them and as a result being passive and sakura is heavily punished if you don't keep up constant engagement with the enemy their posture will start regenerating and undo a lot of the progress you've made in the fight lady butterfly really drives this home but it's hard to settle into that mindset for the first time one of the more difficult things about her is that her telegraphs are harder to read she doesn't have a giant weapon with super obvious swings she's physically much smaller and she attacks with her feet pretty often which isn't what you would naturally expect to see i respect the confidence they had by placing such a huge uptick in difficulty this early on if you're going to do that you may as well do it on something that doesn't gauge progression if lady butterfly gives you too much trouble it's easy to just walk away and come back later she feels like a mid-game boss but the nature of the game being purely action oriented means that you can technically beat anything at any given point you want you can't be under-leveled for her but you can be under-skilled the key difference is that skill is something you can grind by fighting her over and over until she cracks as i mentioned earlier this is also an instance of prosthetic tools being implemented very well into a fight if you time your shuriken throws to when she's in the air you can knock her down and deal some nice posture damage from afar it's not something you can just do mindlessly though it's a bit deceptive when she jumps off the ground because she'll tiptoe around on some thin wires which does not count as her being in the air she has to be actively jumping which makes the timing a little bit more tight she's still not perfect so there are a few relatively minor flaws that'll reel off really quickly the attacks where she leaps high into the air exhibits similar camera problems to gyobu when it tries to look up that high it'll mush in the ground and make things hard to see it's only when she does things like this that the camera can be an issue but i still find it puzzling that they're so insistent on including attacks like this when it's so demonstrably disorienting like with juzo i also don't really like how she has some attacks that can still harm you even if you deflect them some of her attacks can summon phantom butterflies that go through your deflection which means the best way to avoid them is just through dodging or running away it interrupts the pace of the fight whenever she pulls out an attack that does this lastly the whole business with snapseeds is pretty poorly thought out this issue consists of two parts that the npc before this fight makes it sound like snapseeds are mandatory and that you're only given one of them to try out this is pretty misleading since snapseeds aren't required the phantoms in phase 2 really aren't that hard to deal with and that if the game wanted you to use an item it's a little bit insulting that they'll only give you one especially considering that they're consumable if you use one and then die on that attempt you've more or less wasted it this could have been explained much better and fromsoft seems to have overestimated how important snapseeds are for the fight the good news is that issues like this are relatively easy to play around once you figure them out but they're still problematic nonetheless it's still valuable to think about how something good can be made even better and for as fun as she is there is a bit of room for improvement on lady butterfly i still thoroughly enjoy fighting her and the satisfaction of beating her for the first time is why i play these games to begin with she is very well done after finishing hirata estate you awaken back at the dilapidated temple and the only way forward is to head back to the castle where kuro was being held our first order of business is to complete a short side quest from the tengu of ashina who you can find in the temple a little bit past where you killed gyobu i won't be doing very many side quests on this playthrough but this one is worth it both for the tangible reward and so you can get to know the tangu a little bit better his significance to the plot should be immediately apparent he's the one that gives wolf the nickname sakuro he tasks you with killing some of the short guys that can be found just a little bit past the castle gate these are also shielded enemies that die to the axe completing the tengu side quest gives you access to the new ashina art skill tree the skills are one of the few ways that sekuro preserves some more traditional character progression and shares some similar flaws with the prosthetic upgrades and that unlocking all of the skills or even just a decent portion of them is very costly exp is something else that you lose on death which means that unlocking more skills can be very daunting for new players who find themselves dying a lot the combat arts that you'll unlock in these trees is a whole other thing entirely my biggest issue with them is how poorly balanced they are the vast majority of them have slow enough animations that they're too risky to use in most situations ichimonji and its upgrade ichimonji double eclipse pretty much every art for regular use you won't see me use that move because it's like the firecrackers its repeated use makes fights boring to watch but back when i used it i very rarely saw a reason to ever take off each emoji double once i had it most of the combat arts look very cool so they might be nice for some style points but more work could have been done to make them more practical frankly it's not a system that i'm super invested in either way so i won't comment much further on it the first major fight in the castle is with the blazing bull and unfortunately the negativity is going to continue here because i think the blazing bull is the worst enemy in the game my main issue is that it wants you to approach it in a specific way which is fine but then it punishes that approach and makes the entire fight a slog the bowl flails around so much when you do get close and also likes to run around the arena a lot meaning the fight mostly regresses into using safe hit and run tactics to achieve victory this might be a skill issue which i can accept but his attacks just don't feel right to deflect and walking up to him feels risky since he can jerk his head around unexpectedly and deal a hefty amount of damage while also applying a burn build-up but you need to go for the head because that's his weak point hitting the rest of his body does considerably less damage sakura's sword combat is so good that it doesn't need fights like this in my opinion i'm all for variety but not if it's done just for the sake of it a lack of a stamina bar isn't enough to make hidden run fights very fun if anything it makes them more boring since there's less resource management you have to think about there's also a flailing animal type encounter later on that's executed much better than this one so the bull is one of the few encounters in the game that i consistently dread every time thankfully the rest of this level is much better oshina castle is the converging point of many other areas it leads to the outskirts senpo temple sunken valley and the ashina depths this is the closest that this game gets to the interconnected world design that many people love about dark souls 1 and the other games for that matter to a lesser extent the world design isn't as immaculate here which i can imagine being another disappointment for fans of the series i think it would be fair to say that the grappling hook and jump button could have allowed for more interesting world design by vertically piecing levels together but that this potential isn't nearly explored enough it's an understandable complaint and it certainly makes ashina a less interesting setting to explore but that could also be viewed as a way that the game is simplifying itself exploration and wayfinding have been put aside in favor of combat it's just that they didn't have to necessarily make that sacrifice for combat to be as good as it is i doubt that anyone would complain if there were some cool shortcuts to other levels that we could discover the game does toy with this idea already by connecting senpo temple to a hidden path in the outskirts but it's a bit of a bait and switch all it does is lead you to a small contained part of senpo temple where you can activate the demon bell there's nothing to actually explore this isn't something that i actually noticed we were missing until a while after i beat the game so i wouldn't consider it a major flaw but i can understand people being disappointed by securo's world design it doesn't hold a candle to what fromsoft has done previously even though it possibly could have oshina castle itself is actually very short if you just stick to the main pathway but there is a fair bit of side content to do first off you can head to the ashina reservoir where you woke up at the beginning of the game you are revisiting the tutorial area and the enemies here have been completely overhauled it has two of what i consider to be some of the hardest mini bosses in the game plus a layout of enemies that are challenging to stealth past our first order of business is to go back to the well where wolf was sleeping at the beginning of the game there's another one of those purple ninjas here and from what i can tell it's identical to the one from hirada just with a bigger health bar back when we were fighting that one i mentioned that many of these ninjas are fought in unsuitable arenas and this is a prime example of that this well has some of the most frustrating camera angles in the game and the boss is made significantly harder because of it he likes to push you up against the wall where you can hardly see what you're doing there's not much insecure that i would say is [ __ ] but this is one of those moments i got lucky in my footage for this fight so it looks a lot better than it is the trick is to not move around at all and instead let the force of his attacks push you around you should only reposition when it's absolutely necessary that won't work all the time but it can help it's possible that this fight is here as a deflect skill check since trying to dodge him will throw the camera off even more after all i have a pretty hard time believing that fromsoft was never aware of camera issues like these when they were playtesting the game so surely they had a purpose for putting something here that's so obviously frustrating that's the best way i can rationalize it and it's almost an acceptable answer but they did a deflect skill check much better later on so i don't think that's entirely fair it's a moment where you spend more time fighting the camera than the enemy continuing on there are several guys patrolling the path that leads to the moonview tower where you met with kuro back at the start we can take advantage of the stealth system leniency again to make the sequence a lot easier i try not to do this too much when i play but here i think it's warranted fighting these enemies all at once is pretty ridiculous there's at least six soldiers roaming the area plus two of the giant club guys that can take a while to kill on their own much less when they're in a group it is worth your time to kill everything here though so that they can't interfere with the upcoming fight the game actually does this quite a bit as another way to incentivize you to use stealth it places lots of enemies near a mini boss that will interfere if you don't take care of them this could come off as a bit cheap especially if they get in the way during the run back but there's relatively few instances where it feels like that in practice if you follow a similar path to the one you took at the tutorial you can skip all of these guys and avoid anchoring them during the upcoming boss if you're a bit careful i prefer to kill them for peace of mind but it's not mandatory which can make that run back less painful this is the seven ashina spears and many people consider him to be the hardest mini boss in all of sakuro i think i've seen more rage threads posted about him than some of the major bosses and it's definitely warranted given how tough he is although i have to say that he is now one of my favorite encounters there's shades of guiobo here and that you have to take everything he does head on no matter how intimidating his swings are he recovers posture very quickly so every opportunity to build it up is valuable moreover failing deflect timings will really sting here because his attacks deal a ton of posture damage it requires a certain level of patience to read his slower swings and time your mercury counters but as usual maintaining pressure is still important there's something very visceral about deflecting the brutal attacks from this guy he may be a lot stronger physically but your technique still wins out in the end my only real complaint is that one of his attacks where he drives his spear into the ground and shoves it upward isn't considered a thrust even though it kind of looks like one meaning you can't mercury it i almost always fall for this because the game is so good at conditioning you to hit mikiri whenever you see a thrust motion from the enemy the telegraph could have been made a little bit more clear but maybe that's just me it still leaves you with quite a bit of time to react so it isn't a huge problem he is more or less the last thing in the ashina reservoir you're rewarded with a couple of prayer beats for killing the two bosses here so it's worth your time at this point we're ready to start heading into the castle the game returns to form once again by using verticality in its level design here you can't go through the castle main entrance so you have to scale across a bunch of rooftops to find your way in it's a nice way to make grappling feel more involved there's also a new enemy type introduced here the nitro ninjas are more mobile than you're used to and like to run away while spitting out a lot of projectiles i used to hate these things because projectile spam is always frustrating but they're not actually very difficult you can lock them down fairly safely with repeated attacks since they don't tend to deflect you very much their placement in the rooftops is generally good too they require you to time your grappling hooks a little more strategically since getting pelted by one of their shurikens while in the air does a fair bit of damage alternatively you could use the rooftops to your advantage by trying to spot the lurking night jar from the ground and take them out through stealth they do illustrate a bit of awkwardness with movement in sekhiro since you're fighting on uneven terrain the game doesn't actually lend itself to aerial combat very well due to the jumping physics and the nitros like to move around a lot so it's easy to accidentally go flying off the roof when you're trying to chase them down moving around quickly can actually feel a bit awkward to get used to wolf is a lot faster than the previous player characters but that's not all a lot of actions like jumping and dashing feel sort of springy you reach your top speed almost instantly and you carry lots of momentum in whatever direction you decide to jump there's very little aerial control this may seem nitpicky more than anything but there are a handful of times when this can work against you particularly against certain enemies in senpo temple it's difficult whether to tell this springy behavior is intentional or whether it's a technical constraint i can say from dabbling a little bit in games development myself that getting a movement system that feels satisfying and smooth to use is a lot harder than it may seem there's a lot of nuances that you have to think about that can have implications for how the rest of the game works it affects how you design levels how you create platforming challenges and maybe even how your combat system will work the other fromsoft games are probably a bit more responsive than securo but it doesn't take that long to adjust between the two if this sort of movement is what they needed to make the combat feel good i think it's perfectly acceptable once you're inside the castle you find stronger versions of the ashina soldiers they feel like a very natural progression from what you've been fighting so far so i don't have any complaints for these enemies they'll use thrusts more aggressively so mercury counter works wonders here at this point a little bit more of the level opens up to you if you jump to the bottom floor you gain access to the old grave area and the route to the sunken valley there's a moment of enemy reuse that i like here where you can face off against the same leader that was the mini boss back at the tutorial putting you against enemies that you've previously struggled against is one of many ways these games foster a feeling of overcoming challenges and getting better and even though sakura isn't lacking in the enemy variety department i still like that it has things like this as for the old grave there's not much of note here other than a vendor who has some important items that you should pick up this is where a lack of send can really come back to bite you the iron fortress unlocks the umbrella prosthetic and the anti-air death blow gives you a completely new skill but they cost a combined 2 800 cent which is hard to procure this early on this only makes me more confident that lots of things in this game would benefit from a reduced cost grinding money isn't something that most players are going to want to do this is also about it for side areas in oshina castle we can return to the upper floors and continue our trek to the top there's only a little bit left this is probably the most complex level in the game as far as layouts go with all the little subsections it has it still retains the general linearity that we're used to but hopefully it can be a bit more satisfying for those that like exploring every nook and cranny of a world by this point hopefully new players will be getting more comfortable with the game's combat outside of the area boss and mini bosses oshina castle really isn't too difficult the interior has lots of opportunities for stealth death blows so you can pretty much turn everything into a safe one-on-one given that this is a much more close quarters area it's a lot smarter to approach it this way groups of enemies are hard enough to deal with on their own much less when you're doing it in a confined space there's one last mini boss guarding the top and it's a very odd encounter ashina elite jinsuke saze only has a single attack that he uses repeatedly but you're basically guaranteed to die to it a few times just learning how he works his ocean across will do damage through a regular guard so you need to learn the deflect timing and once you do his posture bar fills up extremely quickly it's the initial learning curve that causes a lot of problems there is a pretty easy tell though just pay attention to when his sheath flashes and double tap deflect right after that's the only trick it's safe it's reliable and it works he's a rather traditional display of difficulty due to the skills you need to beat him it's a test of your reaction time since you need to watch for that