Sekiro • Analysis (Full Commentary).

[Applause] hello everyone and welcome to this very special commentary video on sakura in it i'll be playing through the entire game and commentating over it as i go talking about dispersed topics as they become relevant so one moment i'll be going over a specific character and then i'll maybe talk about an isolated piece of gameplay or a visual motif a fun piece of level design etc for the maximum sakura experience i'll be playing the game with the bell demon on hand at all times and without kuro's charm so it goes without saying that there will be numerous edit points in this video because i had to cut most of the deaths out of the run additionally i've decided to omit many visits to the dilapidated temple because i've only got so much to say about it as well as the upgrades and the skill tree advancements i'll be making there will be no suppression on spoilers going forwards so if you've never experienced the game yourself this is the obligatory instruction to do just that before watching any further but not just sakura spoilers i'm going to be drawing on much of from software's pre-secure library so as a point of reference it wouldn't hurt to have some grounding on those games either i spent the better part of 2020 and 2021 putting together breakdowns on the kingsfield games demon souls the shadow towers and bloodborne so if you feel uncertain about any of those titles be sure to check out those videos links have been provided where appropriate i'd specifically recommend at least watching the bloodborne commentary because i'm picking up a lot of threads i left in that video i'd like to thank mimi quesadiff loki sinclair lore and sophie for the immense help they've given me in assembling this video videos like this one are harder to make when you don't have help and these people were instrumental in getting this done if you want to help me make more videos like this you can support me through patreon linked in the description now with all of these formalities out of the way let's begin talking about sakura starting with the opening cinematic sakura's opening is exactly what i wanted from bloodborne's opening a nice overview of the events that set the story in motion it introduces the characters of isian owl and wolf we get to know the state of japan at the time and we get a sense for how the characters relate to one another the story goes that 20 years prior to the events of the game the master swordsman ishin staged a coup in the japanese region of ashina and drove out the army of the central forces claiming the land as his own frum's games usually take place at the tail end of a story that's been in motion for a while where we take the role of someone who will put the climax into motion see confronting the old one in demon souls overcoming fire linking in dark souls silencing the nightmare newborn in bloodborne this story is no different the war for ashina really doesn't have anything to do with our character from the offset he's robbed into it because kenichiro has ambitions for kuro which preclude him from being able to leave and then he sticks around to fulfill kuro's wish of immortal severance and the preceding chapters of ashina's tale like the emergence of the sakura dragon don't have anything to do with us but nevertheless it's our job to clean things up another clear similarity is that like the afterman's in games sakura's story is about the horrors that ensue when the natural world is twisted fromsoftware is a fairly insular company with a clear set of ideas they like to ruminate over ideas like life will impurity purpose and the nature of boundaries sakuro is very much cut from the company cloth but what makes it different from its director hidetaka miyazaki's previous work is mainly the presentation in that it's a much more focused narrative which has its benefits and drawbacks for one characters are better defined here than in any of his other games but on the other hand our role in the story is not really ours to control there are branching paths and somewhat different builds to be sure but we don't get to choose our origin wolf's appearance or anything like that when you look at the miyazaki library there's two categories of event immediacy to look at on one hand you have the dark souls games whose stories take place over thousands of years and whose major players are all very very old then you have demon souls bloodborne and sakura whose stories are more recent they have lore dating back a long time but the events we are made to struggle against were set in motion recently by people who are still in living memory if not still around there's also to consider the presentation of realism dark souls made no attempt whatsoever to ever trick the player into thinking that the story there took place in a real world from the offset and all throughout it hammered home the point that its was a fictional fantasy world with no strands to our own the other games comparatively are more realistic in the sense that you could look at them and say this is the real world after someone introduced a bit of magic to it sakiro could just be said in the 17th century japan if some of the mythology of the region and era was actually true like how bloodborne from the offset could just have been victorian london if there had actually been werewolves these games share a lot of the same dna and for the opening i'd like to note that both games set you up for a very different kind of experience from what you'll come to face both have a loftier more fantastical adventure waiting for us to discover around the mid game but for the opening things are relatively subdued after the cinematic we see emma deliver a note to wolf who is stationed in a well telling him his destiny awaits him in the nearby moon viewing tower this has always reminded me of the beginning of dark souls what with our character being motivated to move by someone dropping something to them but i might be seeing something that wasn't actually intentional i think this note is as good a reason for us to start the adventure as anything else and i think the opening we have is about as good as we could have hoped for considering how much needed to be condensed into it sakiro is a much more mechanically deep game than previous fromsoft outings and it isn't a lateral step from bloodborne like bloodborne was from demon souls so it can't rely on the player having some intuitive knowledge about how these games work and building the tutorial around familiarizing the players with one or two new features in fact if you try to play sakura as a souls game you're gonna have a harder time than if you go in blind because you'll have to unlearn many assumptions the changes in gameplay from bloodborne include a crouch function a dedicated jump button with a wall jumping function grappling and hanging on ledges snap to wall hugging a grapple hook the posture system and stealth just to name a few the tutorial trickles the new mechanics and revisions out at a nice pace so the player will get to engage with all of them but the sheer amount of things to master and how at odds thinks often are with how it was insults makes the entry level threshold here higher than it was in previous games think of it this way these souls games were difficult because you had to integrate patience into your play style and you had to project ahead and make choices based on held resources and enemy familiarity sakura is difficult because it does both of those but it's also much faster and your inputs are more dedicated than ever before which is saying something it's easier in some aspects though for one player direction is a bigger focus to the point that you can even get info on the world by eavesdropping on nearby guards in demon's souls this was handled by talking to npcs in the nexus or finding some npcs in the maps and hoping they'd give you an idea for what to do in dark souls we had frant which made a big difference because of that game world's structure almost every path in that game eventually crossed back into firelink's ryan so we kept going there kept meeting him and he kept reinforcing where to go and what to do in bloodborne the hub was separated from the game world like it was in demon souls so fromsoft tried to compensate by strategically placing npcs at certain intervals and hoping you'd meet them talk to them and for the narrative to come together that way it worked up until around birgenworth which was the point in the game where we're not really giving context for our actions anymore this was fixed for the dlc which i considered to this day to be the strongest showcase of from software's ability to guide the player and it was done with the seemingly simple inclusion of simon the seeker of secrets sekiro takes every lesson learnt and implements them for the most hand-holding experience in the recent from software lineup if i had to point to an issue i have with this approach it's that every play through after the first one forces the player to skip a huge chunk of text from various characters whose dialogue they already know before talking to the npcs was mostly optional here the game hard locks progress behind the chit chats that being said before disregarding this approach there's the question of characterization to consider sakura is a more character-driven game than its predecessors its plot happens because of the characters we're interacting with demon souls happen because of alant whom you can meet once far past his prime dark souls happened because of gwyn who we can meet once far past his prime and bloodborne happened because of lawrence who we can meet once or twice far past his prime and neither one of those meetings was mandatory here many of the major players are characters you'll meet on a few occasions and those meetings go a long way to explain why the characters do the things that they do and for the story to make sense since wolves actions affected on a more macro scale than what we saw in previous games it may be that sitting the player down and forcing them to kind of be spoon-fed the narrative was necessary for it to not come across as disconnected from our actions in the world from software has always had a history for vagueness when it comes to storytelling but often this is as much a case of mistranslations and naming choices going over the player's head as it is a deliberate style if you've never played sakiro then at this point in the story you might not understand why the relationship between kuro and wolf is as important as it is or that it is really important to begin with in breaking down the story of the game i've gone back and forth on whether i think sakiro might have benefited from starting the player in hirata estate rather than going with the tutorial we have now in that hypothetical version of the game there's more wolf kuro relationship building at the start than there is in the intro we have now i don't know about whether i'd prefer that opening in terms of gameplay but i think that in the storytelling department it might have drilled in the characterizations for certain characters and their animosities and alliances with each other better that being said i'd like to go back to what i said a few seconds ago and note that the vague storytelling style from software is as much a deliberate design choice as it is a case of mistranslations and naming choices going over the player's head it's true that these games expect that the player reads into the subtext more than most games but it's not like there's no handholding to get the story across for example the meeting with kuro is jam-packed with storytelling and a lot of it is actually very heavy-handed for one the sword he hands us has the name the japanese name kusabi maru maru is just a masculine suffix and kusapi is a linchpin or a bond it's the same word they use to describe the nexus in demon souls roughly translated the sword is mr linchpin mr thai or if you will mr bond and for storytelling i think the idea being conveyed here is that the kasabi maru just represents the bond to its kuro and wolf share see also how wolf held on to kuro's charm for the three years they were separated but you might have missed this if you didn't know what kusabi maru meant you might also have missed how much the game teaches us about kuro right away he is the divine heir of the dragon's heritage and his name is spelled q and ro which translates to ninth son him being the ninth son and also the sole survivor of his clan though the game doesn't communicate that very well here at the start hints to him belonging to some kind of family clan which connects his character's backstory to the actual histories of many people who lived in the sengoku jedi and if you can connect him to the stories you've heard about them assuming you have heard about them and the shin goku judai then by the time we leave the moon viewing tower we're well on our way to understanding the duo's relationship the introduction actually does quite a lot to get the story going and filling us in on who the characters are it's just leaning on the player having knowledge which most non-japanese players aren't likely to have this is a pretty common occurrence in japanese games actually just games four into your own culture which i suppose we could dub as the foreigner effect or something akin to that where subtext flies over the audience's head because they have no frame of reference to know that certain imagery is important there are many cases of this in sakura and i'll point them out where i can see them though i'm not from japan so i'm sure to miss a lot myself something worth discussing about the introduction to sakura is that it's very linear in a bad way i think it's short so it doesn't