glow and is a test of your hand's dexterity given how quickly you need to tap the button i think he's fun overall and it's a good test before the upcoming boss fight but given that he challenges some relatively basic skills it's quite frustrating to lose to him repeatedly i always feel like an idiot when i mess up my timings against him because it's such a simple response to such a simple telegraph i wouldn't be surprised if he's one of the more polarizing encounters in sakura because of that i do think it's a much better deflection check than the ninja in the well though once he's defeated you can exit out the back window and grapple up to the top kuro is waiting for us up ahead it's a testament to the strength of sakura's boss fights that i can't decide which one is my favorite perhaps the strongest contender for that top spot though is ghanichiro because he's a great case study for examining why combat insecure is so brilliant some players might be taken by surprise that you're fighting kunichiro so soon given how threatening he was at the start of the game one might think that he'd be more suitable for a late game encounter you might recall that i briefly discussed how placing him at the end of the tutorial as an intended loss helped build up some tension and anxiety for when you finally do have to face him those feelings are hopefully still fresh in your mind by time you get here it's made even sweeter by this being wolf's moment to rescue kuro the whole reason that he's here in the first place ghinichiro isn't flawless and there is one fairly significant problem that i'll be talking about with him but he still succeeds by taking so many boxes for what makes a good boss fight he has a mixture of longer combo strings ranged arrows heavy attacks that lead into miku recounters and a slew of other tricks that all demand a very dynamic response from you you're taking everything you've learned so far and pinning it against essentially the final boss of the game's first arc this comment might lose some weight since you could say it about most major bosses in sakura but it's worth talking about almost everything that kenichiro can do is fair his telegraphs are crystal clear and every attack has reasonable enough timings that nothing is unreactable more importantly he also doesn't unexpectedly punish you when you try to be aggressive i'll reference something that i said in my elden ring critique the beauty of sakura's combat is how you can be the dominant force and control the pace of the fight if you know what you're doing nothing shows this better than guinea chiro you can and should be attacking him with every chance you get you can lock him into periods of trading guards and deflects back and forth which is a great way to build up his posture quickly before forcing him to back off because he needs a breather to attack you more safely having a distance closing move like the sure can follow up is really useful here so you can keep the pressure on whenever he backs off with enough practice you can strike a harmony between your brain and your inputs and these sword fights start to feel like second nature i really cannot understate how fun that feeling is and how difficult it can be to create in other games even sekuro itself doesn't quite reach these same heights with its other bosses the flow state that genitrio creates still feels unique to him alone there's also something to be said about the fluidity to this fight it's intensely satisfying watching these two dance around the arena as if they're gaining momentum with every swing much of that can be credited to the attack animations which are all butter smooth good animations do more than just create clear telegraphs they also make everything feel a lot more polished and they're all very well done in sakura i haven't said anything about the game's sound design either but hopefully that can speak for itself the repeated back and forth clanging of your weapons is almost musical with how rhythmic and satisfying it sounds much like lady butterfly guinea trio can be a massive roadblock if you haven't adapted to how you're expected to play yet if that's the case kenichiro might be the hardest boss in the game because he punishes bad habits like no other boss really does he'll track you if you try dodging too often and he may as well be aimbotting with some of his bow attacks given how easily they hit you if you try staying away from him it's good that he does this but what i really don't like is how an encounter that can already be so difficult also expects you to learn an entirely new mechanic to get past a surprise third phase it's a bit of a mean trick that this is the first taste you get of lightning reversals especially after you probably worked so hard to get past those first two phases the game does explain how to do them right before the fight but you've had an opportunity to practice everything else on a regular enemy or mini boss before you're truly tested on it i do not like this about him it makes deaths on phase 3 feel really cheap if you're new in the game's defense his third phase is the easiest since lightning reversals are so powerful but i can imagine the frustration new players feel when they die just trying to see how it works it's something that's very easily fixed too even if there was just one enemy or mini boss before this that used lightning on you it'd be better than what it is now i know that might seem a bit silly since the lightning of tomoe is this heretical dangerous power that only a few people know about but the game doesn't shy away from magical supernatural elements anyway so i do believe there's a way they could have made it work the kinichiro fight overall is a work of art and it encapsulates everything that makes the combat system work there's a lot more you could say about him that i've had to omit for the sake of not making this video longer than it already is with him defeated there is a short stretch of story content before we can move on to the next area after killing denitrio it's not exactly clear where you're intended to go next the next three major areas can really be tackled in any order kuro suggests that you visit the sunken valley to find an ingredient for the fountainhead incense but there was also an npc back when you first entered the castle who told you about senpo temple i think senpo temple is the next logical step in difficulty so that's what we'll be doing here you can access it through a lift in the abandoned dungeon and upon entering you're greeted by a ghost scroll that warns you not to go in it reminds me a little bit of entering old yharnam you aren't welcome here but that only serves to pique your curiosity further the most immediately striking thing about sempo temple is how pretty it is the lush greenery is much more beautiful than anywhere you've been so far and aesthetically speaking it's probably my second favorite level in the game you may have noticed that sakura is rather visually samey throughout which is why this place is so refreshing ashina outskirts and oshina castle have identical visuals more or less and while hirata estate was different it's very dark and dreary like most other places in the world having more visual variety probably would have served the game better especially in terms of exploration and feeling like you're making solid progression dark souls 1 was especially good at this given how many levels simply look different from each other and have very different atmospheres as a result achieving that sort of visual variety is harder to do in sakura where we're bound by a more realistic historic setting so if you aren't a fan of the sengoku atmosphere and matching visuals then the aesthetics will probably leave something to be desired throughout the entire game nevertheless places like senpo temple do add a bit more flair it's more tranquil and enjoyable to look at than anywhere else you've probably been while sakurai may be lacking in visual variety it does a lot better with enemy variety every area has a unique set of enemies that feel like they belong and many areas can be identified solely by the enemies that populate them it's especially helpful in this game where the strength of the combat system can only be brought out by giving you lots of things to experiment on once one enemy type has been mastered there's not a whole lot of value in repeatedly fighting them since every fight thereafter is essentially going to be the same if a game wants you to play in a certain way it's more respectful of your time to make sure that it finds ways to mix up those expectations as much as possible you need to get creative with working in the confines of whatever system you've designed the game excels at this during the mid game stretch that we're in right now in fact senpo temple has arguably the most complex normal enemy in the entire game early on you can encounter these spear adepts who i used to hate a lot more than i do now these guys are very aerial and non-committal they tend to keep a lot of distance until they run in with a barrage of melee attacks that require very rapid deflect timings before backing off again if you try finding them with a standard approach that is relying on melee attacks and deflects to carry you through the fight you are probably going to have the same frustrations that i did you need to do a little bit of outside the box thinking either rely on shurikens to knock them out of the air as much as possible or use the anti-air death blow that you can buy from the black hat badger i'm more partial to that first option since i suck at doing anti-airs but either way once you work that out they become a whole lot easier they're a good example of how securo finds new ways to twist its combat system while using only a handful of core mechanics it feels great to have cracked the code on the spirit depths and they're a lot more fun to fight as a result it is a little harsh placing two of them so close together here but if you're careful you can avoid aggroing both of them at once the shugendo idol is just ahead and with this section comes a secret path that takes you to the demon bell which is worth talking about sekuro is unusual from the fromsoft lineup in another way it's the only game that has more explicit difficulty options it's just not done in the way that you would expect instead of letting you pick from a traditional easy normal or hard option sakuro starts you off on its easiest difficulty and lets you increase the challenge via two modifiers the demon bell and kuro's charm the demon bell is solely a numbers increase it increases the damage and defense of everything in the game in exchange for enemies dropping more loot when it comes to the soulsborne difficulty debate i honestly don't have very strong feelings either way i'm very happy with the games being as challenging as they are but i also struggle to come up with a good argument against including easier and harder modes the go-to argument for many people is that it would compromise the developer's vision these games have always been about overcoming adversity and being able to flip on an easy switch would ruin that feeling i do think there's some level of truth to that and an easy mode dark souls might not even be an enjoyable experience on the other hand it's something that would be so easily ignored by people who play these games specifically for their difficulty the fact that summons in the previous games have always been optional already sort of proves this players who need help can get it and players who don't need help can ignore it yet for some reason this discussion still keeps coming up so i guess that isn't satisfactory it's a conflict that i've never been able to resolve and i'm always curious to know what other people think about it that being said the demon belt does illustrate some potential ways forward for fromsoft if they ever decide to expand on this difficulty system i've done one demon bell run before and it does add a bit of replayability but i can't say it made any major difference in your approach to bosses or anything the hardest thing about it is that it can make bosses longer which requires more mental stamina but these increases aren't substantial enough to feel noticeable in most cases and there aren't any changes in how you have to play i'm not sure if it works great for sekiro since it's not an rpg and therefore isn't as numbers based i could see it having more merit in a traditional souls game where damage can be a lot more punishing higher damage becomes a non-issue when deflections will just negate it entirely perhaps a compromise on the difficulty debate could be some kind of reverse demon bell system a modifier that you can activate to reduce enemy health and damage but also reduce their loot or exp yields as a result if the game started you out on the supposed hard difficulty but let you switch down to easy in exchange for less rewards maybe it could appease both sides of the debate i'm not really sure kuro's charm on the other hand is a lot more impactful after beating the game once you can choose to give kuro a charm at the very beginning of the game that more or less changes how the entire game is played by going charmless you take chip damage while doing normal blocks effectively punishing you for doing anything short of perfect you have to deflect everything it also has its own set of numbers increases with more damage higher posture bars and so on in exchange for faster send and exp gain you can also activate the charmless and demon bell modifiers together if you wish stacking their effects for an insane difficulty mode i've played the game charmless 2 and i didn't really like it it wasn't an enjoyable experience but i might be in the minority here charmless strips away one of your tools since blocking is now a lot more dangerous and i found myself playing a lot more defensively since even the slightest of mistakes would be punished allowing for that slim margin of error means that if you do make a mistake during the fight you'll have an opportunity to readjust and find your footing again which can be fun going charmless removes that element from the game and it's a net negative for the experience in my opinion nevertheless the daunting prospect of needing to play perfectly can draw players back in for subsequent playthroughs it is a good super hard option for those that are into that sort of thing which might further prove that difficulty options would be good for the game who's to say that it doesn't go both ways i've opted not to use either modifier for this video because i like to talk about games in a manner that most people will have experienced and anyone that's played sakura will have done so without these modifiers at least once meaning we can all discuss the game from a similar baseline the next boss fight coming up is the armored warrior this area has a couple puzzle boss fights and he's the first one you can't deal vitality damage to him at all and he doesn't have any death blow markers which suggest that you kill him through non-traditional means the solution is to build his posture up and then knock him off of the bridge i think it's communicated well with how he flails around to break the walls and how wolf makes him stumble backwards whenever you do try to death blow him this sort of quote unquote gimmick fight is a lot more enjoyable than things like the blazing bull it still relies on the core combat mechanics since you attack and deflect him normally but it mixes things up by making positioning the ultimate determining factor in your victory you have to strategically wait until he's close enough to the edge that you can knock him off and then go for your finisher it's a good fight overall and definitely one of the more memorable mini bosses [Music] there's one more stretch of land before we're at the end and it's a surprisingly long one another way that senpo temple achieves difficulty is through making spaces between idols a lot wider than the previous areas do paths from idle to idle are more strenuous gauntlets which is somewhat reminiscent of how they handled bonfires in dark souls 1. before now the game has been very generous with idol placement they're all over the place in ocean outskirts and oshina castle especially i'm pretty happy with the hefty amount of checkpoints throughout the game particularly with bosses since runbacks are a thing of the past with few exceptions you can get back to major enemies without a hitch and unnecessarily long run backs have always annoyed me in the previous games so i'm glad they've largely been eliminated in sakura especially considering you tend to die so much at the same time i'd be lying if i said the lack of checkpoints here didn't build up a lot of tension and stress as you approach the end of the temple which makes finding that precious idol all the more relieving having to face enemies while carefully managing your healing resources is a pretty big staple in these games so in that regard senpo temple might even feel a bit nostalgic the monks found here aren't all that tough but small mistakes against them can add up and culminate in you losing a fair amount of progress if you do die while we're on the subject i haven't talked about the penalties for death much yet because there's no traditional level up system and because of the abundance of checkpoints skill point experience and money are sort of the last resort if you want to have some kind of tangible death punishment these experience and send losses are randomly avoided by the unseen aid chances which also reduces the more dragon rot spreads as a penalty for dying too much frankly i think the death penalties are pretty poorly thought out for a few reasons a side effect of stripping away exp and money on death with no way to recover them is that players are now incentivized to go and spend as many resources as possible before a major fight so that they minimize losses when they eventually die as a result unseen aid loses quite a bit of value which then inadvertently makes dragon rot much less punishing the only time losing money can really hurt is if it happens in a place like this where there's a long stretch without any idols and lots of enemies that give a big sin build up without any opportunities to spend it my hunch is that fromsoft realized that death was a lot less punishing after putting so many idols everywhere and as a result they decided to implement this whole system as an alternative this might be too bold of a proposition but i think it would suit second row the game would be just fine if there was no penalty for death dragon rot unseen aid and the exp or send losses really aren't that necessary games like celeste demonstrate that the lack of progression is often punishment enough that encourages you to keep pushing yourself death doesn't have to be this penalizing it can be twisted to become encouraging if the game remains indifferent to your failures and this game is all about encouraging you to get better so i think it would work anyway the lack of checkpoints can really sting at the end there's three spirit depths guarding the main temple hall where the last idol is and even though i like these guys individually doing all three of them at once is absolutely brutal the only way i can get around it