get grading but outside of the intrinsic reward of doing it well there's no incentive for skilled players to really embrace any hidden challenge here there's an optional mini boss but he only drops a healing palette whereas the standard drop for bosses to come will be prayer beats which can be used to increase our max vitality and posture even if we defeat konichiro when we fight him all we get is an extended cutscene where wolf gets hit with a kunai before having his hand cut off for comparison's sake in demon souls the boss of the first area was a vanguard demon and if we killed him we got to explore a secret area and looted for some consumables dark souls opening had fewer rewards for observant and skilled players at the start than demon souls did but it made up for this with the sheer craftsmanship of the undead asylum bloodborne's tutorial is literally one half dead skirts beast in yosefka's clinic and it can be completed in less than a minute if we discount the horrendously long loading screens the reason for this disparity in tutorial quality is partly because sakiro is not as build focused as its predecessors were meaning there's less experimentation needed to be crammed in partly because the story is much more directed than in previous games where we just entered the story near the tail end after everything had collapsed and were in effect free to start wandering to wherever we wanted to go right from the get-go partly it's because of the mandatory talking bits i discussed earlier where your options are to either wait for the dialogue to exhaust itself or skip it hardly engaging gameplay and finally partly it's because the game needed to familiarize veteran from soft players with a lot of new mechanics it's worth noting here that the game drills climbing crouching and stealth into the player's head before they're able to start dealing damage in terms of decision making the only part of the tutorial which returning players have to look forwards to is deciding whether or not to keep kuro's charm kuro's charm is an unlockable item which you get after beating the game once if you hand it over to kuro you begin to take chip damage when you don't block perfectly but your sen and xp gain is increased by 20 percent like i said in the beginning i'm ditching this charm for the entirety of the playthrough and not having it around really got me to appreciate the value of timing i think the inclusion of these additional difficulty challenges is a great way to keep the game engaging for more skilled players and i also think and i'm talking from experience here that embracing challenges like these can get novice players like me to actually step up i'm not much more than okay at these games so i was a bit surprised by my ability to actually complete this run the added difficulty demanded more of me and i think players would be surprised by how much better they perform when the game is less lenient about screw-ups this meeting with kenichiro makes it so that the only member of the game's core cast yet to appear is the sculptor and we're just a little bit more than 15 minutes into what can be a 30-hour game there'll be time later to talk about kenichiro as a character and boy is there a lot to dive into but right now i want to touch on his placement as the tutorial closer it's a good idea to commit the setup to this encounter to memory because it'll be relevant again in the end kinichiro stands proud on the hill of chinese silvergrass looking at the moon the moon is an ill omen and it was the central focal point in the first frame kinichiro appeared in because it's an idea from what's to connect to him kuro started to get some words out but was stopped by wolf who instigated the fight against kenichiro after fumbling to draw his sword blink and you'll miss this miyazaki likes to include definitive death points in his tutorials and i think it's safe to say that kinichiro killed almost everyone the first time around like the other fromsoft tutorial bosses he is quite beatable if you know the protocol i don't but i think sakiro's more unique and complicated combat system in short most players didn't even make it to his second phase i think losing to guinea chiro accomplices to set him up as a formidable threat down the line and i also think the encounter setup does a good job of juxtaposing him and wolf miyazaki's protagonists are usually outsiders from demon souls to dark souls 3 they all came from vague backgrounds and were introduced to the world as the player navigated it you could always sort of headcanon some lore for your characters in those games to tie them into the happenings around them more intimately but fromsoft didn't make any of those possible connections definitive a big benefit to the outsider protagonist is that their backstory can be up to the player's imagination and design wise that setup also means the developer doesn't need to integrate the protagonist into the plot quite as extensively which makes it easier for the player to take in the world think of it this way in dark souls you are navigating a world and learning about it as you go in sakura you are doing the same but the developer also had to make sure none of wolves relationships which predate the events of the game come to grind against your internalization of his character i won't ignore how we're only forced to interact with two characters which wolf unambiguously knew before this adventure though there are optional interactions with some others and that the game establishes him as having some memory issues to make his experience in a strange land come across as more ludologically in line with the player's experience but i also think the opening did a good job of priming the player for the experience and the seminal touch might just be the encounter with kinichiro from the offset he's established as more in touch with his surroundings he has the high ground he's staring at the moon his health bar has his name as gennichiro ashina connecting him to the land and he says his name again when the fight begins when it concludes he comfortably walks away whereas wolf's movement in the beginning was characterized by a haste and precaution i might be reading too much into the opening but i do get a real sense of wolf not belonging to this environment from the way it plays and it sets up the relationship we'll come to have with this world quite well the point of losing in the tutorial here is the same as it was in demon souls and bloodborne to move the story forwards so that our playable character can finally go into the game's hub area here we get to meet the sculptor who will upgrade our tsunobi prosthetics and for the early game at least this area is the only place we can talk to emma who will upgrade our healing gourds a common storytelling motif in from software games is the idea of the events in front of us having happened before for example in bloodborne the choir and menses had distinct ideas about how to use the old blood to go about transcending humanity menses led by mikalash believed that they were ready to use it immediately whereas the choir believed human beings were not mentally elevated enough to guide the process and believed meditation and enlightenment were needed first that split was reflective of another older split in that game which was the split between lawrence and willem the healing church and birgenworth and even that split was reflective of another even older split which we can see in loren and ease which embody the dichotomy of vermin and phantasms or beast and kin there were always differences to be sure but it was roughly the same script repeating over and over again see also dark souls where the fire kept being linked over the ages demon souls were the old one and the spreading of the colorless deep fog had happened before and kingsfield 1 and 4 where there had already been an attempt to reach the bottom of the respective dungeons the sculptor and wolf are another showcase of this idea of repeating narratives both start out as highly skilled shinobi attached to powerful men those being kuro and ishin but where wolf was trained by owl the sculptor learned with kingfisher a shinobi woman he was partnered with in the past they trained together in the sunken valley where the sculptor obtained the name orangutan assumably because he learned to move the way the monkeys of that area do both wolf and the sculptor fight the interior ministry wolff does so at the end of the game the sculptor did so 20 years ago during eshin's rebellion there is an ending where wolf becomes a sculptor making buddha statues in this temple after losing kuro and there is also an ending where wolf is conquered by shura like the sculptor will be both men had their arm cut off by a prominent ashina leader kinichiro cut off wolf's arm and ishin personally cut off the sculptor's arm and both men made use of the same prosthetic arm both men are caregivers to a child that being kuro and emma with a sculpture found on a battlefield there are many differences too like how ishing cut off the sculder's arm to stop the sculptor from being able to fight as his bloodlust was transforming him into shura whereas kenichiro had no empathetical emotional considerations for wolf when he cut his arm off but the from soft style of a world containing reoccurring narratives is very much maintained in this game something i want to point out before we leave this area is the trail of blood leading out of the sculptor's empty batsudan or shrine cabinet thing these things serve as a center for paying proper respect to the buddha and deceased family members they usually have doors or some manner of cloth acting as a separating barrier to mark it as a holy place but not only is the door here wide open the thing is covered in cobwebs like it hasn't been used in a long time there's another strange thing to note about the butt sudan here and that is that it's empty there's usually a scroll or a statue or some representation of the buddha's enlightened body or works inside of these which act as reminders of the goal behind buddhist practice inner peace purified mind enlightenment that sort of jazz there's nothing in the sculptures but sedan though which might be another example of franz after lying on subtext which goes over the head of a non-eastern audience for storytelling he spends his days carving out statues of the buddha but they always come out with a face of agony maybe because he is not conducting himself in harmony with the buddha's teachings or maybe because he's not ready to let go of his past buddhism teaches to live in the present moment and the sculptor is very much not able to do that because he's wrecked by guilt from all of the people he has killed right now we're talking to han be the untime the story goes that he abandoned his master on the battlefield in the manga it's revealed that his master was general tamara from the opening cinematic he abandoned him and he has not been allowed the release of death yet a cursory glance at this guy might have you think he's kind of a nothing character who exists solely for his utility to the player in that he can teach combat maneuvers but he's one of my favorites in this game because of his function in the world design he's very analogous to the crestfallen warrior characters in king's field 4 that guy was located in the entrance tunnel to the first area in demon souls he was located in the main hub and was one of the very first people we were able to talk to and in dark souls the same having someone right at the beginning of the adventure who could communicate to us the dire desperate and defeated state of the world was a good thing in priming the player on what sort of atmosphere would come to permeate areas to come note also how bloodborne starts us in a medical clinic and how the first npc we can talk to in that game was a doctor in yosefka and the second was a sick man in gilbert which i think did some legwork to influence the player's perception of the world as one overrun with sickness to me the core feature of sakura's world is corruption and han be embodies this quite well wouldn't you agree of course him being a combat instructor is not to be neglected sakura's combat is very different from previous from soft combat and him giving you an avenue to explore the intricacies of the new system in a safe environment where none of your resources are on the line is very beneficial to the game i think i wouldn't have wanted such a straightforward trainer character in previous games but since sakiro's protagonist has a definitive backstory and is a character in his own right much more so than previous protagonists i think it makes sense to include hanbe because training with him is more in character for wolf than dying 50 times on the overworld is it's really hard to sell players on the idea that wolf is this great warrior if the player is spending prolonged stretches of time on the resurrection screen don't get me wrong i died incredibly often my first time through i'm not really that good at these games but learning to compartmentalize the enemy movement sets was probably helped by the time i spent with han bae the final character to talk about in the opening is emma the game's healer character when she was a child emma was found on the battlefield by the sculptor he was eating a rice ball and she kept staring at him until he finally gave her his food which she then promptly ate and then began following him around eventually though he sent her to lord dogen to be mentored in the ways of medicine she's currently lord eshen's personal doctor and it was she who created the court of medical waters the medical science we see in sakura is a hybrid of real actual medical knowledge from this era