is by utilizing catching sugars and the bloodsmoking in jutsu to take two of them out for free and then take care of the last one solo maybe that was the point to make the ninjutsu technique seem more appealing and if so that's fine after all taking on three of these guys at a time is pretty damn unfair once you're past those guys you're pretty much done with sempo temple there's a couple secrets nearby that i won't bother showing but you can unlock a fourth skill tree by going through a cave just past the back of the main hall it's cool but i've never used the temple arts since it spreads your skill points even thinner so i can't really comment on them there are lots of decaying monks around here but they can't be killed just yet they're immortal thanks to the rejuvenating waters so your best bet is to run past them and rest at the idol senpo temple is another strong level i enjoy it more for the visuals and atmosphere than anything but the enemies and bosses found here are equally unique and it's one of the harder areas by virtue of being more of an endurance test the area boss can now be accessed by interacting with the bell just past the idol following the trend of the armored warrior the senpo temple boss fight is a puzzle except this time there's basically no combat involved i hesitate to call it a boss fight to begin with for that reason you aren't being tested on any of the core mechanics here instead it focuses on being thematically interesting looking at it through that lens i think they were very successful the atmosphere in the halls of illusion is equal parts relaxing and eerie the music or lack thereof goes a long way in creating this feeling almost like it's a new reality that you're not supposed to be in more interestingly this fight is based on the three wise monkeys proverb see no evil hear no evil and speak no evil each of the monkeys embodies those ideas the purple monkey runs away if he sees you the green one does the same if he hears you and the red one will shout at all the others if he sees you i also think the fourth monkey being invisible as an homage to the sometimes forgotten do no evil is a very clever touch there's a cool bit of problem solving with this guy in that his panel at the entrance is empty to hint towards this quirk the footsteps that trail behind you as you explore might be a little too on the nose and partly ruin that puzzle in my opinion but it's still a cool touch with all of this in mind the idea of the folding screen monkeys is very good it's an interesting parallel to real-life cultural influences as a way to take advantage of sakura's grounded setting in practice though it doesn't translate very well to a good puzzle and for that reason i don't ultimately think it's a good fight the goal is to find a way to kill every monkey since they'll run around so much so how can you kill the purple one without being spotted how can you kill the green one without being heard and so on there was potential here to try and incorporate those concepts to take advantage of the stealth system more but unfortunately that isn't the route they took the way you win is by making small adjustments to the environment and luring the monkeys into the areas you've changed they weren't very subtle about the solution at all which is mainly why it's not a very good puzzle for instance it's pretty damn obvious that you use the bell with a quote deafening sound to take out the hearing monkey same goes for the seeing monkey when you create a room that's quote dark as night once you wander around enough and find these locations it's just a matter of chasing the monkeys into their appropriate spots and following what the signs say it's not particularly engaging nor does it make any use of the game's unique mechanics again i think one way you can make these ideas more interesting is if they were incorporated with the stealth system more maybe having to find a correct path through the halls that would allow you to sneak up on every monkey safely it could still make sense with the three wise monkeys motif while also playing to the game's established strengths overall it gets a resounding meh from me and it could have been done much better once the monkeys are down you get transported to the divine child's room where you can take the mortal blade i haven't touched much on the game's story but this is an important moment so it feels worthwhile to show off a little bit acquiring the mortal blade is a reasonably memorable moment both for the well-directed cutscene and for the cool combat art you get upon doing so it feels like a significant turning point in your quest since the mortal blade is so instrumental after this sempo temple is done for now we'll briefly return later for a side quest to reach one of the game's endings after returning to oshina castle and speaking to kuro our next objective is to head into the sunken valley it can be accessed through a path tucked away in the back of oshina castle and it's a relatively short level i really like the initial descent into this place hearing the monkeys scurrying about is a little bit startling and makes you feel like you're finally venturing into uncharted territory this is their habitat not yours the sunken valley is the most vertically inclined level in the game and i think it makes the best use of the grappling hook because of that sakura's grappling mechanics aren't particularly deep or innovative on their own it's less of an extra movement option and more a tool that's been incorporated into level design we've already seen this throughout the game in smaller segments where verticality adds complexity to stealth zones but the sunken valley takes this concept further and makes grappling a part of your entire traversal you move from section to section that way instead of on foot this doesn't really change the simplicity of the grappling mechanic itself but it's a nice way to demonstrate how level design can be uniquely elaborate it could be viewed as a flaw that the other levels don't experiment as much with this and if the actual act of grappling was more fun i would probably agree with that but i think it's a decent way to set the sunken valley apart and break up some of the patterns that the other levels follow we're a little over halfway through the game at this point so if you've been bored with the layouts of the previous levels so far hopefully the sunken valley could reignite your interest a lot of enemies here also focus on ranged attacks instead of melee ones and part of that challenge could be sometimes timing your grapples in line with the enemy's shooting patterns so that you don't take a bullet to the face while you're in the air gun wielding enemies in this game tend to go down a lot easier than their melee counterparts so they're usually placed as far away distractions whose timings you have to track in your head while dealing with more pressing matters it's smooth sailing once you're up close and can spam attack them down but getting to that point is the challenge snake eyes shirafuji is the first mini boss here and she's essentially a powered up version of the normal rifle enemies you fought earlier on despite being the gatekeeper to the gun fort she is a pretty melee inclined enemy you can keep the pressure on her like with most other bosses as long as she's within range in fact doing so is pretty critical against her because when she backs off and decides to shoot at you deflecting those bullets won't affect her posture at all one thing i don't like about her though is how her perilous attack can be deflected despite being a grab the game has long established that grabs need to be dodged to avoid but the snake eyes breaks this rule it makes a little more sense when you look at why because she grabs you with the hook on her weapon instead of her hands but it's an inconsistency with the rules i'm not a huge fan of aside from that she's a fine fight my attempts at the gun for it after her were all pretty sloppy so excuse the poor display of gameplay you're about to watch i tried running it a few times to get something more impressive looking but i realized that this could be more indicative of what the gun fort is about this is a section where you're constantly being spammed with projectiles by enemies that you can't reach or see which sounds terrible but i think the intention is that you're supposed to blitz through it as fast as possible it's a sprint through a very chaotic barrage of bullets that really only works because of the mobility that this game affords once you're up against the wall past the bridge you can hide from them a lot easier but it's also hard to know where exactly all the enemies are positioned it's a good example of what i was talking about earlier you have to keep track of their shooting patterns while trying to close the distance and that can entail a lot of frantic decisions when choosing whether it's safe to leave cover or not and when you should be going for kills on certain enemies it's certainly a departure from the usual stealth zones that we've been seeing something that's a lot more fitting for an area themed around gunfire sound cues can play a very helpful role when tracking when you've been shot at you can't always see who's shooting at you but you can definitely hear it perhaps this is digging too deeply into what they were going for but like most parts of a game good sound design can have an influence on how you play responding to the sound of gunfire rather than the bullet trail might give you an easier time since these sounds are so prominent and distinct and can be reacted to even when the enemy is off screen the cave area after the gunforge will take you to another mini boss the long arm centipede giraffe and it's identical to one that could be found back in senpo this guy could be construed as either another deflection skill check or as a joke enemy it's probably a little bit of both he's not difficult at all as long as you hold your ground the small arena would suggest that he is a serious skill check to prevent you from running around to dodge but the name and appearance make him seem a bit silly i think he's hilarious and he's pretty easy to kill the more interesting thing in this section is the second event with the great serpent it's not as memorable as the first encounter but it's a good reminder of the serpent's existence in the world it hasn't made any appearances since all the way back in the outskirts and giving it only a handful of flashy encounters like this helps create some sense of mystery over what its role in the world really is if i had to have one complaint they might have been able to do more to make this encounter more intimidating since it's in a less claustrophobic space and it doesn't snap wildly at you when you narrowly escape like last time it's not as remarkable but that could also be attributed to the repeated exposure you're a little more desensitized since you've seen this monster before if anything it acts as a nice prelude to the final encounter we'll have with this serpent later in the game the final section of sunken valley is a long stretch of grappling across buda statues and it's here where the scope of the area really begins to dawn on you these statues can be seen elsewhere in the game but they're a lot more striking when put up against the massive cliff faces that make up this area so visually speaking it's quite impressive even though the sunken valley is relatively simplistic visually this final section invokes a different feeling than we're used to it's more primal by virtue of the enemies found throughout the area the humans are gone and have been replaced by a bunch of monkeys who will either run away or scream at you whenever you're spotted there's a feeling that you've ventured somewhere you're not really supposed to be given the complexity of the area's terrain it makes sense that few people would be capable of descending this far but as a result there is a feeling of finality to it like you've conquered a difficult mountain climb and now you're at the apex compared to the gunfort this place is a lot quieter it almost feels like they've mushed two completely different concepts together yet managed to make it work it exemplifies the progress you've been making in this area so far as for the enemy placements there's not really a whole lot to say the monkeys are relatively weak so they try applying difficulty in the same fashion we've seen throughout the sunken valley so far there's a monkey with a gun that shoots at you while you're hopping across the valley which means you have to time your movements a little bit more carefully either that or just take him out with a shuriken before he runs away to make your traversal safer i should mention that you can jump to the bottom of the valley where there's a poison swamp but we'll be coming back to that later there's only one major thing worth doing there and it's part of a side quest needed to reach one of the endings the last thing for you to do is kill this chaotic crowd of monkeys that absolutely flip their [ __ ] when they see you like the centipede draft it seems a bit like a joke encounter but it's fun nonetheless for now that's actually it for the sunken valley the best way to sum up this level is short and sweet the gunfort and this final valley are really the only two sections but they're very distinct from each other and still keep you engaged in similar ways the level focuses more on interesting traversal and ranged mechanics as a break from the taxing attack deflect combat you've been engaging with so far in many ways the upcoming boss will reflect this too and yet again it's one of my favorite bosses in sakura over the past 10 years or so many games have made strides to become more cinematic fromsoft's titles have never really tried to follow these sorts of trends so i can't say for sure if this was intentional or not but the battle with the guardian ape feels like something straight out of an action movie i think this is the most well animated boss in the entire game i'm not a zoologist at all but its movements are incredibly erratic and wild in the way that i would actually imagine a rampaging ape would be it's fun simply watching him move about the arena trying to destroy wolf like it's a life or death game of cat and mouse good animation work is a big reason why attack telegraphs in this game are so clear but as demonstrated by this boss it has implications outside of that the way that participants move and behave can go a long way in contributing to the presentation of a fight you don't necessarily need movie-like shots or extreme graphical fidelity to invoke that cinematic feel the guardian apes animalistic movements are a spectacle to look at but they also drive its attack patterns and behavior the overwhelming visual aspects are intertwined with the gameplay and how you respond to his attacks which takes much better advantage of the medium the guardian ape is probably the most unpredictable enemy in the game reading a sword swing is generally much easier than reading a swipe from a beast some people will find this the hardest fight in the game since it's the first major boss where you don't really trade attack and deflects back and forth because of that it may initially feel like he's not designed well around sakura's combat system but i think that he fosters aggression in a different way many large enemies like this are surprisingly mobile he likes to dart around the arena after recovering from most attacks what most other bosses haven't reinforced yet is that wolf is just as mobile as they are and that you have to take advantage of sprinting and positioning to keep up with him his attack recovery windows are a lot more pronounced so you want to stay close to him after he finishes his attacks in order to punish this is the main difference between the guardian ape and something like the blazing bull who feels built with a similar approach in mind despite his unpredictability the ape still has clear responses to his attacks for you to figure out and once you find those responses you can take full advantage of his relatively longer downtime between attacks you're still rewarded for getting up close and personal i've often found that staying behind him is a pretty safe bet it keeps you out of the way of most of his moves and they don't have very good tracking he's a surprisingly fun boss that doesn't use sekiro's established conventions there's no rhythm to learn with this guy nor is there an exciting back and forth but it's a lot more creative in fact this will be a lengthier section because the guardian ape is really two bosses in one i'm still a bit bummed that i had his death fake out spoiled for me on my first run because i knew about it ahead of time i can't really decide whether this secret is well hidden by the game or not the fact that the first phase only has one death blow counter is probably enough to raise some eyebrows since even mini bosses have been established as having two phases giving him additional death blows would probably be too harsh of a solution to this and the shinobi execution pop-up is a solid diversion but it's still a question i'd like to pose to people who went into this fight completely blind were you expecting his second phase or not and if so were you expecting it in the way that it happened or was the resurrecting ape a giant shock i'd be interested to know anyway this phase is a more traditional secure fight since he now has a sword that you can deflect much more reliably the guardian ape will probably be a vitality kill but the headless ape will probably be a posture kill much like his headed counterpart the animation is top notch here it's a little bit disturbing watching the apes body slither around the way that it does it makes a lot of sense knowing that one of the immortal centipedes is in control here his attacks are slow and lumbering without an established rhythm so it feels more like a typical test of your reaction time rather than your ability to read and learn patterns it's actually a lot easier than phase one because of that predictability but this is also the most drastic phase change found in the entire game which can be a challenge in itself it's testing your adaptability which the game hasn't really dabbled in yet of course previous phase changes have introduced new attacks in the boss's moveset but the headless ape may as well be an entirely different entity aside from the appearance these two phases are completely different bosses phase 2 also has a unique interaction with the spear prosthetic tool which makes things a lot easier if you can deflect the attack where he sort of collapses on top of you he'll fall over and remain vulnerable to counter attacks for a good few seconds you can then use the spear to charge into his severed neck and rip the centipede out from inside him dealing heavy posture damage in the process it's one of the coolest looking uses of prosthetics in the game but part of me also wants to criticize it for being too big of a leap in logic for most players to figure out naturally if you spend time in sempo temple after getting the mortal blade you can find out that centipedes are what gives these creatures immortality so perhaps that's the hint you're supposed to remember for this fight but to also assume that the spear can reach into the apes neck and thrust it out seems like something that only makes sense after you learn it exists i'm not sure though my intuition with these sort of thematic tricks usually isn't very good so i'd be interested to hear opinions on this too i wonder how many people discovered it for themselves i still love this fight either way it feels like both a spectacle encounter and a regular boss tied up into one fromsoft also deserves applause for getting the camera right on such a big flailing enemy you would usually expect the camera to be a massive pain for large enemies in these games but it regularly zooms out so that you can always see what the boss is doing without impeding the ability to see your own character it also goes out with a bang thanks to such a disgustingly fantastic finisher death blow the ape was protecting the lotus of the palace the next ingredient for the fountainhead aroma with this in hand we can return to oshina castle and proceed to the next level the final area of this mid-game stretch is the ashina depths and it can be accessed through the abandoned dungeon found in oshina castle you have to pass through this dungeon to get to senpo temple as well but i glossed over it because i honestly don't have very much to say it's more notable for its atmosphere than anything else there's shades of dark souls here with how bleak and decaying this place is the only enemies of note here are the test subjects who look like something straight out of undead burg these corpses don't really pose any tangible threat but they definitely add to the creepiness given the completely unique ambience it is disappointing that the abandoned dungeon doesn't amount to anything more than being a bridge between areas there is a side quest here that ultimately leads to a secret fight which is kind of cool but the enemies involved are just reskinned versions of things you've already fought it's not really that important gameplay wise nevertheless it does have the first shichiman warrior mini boss who is worth talking about a little bit the shiichimen warrior fights aren't very good he uses a lot of ranged magic that blocks off a lot of openings which can result in running around hopelessly until he leaves himself vulnerable without any projectiles serving as an imminent threat compared to most other mini bosses there's an awful lot of empty time he's a lot easier if you have the phoenix lilac umbrella which completely negates every attack of his the specialization of the prosthetic tools goes pretty far here since it's so specific to these apparition type encounters that it can completely trivialize them you can just hold up the umbrella walk towards him attack until he teleports away rinse and repeat until you're done it's not a very interesting encounter once you get past him you can get to the pit that leads to the ashina depths this place is a lot more involved the depths has one of the most memorable introductions since its entrance lies at the bottom of a massive pit that you have to fall into there is quite a bit of novelty in being swallowed by this unknown void it may even be a bit of a scary thought depending on who you ask the depths is more shrouded in mystery than the rest of the game especially with the village at the end being one of the more cryptic areas the idea that there's something unknown sleeping beneath the land you're more intimately familiar with is enough to make you interested in the area when you first enter it even so sakura never quite reaches the same atmospheric heights as bloodborne or even the dark souls trilogy until maybe the very end this is something else that i would attribute to a more restrictive setting dark souls has a lot more creative freedom to pursue different types of levels since dark fantasy is a pretty loose space to start on it can be pulled in a lot of different directions within the same game while still making sense bloodborne's universe is still using some pre-established themes with the gothic architecture and lovecraft horror but there's still a lot of potential to create a compelling terrifying atmosphere from those ideas which bloodborne absolutely capitalizes on sakura's atmosphere pales quite a bit in comparison even though there probably were opportunities to elevate it further the abandoned dungeon is solid proof that they still could have done something creepy and oppressive without feeling out of place to my knowledge this is the first time that fromsoft has tried building a world based on this much real life history that's not to say that sakura is realistic by any stretch but rather they used an existing period in human history and built around that instead of creating something completely new creating a strong atmosphere is something that fromsoft definitely excels in but they're better at doing so in worlds created more or less from scratch this could be another reason why some soulsborne fans may not enjoy sakura as much you don't really play it for the atmosphere and world fountainhead palace is more enjoyable on this front but it's saved for the very end and only further proves that there is some missed potential with the rest of the areas as for the poison pit currently on screen right now it's the first zone of the depths and despite being their signature poison swamp area it's quite enjoyable staying out of the poison is a lot easier when you have a grappling hook to propel you off the ground at a moment's notice and it's easy to remain on dry land against the few enemies that populate the area i also like the instance of grappling from tree to tree in the center which won't actually alert them to your presence i think the intention is to use these to time an aerial death blow against the cannon wielding woman in the center which is a neat idea but i failed at that as you can see and had to take her out normally i didn't use it against shira fuji but the sabi mario prosthetic is very helpful against the snake eyes mini bosses they don't deflect against any of the swings until the very last hit and even then it's very spammable so you can get some easy posture build up whatever strategy you used for shirafuji will work against shirahagi too it's the same fight hopefully the player will find hirohogi easier now that they've had practice and can feel a stronger sense of accomplishment when they win as a result now if you watched my elden ring video you'll know that i was very critical of that game for how much it recycles content from this point onwards sakura recycles quite a bit of content itself not as much but it's there so i think it warrants a small discussion on this whole topic there's a rematch against the headless ape in the den right after shira haki and even though the first ape was incredible this is one of the weakest boss fights in the game it would be far too sweeping to say that a game reusing content in later areas is automatically bad it depends a lot more on how it's done eldon ring's issue is that many reused enemies aren't enjoyable to fight themselves but also because it often feels like it's done without any rhyme or reason while there may be a lore explanation for every single little detail in the game those explanations feel like they came after fromsoft decided to reuse an enemy in a given area lore reasons are a lot easier to cook up than completely new enemies most reused enemies in sakura don't suffer the same fate there aren't as many bosses that are unfun to fight and repeating them throughout the game could be a means of skill expression since sakura bosses generally have a steeper learning curve cracking the code on a dark souls or elden ring enemy is generally easier than going through the trial and error of learning deflect rhythms so repeating content here is often more justified things also don't feel out of place very often ashina generals are regularly seen in ashina there's a hidden path from the sunken valley to the ashina depths so it's not really outlandish to see a snake eyes in both areas unfortunately the headless ape doesn't really fit either of these explanations and finding it randomly in such an unassuming den isn't nearly as exciting as the first encounter the much more notable thing about it though is once again it has a surprise second phase it summons another ape to make the fight a two on one the mechanics of the fight falter quite a bit here and it isn't nearly as enjoyable as fighting these two enemies on their own the second ape is like the regular guardian ape but with a more limited moveset and much less health this fight may seem more difficult at a glance but i'm relatively certain that both apes have had adjustments to their ai so that they don't just layer attacks on top of each other for the entire fight and make it impossible to engage they're intended to take turns attacking and one of them tends to stay backed off while you fight the other but these patterns aren't consistent you need to do a lot of running around waiting for them to give you an opening much of the time sometimes one ape will start an attack just as the other has finished which makes any follow-up on your part a lot more risky it's actually a very slow paced fight and the frantic nature of the normal ape mixed with the more calculated approach of the headless ape doesn't make for a very good combination i don't have much else to say about the fight it isn't very fun and it's one of few instances of sakurai reusing content poorly on the bright side now you can kill the headless ape for good by using the mortal blade which is a cool moment this is the only point in the game where a major boss interrupts the middle of the level the next portion of the depths awaits us this upcoming forest section is difficult to navigate because it has quite a few vertical layers and because you can't physically see that well due to all the mist you lose your bearings a lot more easily since it can loop around back on itself several times and it looks the same throughout so you'll often run in circles asking yourself if you've already been here a lot getting lost and having to chart out the correct path yourself makes levels in these games a lot more memorable so it's nice to see that feeling rekindled here if only a little bit despite its narrow focus on combat and stealth wayfinding is still a skill that the game can test you on this part along with ashina castle are probably where it does so the most the enemies found here are phantom versions of the bandits and wolves from the hirata estate they aren't dangerous on their own but there's a whole lot of ganks in the lower sections much like in hirata estate these bandits make things difficult by coming at you in groups the quirk this time is that while the bandits can spot you from afar like any normal enemy you can't see them until they get close meaning you have to be a lot more careful with your surroundings since you could get crept up on and overwhelmed pretty quickly their invisibility can come off as gimmicky when you deal with it for the first time and it's not my favorite section in the game but relying on sound cues can help once again the challenge isn't just responding to whatever attack is being thrown at you it's also to identify where they're coming from it's an extra piece of information you need to process listening for their grunts or swings is a quicker way to tell when an attack is coming and the game doesn't use audio tells that much so it's nice to see whenever they do the headless is an optional boss that you can find in this area there was actually one that you could have found earlier if you took the hidden route to the demon bell from oshina outskirts but this will probably be the first one that players try to actually fight the headless is quite a special mini boss both for visuals and for gameplay it looks like a monster you would find in a horror movie it has some very unusual movements somewhat similar to the headless ape and the ominous soundtrack that plays while fighting him adds quite a bit to the experience while it's very well presented he isn't a whole lot of fun to fight everything in his arena happens in slow motion which feels very unnatural after learning the standardized attack animations throughout the game the headless has this quote-unquote disadvantage too in that his attacks also look like they've been slowed down but that doesn't really make his deflect timings easier there's something uncanny about playing at this reduced speed even though you can visually tell when the attack wants to land your instincts still want to deflect as if he's moving at a normal pace i imagine this behavior is intentional to match with the abnormal look of the boss and mixing things up like this isn't necessarily a bad thing but it feels like having to relearn a core part of the game just for a single fight i'm also not entirely convinced that his hitboxes are fair it often feels like they come out just a little bit before the swing as if they aren't slowed down to the same degree that the animations are the more pressing problem with him is that he requires divine confetti to do anything more than a sliver of damage with each hit mandating consumables against a difficult boss forces you to grind for that item if you want to beat him and that makes deaths all the more frustrating if you die without any confetti left your punishment is to waste your time farming some up again for another round grinding in this game or any game really isn't interesting or engaging it feels like deliberately wasted time and to me that's one of the worst offenses a game can commit the headless is very much a style over substance enemy and for that reason this is the only one that i'll fight during this playthrough the other mini boss in this area is tokujiro the glutton who's a jews of the drunkard clone he feels extremely out of place in the area and i would love to know what the lore reason is for this guy being here in the first place aside from that it's an all right encounter he comes late enough after juzo that you've had a lot of time to refine your skills and you can now test yourself against something that might have given you trouble previously after tokujiro's death you do a bit of platforming to reach the inside of the temple where all the mist is originating from the miss noble tops off this trio of many boss encounters but he doesn't really count because he's completely passive he's more representative of an environmental boss instead of a conventional one you can think of the constant disorientation throughout the section as being the enemy and killing the miss noble as defeating said enemy from that perspective it's easier to appreciate what they were going for with the miss noble it's a very weird encounter for the first time because you don't know what to expect whatever is staying in the temple remains a mystery and when you fight him it seems a little bit anticlimactic i think the sudden flash that makes all of the mist vanish away is a cool enough visual moment that makes up for that though this opens up meebu village the final section of oshina depths this is the place that i referenced at the beginning of this part it's one of the game's creepier areas the sorry state of the villagers suggests that something quite twisted has happened here the buildings are very run down and outside of combat there's a notable lack of music and ambient noise to add to the atmosphere the only things that can be heard are the occasional zombie-like groans from the villagers some of them have formed patrols and stroll about the village while others burrow in the ground and surprise you as you walk by them they don't pose very much of a threat many of them will die in just a single hit which helps to sell the ruined state of the village whatever did happen to the inhabitants reduced them to the state you find them in here where all they can manage is to hopelessly swing some makeshift tools at you to attack the lack of a challenge can feel like an anti-climactic entity area but i think it was worth it to augment the creepy atmosphere it was really the last chance the game had to do something like this so i'm glad they saw that opportunity and took it while they still could the mini boss you can find up ahead helps alleviate this complaint as well oren of the water is up there as my favorite mini boss is either her or the seven spears she's a very no-nonsense one-on-one sword fight that plays to the combat system's more traditional strengths it's mostly a test of deflection since opportunities to swing back are fairly limited and her posture bar fills up pretty quickly if you can deal with her combo strings it's been a while since we had a new fight that used attack and deflection rhythms so it's a refreshing return to form she's no pushover either given that she's an entirely new enemy type with a new set of attacks she's one of the trickiest mini bosses in the game to learn and master her telegraphs are harder to read and you could end up dying a few times just trying to comprehend what she's doing what stands out more about her is the amount of work that went into this fight orin is a completely unique encounter who doesn't get re-used anywhere and she has her own little bit of dialogue before the fight starts her move set is also surprisingly complex for a mini boss almost to the point where if you buffed her posture bar a bit more she could stand on even ground with some of the major bosses incidentally ashina death's major boss is a single phase fight for real this time so maybe she was built this way to compensate for that instead of the boss being a multi-phase fight as his convention you have two separate but still complex single-phase fights to break it up a little bit there's not much left to the area once orin is dead there is a secret route that leads to the head priest's house which is a pretty exciting and well-kept secret which the game is sort of lacking otherwise speaking to him hints more at the events that drove this village into the ground and it's kind of a disturbing conversation but for gameplay purposes there's not much here the ashina depths is more inconsistent in quality and i'm not as enthusiastic about it as i am with the others the ape duo and headless fights aren't particularly enjoyable but the level design is still solid and mibu village's atmosphere is definitely one of the better ones it's probably the area that i look forward to the least but that makes it sound worse than it is if anything it speaks to the strength of the other levels ashina depths is lower in the overall ranking despite still being a decent experience in itself the corrupted monk is even more suspicious than the guardian ape was she also has one death blow marker but there's more to it than that there is no fancy introduction and much like the enemies found in the mist from before she looks like a ghost instead of a physical enemy your suspicions would be correct if you thought this wasn't the quote unquote real corrupted monk but there is no surprise phase 2 this time if we don't count the folding screen monkeys this is the first and only single phase major boss in sakura i'm not certain but i believe the corrupted monk has the fastest posture recovery out of every boss and mini boss it