and some of the erroneous assumptions and practices as well except for this game those falsehoods are also real for example the hari kiki kaki a 16th century medical text from japan claims that diseases are caused by tiny bugs or evil kami which crawl into the body and what do you know behind the corrupt immortality in zekiro we see centipedes inside of creatures a big difference between sakura and the harikiki kaki is that rather than suggest acupuncturist treatment the people in sakhiro's world think of these centipedes as a good thing this is another idea from software likes to ruminate over see also bloodborne where the people thought that the elder rich horrors were something to be embraced rather than running away from corruption and impurity the people in france worlds embraced them thinking there's something in it for them to gain the addition of the grappling hook really explodes the player's freedom of movement so it's funny that its introduction is as understated as this bridges out grapple over the cliff during the games early conceptual stages it was decided that sakura was to offer a greater freedom of movement and traversal than previous games and this decision had some to be expected ramifications for level design up until sekiro the from software team had excelled at making open world dungeon crawlers navigation had always been funneled through tight spaces and half of the combat was being strategically located to deal damage the movement scheme itself also leaned into a dungeon crawler sensibility because of how limited it was and how dedicated each press of the button was if you press to roll in the middle of an attack animation the animation would complete and the role would then initiate and there was no way to overwrite it the first action you selected in the middle of an animation would be the first action you'd perform even if the wisdom of the action had changed in the milliseconds in between you initiating it and it playing out prior to miyazaki from software had made dungeon crawlers as their bread and butter in the king's fields shadow towers and even the first armored core to an extent miyazaki's contribution wasn't so much in the level design as it was to ecofy the games moving them from first to third person which brought with it a lot more situational environmental awareness this dungeon crawler sensibility was there from demon souls all the way to dark souls 3 but sakura is where it really no longer applies when the player can dip out at any time and zip around the map like spider-man the old enemy encounter formulas simply don't work anymore and a lot of the game's mechanics might have been implemented solely so that the zippy movement played better things like climbing for example sakura's movement is much more expressive than before but once you begin to test the parameters of the system we have you'll inevitably start noticing some of the workarounds included to support it things like enemies having a fixed distance they can travel which means the game's areas are segmented threats from certain enemies are localized to the areas they inhabit for example if i wanted to get a better shot at fighting kawarada here i could just bail on him and stealthily return later after he's been reset to get a free death blowing usually i'd have to break his posture to get a death blow but sneaking around will also do the trick another workaround can be seen in the world design because there are more pitfalls and cliffs and walls are much taller than ever before i think those actually serve to give ashina a sort of grand feeling when you are exploring it but the explosive amount of maneuverability does at times clash with a world that isn't realized enough for things not to feel artificial locks on progress specifically this is something i've talked about on this channel before but think of a game as a sort of opportunity space if there's no jump function then provided there's never a scenario where a jump would easily clear an obstacle players aren't likely to complain about the lack of a jump function see silent hill or resident evil no one ever complained about dark souls not having a climbing function but the moment dark souls 2's iron keep had a checkpoint that you could have easily cleared by climbing up a small wall all of a sudden it became a big issue level designers are never off the hook when it comes to a game world signaling inner realization and realism i'm about to die shortly from my poor fighting and since it'll be my first death post tutorial this is where we'll talk about the resurrection mechanic although it's central to the experience narrative and to the marketing shadows die twice a it didn't come about fully formed during the game's initial design stages one difference from previous games the team wanted to emphasize with sakiro was that as a ninja the player was going to be more exposed and vulnerable than before and they wanted an experience which could go very wrong for the player very quick to keep them constantly at death's door the idea of the players constantly fearing death is another from soft staple the issue in testing here was that the one mistake away from death ninja role-playing worked a bit too well the players were dying too much and it was disrupting the natural tension cycle and flow of the game this is why the resurrection system came about it allowed for players to retry encounters and it elongated each attempt by the player to reach the next area or overcome the obstacle in front of them i'm sure everyone who's played action games has had that moment where all seemed lost you were out of resources and 40 minutes away from your last checkpoint with just a sliver of your health bar remaining and then all these added pressures made it all the more satisfying when you miraculously manage to succeed regardless and i think the resurrection mechanic in sakura is a way of manufacturing that experience you fight your hardest every time because you really don't want to have to resurrect but after you do you somehow still manage to play with even more focus oh and uh fun fact sakura's subtitle shadows that twice was just intended to be used as a slogan for the initial teaser trailer but was added as the official name by activision's request i'm fetching the young lord spell charm right now so i'm gonna talk briefly about npc quest design before getting back to talking level design a reoccurring motif running through sakura is wolf having memory issues related to the hirata estate incident and maybe some more stuff and the way we're made to interact with this motif is in the best way possible we're given mysteries to solve for inosige nogami and his mother that means being characters which wolf has met before but can't remember when we're done cycling through their dialogue we get the young lord's belch charm which we can use to travel to the optional hirata estate level these two characters are fairly incidental to the experience all things considered but i like the way their quest is laid out because it conforms to the player's natural navigation of the level rather than demanding that the player does a lot of backtracking or loading from one area to another if you watched my bloodborne commentary you've probably had enough of me discussing the quest designs in these games but suffice it to say i think sekiro generally speaking does a better job than base game bloodborne does the quests again generally speaking aren't impositions on the player's time and they usually don't ask the player to go way out of their way to complete them i know there's something to be said about using that approach one good reason is that it allows for areas to be reused and revisiting old areas with new content in them can go a long way to make the game world feel more alive but from demon souls to dark souls 3 those sorts of quests could feel very weird to me because they sometimes went against the isolated dungeon crawler sensibility and overemphasized just how much power we had over our traversal in those games it was fine when hub quest lines like the one we saw in dark souls once firelinks rhine advanced because we kept naturally going back there so the character development felt very organic and i also think quests like rescuing bjor and eurea and demon souls were great because they took us to new areas but quests like having alfred destroy annelise in bloodborne or getting the frozen tears from the divine child of rejuvenation which we'll be doing a few hours from now not so much because at best they make our character into a mailman who has to ship items around the world to make other characters get around it's not the individual stories that bother me mind you but how advancing them has the player go out of their way to play a very different game all of a sudden one which isn't very engaging after you do it the first time around i in general like for these npc questlines to be more like braydors or simons in the bloodborne dlc or solaires and siegmires in dark souls 1 where they map onto the player's natural path through the environments if in bloodborne alfred's questline had been advanced by maybe summoning him in hemvik and then going on the carrots right to cainhurst taking him with us rather than warping towards him and handing him the extra summons you can acquire in cainhurst after completing it solo daddy gel much better with me i do give sakura more wiggle room on how much extra navigation their quests demand because the movement is fast enough for this stuff to not get grading and because the loading screens aren't as bad as in bloodborne i also feel the npc quest line advancements are more reliable here than they were there going back to our talk on level design level designers are never off the hook when it comes to a game world signaling inner realization and realism it's not enough to just create a level that plays well with the mechanics on hand it's also good practice to not highlight which mechanics are missing or how artificial the game world really is but on the flip side if they do a good job and there's no instance where a missing function would so easily solve a problem that the lack of it becomes instantly observed by players then players aren't likely to ask why the game lacks that function for sakiro this is why i consider the green spot marking where we can grapple do to be such a good idea far beyond just signaling where we can grapple to not only does the dot remove the need for players to abstract the gameplay function and read the world through that abstraction which frees up level design to focus more on realistic looking environments rather than gamey looking ones which communicate the interactions available think of the grapple hook points in ocarina of time but it also means the player isn't going to jump off a cliff because they misread some protruding stone to be a grapple point there's not really a gradient to where you can grapple to here with a few exceptions in the whole game you know if you can grapple to an area when you see it this is what i consider to be the good kind of enforcing an opportunity space but like i said earlier i think this focus on freedom of navigation does at times undermine the world's geometry and cohesiveness of course the world is not merely set up by how we navigate it it also exists in things like the item descriptions and the passive lore we can absorb when we navigate the world this merchant for example sells information he's a lore dump he also sells the phantom kunai which i'll make use of later and we also have memory remnants like the one i activated before talking to anayama which allow us to see conversations which characters in the world have had these and other implementations like the eavesdropping opportunities beef up the cohesiveness of the world and i'm not saying sekuros is falling apart or anything but because we can zip across everything now it's harder to realistically wall off content so mountains get much taller than they would have otherwise been as to trees and all of a sudden we're seeing massive cliffs all over the place i think the developers did a good job of designing engaging areas with these limitations in mind but i also think the level of explosive freedom we have came at the price of my favorite aspect of from software's traditional level design and that is theming when you empower player traversal as much as sakura's grapple hook does it's harder to create more intimate areas like dark souls's new londo and it's harder to direct the player's movement to best emphasize a level's theme again think dark souls is new londo because you have less of an idea for where the player is at a given time and because the player spends less time in a given area when the player is locked to the ground it's easier to push them into walking through certain funnels and when combat is as slow and as hard-hitting as it was in souls the player is actually incentivized to walk around slowly and take in their environments sakhiro's levels are well themed but the gameplay doesn't direct the player to best experience this i consider this to be one of sakiro's greatest losses moving from souls and bloodborne because these intimate and tightly directed levels were among my favorite features of those games the setup as this does a good job of imparting a feeling of traveling vast distances but there's a part of me which wonders what could have been if fromm had decided to compare to the baseline zippiness of movement lock the player down from time to time to put the focus on the environment rather than our mobility on the topic of navigation and exploration something to note is that there's not a lot of valuable loot you can find some money here and there but this isn't