can actually be pretty deflating when she backs off for a little bit and you hopelessly watch the thing trickle back down to nothing as if your efforts were off or not thankfully she gives you plenty of opportunity to keep the bar up since she attacks so often and with lengthy combos often five or six straight hits it's also prudent to find cracks in the armor whenever you can every bit of vitality damage you can deal will help offset that posture recovery the feel of this fight is really good some of her attacks are the most satisfying to deflect in the game blocking the powerful blows from guilbu's spear was exciting but he didn't attack with the same frequency that the corrupted monk does she has a similar scope to that fight but she swings and spins so much more relentlessly that each interaction feels like neither of you are backing down until the bitter end her poise is also a lot better than many other enemies she won't go into hit stun from your attacks very easily so this is more of a defensive encounter where you can't take as much initiative like you can with something like lady butterfly or guineachurro it doesn't feel that way though because even being defensive in this game still means making progress towards victory deflecting is both an offensive and a defensive tool since even when you're just reacting to all of her attacks you're still actively working towards a death blow in a way this can make her into a very cathartic experience all of her attacking is working against her in the end so you can focus solely on your defensive options and enjoy the brutal clash of their weapons while her posture bar inches up one deflection at a time she also has a couple sweeps and thrusts that require jumping and using mercury counter she checks pretty much every defensive option which is something that the game would be lacking without her the corrupted monk may not be as remarkable as the other bosses but there's not really anything that greatly weighs her down the highs aren't as high but the lows aren't as low it's a nicely refined encounter that offers something the other bosses don't once again i could probably convince myself that she's my favorite boss there will be a little more to say once we encounter her true form later on but with the fake one dead we can collect the final ingredient for the fountain head aroma with that mission complete we can return to kuro and enter the final stretch of the game so this video is going to get a little bit weird after this point there's only one major level left but we have quite a few smaller side things to cover that could really be tackled in any order for that reason the next few sections might be a little more rapid fire there's less to cover in each individual section but the final stretch still spans multiple distinct parts if you stay focused on the main quest line after corrupted monkey are surprisingly close to the end after collecting the last ingredient the world changes and the interior ministry begins their assault on ashina the castle is now overrun by red guards and interior ministry ninjas we need to get back to kuru's room but you can't fast travel there anymore if you want to get back into ashina castle you have to do so on foot seeing old areas evolve as you progress through a game is always a cool device no matter how many times you see it the first impression of an area is usually the one that sticks it becomes established as what you're used to returning after things have morphed creates a kind of dissonance in your brain there's a familiarity there but it's not supposed to look like this and it's enticing to explore just to see how much that change has spread on this revisit to oshina castle the only major change is with enemy layouts plus some planks that connect the rooftops together the new red guards that can be found here are pretty fun to fight and they're a more dramatic step up in difficulty from anything found in the last three areas the mid game of sakura that is senpo temple the sunken valley and ashina depths had a lot of combat encounters that required an atypical approach from this point onward there's a return to standard melee combat against mostly human enemies the red guards are sort of the new equivalents to ashina soldiers and their attack patterns aren't so bad but their numbers are a lot higher they have more vitality and posture than their counterparts which can make learning them more of an uphill battle in fact the whole section leading back into oceana castle is pretty grueling if you choose to fight everything instead of sprinting past them after dealing with the red guards on the castle staircase you have to fight your way past all the ministry ninjas that are patrolling the rooftops they're another example of how enemy reuse is serving the player well if you bothered to fight the one back at hirata estate you probably remember how much of a struggle it was now it's time to prove yourself and take them down in a more strenuous environment where they can actually gate your progression while the design and placement of these enemies is fine the difficulty curve from the mid game to late game is a little too steep for my liking and can make for a jarring experience that could have been smoothed out a bit more appraising difficulty becomes harder to do the longer you spend with any game because things naturally get easier as you go it's part of growing more skilled but after facing things like the rifle women and mibu villagers who can pretty much all be beaten by attack spam it's easy to see how much of a spike the castle invaders are having a smooth difficulty curve is a key way to make sure that players don't get soured by frustration towards the end and it's not nearly as rough in sekiro as it is in some other games but there is some room for improvement i think the red guards are the most resilient standard enemies in the game so far and that they can trade blows a lot better than we're used to many oshina soldiers could be taken out in 1-3 deflections or mercuries but the red guards and even the ninjas can take at least double that effort probably more things get a little bit easier inside the castle where there's fewer guys on the lookout and you can resort to stealth once again stealth is probably preferable most of the time since as we've seen before these ninjas aren't well suited for fighting in tight areas like this i should note that there is a little bit of optional content on this revisit but i won't be showing it since it's all against enemies we've seen before you can fight a chained ogre at the bottom floor of the castle and there's another ninja mini boss near the entrance to the sunken valley neither of them are very memorable to be honest it adds some more flavor to these revisits but we're far enough in the game now that i've covered most of the broader topics about sakura that i wanted to the rest of the game's strengths lie in more striking individual moments like the boss battles once we're at the top of the castle there's a turning point in the story sakura has a handful of branching paths and different endings but the only choice that makes a major impact on the outcome of the game is this one before now it'd be easy to say that genitaro is the villain of this story but if we're looking for the most evil character and the one who's been out to get wolfe since the very beginning we need look no further than owl kuru's immortal blood is intensely desirable to both kenichiro and owl but genitro's motivations are a lot more sympathetic in fact i don't believe owl's motivations are ever explained that thoroughly beyond wanting power for the sake of power on the other hand kunichiro having been taken in and raised by this land is desperate to protect it from the ministry's invasion so naturally gaining the power of immortality would turn the tides in his army's favor when you speak to him here owl demands that you forsake kuro and help him obtain the power of immortality instead it's either that or stick to your original mission and continue pursuing immortal severance as one might expect betraying kuro leads to the bad shura ending which stops the game rather abruptly while staying loyal to kuro lets you continue playing in the interest of keeping things chronological we'll be taking the shura route now and that means fighting one of the game's final bosses if you side with owl wolf falls to something called shura it's not entirely explained in the game but i believe it has roots in real world religion it has some parallels to the asura from hinduism which are powerful deities described to be in constant battle but i haven't looked into it very much beyond that in the context of sekiro falling to shura means giving into bloodlust and becoming a demon of sorts that just kills without reason by betraying kuro wolfe goes down this path which emma immediately recognizes and vows to kill him before he can roam free it's always a little bit surreal watching a character who was previously very benevolent and calm suddenly take up arms and fight against you in most games an npc would be the traitor and you would have to stop them but the roles are reversed here there is a conversation you can have with emma before this where she reveals that ishin taught her how to use a sword but even so being able to see that in action is a very cool surprise as for the fight itself emma is handled more or less the same way you'd fight any other human sized enemy except her tempo is a lot more irregular than other fights of this type it's not like the headless where everything is literally in slow motion but rather a lot of her attacks have very slight delays on them that are meant to be a tad misleading i always feel like i need to do my deflects about a quarter second to a half second later than expected it's a very subtle difference but it certainly goes a long way she isn't a very easy boss what's nice about the way she's designed is how there are two equally viable approaches to beating her emma's primary weakness is her lackluster defenses her vitality and posture aren't very high and she tends to only deflect every third hit of yours when you attack her because of her aggression you can focus primarily on defensive play and defeat her with minimal attacks on your part this is the preferable option in many ways since she doesn't like to clash swords with you she tends to run away and follow up with a gap closing attack when you try to move in in fact she often moves just barely out of reach as if to trick you into trying to regress but if you do want to go on the offensive you certainly can you'll find that her poise is very weak and she can be stunned out of many attack windups it's easiest to see this on her thrust or her signature four hit combo what makes this approach difficult is how keen she is on punishing you if you misread what she's doing she has a tendency to retaliate quickly when you're in the middle of an attack animation so even though knocking her out of her own attacks is important you have to be calculated about when you go for it this behavior of hers really showcases how great of a feature the attack cancel window is there's a short period after attacking where you can cancel into a deflect which is very handy if you realize quick enough that she's about to punish you it adds a layer of skill expression that amounts to a big reward if you can recognize that you made a mistake and correct it all within a few frames canceling into deflects helps on several bosses actually she's just one of the more noticeable ones emma is a really strong fight and she's pretty difficult as you're trying to figure out how to exploit these weaknesses of hers there's always at least a tinge of guilt when you kill her since she's arguably the kindest character in this whole charade she's definitely worthy of the spotlight given with this fight even if the outcome doesn't turn out so well emma is the prelude to ishin ashina the true final boss of the shura ending there's something uniquely badass about this version of ishin specifically he looks rather sickly and emma will tell you about his progressing illness throughout the game yet he's still clearly very proficient and he fights knowing full well that no one else would be able to stop wolf in his current state part of me almost wants to say that the theming and context of this fight is even better than the true final boss but maybe that's pushing it phase 1 of eachine's fight is relatively simple without a whole lot of surprises his moveset is actually fairly limited for a major boss and maybe this is the practice talking but it isn't that hard to push him into phase two the back and forth you can engage with eachine almost matches genital rose in that you can become the dominant force by counter slashing all of his basic swings you can fall into a pattern of constantly bullying him that makes it harder for him to use his more dangerous attacks and push him into that second phase more easily you're incentivized to counter slash as much as you can since isian sidesteps your attacks and follows up right after if you try swinging at him in neutral it's a bit of a shock and difficult to adjust to since any other enemy would deflect that attack instead you almost have to settle into what ishin wants because if you try sneaking hits in he'll straight up dodge most of them it's a clever idea that forces you to fight a little more head-on and i kind of wish more bosses did it as a means of punishing bad habits ishin's phase 2 is less traditional since it introduces a handful of fire attacks that need to be avoided through dodging and positioning previous fights that rely on this tactic have mostly fallen short with things like the blazing bull and chained ogre and ishin is much better than both of them but he still isn't perfect he has two attacks that launch waves of fire at you the first one is avoided by dashing behind him with careful timing since it has such high tracking it's not too hard to get it down consistently though and there's ample opportunity to punish him afterwards so as far as dodge attacks in this game go it's one of the best ones the other one is best avoided by sprinting perpendicular to where it's coming from and keeping your distance so that the flames will miss you jumping might also help but if you just maintain your speed it shouldn't cause too much of a problem fights like the guardian ape have hopefully taught that being mobile is a viable route to avoid damage sometimes and ishin tests that lesson here which is actually something pretty unique to him the other final boss doesn't have an attack that you avoid this way things like that help make the fight feel a little more final for lack of a better word despite that it leads to an anticlimactic finish it's still worthy of final boss status his signature attack one mind is the remaining one that i'm a bit iffy on you need to find a safe spot to stand during the wind-up since most of the arena gets engulfed by fire following a tricky six-hit string of deflections that require very precise timing my main issue with this attack is that one of the hits the fifth one in the sequence requires too tight of a window to deflect consistently i think it's a side effect of the anti-spam measures in place your deflect window actually shrinks if you spam the button but this attack sort of requires that you spam the button which means it's extremely easy to miss one of the slashes one mind does damage through a normal guard which makes it feel like an almost unavoidable punishment but it is really nitpicky so i won't dwell on it i like emma and ishin overall they're not as good mechanically as the true final boss mainly because they don't test you on as much their move sets are smaller but it is still worth getting the shura ending to fight them anyway as for the story conclusion it feels deliberately underwhelming like a punishment for abandoning your quest so soon with ishin dead there's little stopping wolf from wreaking havoc on whatever the hell he wants he's cemented himself as the strongest force in ashina shura consumes him so much in this short window that he even backstabs owl once it's all said and done which could be viewed as a callback to when owl stabbed wolf at the end of the hirada estate he's gotten his revenge the gist of this ending is that wolfe became a demon that slaughtered everything in his path for no reason other than a deep desire to kill it's not satisfying by any stretch and it even feels very out of character for wolf so as far as writing quality goes it isn't very good but hey maybe that's the point like much of the story in sakura i don't have much to say on it the fight is a lot better than the ending so let's stay on track and instead go with the correct option staying loyal to kuro and disobeying owl's wishes disillusioned with his choice owl challenges wolfe to a fight with almost no hesitation their relationship almost definitely wasn't based on love it was based on exploitation for a personal gain owl needed someone to keep kuro safe over the years and wolff was a lost orphan who likely would have died without any parental figure to take him in as you've probably noticed so far i don't tend to comment much on lore or story but one of the best things about the owl fight is how his characterization manifests in the actual battle if you manage to kill genitrio at the very beginning of the game he tricks wolf with a distraction and slices his arm off anyway the outcome is the same but one of his lines is replaced instead of taunting wolf he now says quote a shinobi would know the difference between honor and victory that line captures what great shinobi owl is all about owl is not an honorable man he fights with a lot of dirty tactics that often parallel what wolf is capable of aside from his impressive mobility he also has shurikens and firecrackers but my favorite trick of all is how he knows how to makiri counter if you thrust attack him in neutral it plays a custom animation and hits you with tons of damage which is an equally pleasant and unpleasant surprise when you first fall victim to it even though owl uses all of these cheap tricks the fight manages not to feel unfair especially when you consider that many of the same tools are at your disposal the shuriken's follow-up attack is once again a saving grace here if you like being aggressive owl is one of the longer fights since he often runs away to recover posture owl and wolf sharing many similarities in battle tactics isn't just a subtle piece of storytelling it augments the gameplay by building a fight that essentially mirrors your own capabilities the two of you are on as equal footing as possible he even tries to apply a debuff that prevents you from healing which is wolf's only major unique advantage it's all very logical to assume that he'd match your style since owl is the one the trainwolf to begin with and to me that's close to the best way to convey a story in video games sharing information through gameplay makes better use of the medium as opposed to interrupting the action with cutscenes and long stretches of dialogue his tricks get amped up when the second phase comes around he feigns defeat when transitioning to phase 2 and views it as a show of respect if you see through that deception and attack him while he's down which further demonstrates the odd relationship between these two his new smoke bomb attack is probably one of the hardest things to deal with in the fight it feels like a tempo reset so to speak since it forcibly removes your lock on and makes you re-establish your focus on him this is probably something that would only work in the owl fight without feeling a bit [ __ ] due to his unusually large size his silhouette is much easier to spot in the smoke which makes the incoming telegraph actually readable even with limited visual information the anti-heal debuff is even more threatening now too since he gains the ability to throw poison you can't use antidotes while afflicted either the path to victory is still ultimately through posture breaking but he offers room to get creative if you so choose the fact that he uses so many tools against you could be a hint that your prosthetic could come in handy i only stuck to the shuriken for this fight but i could definitely imagine applications with the umbrella and the myst raven among others thematically he's one of the best in the game with how the fight reflects his character and they were able to translate that into fun gameplay despite how obnoxious it might sound on paper i think this is a boss that you appreciate the more you fight him many of his subtleties are only brought out through experimentation and examination miyazaki himself hinted at in an interview years ago that owl is one of his favorite bosses and after studying the fight for this video it's easy to see why owl is yet again a very good boss it might be strange to do it so soon but we're going to head right to owl's rematch now you can go straight to fountainhead palace after the fight but i prefer to leave that to the end i like taking care of all business on the ground before heading to the divine realm the remaining endings of sekiro are largely just variations of each other with a different final cut scene that plays for each one the purification variant can be unlocked through a side quest accessible after owl's first defeat the quest itself isn't very interesting and the only ending i plan to show is the true ending but the content tied to the purification ending is worth doing there's a bit of monotony in the tasks to reach that point since it's just a series of eavesdrops and conversations with emma there's not much to dissect with this dialogue and usually i would skip over it but i suspect that some people might be annoyed by how much i've glossed over the story so far i've been ignoring the story on purpose and i would like to use a little bit of time now to justify that decision securo does not have a bad story i think it suits the game perfectly fine that being said most games including sekiro have something of a barrier that separates the gameplay from the plot whenever there's important story information that needs to be divulged to the player control is wrestled away from them in a cutscene or a long stretch of dialogue without any meaningful input and once that information dump ends the game will switch back to gameplay mode think about it this way if there was a version of sekiro that removed every single cutscene but kept everything else it would be nonsensical for continuity but it wouldn't change anything about how you play the game for better or for worse video games tend to isolate their stories in this way of course there are exceptions but usually it's a firmly separated facet of the experience and i don't really like how we've decided that stories and games should be told this way but that's a discussion beyond the scope of this one as a result critiquing a story requires a completely different skill set than critiquing gameplay and i simply don't consider myself well versed enough in storytelling to fairly appraise it the furthest i'm willing to take it is discussing how the story can have ramifications on the gameplay and whether those ramifications are positive or negative that's pretty much what i was talking about with owl but as far as judging the quality of the story goes and picking apart its themes and characters i just don't have anything of value to say moreover from soft stories are so complex and abstracted to the point where you'd have to spend a sizable chunk of time just summarizing and clarifying what happens to make sure everybody is on the same page sakura is more straightforward on this front but it has so much to talk about with gameplay already that i'd rather leave story analysis to people who are better at that than i am there is a lot that's been said about soulsborne and sakura lore over the years and those videos are very well made i'm aware that this can come off as dismissive and i apologize for that but just know that it isn't done with bad intentions i am just not the kind of guy that knows how to analyze stories very well i've been making strides to improve and there are a handful of games with stories that i think are worth discussing but for sekiro i can assure that anything i'd have to say on its story would be completely uninteresting i'd rather focus on the qualities i'm more comfortable with than make a half-assed attempt at shoehorning story analysis into this script which is long enough already to anyone irritated by this mindset i understand but i hope this helped us find some common ground with all of that hopefully cleared up we now have the father's bell charm and can access a new version of hirata estate interacting with the dilapidated temple buddha again will take you back to the entrance of the burning building where you found owl dying on the first visit it's not that different from before there's just too many bosses you have to deal with masanaga the spear bearer is another ministry ninja with the only difference being that he can summon wolves throughout the fight to help him it's annoying but it's easy to interrupt him whenever he does it so once again staying aggressive is the key here you have to work your way back to jews or the drunkard after this and like last time the enemy placement here is kind of awkward and not very good there are three more ministry ninjas on the rooftops and trying to fight all three of them at the same time is one of the worst experiences i have had in this game they aren't really positioned in a way that allows for stealth either sneaking up on one will alert the other two so it's a two on one at minimum plus some additional bandage at the bottom that can make your life even harder once again this is nitpicky but considering they stand between an idol and a boss it isn't the same careful enemy placement that we're used to and i can't help but raise an eyebrow whenever this stuff happens using a gatching sugar is my preferred solution to this problem and that would be fine if you didn't have to run past them every single time you died to the jews or rematch up ahead using a gaching for juzo is helpful too there aren't as many adds around him this time but he does have a ministry ninja on his side and stealthing that guy turns it into a duel that's a lot more manageable otherwise it's the same old juzo that we know and love he's tough but he's fun though i have to concede that i started finding these sumo guys a little bit tiring to fight by this point there's still one more later in the game to deal with for a total of four in the entire game it is logical for juzo to be encountered here again though the game could have done without tokujiro and ashina depths but it's not a huge deal with juzo taken care of we can get to the real reason why we came here the second fight with owl i find that owl father is the hardest fight in the game it isn't wildly different from great shinobi owl in that lots of his attacks and timings are the same but many of his chains are extended so he'll follow up with things he didn't before or combine attacks in completely new ways it very much builds upon what you learned in the previous fight by adding further complexity to these same moves the most defining thing about it though is that this battle is a serious endurance test he's surprisingly passive and likes to jump away a lot he also won't engage with you from neutral all the time which means that he has plenty of opportunity to heal posture something he already has a lot of you can stay close to him as much as you want but he'll still leap backwards and zigzag around constantly being the aggressor is a lot more work but being passive yourself prolongs an already lengthy fight he's very draining because of all of this it demands the same focus expected of you in other fights but stretched over a much longer period endurance style bosses can be excellent for this very reason they're checking if you can run a marathon instead of a 100 meter sprint most bosses so far have fallen into that second category but we need both to stay mentally engaged throughout the game and our father is here to help fill that role the underhanded tricks that he relied on in the first encounter are back again too this time with a bit of variation the anti-heal and poison are gone but he'll still obscure himself from your vision a lot of the time either through the firecrackers or with his flaming bird attack in phase 2. he engages from a distance after hiding himself this time and it was those instances that i struggled with the most on my first playthrough it gives you a lot less time to comprehend what he's doing since the only time you're given to read his telegraph is however long it takes before he's shrouded in smoke you're forced to study him a little more closely than the other bosses because of this and i go as far as to say that he has the steepest learning curve out of every enemy in the game and that includes the final boss similar to the corrupted monk owl father really shows how much sneaking in vitality damage can go a long way too it means that those moments where he's backing off will be less punishing overall since his recovery will be slowed the one attack of his that i used to hate was the ice owl one where he disappears into his outwall and reappears somewhere behind you for a heavy attack i can't think of any other move in the game before this where readjusting the camera is needed to avoid damage sure the smoke bomb in the last fight made you lose your lock on but he'd always come running at you from the direction you were already facing this time you have to actively identify which direction the attack is going to come from before it comes out nowadays i view it as a way that the game makes you use everything that's available to you even if something doesn't seem like a tool at first the camera has been a nuisance more often than not up to now but it's largely okay for this fight so making you use it to track an attack is an interesting way of expanding your arsenal in a non-conventional manner having to control the camera in most 3d games can be quite a chore especially when dealing with it during boss fights but owl father has a surprisingly good implementation of it no matter how much of a minor detail it is i think this is one of the most satisfying fights to learn and master he and lady butterfly were my two biggest obstacles and they still stick in my memory because of that while lady butterfly killed me the most owl brought out the most frustration to the point where i was almost relieved that he was optional i could have thrown my hands up and walked away if i wanted but i didn't i practiced persisted learned the fights and now i'm left with a great feeling of triumph knowing that i can beat him consistently at the end of the day i think that's what these games are all about i wouldn't normally talk about the true ending side quest but there's at least one significant moment that happens during this one so it feels right to at least acknowledge it to obtain the true ending you have to complete a simple but lengthy side quest for the divine child a lot of it is just more dialogue reading bringing her miscellaneous items and things like that so i'm going to skip those and instead just talk about the spectacle moments that are behind this quest she'll eventually ask you to bring her a pair of serpent visceras which you can obtain through the final interactions with the great serpent this is where you return to the sunken valley the quest objective that i referenced earlier is at the bottom of the ravine here it's where you find the dried viscera there's a cave tucked away behind a merchant that when you enter appears as the place where the great serpent's body originates at least that's what i thought on my first trip here it stretches and wraps around all the twists and turns throughout the cave it's a bit ominous to confront just how massive these things are so up close as it turns out though this is actually a 2nd grade serpent it is not the one whose eye you stabbed out at the beginning of the game i have mixed feelings about this overall it somewhat cheapens the impact of the first serpent but i also have to concede that sneaking through the cave until the face-to-face confrontation is pretty cool it also manages to incorporate the ninjutsu into a relatively decent puzzle it's a way of making the serpent feel like an obstacle you overcome instead of just a relatively fancy set piece if you find a hidden path from senpo temple to the sunken valley passage you can come upon the original serpent sleeping down in the valley the plunging death blow you use to kill it is up there as the coolest visual moment in the game and it's probably the best way they could have gone about letting you kill the serpent to begin with it's far too big to work as a boss fight but it makes sense to have some kind of closure given how impactful it seems on the world so giving it such a visceral death is quite fitting i mostly just wanted to mention it for the wow factor it's probably the most interesting thing to come out of a side quest in this game it also allows me to segue into the fountainhead palace we're finally ready this place has the most glamorous buildup out of all of the areas and it's certainly deserving of it after bringing every aroma ingredients to kuro you can return to the cave guarded by the monk in ashina depths and get taken to the final area in both a marvelous and puzzling cutscene perhaps including massive abnormal creatures is acceptable given the precedent set by the serpens but the giant straw doll that takes you to fountainhead palace is unusual even with the supernatural elements elsewhere in the game it's so gargantuan that you have to wonder how it remained out of sight from you and everybody else in ashina this entire time it's likely a nod to shinto where these shimanawa ropes are believed to ward off evil spirits from sacred places given how important fountainhead palace is in the lore i suppose it makes sense to have such a grandeur being gatekeeping its entrance at any rate the cutscene does a good job at making you curious over what's to come that curiosity may just stem from confusion before the excitement sets in we're in the final stretch of sakura now and it's arguably the best section in the game the true corrupted monk isn't all that different from the original other than some added moves on phase two and three as such i don't have a whole lot to say on it it shares the same strengths as the mebu village version just with more time to shine this one definitely has a better arena though bosses in this game have pretty universally uncluttered arenas so that you can focus purely on the fight and that's true for this boss too but it does feel like it had a little more thought put into it as opposed to just being a simple large circular room fighting her on the entrance bridge is very suitable for her role as the palace guardian instead of creating a boss and then needing an arena to house them in the bridge feels like a very natural part of the palace that just happened to be a good place to put the corrupted monk they even incorporated the arena into the mechanics of the fight by letting you stealth death blow from the trees to skip the second phase i still did not work this trick out for myself but unlike some other secrets in these games i think it is something that you could reasonably find out on your own and it'd be a neat moment of discovery she summons a bunch of shadows when going into phase 2 that you can't damage as far as i know so instead of dodging them you might be more inclined to grapple up into the trees to safety with any luck he'll land on the one that reveals her and figure out that it opens her up to a free death blow things like this would probably make other bosses too easy but she's a three-phase fight the first one since guinea churro actually so it doesn't feel like she gets cut short phase three is largely the same as phase one except the immortal centipede writhing inside her reveals itself and she gains a new attack where she spits terror buildup gunk at you you need to have a decently swift reaction time to dodge it but it isn't entirely difficult just dodge behind her and it shouldn't be an issue all in all it's just a tougher corrupted monk fight it doesn't change things as radically as owl father did but i don't think it needed to it gives closure to what might have felt a bit underwhelming originally and for that alone i'm satisfied she and the headless ape are the only two times where a major boss isn't placed at the end of an area so it's good that she's here for those wanting a normal fight out of the fountainhead palace since the boss at the end is more of a gimmick fight defeating the corrupted monk opens entrance to fountainhead palace the last new area in the game they saved the best for last with this one as you might have guessed already fountainhead palace is my favorite level in sakurao as someone who's fallen in love with the combat system that might seem a little bit weird since it has a weak lineup of mini boss encounters and several enemies that die in just a few hits those are all fair criticisms of the area and its biggest weakness is not enough combat encounters but the good certainly outweighs the bad first and foremost this is the most beautiful area in the game and it's the only place that really shocked me with the visuals my first time like senpo temple it has a color palette that's unlike anything you can find elsewhere it's a lot more scenic with all of the contrasting elements from the pink cherry blossoms to the deep blue water to the red accents on all the buildings and more the fact that it looks this special really suits the divine realm motif that they were following for the story it's too pretty to be something that you could have found in the war-torn land of oshina there's a great sense of finality to this area when you're not in battle things are very peaceful the only sounds you can hear are the melodic flutes of the palace nobles or the running water from the gigantic carp lake it further cements the idea that other areas could and probably should have had more thought put into their presentation fountainhead palace is evidence that the game had this sort of potential nothing comes close to topping this environment the palace is very well designed in another way too it's suitable for a final area since it blends almost everything the game