an exploration driven game it's an action game so it follows that the key consideration driving exploration is combat and more specifically you explore to hunt for stealth death flows the easiest cleanest way to deal with enemies these were actually inspired by the hisatsu technique from tenchu i read a lot of reviews of sakiro for this video and what stood out in the negative ones was how many of the people were trying to justify to themselves that the game was bad when they clearly just didn't learn it if you try to play sakura as a more traditional action game yeah it's gonna suck because the mechanics on hand do not actually facilitate an experience like that and you're going to be actively grinding yourself through an experience that isn't able to deliver on the fantasy you're trying to impose on it this probably wouldn't have been an issue if sakura had launched like 20 years ago when the expectation was that games had unique gameplay but in the more homogenized landscape of 2019 when it originally launched people wanted waypoint markers objective lists and they wanted regenerating health and a combat system that holds your hand a bit i think it's totally fair not to like the game but for someone to call it bad because they're not willing to engage with it on its own terms i think is sort of silly but the interesting thing about the reviews is that this sentiment wasn't just an outsider looking in thing veteran souls players were saying the same thing from demon souls to dark souls 3 from software had opted to not overhaul their combat system but rather to refine it and add more bells and whistles to it sakiro still has the soul's dna at its core but its combat system is not just another iteration on what came before it may look similar on a cursory glance but the mental state it expects you to be in is completely different and the tactical choices we had gotten accustomed to in souls no longer apply and you can generally speaking get more utility from what you have at your disposal than ever before i don't know anyone who seriously used the binocular items in previous games but i can see the night jar monocular here actually being of use if you want to get the lay of the land in an area before proceeding previously i mostly just used these to see the distant environments which was a good function in its own right but here there's that and actually getting information about the enemies side note i really like the placement of the night jar monocular because this area can be a fun stealth challenge if you tackle it properly i didn't and much like how in dark souls we first got the alluring skulls where we could throw them to lure the metal bore into the fire the location of the monocular here sort of nudges the player to test it out in an environment and against enemies where using it is so beneficial that you might actually keep it in mind for future encounters so some souls carry over's gain functions but some lose them things like dodging or rolling to get invisibility frames if you try that stuff here you're mostly setting yourself up for a bad time one issue that's always kind of plagued the souls games and bloodborne was that the enemy move sets didn't really get more complicated or engaging as the experience went on and the growth that did occur often made for lackluster gameplay compared to the usually stellar early game the combat worked on the simple premise that the player had to avoid slow hitting attacks by leveraging patience and their environmental awareness against the enemy ai getting hit was always kinda annoying because most of the time you know you probably could have prevented it but you really wanted to get that one extra hidden in the abstract it was a very caveman combat system but it worked demon souls strength was in the experience not the individual components of it and the combat was there to reinforce the dark oppressive ambience to reiterate how little the world cares about your well-being and to give you a challenge you could overcome that's all it set out to do that's all it needed to do and it did those things well but when developing sakiro it was decided early on to not iterate on the old combat system and instead to start over again when asked about it in an interview miyazaki explained that the key words when designing the new system were dynamism and intensity the former came about with the explosive mobility of the player character and how it liberated players to reposition themselves from almost every area in souls you could very easily get stuck in a corner surrounded by enemies if you weren't careful but zakiro's ninja fantasy required for those moments to be mostly omitted fights are not about honor and anything goes everything can be incorporated into the combat the letter keyword intensity was created by the rhythm of katanas clashing you have to carefully time your deflects to deal the most posture damage and take the least amount yourself and you have to read the enemy animations carefully to see when the best time for your own attacks is and whether there's some optimal posture break options you can get and that's an important change from previous games souls was always easier if you learned to read your enemies animations and memorized the timing of their attacks but it was also very forgiving and because of the generous iframes in rolling and the shields the combat was more passive than it is here bloodborne's rallying mechanic and gunfire triggered visceral attacks and dark souls 3's weapon arts went some ways towards overcoming this passivity but the decision to go for a complete overhaul in sakhiro makes for the most engaged combat system in any of these games by far dark souls rewarded players who focused on reading enemy animations but sakura's baseline experience asks for levels of position and engagement reserved for veteran players in previous games since i just got destroyed i've gone back to the dilapidated temple to cash in on some of my looting specifically i'm upgrading the healing gourd and fetching some shinobi prosthetics the healing gourd is mechanically identical to how dark souls estes flasks work i think going for an endlessly refilling healing option was wiser for sakuro than to make healing items a depleting resource like in bloodborne and demon souls because i don't think sakura's strength is in the inventory system and i don't think the inventory mechanic makes for good ninja role-playing when you're interacting with it sakura's focus on mobility and the freedom of exploration might have been poorly served if the game was very inventory focused because we're meant to be you know sipping around the world and fighting enemies spreadsheet management can up the immersion for certain experiences but i think for sakiro the less we're standing still the better and i think the developers agree with me looting corpses in this game does not require that the player positions wolf in the vicinity of lootables and instead the player can just hold a button and vacuum up everything around them except the items that were placed in the levels by the developers i think this is another good change for this game because again it means we can stay moving around and grapple hooking over the map rather than having to periodically get down and loot stuff think about how taxing that kind of looting would be on the experience this game is trying to deliver on i think the prosthetic tools are well considered placement-wise in the ashina outskirts i acquired the shuriken throwing star and the firecrackers these two are among the most useful tools for most encounters in the game and they are both front loaded i also got the bell which i can use to go to the hirata estate where i can pick up the flame wet the axe and the mist raven feathers and all of these are also very useful the mist raven feathers are actually my favorite tool in the entire game the prosthetic tools are also well considered gameplay wise i think the player's main weapon in the game is the kasabi maru katana and the idea behind the fixed main weapon was that it allowed the devs to hone in on the idea of the player mastering their weapon this has a positive knock-on effect of freeing the developers to make the enemies behave in more specific and predictable ways in souls the enemies were designed to have vulnerable states that had to last a bit longer than the slowest attack the player could get off in bloodborne the same and it's actually pretty funny to look at the guns in that game because their firing frames are clearly bracketed by type meaning the visceral attack timings are standardized for the entire arsenal here since the player can always get an attack in in the time it takes for the kasabi marut sword to swing every enemy can be designed around that parameter and since the player always has access to their sword that parameter for enemy animation timings is all that is needed and so enemy timings can become much tighter than before certain prosthetic tools can have their own timings but since they are optional it's not that big a deal if certain enemies are too fast for you to effectively use one tool enemies are all balanced around our sword after all that being said the prosthetic tools still do a lot of the heavy lifting there were three main actions which miyazaki and the gang had in mind for the game those were grappling sword fights and killing wisely and i think the prosthetic tools are the secret sauce to keeping the game engaging all throughout the tighter combat is great but it also robbed the player of combat options which the developers thought was necessary to have the player get into that ninja mindset of someone who can actually use anything as a weapon and can be victorious in encounters often in strange ways the prosthetic tools are the fix for this they allow for more experimentation and vary up the approaches we can take to dealing with enemies and remember this isn't a stealth game we are expected to deal with the enemies the stealth mechanics we do have are just here to give us more options success in sakura is more dependent on timing and engagement than before which is why the optional difficulty increases work here whereas i think they were always shy of the mark in previous games i wonder if the iframe focused combat of old was sort of an accidental byproduct of the system there and that in demon souls we were always supposed to use shields until we got familiar enough with the world that we could do some bonkers playthroughs with the more outlandish weapons but the iframes were embraced by players in subsequent games and when fromm decided to incorporate them into the actual difficulty scaling in dark souls 2 everyone got real mad that probably would not have happened if they'd have tried that in sakura though because the expectations of the combat system are completely different i appreciate the new game plus modes we got back then but i don't think they made the experience as more of an engaging challenge to overcome as much as they just made it a bit more frustrating when bad hitbox detections got read as hits or something the kuro's charm and beldum and self-imposed difficulty challenges here on the other hand are functionally somewhat different to our previous game scaled up difficulty and because of the game's expectation of precision and engagement i think these bring out the strengths of sekhiro's combat whereas i think new game plus tended to bring out some of the worst of souls combat i know the added challenge there has its fans but i like those modes because they let the player have a ready-made character throughout the whole game rather than having to build one an engaging process on its own but a different experience especially when it comes to role-playing as i noted earlier i will be playing through the rest of the game with the bell demon and without kuro's charm it will be hard to see at points because i have the hud turned off as much as i can but i'm still enough of a scrub and still take enough damage that you'll be able to see the little icon under my health ringing the demon bell increases enemy damage resistance both vitality and posture and it increases their damage output to my vitality and posture but on the plus side i'll get better drops from them and that's actually a good trade-off because i want to purchase as many spirit emblems as i can before they jack up the price and having more loot to sell to vendors will actually help ever so slightly to keep me using my prosthetic tools something i really like about the demon bell is that this little magical curse is presented with the inventory system where i just casually have a little demon in there which will be destroyed if i use the item although the average level in this game might not be as focused as they were in souls i think the set pieces here come out better because the larger moveset makes them less chorey and there's more we can do in them i'm particularly fond of this serpent stealth segment it's a nice little change of pace the idea behind the snakes might be ben titan an originally indian goddess who made her way into japan in the 6th century she's the goddess of things that flow things like music knowledge words water and time she made her way to japan through the translation of a chinese buddhist sutra where she was initially a protection deity and later became one of the seven gods of fortune ancient writings credit her with the killing of the three-headed vritra a snake associated with rivers in japan she's connected to serpents and dragons and she and a five-headed dragon are the central characters in an ancient japanese tale where the dragon tyrannized people until bansaitan emerged and convinced it to stop its harassment in shinto then saitan is a kami named ichikishima hime nomikoto and is revered for her eloquence music and knowledge where she is often portrayed as a coiled serpent with a woman's head whereas in buddhism she's often portrayed on the back of a serpent this is imagery we'll be seeing in the game and the great serpent's name here literally translates to guardian spirit white snake making it a protector deity like benseitan the serpents of ashina are gods who were worshiped in the land prior to the arrival of the sakura dragon the herb catalogue scrap reads a page torn from the ashina herb catalog a compendium of flowers and herbs the snapseed naturally grows in ravines and deep valleys according to denizens of the sunken valley such places are appropriate for offering oneself in marriage to the great serpent if one wishes to become a bride they must enter the belly of the serpent in the valley this idea of human marriage to gods is a reoccurring from software motif see annelise and queen jarnam in bloodborne gwynevere and osceros in dark souls 3. and the palanquin we hid in to get the death blow on the serpent's eye is where the marriage ritual would be conducted sakura draws a lot from eastern mythology and religion but like i talked about earlier it falls more into the blood-borne demon souls camp than it does dark souls is in that the world is interchangeable with our own but for the inclusion of magic the game takes place in japan some years after the sengoku jedi or the warring state period i also noted earlier that sakura takes its cultural pilfering and symbolism for granted and this is another example of just that all throughout the early portion of the game we pick up information discussing the interior ministry's plans and the game expects you to understand why they are a threat their why kenichiro is doing the things he's doing but if you aren't familiar with the significance of the era then the characterization and world building that is implied from this is not necessarily apparent for example it is important that gennichiro is an orphan in a much deeper sense than just he went from rags to riches it's important that isian doesn't really have great territorial ambitions and that the ashina combat style basically boils down to do whatever you need to do to win it's important that this game takes place after the sengoku jidai the sengoku jidai saw the total breakdown of the previous feudal system and this era had japan descend into a bloody war for over a century it was the height of political schemes and when you think of samurai and ninja heroics this is the area you're thinking about a time where any peasant could just pick up a sword and go out into the field and make a name for themselves and during this era a lot of the most notable warriors of japanese history came to be and it ended when the three great unifiers of japan like their titles imply unified japan i'll elaborate on that in a bit though because right now we're fighting gyopu masataka oniwa who's become sort of a meme character because the english duff is maybe a bit too excited to shout his own name whenever he first rides into battle i think he was a lot of people's wall when they first played through the game who forced them to actually buckle down and learn the mechanics rather than just zoom through and hope to get lucky this is because we've only had two fog gates thus far the first one was behind the giant and the giant could easily be cheesed yobu not so much aside from grappling to him to close the distance there's not a lot of easy movement available to us and he hits like a ton of bricks so if we were to rely on luck to get past him we're relying on bad odds the lore behind gopu is that he was a bandit leader whom ishin defeated in combat and invited to join him because of his fighting prowess in the battle against the central ministry 20 years before the game begins yobu's horn spear broke and so ishin gifted him the spear of general tamara the guy he killed in the opening cinematic and fun fact ishin himself will use this exact spear if you fight his sword saint version as the final boss i really like this battle and i think it highlights the strengths of the revamped combat system like the giant earlier there's a lot of different kinds of interactions with this guy because you can maneuver wolves in more ways than you could previous from soft protagonists particularly i like how much the elevation plays into the fight and i really like how we keep moving in souls and bloodborne the stamina system made it impossible to design bosses which required this much mobility but in sakura this is workable and i think it comes together really well in most fights it's incorporated into this is just one case of many but the new combat system makes the epic fights actually feel epic in the moment whereas in souls we fought giant creatures by swinging our swords at their legs and crotch here there's a real palpable sense of speed in the air and since the enemy moves around as much as he does and since wolfe is as maneuverable as he is the camera can actually show us gilbu and not just his legs in fact the camera has to show us gopu because the fight is about breaking his posture more so than eating into his health the camera is locked to his torso so that we can see attacks coming and deflect them in time this usually was not the case in souls there larger enemies again usually had the lock on attached to their feet and we knew to get the shield up when they started to attack but because the shield just ate our stamina the combat system actually incentivized the player to abuse the invincibility frames of the rolling making for a combat system where our interaction with the enemy was slashing at them and then rolling around them here this has been inverted the best way to deal with enemies is to use the deflection well and dodging away is reserved for unblockable attacks and for very very unique moments where you can situate yourself in a better spot for dealing damage when the enemy is locked into an animation if you dodge as much as you had to do insults you're not playing optimally the system here forces you to get as close to the edge as possible it's much tighter directed and the fights actually feel like epic fights we're talking to isian in this tango disguise right now so i'm going to conclude our talk on these in goku jedi after over a century of bloodshed unification was achieved and with it everything changed a rigid caste system was installed ensuring no one ever gets to abandon their allotted place in life funnily enough this system was set in place by the second great unifier who began his career as the sandal-bearer of the first unifier the height of hypocrisy but whatever there was no more freedom of movement in this system and there was no more armed populace which certainly helped make revolutions harder the central government began collecting taxes again and after all the fighting no one could fight the third grade unifier japan was firmly under his control and that's where sakura begins so you understand why this specific time period is so important to the story a good analogy would be to consider how a cowboy western taking place during the final days of the wild west is very different from one taking place during its heyday the cultural dynamic of the era is different as is the societal expectation for proper conduct and the definition of heroism sakura might look like a samurai ninja game but it takes place after that era ended and it is set in a fictional region that managed to hold out longer than any other going back to the cowboy analogy imagine if sakura was a cowboy game that took place in a fictional american state which still had stage codes robberies and gunslingers during world war ii or imagine if the american civil war had ended everywhere except for in one fictional state which managed to draw on the magical nature of its land and hold out against the rest of the nation for another two decades this is the ramification of sakura setting and it impacts the narrative in so many easy-to-miss ways for example we learned from the game's opening that ishin took ashina by pushing the interior ministry out and in the two decades since ashina has been under his control meaning he's such a powerful leader that the central government of japan which has absolute dominion over every region in the land is afraid of a direct encounter and is opting to wait it out hoping ishin will just weaken with age with all of this in mind it's not so crazy that people are as loyal to ishin as they are he's the final holdout and the ashina nationalism becomes very easy to understand because the alternative to isian is a caste system it's federal taxes it's disarmament and it's no freedom of movement gopu's loyalty makes sense when you consider isian's leadership in contrast to that of the alternative kyopu respected strength above all and so he took up arms with ishin and he guarded the yashina castle gate with his life because gennichiro instructed him to do so and kinichiro boy his devotion to ashina is not so crazy when you consider the ramification of him being a bastard peasant adopted into a royal family who managed to rise through the ranks and become the leader of the whole thing after the national caste system was enforced after killing the rats for isian we get the ashina esoteric text this is my go-to style in this game and i think its core idea is very much in harmony with isian the man and ashina the land going back to our talk about the combat when we're shielding ourselves from enemy attacks the closer their attack is to landing the less posture damage it'll do to us and the more it'll do to them if we get the deflection in perfectly our posture won't actually be broken and higher level enemies often rely on us being in a full posture bar mode and having to play perfectly to keep us on our toes demon souls in dark souls had a parry mechanic where we could stagger the enemy by timing our parry correctly the moment the enemy weapon started moving towards us was generally the time to initiate the parry this is about the same window as sakura gives us for deflections but mastering this here is made more difficult both because wolfe is more vulnerable than his soul's predecessors and because the game likes to cheat its attack timings animators are taught to use windups to communicate the impact of an action and sakiro loves to cheat out these windups just a little little bit longer than you think so an enemy will pull out a sword slash with it and then bring it above his head for a downward slash but it'll hesitate for like a fraction of a second to throw off our timing this can be frustrating when you're just learning the ropes but it's actually very beneficial because you can use this window to recover some posture by keeping your defenses up new sakura players are often taught to rapidly press the deflection in order to block enemy attacks more successfully but this is actually a really bad habit that everyone will have to unlearn when they encounter a lock on progress that cannot be overcome with this tactic the issue is that spamming the deflect button will reduce the number of frames the deflection counts for if you press it once from an unguarded position you'll have about half a second of deflection usually 30 frames but i'm playing on a ps4 like a noob so 15 frames and if you spam it each press will give you fewer frames until it bottoms out at seven three and a half for me that's just a bit over 0.1 seconds which is about how long it takes to blink aside from observing the enemy attacks there are also audio cues we can base our deflections on which might actually be the better strategy because humans react faster to noise than we do to visual stimuli i think if you're judging the combat systems on how deep they are or on how much enjoyment you can get out of them then sakiro's blows souls and bloodborne's is so far out of the water that it's not even in the same league not the same sport really sakura's combat is much more refined than it was in previous games but i don't think these are necessarily the best standards to judge the system on demon souls combat was not about engagement in its own right it was a vehicle to deliver the oppressive atmosphere home same in dark souls bloodbornes was doing this too but it also incorporated the rallying mechanic to make the player more aggressive to get them into the head of a bloodthirsty hunter who was saved from blood drunkenness solely because they had a relationship with a magical dog sakiro's combat is getting the player into the headspace of a ninja and i think it's as successful at this as previous games were at directing the player to engage with the theme of their combat systems were but on top of that i also think sekiro's combat is much more fun to engage with and i think it's better designed from the perspective of the game scaling up in difficulty as it goes along to get a good idea of what i'm saying bloodborne's very first enemy was a skirts beast and in that game's final level the baseline complexity of the enemies didn't have their move sets be harder to read or anticipate than reading and anticipating the skirts beasts was there are more kinds of crazy encounters after the menses ritual like the amygdala laser beams but generally speaking and this goes from demon souls to dark souls 3 enemy difficulty rose throughout the games chiefly by the numbers the enemies had assigned to them getting bigger rather than them becoming more difficult to anticipate sakura reverses this the numbers behind the enemies still get higher but the difficulty of the late game has more to do with the actual fights becoming tougher and the variety of