has done into a cohesive package the palace nobles encourage a stealthy approach by applying in feebling buildup as soon as you enter their line of sights which is a death sentence if you're inflicted by it it cuts your health by 80 plus percent blocks you from resurrecting and strips away pretty much all of your mobility it helps to think of the palace nobles as physical obstacles instead of enemies whichever way they are currently looking is something that you can't cross it's a way of introducing some dynamic obstacles in the level while still retaining stealth options it can feel cheap when learning how these sorts of debuffs work for the first time but sekiro goes about it in the smartest way that it could have the first nobles you find are in a small controlled environment close to the first checkpoint so it's more acceptable to die during the learning phase the poor mini boss lineup is partially made up for by the okami warriors who are my favorite regular enemies in the game i love how bouncy they are and they have a very satisfying rhythm to learn moreover their numbers are more appropriately balanced than several other in-game enemies they're certainly tougher than the oshina soldiers but they don't halt you in your tracks as much as say the red guards back at the castle they can be thought of as how the palace tests you on your fundamentals given that we're at the end of the game i think it would be right to use this moment to reflect on how sekuro has facilitated evolution and growth in the player in a way that's more special than how fromsoft has done so in the past every person enjoys the feeling of getting better at something whether it's in games or otherwise seeing some form of improvement in an activity justifies your time commitment to it in the first place it's why people go to the gym it's why people learn an instrument and it's why people play such difficult games like these rpgs confront this reality more directly by showing you that progression in the form of raw numbers which can be a bit exploitative depending on how you look at it many of us derive satisfaction by just making numbers go up on a screen even if there's nothing engaging about the process itself say what you will about grinding for experience or money at the end of the day it isn't a particularly taxing endeavor perhaps you could say that grinding is testing your patience but to me that's the equivalent of saying that a 15-minute black screen before a movie can add value to said movie even if the content that followed was the best film ever made you're going to question why they made you do such a literal pointless task before the good stuff actually started i get a bit disillusioned when i see rpg mechanics and progression systems seep their way into other games because it's taking the easy way out improvement doesn't have to be so blatant the soulsborne games have always struck a good balance with this in that they reward the player for getting better mechanically while also letting them watch their characters grow through level ups and stats but i don't think that it matches the joy that can be derived from mastering a system like sekuro's where skill is the only thing you can rely on if you get stuck on a boss in dark souls or bloodborne you can grind a few levels to give yourself an advantage but if you get stuck on a boss in sekuro the game refuses to budge until you can prove yourself back at the beginning i talked about how the tutorial introduces basically everything you'll need to know for the rest of the game if you went to watch somebody play securo for the first time and then came back to this video we'd be using the exact same tactics my gameplay would just be more refined since i've had multiple playthroughs of experience to draw from any player can reach that point with enough practice and it's deeply rewarding to traverse these final sections while remembering just how much you sucked at fighting the tutorial mini boss for the first time it's about as purely skill based as you can get with very very few exceptions none of the extra mechanics like combat arts or prosthetics trivialize fights in a way that makes them unsatisfying sekuro is more emblematic of from software's philosophy than any of the previous soulsborne games that anyone who sets their mind to it can overcome a challenge but it doesn't come without struggle and i think sakura should be remembered as the game that presented the most challenges but had the sweetest victories it's not a feeling that can be easily replicated i suppose the tranquility of fountainhead palace lends itself to this reflection pretty well given how there's more relaxed stealth sections as you take down the palace nobles you have time to think about how the journey has gone so far i don't think fountainhead palace is as big physically as senpo temple or ashina depths but it feels longer because you're coerced into exploring the entire thing and the constant threat of unfeebled buildup makes it hard to sprint through all of the buildings most players will probably try to swim across the lake as soon as they enter but if you get too far in a mini boss that you can't reach yet will start shooting lightning at you rendering your efforts impossible you're funneled into a particular route a lot more than before placing a lightning sniper to kill you when you go in the wrong direction might not be a very elegant way to achieve this goal but i think it's a worthy trade-off to make the level look and feel as good as it does the waterfall sort of defines the theme of the area so obviously it needs a source to pull from and the deep blue waters of the central lake is one of the most prominent aesthetic elements of the palace letting the player swim through it to effectively skip over most of the level diminishes a lot of their work and the game has long established that it's supposed to be more linear anyway so i'm okay with this restriction for the sake of preserving actual exploration it's somewhat like the missed noble only a lot more blatant the boss is an environmental hazard that can only be defeated through proper traversal it's still a little disappointing that after the corrupted monk the area doesn't have any traditional boss encounters in any event the other two mini bosses here are a reskin of the blazing bull and a shiiji men warrior i still don't like the sakura bowl fight but i do at least appreciate that it looks like it kind of belongs the shichiman warrior is another instance of reuse that doesn't really fit with the area but at least it's optional as you progress further the okami warriors will start using lightning on you the little shark dog things can do the same it's the first time that lightning comes back since guinea churro and as much as it might feel like an underutilized mechanic it was still wise to bring it back for fountainhead palace for a few reasons if this is supposed to be one of the final tests of skill it only makes sense to bring back as many learned techniques as possible lightning reversals still aren't hard to do but their infrequency means that the player still may not be fully comfortable with them by time they reach this point as such it's pretty much the last chance there is to practice them before the final boss which does incorporate lightning into his moveset with gennichiro it was a bit cheap to introduce a new mechanic against such a difficult boss only to have it neglected right after him the final boss solves this problem by reminding you how to use lightning reversals in this area so it's a smarter pacing of mechanics lightning reversals can also be very helpful in dealing with the groups of the okami warriors in these sections the arc is so large that you can stun three or four enemies at a time i'm sure this is the intended way you're supposed to approach some encounters here since they come in such large groups you can leverage the benefits of lightning reversals much better even so i do wonder if this technique is generally too strong and if it can make fights a bit boring as a result it doesn't show as much on regular enemies but against the couple of bosses that do use lightning successfully countering it deals so much damage and posture that it almost feels like cheating some games do have releases and tension in the middle of fights where the boss will get stunned for a bit after passing some hp threshold hollow knight is an example of how that technique can be done well since healing is a more committal action in that game and those brief pauses in the fight can give you that opportunity as a reward for surviving long enough lightning reversals could be viewed as somewhat of an alternative to that feature it stuns bosses and enemies in a similar manner and lets you follow up with some free damage or healing i would be more on board with this idea if they weren't so easy to pull off every instance of lightning in this game gives you more than enough time to react it's a little bit too generous considering how much you are rewarded for it this will be more apparent against the final boss but even against the okami leader you can probably tell just how strong reversals are this was the woman that was shooting lightning at you she is pretty weak like the miss noble and killing her will let you swim around the lake freely fountainhead palace is the only level in the game that comes after you get the meebu breathing technique at the end of the depths so it does have a full underwater section to leverage that there's shades of the first great serpent encounter down here with the great carp who also tries to eat you as you stealth past if you're someone who gets a bit of anxiety from deep depths of water it's actually quite a frightening scene and i think it's memorable for that alone it captures the same feeling of narrowly escaping a rampaging monster that you have no hope of killing normally unfortunately the swimming mechanics don't feel very good but the lake area is big enough that it shouldn't give you too much trouble it has the same springiness feeling as jumping and dodging do except this time it's your primary form of movement it's a little bit unwieldy overall and definitely less refined than the land movement but i can't say that i hold it against the level very much it's a problem that manifests more if you try fighting the fish or the underwater headless as far as traversing and passing the great carp goes it's serviceable and at least somewhat worthwhile just so the player has a chance to try the underwater gameplay this swimming route is the only way to get into the palace proper and it more or less marks the end of the level there's one last encounter with some okami warriors as you climb the stairs leading to the top while it may fall a little short in combat the broader exploration of fountainhead palace is very carefully done and above all else the level is absolutely gorgeous it offers something for people who like combat stealth finding secrets and it'll probably be a very amazing experience for those who were craving the same visual variety that sembo temple offered that beauty extends all the way to the area boss it's time we fought the divine dragon kunichiro and the divine dragon are the only two fights that have had a constant build up throughout the game wolfe and kuro's powers are closely tied with the divine dragon and a little bit of curiosity was tumbling around in the back of my mind wondering if we would actually get to see what the source of that power looks like we do as you can see and it managed to subvert whatever expectations i had conjured up and presented us with an absolutely stunning spectacle fight i can imagine some players being disappointed that the boss of such a legendary area doesn't have anything particularly challenging about it but the boss fights have been such a great strength of the game prior to this that i think they're justified in placing something more gimmicky so that they can focus on the theme and visuals i only get peeved about gimmick bosses when the quality of regular bosses is subpar but that isn't the case with sikaro every boss fits some sort of role or niche that pushes the limits of the combat system and the only thing that's been lacking so far is a pure spectacle boss the fight leans so hard into being easy that it removes a lot of execution barriers no matter how small they are you have a mini screen clearing move against the first phase of old dragons that eliminates the need to attack them conventionally and lightning reversals in the second phase are somewhat automated you don't have to time any jumps like usual there's also a semblance of some puzzle solving in figuring this out but the visual tells of the lightning flickering on the grapple points should be a pretty dead giveaway to the solution the idea here i think is that you're meant to beat the boss on your first try it's not supposed to be a prolonged experience the surprise factor is at its strongest the very first time you see it and having to devote attention to the combat mechanics would distract from those feelings to some degree moreover dying during this boss would feel very deflating since it rips you out of the entrancing experience and makes you watch it from the beginning at which point your fascination won't be as strong even for a from software game you don't need to make it absurdly difficult to create a memorable boss the fight is a visual delight with the artwork but the music might actually be the most standout element to me sekuro has a good soundtrack but it's less varied than the previous games because again it has to fit in a japanese setting the divine dragon track is still very much a part of that traditional japanese sounding theme but it's much more epic and grandeur than anything we've heard previously if you've played the bloodborne dlc don't worry i'm not going to spoil it if you haven't i'm sure you can remember the crescendo that blasts after the phase change in the first boss fight it's a great example of how music can augment a gameplay experience to make things much more exhilarating without needing to alter any mechanics even though it isn't really a battle per se the divine dragon emulates the same feeling of hype thanks to the soundtrack i hope the artistic elements in this fight can speak for themselves the divine dragon is a gimmick boss done right and i think there's very little to complain about it's incredibly fitting for the finale of fountainhead palace and solidifies the level as the best in the game [Music] ashina changes once again when you return from the divine realm and it's a lot more significant this time the interior ministry is here in full force and the whole place is going to hell now sakuro doesn't really have any secret optional areas the revisit to ashina outskirts is the closest it gets to this but it isn't hidden the same way cainhurst castle or archdraken peak are an npc will straight up tell you the way there a new bridge where the great serpent originally was has created a new connection from the castle to the outskirts it is worth doing since there's a major boss at the very end but i don't enjoy revisiting the outskirts very much it gets some credit for how much it radically changes from the first time through enough to the point where it isn't entirely recognizable but the enemy placement and balance really falls short that nowadays i would recommend just sprinting past everything there's only one miniboss here shigekichi of the red guard who's a firebased version of juzo and tokujiro it's basically the same song and dance as those two fights so i don't have anything new to add it's more worthwhile to draw attention to why this part specifically is more unenjoyable than the rest of the areas they overwhelm you with enemies a lot of the time but these aren't the weak hirata bandits that die in a few hits they're the redguard soldiers with complicated combos and high vitality and posture i don't think you're actually meant to fight everything here their numbers are way too absurd unless you spend lots of time luring enemies away from the group to fight them individually my guess is that they wanted to make this revisit feel more chaotic and hopeless to fit in with ashina's downfall for as skilled as he is wolf is truly powerless in this situation saving the land is not what he's here to do and no matter how many red guard enemies you try to fight it's going to end up fruitless in a way wolfe is responsible for this downfall severing immortality means rejecting guinea giro's wishes and effectively making the rescuing of this land an impossible feat from that perspective i suppose it makes sense that this place is so difficult but it paradoxically makes it harder to appreciate since you can't experience its content to the fullest extent if you're incentivized to skip as many enemies as possible you're deliberately missing a lot of its layout intricacies and getting less time to soak in the atmosphere given off by ashina's new grim reality like i mentioned the level has actually changed quite a bit with how many barricades watchtowers and other haphazard structures are strung all over the place i wish it was actually more fun to tour the destruction and see how much the outskirts have changed but it isn't worth all the hordes of enemies you'll have to sift through criticizing these games for being too hard can elicit some strong reactions and i've essentially just criticized it for that so i should acknowledge that maybe this is a skill issue and i'm just bad at fighting these enemies i like to think that i've made enough of an effort to find a viable path through this area that doesn't involve skipping most things and none of my approaches have worked perfectly i can accept that i'm not good enough but i would really like to know some possible ways to deal with three or more red guards at a time before i concede that point there is something to be said about how much more interesting of a repeated area this is than the castle invasion phase though not because the castle invasion was bad but because this version of the outskirts almost feels like an entirely different level than the first time it's now night time for one which matches the sort of grittiness found in the hirata estate but just moving through the level backwards is a surprisingly good change in perspective as well i think that can speak to how good the individual level design is in securo that with just a few simple tweaks and adjustments to the environment these areas will be worth going back to to some degree the enemy layouts are my only main gripe with it otherwise it has the same level of care that the rest of the game does and i always appreciate that fromsoft is willing to do that work in areas that some players will just straight up miss i know this section was really short but i don't have much else to say on the outskirts it isn't super outstanding and it's not that long but it is probably a good thing for the game overall the construction and theming is a lot better than the balancing once you're at the end you can interact with the idol to reach the boss and it's definitely one of the more interesting bosses in the game many have described the demon of hatred as a soulsborne boss thrown into sakuro and i think that mindset