enemy attacks status ailments and approaches we have available to us at any given time going up i said in my video on it that i thought bloodborne might have been the end point of how complex that game's combat system could get at the end of the previous games increased difficulty often boiled down to you having to wait longer for the enemy to deplete their moveset you dealing less damage to them and you taking more damage from them that limitation did make for a lot of creative encounters in those games but i think the numbers can only be tuned so high before you first get diminishing returns and eventually it just becomes annoying to play through see the ringgit city but sakura's new combat system did not come for free in all of these games the depth of the late game is built on top of the fundamentals of the early game and for sakuro this means front loading a lot of the growing pains the extreme entry level to sakura is necessary because the core of the combat needs to be there from the get-go and since the core is so extensive and because build paths are optional which means everything must be completable without ever getting an upgrade the whole game needs to work with only the opening basics and since the game gets as complex as it gets that means scaling up the early game with the late game i understand why the game got as much negative feedback as it did because it did take me until the guardian ape for the combat system to click for me the first time but i think that once you get it sakiro just lands it's not all that rare to see the realism of a given game be underserved to make the thing play better sakura employs many of the gaming staples like a wolf has infinite stamina and how the ostensibly large land of ashina is immensely cramped and has no navigation paths outside of the ones which take us the player to where we need to go but there are some other creative liberties and lack thereof with reality which a director of a potential sequel might want to consider to better smooth out the experience i think from software's environments are generally speaking very appealing and the eastern architecture employed here in asiana castle is quite nice looking but and prepare for some nitpicking because the roofs protrude outwards as much as they do they make it harder than maybe it should be to climb them because the ledge grab sensitive collision object is stationed so far away from the wall the roof rests on top of and which you'll likely use to get that wall jump to the roof it's not hard to climb the roofs and the grapple sure does help but it's harder than it has any reason to be one suggestion would be to physically lower the heights of the roofs and hope players won't notice the strangely small upper floors for houses another would be to have the let's grab script be a bit more sensitive on these ledges to magnetize a player trying to grab to them a bit more towards them that might bring its own issues though since the let's grab is the same button as we used to vacuum up the loot so if we're running on rooftops and trying to fetch drops we might accidentally get snapped to letches we didn't want to climb up on in this case the developer would have to consider whether they'd prioritize the convenience for climbing or whether it's more important that the player can simply internalize the mechanics for one grab function and know that its parameters so reach speed etc will be applicable for the entire game maybe another solution would be to have the vacuum looting mapped to a different button or to just be automatic i don't know about either of those options though because sakiro is already pretty heavy on the controller real estate and if the looting were automatic i'd probably miss triggering the vacuuming manually sheenan castle will conclude with the second fight against kenichiro and after that fight the mid game will begin in full the game is actually pretty deceptive about that because it is possible to complete both the shampoo temple area and meebu village before fighting kunichiro we can also make our way to the door leading to the bridge we fall down from to reach the sunken valley in the room where we fight the long-armed centipede giraffe and for a first-timer it'd actually be smarter to finish those areas first because after gennichiro is defeated here the game will raise the prices for spirit emblems and you really want to stock up on those i actually have no idea what the prices are increased and i think it's one of the worst design decisions in the entire game the core concept of playing like a ninja and using versatile tactics is undermined a lot when we also have to start grinding out some extra cash to afford some shurikens quick heads up because i know many of you like to watch these videos when you're going to sleep a loud noise is coming if you've watched any of my videos you'll know that i'm the first guy to defend resource scarcity as a way to make gameplay more decision focused i'm famously the guy who still prefers demon souls healing to dark soulsis i'll elaborate on this later when we discuss healing don't worry but in this instance i think the resource management approach was completely wrong in fact i'm actually not sure why we even have to buy spirit emblems it feels to me like these things would probably work better if they operated like the astis flasks or helen gortz here and automatically regenerated i think if these things were free it would take the sting out of experimenting more with them and learning to incorporate them into our playstyle and i think players would have learned to appreciate the strategic depth the prosthetic tools offer even more if the game is about playing as a ninja then i think the costs associated with the spirit emblems are just getting in the way of experimenting further i think pricing them was completely the wrong decision and increasing the cost as the game progresses and we should be learning to become more dependent on using the prosthetic tools is baffling to me but i suppose i shouldn't complain too loudly considering how easy it would have been for trump to shift the game with the old weapon durability mechanic intact this all being said i genuinely wonder if there was a reason for the setup we have being the setup we have i wonder if it's a solution to a problem which the team discovered in play testing which i can't see because i've not played the game with free spirit emblems i understand limiting how many we have on hand at a given time because the player needs to engage the enemy the prosthetic tools are just supplementary options at our disposal but if you think there was some issue with the spirit emblems refilling once we rested at a sculptor's idol i'd be interested to know as is to me it comes across as just a vestigial design philosophy from their more resource driven rpgs and if we're on the topic of questioning why certain gameplay options are not available i'm not sure why the gunfort key is locked behind beating kunichiro exactly since it just takes us to the guardian 8 boss and nothing that happens there will contradict the narrative that geniciro is still controlling the castle but there you go this game's progression layout should be familiar to anyone who's played dark souls 1. the early game there was much more open but both games reset the difficulty curve after a climactic fight in a castle and both games then tasked you with entering areas which branch off from the more linear path from the beginning also some of those late game areas are completable in the early game but are still adjusted for late game damage values and general difficulty both games also begin with someone throwing something down to our protagonist initiating their adventure and both end with us fighting a legendary king the system behind the narrative progression in sakura is nothing remarkable if you've played a few video games you know this setup by heart you navigate environments then you open locks locks being anything that impedes progress be it a puzzle dissolve actual locks to open or as is mainly the case here killing a boss what's interesting to me is that the narrative does not branch based on the order in which we will come to complete the post ashina castle levels that being meepu village sempu temple and the sunken valley and the path to each of these but it makes sense when you consider that the core players in the story are not making their decisions based on the immediately recent occurrences in those places i do think it's a big missed opportunity to not lean more on npc's stories branching to fit our progression through the world though some can like kotoros and gentlemen's based on where we send them but i'm more thinking about npc quests organically branching rather than us making boolean kotoro with anayama the peddler equals true choices for the npcs to follow so something like meeting a younger shinobi in the early game who is abandoned by his master and comes to admire wolfe and will follow us to the first post-castle area we go to in hopes of becoming a stronger warrior and will then base their fighting style on the region he followed us to so maybe he'd mimic the monkeys of the sunken valley like the sculptor did in his youth maybe he'd study the fighting style of the senpu monks or maybe he'd base his fighting style on the carps in meepu village then in the end game when we're fighting the interior ministry we could find the shinobi near the ashina castle where he'll have a glorious final battle and make his former master proud actually i don't know if this specific story would work because it might undermine the running subtext of the competing religions if we had another shinobi who would just sponge off of any culture and then be welcomed back in ashina castle but i think more npc's stories like this one would have gone some ways to adding replay value to the game sakura does not have as many play styles as souls or bloodborne because it really doesn't lock any style away from the player if you spend two to three hours grinding you can have enough skill points to be adapted at everything not master necessarily but adapt for those last light weapons no prosthetic tool comes at the trade-off of another one meaning you can create a maximalist playthrough where you obtain almost everything and can make full utility of nearly every playstyle alteration the game throws our way because of this i think zakirow has less replay value than his predecessors and i think being able to toy around more with npc stories could have made revisiting the game a bit more exciting because you could see it in a slightly different light based on the alternate choices you make and how those choices ripple through the rest of the game and i think this lack of more vibrant and versatile npc quests also hurts the game's dragon rot mechanic because the npc stories we have aren't of great mechanical significance so you might not actually care that the sick npc's stories are locked from progress until you heal them and to clarify when i say npcs i'm not talking about kuro i'm not talking about german frampt or the monumental either i'm talking about the optional people in the world who have stories to play out during our adventure which we can to varying levels participating of the opinion that sakura's npc quests are pretty solid for the most part but that the game is pushing a boulder up a hill all throughout because the progression layout of the game isn't capitalized on as much as i think it could have been to this day i think dark souls 1 was brum's best outing at npc questlines and it's not so much because the npcs there were better designed in fact they were largely just imported from demon souls but because the layout of the world had us organically cross paths with them as often as we did because they kept cropping up in firelink's ryan and we had to go there numerous times in the course of completing the game it's the hub to the early game and some late game areas also connected to it so we were always going back there and since the npc quests advanced with the state of the game's progression or because of some actions you'd performed in the world it was a great structure for organic npc storytelling demon souls had this too with a nexus but it had fewer npcs and the disjointed layout of the world didn't exactly make it feel as well designed as it was in dark souls bloodborne for my money was the worst at this because the npc stories there are mostly centered around the tomb of urden and the game has no mandatory reason for us to ever revisit that area after defeating vicar amelia in the early game the actual hub of that game the hunter's dream didn't allow for npcs to go there and the npc stories were largely uninteresting anyway so it just fell flat to me that is until the old hunter's dlc game in that expansion we progress in a linear sense and are walking backwards in time to reach the origin of the yharnam curse and the npc quests there were fitted to this more straightforward format and they propped up the mystery angle in the best ways this is simon the seeker of secrets and breidor the church's athen sakura's world is more akin to bloodborne's is than it is the other fromsoft games but the world progression layout plays out a lot more like it did in dark souls 1 what with the mandatory quest having a more free-flowing nature in that we could complete the segments of the main story in a different order and while the quests we have here in sekiro are mostly very well fitted to the world layout the issue is that the ones which play out organically in the world mostly don't actually go anywhere and the ones which are stationary are asking us to reload areas constantly which isn't the strength of the game for the most part we're either meeting a dying soldier in a level who then dies quest over or we're going to some temple and exhausting dialogue for five minutes while reloading the map in 90 second intervals and i am once again complaining about this because it's something i really think would have been easy to improve on from bloodborne because the world layout here is actually much better than it was there i feel and these quests don't even need to have any grand finales scripted at the end it can be as simple as a family trying to get back home to meebu village and then you find their corpses at the entrance when you get there or a monk we could meet in the early game who was on a journey to retrieve some texts coming back to ashina who winds up being disheartened by the state of the senpu monastery when he gets there i'm not 100 sure how the game loads levels so i don't know how much extra work it is to fit these npc stories in but i think the work that goes into them must be worth it because i think npc quests are one of the less talked about strengths of these games i've now cleared the path to genituro are still some things to do in the ashina castle parameters so rather than fight kinichiro right away i'm gonna go unlock a few warp points go back to the moon viewing tower from the beginning and i'm gonna go fetch gobu's broken horn and while i do this i'm going to talk about the idea of impurity as it relates to these games because it comes up a lot and will be integral to understanding the story to come a reoccurring motif in these games is that power manifests from up high and then descends across the land bringing with it prosperity because as it flows through the world it picks up the impurities in its way there is a problem with this however and that is that impurities are not eliminated only moved and if you think of this power which comes from on high as light or water then a lot of the imagery in these games makes a lot of sense in dark souls the highest peak on the map was anor londo actually was seath's tower but that's basically in anor londo so why split hairs and anor londo was associated with light but below the city of the gods we had the cities of the undead and if we crept further and further down things got filthier got more impure and corrupt undead berg's sewer system the depths housed a dragon who had been corrupted by the impurities it had imbibed in its life and the sewer system itself was a mechanism for moving impurities from undead burke to somewhere further down and that somewhere was blighttown an area characterized by parasites and filth and low frame rate it was it was enemies that threw feces and the like and even further below that there was the demon ruins and isilit and the demons in dark souls were many of them carrying an impurity filth visual motif think how much insectoid and parasitic imagery there was there but below anor londo we also had new londo a human city which had been absorbed by the dark and become corrupted there was also oolacile which had been conquered by the dark and become corrupted at the end of the flow impurities begin to stagnate they just wind up somewhere and become a source of corruption i talk about this idea almost every time i talk about a fromsoft game because it's an idea which they go back to over and over again in demon souls the valley of defilement was where impurities and undesired things wound up in bloodborne the exposed central yharnam sewer area housed filthy enemies and this idea of flow versus stagnation was even seen in the layout of that game's dreamlands where the nightmare of mensis was stacked taller than any other area in the game leading to the nightmare frontier the frontier of the nightmare of menses from which we could see the fishing hamlet from which we could look down below a great body of water to see yharnam which itself was built on top of the chalice dungeons that world was vertically stacked with the celestial great ones residing on top in the dreamlands human beings living in the waking world and thumerians living in the chalice dungeons that game's story happened because humans started digging around in the chalice dungeons and brought with them the blood of the great ones which had the power of making physical forms mutable but since humans weren't enlightened enough to guide the process people just became beasts they became corrupted i've said much about this theme on this channel already so sorry if i'm repeating myself but the japanese word for this idea is ke gare literally translating to impurity or corruption and is applicable in both physical and spiritual context if you murder somebody you obtain impurity and that corpse will become a seed pad of maggots and other impurities meaning the corpse has become a source of kegare if you do not cleanse yourself after obtaining kegare you begin to spread it switching over to a water analogy rain comes down from heaven and is clean it runs through as a river and cleans the land of impurities but eventually the rivers run still and it is in those still waters that impurities stack and begin to attract other impurities like how parasites hatch their eggs in still waters because they won't be carried away by the stream stagnation becomes rot another way to look at kegare is to think of it in terms of boundaries so feces are not impure when they are inside of the body because that's their proper place same with blood but once this boundary is crossed you get kegare and proper cleansing is required to mend the crossing off these boundaries i talked briefly about this earlier but every miyazaki game with the possible exceptions of the rosine and armored core 4 i haven't played those so i wouldn't know is about the corruption of the world and the horrors which ensue until things are said right again in demon souls a land awoke the old one and brought the soul arts back in dark souls gwyn corrupted the natural order of the world to artificially prolong his age of fire in bloodborne the scholars of birkenworth later healing church began experimenting with the old blood they found in the chalice dungeons corrupting the physical state of those who drank it transforming them into beasts sakura's story is about how the legacy of an immortal bloodline which should have never come to japan has corrupted the institutions and peoples who've come into contact with it it's about how kenichiro's desperation to save his motherland from the invasion of the central forces induced him to approach and embrace heretical arts which corrupt the nature of the land and those who live in it and another way we see kekare in the game is in dragonrot wolff was gifted immortality by kuro but the immortality came at a price that is wolf's blood becomes stagnant and lacking resurrective powers of its own it simply absorbs the life force of the people around him and the more we resurrect the less life force we have to leech off the idea here is that immortality is parasitic and this theme will crop up a few more times in this game note though that it's true death that causes this the kinds that have us respawn near the sculptor's idols this disease dragon rot is one way from software has gamified keigarei this cutscene signals that the player has died enough times for the disease to spread full disclosure i actually got it to play way back when i got killed off screen in the great serpent section but i thought i'd save it for when the dragon raw talk began in earnest the way it works is that after a certain amount of deaths the player will obtain rot essence items which describe the npcs who have become sick and until the player manages to cure the dragon rot that npc's quest line cannot progress in addition to unlocking npc story progression dragon rot also lowers unseen aid unscene 8 is one of those mechanics which i think might just exist for the ludo narrative because it doesn't actually change all that much when you're playing i like it but because death always has a penalty getting unseen 8 never removes the despair of losing xp and zen only lessens it somewhat the idea with this is that the buddha or some high buddhist being grants wolf certain odds at protection which will make it so that he doesn't lose a certain amount of xp or sen when he dies the first npc to obtain dragonrot will always be the sculptor probably this is a gameplay consideration because he's the only npc the player is guaranteed to know and have access to early on in the game where most if not all players will be dying for the first time story wise though i think it's fitting that it's him that gets it because he's wolves surrogate in the previous story which took place in this country the dragonrot subplot is a good showcase of the strength of resting a story on the characters players encounter in the game rather than just the passive lore if a player has been struggling a lot to advance in the game then it might upset them to see the sculptor become ill because he's been so valuable in giving us prosthetic upgrades he won't die from dragon rot and he'll tell the player as much but i think the moment where we wake up and he talks to us about the disease we'll have some players a bit worried even if it's just for a moment waking up in the dilapidated temple right after dying will likely nudge most players to ensure that death will spread the illness but for good measure emma was placed outside to explain as much and to elaborate a bit more on the exact mechanics of dragon roth to curious players comparing the npc setup in our central hops insecure hops because there's more than one to the comparison hops in demon souls bloodborne and dark souls 2 and 3 is interesting because of how much more progression there is in the life of the sakura characters dragon rod alone is a bigger subplot than anything going on in bloodborne's hunter's dream and while demon souls nexus dark souls 2's majula and dark souls 3 spiraling shrine had more events to engage with i feel those are less successful in actually making me care about the people there because they aren't as fleshed out as the characters in sekiro are and because sakiro does more with less the nexus majula and firelinks ryan in dark souls 3 all let you send characters there to engage with sakura has one character who can show up in the dilapidated temple and that's fujioka the info broker who's a vendor i don't know if this is what makes the dilapidated temple a strong hop or if the strength comes from the characters which reside here but regardless i'm quite fond of this area i do wonder though what deeper ramifications for dragonrot might have done to the experience and the places we visit if you put a gun to my head i'd say that the dragonrot mechanic doesn't impact the game nearly as much as a similar mechanic that being world tendency did in demon souls but it's a bit of an unfair comparison in that while both systems are gamifying the idea of kegare of corrupting impurity demon souls also had character tendency meaning the game had this show up in both character interactions and in the world we explored whereas sakura's dragon rot is only relevant for certain npcs i'm breaking up the playthrough a little bit by heading to the hirata estate before finishing off kinichiro because i want to make as much money to stock up on as many spirit emblems as i can before the prices go up but there's another reason i'd like to tackle this area fairly early on and it's because the herata story is important to the main plot i talked about earlier how it might have made more sense story wise to start the game here wolf's memory issues seem to be a way for the game to have him be a bit of a blank slate to make him serve as a bit of a self-insert for the player but when he has conversations which draw upon knowledge from this place it can feel very disconnecting because he's acting on information the player might not have at that time so if you think about the interaction we have with owl in ashina castle later on the game seems to assume that the player is familiar with what happened here fromsoft isn't above wake storytelling but this sort of stuff is not vague as much as it is just bizarrely chopped up if you look at bloodborne everything that connected to the main game which was important to understanding the story with the exception of the old hunter's dlc was on the main path through the game or if we look at dark souls that game's main narrative is a front created by gwyn and maintained by his associates like france who are duping the player into linking the fire and it's not unless you actually break away from the intended path that you can uncover the truth of the world sekiro doesn't do this now i will note that with the exception of hirata this game has no large optional area like most of its predecessors liked to include so that might explain why everything here connects back to the main plot but even if that's the case i still think hirada is really weirdly inserted into the experience considering it could have easily been made into a main path maybe with wolf and kuro helping one another remember the events after we defeat kenichiro i'm not saying that would make the game better i actually think breaking up the two time periods of the story is a cool way of letting the player jump between them but i don't like the way a huge chunk of the story is relegated to optional content and then largely spoiled in the main game should the player not figure out how to get here interestingly although i don't think this was ever the opening area to the game there are some weird design choices which give a bit of credence to that idea for one herada arguably operates about as well as a tutorial as the tutorial we actually got did it's not as