has made the fight a lot more hated than it should be because it's not really accurate there's just too much about this boss that wouldn't work in those games without some major adjustments to the point where it'd be a shell of what it is now these equivalencies probably stem from the fact that you do very little deflecting against the demon of hatred it does require more dodging and mobility but that doesn't automatically mean that it would fit in a dark souls game for starters sekuro's lack of a stamina bar is probably the biggest reason why this fight works in the first place the demon of hatred is extremely mobile he straight up has a move where he'll run to the other side of the already large arena having limited stamina would severely [ __ ] your ability to keep up with lots of his attacks that's not to say that they're all done in an interesting way of course but he's still very much meant for this game he represents what sekiro's combat is about in the sense that all of his attacks have a sequence of steps you need to follow in order to dodge and punish in the same way that melee attacks have a sequence of deflect timings that you need to get down once you've figured out to those combinations you can avoid that attack every time without fail for instance you always run away and grapple back in whenever he jumps in the air and slams back down for an explosion it's not a difficult maneuver but it relies on lesser used tactics figuring out those responses often feels impossible at first because players still may not be used to doing it if there's one main failing of the fight it's that he's demanding a playstyle that you haven't been trained enough for you are mainly figuring out how to use jumps and dashes instead of things like deflects and mercuries it's under the same umbrella as things like the guardian ape the chained ogre and the blazing bull the guardian ape succeeds where the demon of hatred fails because it isn't as rigid in how you have to respond the apes attacks don't require a super specific response and you can still maintain an offensive presence if you position yourself properly full disclosure here i am absolutely terrible at the demon of hatred fights which is why you'll see me resort to prosthetic tools more often than any other boss the suzaku umbrella gives you immunity to fire attacks which is a good chunk of his moveset i would almost say that it's too strong against him and that fromsoft would be justified in letting some of his attacks do a bit of chip damage through the umbrella but he uses so much fire that spirit emblems are a relevant limitation on how many times you can use it to your advantage so i think it's okay the demon of hatred is probably the boss that i have the most nitpicks with but i still think he has a place in the game because he's an endgame boss that tests you on the few skills that the real final boss doesn't in a way they're the two extreme ends on a spectrum of combat approaches sword saint ishin rewards all-out aggression and demon of hatred is more about careful defensive play he also succeeds as an endurance test boss due to his large hp pool in fact three deathblow markers are more daunting on him than the true monk and the sword saint because there's no shortcuts or tricks to make the fight easier those bosses have a stealth death blow and lightning reversals respectively to take some of the pressure off but the stakes against demon of hatred only rise over time because dying means having to endure those lengthy previous phases again in fact i would say phase 3 is one of the most stressful things in the game period the attack where he encloses you both in a circle of fire can especially make you panic but you have to keep your cool as much as possible as with the sword fights making one mistake can domino effect into several more and mistakes against him are very punishing if you wind up eating a burst of fire to the face i wouldn't call it a bad fight far from it actually but it is different it's not really something that you can readily expect and prepare for he might be the most unique boss in the game because he fills such a strange role i look forward to fighting demon of hatred every time on subsequent playthroughs but i don't get the same enjoyment out of fighting him repeatedly in the reflections of strength like with ganichiro or corrupted monk or sword scenes it's best handled in moderation if you hated this boss the first time you fought it returning to it every now and then can hopefully help you discover some new small things to appreciate it's not bad it's just weird the demon of hatred was the last bit of side content to do it's time to get out of oshina and put this immortality business to rest once again you can't fast travel anywhere in the castle or the outskirts for that matter you have to make a small trek back on foot to the reservoir and through the tunnel where you encountered ghanichiro all the way at the beginning despite its destruction ashina castle feels so alive during this section as you watch generals and soldiers clash with the interior ministry it goes down in a literal blaze of glory just how easian would have wanted it i'm sure i'd like to give a bit of preliminary context that'll help us discuss the final boss a bit better recall that ganichiro never died during our battle he was wounded by wolf but he still has a corrupt form of immortality through consuming the rejuvenating waters it's possible that he was even waiting for ishin to succumb to his illness this entire time so that he could come back and steal the black mortal blade that was in isian's possession since the original coup 20 years ago the black mortal blade is a big oddity in the lore and i know i said i didn't speak much about these things but i do feel like its existence cheapens your own efforts at least a little bit since the regular mortal blade is hyped up as such a legendary weapon that no man has wielded before now to learn out of nowhere that eachine had some version of it this entire time makes it seem not so special after all if we needed a mortal blade why did we have to go to senpo temple in the first place it's doubly strange that you can ask ishin about the mortal blade after the first genituro fight and to my knowledge he makes no reference to the black version at all it's a minor gripe but i did want to mention it because there is a counter-argument to this conundrum that makes it more acceptable but we won't see that until we fight the final boss there are also a couple new mini bosses as oshina castle is burning but they're all repeats of things we've already fought i don't think i need to go over them all that said it's about time we finish this there's always something poetic about ending things where they began no matter how tropey it is for lack of a better word it's an in-your-face reminder about how far you've come on your journey and honestly i can't think of a better arena for the final fight to take place there's a lot that goes into making a good final boss not in the sense that there's hard and fast rules that every developer needs to abide by but rather it's the last chance they have to leave an impression on the player and getting that impression right can elevate a game into something that becomes a memory even long after you've finished it the way i see it the greatest quality a final boss can have is being something reflective of the entire experience something that takes the best things the game does during its run time and bundles it up into one final send off from that perspective i think sword saint ishin is the best final boss these games have had and one of the best final bosses out of any game i've played period of course it wouldn't be right for the game to end without getting closure with geniciro so the first phase of this staggering four phase encounter is a rematch against him i mostly view this as a lead-in to ishin's introduction rather than an integral part of the fight but considering that kinichiro was the first major test of mechanics it feels fitting to bring him back for your final test hopefully by now he won't pose too much of an issue when genichiro appeared here at the very beginning of the game the player likely shared the shaky confidence that wolff displayed as he was drawing his sword wolf is no longer afraid and the player shouldn't be either if you can beat the monk owl the demon of hatred and so on you can certainly beat kenichiro and i think placing him as a prelude to ishin's much harder fight is the game saying that it has faith that challenges like this are now beneath you you aren't the same player that you were 25 or 30 hours ago the phase change cutscene is what i was referencing a few moments ago when i was talking about the oddities of the black mortal blade lore information about this sword is tucked away in a chest behind eachine's room which means that players who didn't discover it won't have any idea why genitro does what he does here at the end of the day the black mortal blade is a device that allows eachine in his prime to be the final boss and i think that idea was attractive enough that fromsoft was willing to whip up some new lore so close to the end even though the details seem like something we should have known about earlier the black mortal blades japanese name is translated as open gate as it's capable of opening a path from the underworld which is how the sword saint can resurrect there are lots of questions i have about how this works and the more i think about the black mortal blade the more i don't like it but the cut scene is entertaining enough that i'm willing to hand wave these concerns a little watching eachine crawl his way out of ghanichiro's body is equal parts disturbing and awesome even if the underlying reason for it is a bit contrived there's a shock factor that's almost unmatched by anything else in the game if this is what they had to do to make the sword saints possible i'll happily accept it as for the man himself he's the pinnacle of everything combat is about it is the most intricate sword fight in the entire game he can still be boiled down to attack deflect rhythms but there's so much variety in his moveset that it still feels very fresh and unique from every other fight all of the core combat mechanics come together here like a final exam so in that respect he really is what sekiro is all about i don't know how to demonstrate this better other than just reeling off examples of everything he tests you on he has several standard combos that test basic deflection and pattern recognition his version of ashina cross and the massive spin attacks are wind-up and release style moves that test memorization of timings he has two of the main flavors of perilous attacks different sweeps that you have to jump over and different thrusts that you have to makiri counter dragonflash can be sidestepped so you can take advantage of positioning and punish him he gains extensive ranged options in phase 2 with his spear and pistol that makes it a lot harder to play passively and keep your distance and lastly phase 3 brings out lightning reversals for the final time i honestly can't think of a base that isn't covered by eachine if there's a combat tactic that you've had to use in the game previously it will manifest in some form during this fight given how essential combat is to the sekiro experience it only makes sense that the final boss would be the best representation of that system even with that in mind he's still representative of sekiro in another way there's more to him than just an ultimate convergence of mechanics ishin is certainly deserving of his famous slash infamous reputation because he is undeniably the hardest final boss that fromsoft has ever made part of me almost feels like that the argument that he's too difficult could hold some water it's almost cruel that after the player has endured so much hardship the final mountain they have to surmount is steeper than anything that came before it sekuro is nothing if not difficult though and if the final boss were more an experience like the divine dragon instead of a challenge like the sword saint it would be a tragically unfitting end to the game like i was talking about during fountainhead palace this game makes you overcome adversity in a way that many other games including the soulsborne series don't if you want to finally reach that bliss of having conquered the sakuro experience you're going to have to earn it the sword saint captures the essence of that design philosophy better than any other encounter this is the hardest game that fromsoft has made in their modern lineup i think many people would agree with that but it's never been difficult just for the sake of it it does so to cultivate feelings of self-improvement and i think that's a challenge that's to be embraced personally i still think owl father is just a little bit harder but i would be lying if i said ishii didn't have me stumped for hours on my first run a quality of all these bosses that i've neglected throughout this video is just how fair all of them are calling something hard but fair is a bit of a loaded statement but i can't deny that it has some value when talking about difficulty we could pick apart eachine's reaction times whether his telegraphs are clear and all that standard stuff but i think there's a better litmus test that demonstrates why sekuro's bosses are so masterfully done can you feasibly reach a point where you'll be good enough that you can consistently beat the boss without taking damage ideally in a way that doesn't intentionally exploit bugs or gaps in the ai's capabilities for almost every boss mini boss and even regular enemies in this game the answer is yes you can i struggle to think of instances where damage is nigh unavoidable or where you have to morph your approach into something unwieldy the camera is probably the most unfair thing about this game but even that says a lot because of how infrequently it ruins fights if sakura was unfair the cap on your skill would be a lot lower because it would just be impossible to get better at certain things but it doesn't resort to that and it justifies placing bosses like eachine in the game as a result this is the last time i'll say this i promise the sword saint is one of my favorite bosses in sakuro it has everything that i look for in a final boss a great test of skill sensible challenge good setting and build up and most of all it's a shining example of what this game is all about the feeling of accomplishment derived from beating him is why i enjoy games to begin with and for that sword saint eachine will go down as one of the greatest final bosses i've ever encountered all that remains is to give kuro the frozen tears and let the final cut scene play out to be honest even the true ending leaves you with more questions than answers since it marks a new chapter in wolf's journey he sets out on a trip to the west to return the divine dragon to its homeland it almost feels like a picture-perfect setup for a sequel or dlc and it's fair to express disappointment that this is all we've seen of sekiro but to be honest the game doesn't need to expand on itself any further if there's one word you could use to describe sekiro it would be cohesive it does a lot with a little and once it achieved its goal it bowed out without overstaying its welcome that's not to say that making new sakura content is impossible they could do it and i'm sure they would do a very good job but the game is already in a very comfortable place recognizing when to stop before you jeopardize your own refinement is a sign of quality in and of itself lots of games tend to over indulge in features and spread themselves so thin with content that you're left with something without much substance sakuro proves the value of working with just a few tightly designed features and how you can stretch conceptually simple mechanics shockingly far to create a good game the more i wrote about sekiro the more i realized how much i love it i don't think it's quite as good as bloodborne but it's close and i really hope that more experimental titles like these ones are in fromsoft's future it is a bold step forward and they got an impressive amount of stuff right for such a new direction if you watched this far without playing the game i would still highly recommend it videos like these can never be a true substitute for the experience lastly i would of course like to extend my sincere thanks to everybody that stuck around this long i really appreciate it especially with how much of a time commitment this video is i feel that sekuro's strengths are best brought out through examining its individual components very closely which is why i chose to cast a wide net and do a commentary style critique as opposed to a general review i feel like i wouldn't have been able to do the game justice if i tried wrapping up all of the mechanics areas bosses and whatever else into a 45 or 60 minute video i do have more stuff i'm working on so if you did enjoy please feel free to subscribe like and comment it's all free and it really does help out thanks for watching or if you didn't like it feel free to leave a dislike and a comment telling me why uh that's not a joke i really do appreciate all forms of feedback so that would that would still be cool i'm at the end now so i'll go off script and just rant for a little bit i have nothing else to say about the game uh this video was fun to make but i doubted myself a lot while writing it especially um now that i'm closer to the end product i'm more satisfied with it but it probably was a mistake doing such a long video when i'm still relatively new at making videos obviously like the elden ring video was pretty long and whatever but this was something else entirely i actually started working on this several months ago and i wanted to have it done before elden ring came out but i ended up restarting the script a good like three four times before coming back to it now and actually getting something done um so obviously it didn't happen before alden ring but but that's okay uh obviously there's still some room for improvement on it i think um some sections are probably more boring than others some stuff i could have just cut out stuff like that but this is the state that it's in now and i'm i'm satisfied enough with it i'll just say one more time thank you if you did watch this far um i really do appreciate people that you know take their time to to check out my stuff it's a nice feeling uh as i mentioned i do have other stuff that i'm working on and stuff that i want to start working on uh so yeah more stuff coming i won't say exactly what it is yet but um but yeah anyway that's about it from me i hope you enjoyed the video and i hope to see you come back for the next one

Channel: VG Matthew

Views: 766,475

Keywords: sekiro critique, sekiro shadows die twice, sekiro gameplay, sekiro review, sekiro, sekiro walkthrough, isshin the sword saint, sekiro final boss, sekiro shadows die twice gameplay, sekiro shadows die twice review, sekiro boss fights, fromsoftware, guardian ape sekiro, sekiro playthrough, sekiro commentary, sekiro game of the year

Id: 7Li-qG2t82U

Length: 182min 43sec (10963 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2022