streamlined maybe not as user friendly but it still has a lot of functions front loaded with a gradual rise in the overall challenge both paths front load a bunch of stealth options but only hirata has swimming both paths teach us how to fight enemies but only hirata has bowmen and status ailments both paths teach us how to climb but only herata's climbing sections feel essential to the environmental design whereas the cliff area in the ashina reservoir opening tutorial to me feels like it could have been tacked onto a pre-existing area last minute of course in the tutorial we got we had the wall shimmying mechanic which we don't get here and we fight early game kinichiro and late game kinichiro and in the same spot which bookends the experience quite nicely the extent to which the herata estate is a real place was a long subject in a previous draft of this script but since it more or less boils down to don't think too hard about it i think that's likely the best way to leave that conversation interestingly though this isn't the first time fromsoft has given us one of these dream memory places which is both real and not dark souls 2 had the giant's memories dark souls 3 had the end of the world which we could rewind from it also had the whole untended graves area and bloodborne had the chalice dungeons where we could fight long since dead entities and past versions of some which still lived in the world of sakura meditative journeys just have a physical component which is how we can explain the folding screen monkey fight later on as well as the confrontation with the sakura dragon much later on there's another interesting design quirk running throughout this area which makes me think it might have made more sense at this area had been the opening tutorial and that is that it's the only environment in the game seemingly designed without the grapple hook in mind so if i wanted to i could go from the bridge near the opening of erada all the way to owl without ever using the grappling hook the only mandatory uses of it to reach lady butterfly are to jump from the opening area to reach the first sculptor's idol and to either hook shut up the branches in the river to get the makiri muk skip or to hook shot on top of the little shrine things after talking to owl and if this had been the tutorial the idea might have been that we would actually play through the level on foot and by climbing i think it's notable that this area contains a shortcut in the giant's gate that we would navigate it by foot and by climbing and then we could return later on and then use the grapple hook to fully explore it i didn't explore much of the datamined content which has been found for sakura when making this video though so i don't know if there was ever anything to this or whether i'm just reading something into the game it might be best just to leave stuff like this to the data mining community who have actual answers what i will say though is that i think hirada is one of the better themed levels in the game and i think in spite of our zippy movement the alterations made to the environmental design managed to stand out and actually impart a sense of progression through an area in turmoil so when we entered it's raining heavily and then the first notable piece of architecture was the bridge running over a large river in the fight i just finished i picked up the flame barrel needed to make the flame and shinobi prosthetic tool and it was actually located within the bonfire so at the start there is a big focus on water with some little sprinklings of fire note also that the archers used flaming arrows which hit with a burn status affliction and that there's a lot of oil items to be found then as we'll continue to progress into the herada estate the balancing of water and fire is going to tip a bit further into fires court with water still being represented with a running river not quite as large as the one at the start but fire being shown where we meet owl then when we fight jusso there's an even smaller body of water and every house will be a flame and then finally during the lady butterfly boss the whole arena will be on fire with no water to be seen i don't know if there's any actual significance to this but i think it makes for a good and dynamic feeling map which is a fun enough reason to design a level like this in and of itself the idea with the hirada estate is that this is where the hirara family lives shocking and the hirada family are likely led by john hirada name unknown who fought under ishin during the ashinaku and was rewarded with nobility the idea with the other houses on the estate is that those are where the herata's samurai live and like how the heradas are a family loyal to isian these samurai are a class loyal to the hiradas some probably being blood relatives in our first meeting with kinichiro he stated that he had not seen kuro since kuro's uncle's funeral and that uncle he spoke of might have actually been jon hirada with kuro being the son of someone in the hirada elite class i noted earlier that his name means ninth son and in spite of him having so many older brothers he was almost certainly a bigger deal than them because he obtained the dragon's heritage and the choice of wolf as a shinobi is no joke either wolf's father is the shinobi of ishinashina the most powerful man in the region arguably the entire country and owl's play of having wolf not be here for the invasion is tactical in that the disappearance of the divine air could be pinned on wolf if everything went sour the herada story is mostly told in environments but we also have some more traditional quests or if not quests character encounters to fill us in on what's going on like the npc who nuts just to the area where the shinobi acts could be found like anayama or the people in the houses when it comes to storytelling from doesn't give us quest locks at least they didn't by early 2022 when i'm making this video future watcher so their encounters quests and stories obtain a transient sort of quality and i think this is why they're more linear and undetailed undetailed compared to more hardcore rpg quests arm detailed nature doesn't hurt them i think that if a banner popped up every time we started a quest which said something like lone samurai quest started or find the monkey's axe it'd sell these quests as more integral to the game and i think players would end up not liking them as much considering they'd be much smaller and less interactive than the hypothetical banner would have suggested but because they are so subdued they feel more like wallpaper than ornaments i mean that in the sense of they are there to give flavor to the world rather than the world existing to prop them up and i really appreciate sakiro going for more of these sorts of optional npc quests even when they don't have much in terms of material rewards the chambered layout of the hirada estate makes for more open-ended combat since we can come at things from more than one angle and there's usually more than one elevation for us to play on in spite of the shake-ups made to the combat insecure the philosophy is still true to what we had in souls it's a system built for one-on-one encounters where the player is sometimes asked to leverage their situational awareness and heightened mobility compared to the enemies to deal with mobs bloodborne had already sped up the fighting from souls and sekiro takes this into overdrive but because of the grapple hook the prosthetic tools the stealth climbing jumping and general elevation-based gameplay shenanigans there's much more strategy than before and for level design these new tricks means levels are more open than ever before and i think the herada estate has a really strong creative through line in terms of offering good challenges sakiro is pretty good at this in general but it's very apparent in the hirada estate level maybe because it has so many optional paths if you think of the environments in a game in terms of the systems which prop them up and the player and enemy behaviors they facilitate you can really start admiring good level design when you see it the stealth options in sakura basically amount to eating a gachin's sugar or using the spirit fall of the same name hiding behind some level geometry like walls or shimmying on ledges and if you're lucky sometimes there's some plant life to crouch around in the intent of the combat system made it so that stealth options always had to be somewhat integrated into every area it's not the deepest system nor is sakiro really a stealth game but being able to dip in and out of combat is essential to the ninja fantasy and so there was more than likely a rule for level design that they include some options for sneaking around and the in-game contextualization of these options is often very interesting the ashina outskirts had some rocky outcroppings constructions and plant life to get lost in the castle had rafters and rooftops but what makes the stealth options so fun in the herada estate is that they're all sight paths so rather than dumping us into a large manner this area is actually just a really long path from the start of the river all the way to owl but there are locked gates and a boss to get around and the stealth options are mainly located in the branching paths from this main road like the walled of little houses for the samurai and around the main road like the flowers where we fought the shinobi hunter or how there's branch grapple points all around the path in the bamboo forest we'll be fighting a lone shadow enemy soon and he's actually the biggest tell early on that the assault on hirata is not as straightforward as it seems the story goes that bandits led by juzo the drunkard invaded during the night and burned the estate down killing everyone they found there are a few occasions in our track through this place where it is hinted in overt and subtle ways that something bigger is going on people think the timing of the invasion was too convenient and looking at the event it seems a bit too organized to be the work of some random bandits we are left a bit in the dark the first time through though astute players will likely have some lingering questions but like i said the biggest giveaway we have right now as to what's actually happening is the lone shadow enemy here guarding the missed raven feathers these guys are the elite agents of the interior ministry and their hand in the destruction of hirata estate should raise some questions but as we'll find out later the interior ministry is actually being played by owl he's the one who's really leading the charge to destroy the estate because he wants to acquire the dragon's heritage for himself he's roped the interior ministry into the endeavor probably because he knows these guys will do anything to her legion as for the bandits i think the idea is that they're good fall guys in case things go wrong them and wolf owl's idea was to kidnap kuro but lady butterfly beat him to it she's going to try and use her powers of illusion to trick kuro into conscripting her so owl has locked her in the basement and decided to burn her to death knowing kuro will survive the ordeal but wolf's emergence into the scene was an unexpected course of events because wolff was sent by owl to the dragon spring pilgrimage during the banded assault wolf is kuros shinobi but owl has him obey a corrupted bushido code which prioritizes the word of the father over the lords anyways wolf made his way back in time to see the assault and when owl sees as much he realizes that he can use wolf to hopefully take out or at least damage lady butterfly faster than she can trick kuro in conscripting her to his oath and then he can just destroy the survivor and kidnap kuro and have himself be put under his oath so he can obtain immortality except kuro chooses to come back to the burning basement after the fight wolf has with lady butterfly to rescue wolf conscripting him to the oath which is something i will never planned for in the aftermath of this whole debacle kuro was found and sent to genichiro's care where he was probably taken pretty well care of he's a noble after all for the three years until wolff rescued him at the start of the game in the interim between the hirata assault and the start of the game yanichiro had not become desperate enough to attempt to weaponize kuro's immortality and i don't think the timelines of events are necessarily a coincidence wolfe had spent the last three years trying to get to kuro but had been unable to when we first saw him at the game's start he already had the white hair of dragon rot so he had probably died many times before we got to control him at some point he made his way near the moon viewing tower got caught beaten to crap maybe even killed and then thrown down the well the memory problems which plague wolf have to do with the damage he's taken over the course of trying to reunite with kuro and the timelines converging so neatly what with wolf getting to kuro just when genitaro decides he needs kuro is probably because ishin heard guineachuro's plan and decided it was too far gone and sent emma to get wolfe back into action but wolf's entry into ashina castle just so happens to have him destroy all of the ashina defenses leaving them very vulnerable to the interior ministry's assault and whether or not owl planned for that and then assumed wolfe would stay loyal when the two meet again in ashina castle i'm not sure but the whole setup seems weirdly favorable considering owl's plans this meeting with him is very brief but i think it's designed well enough to be memorable for when we encounter owl again specifically i'm talking about the presentation the fiery environment not again i mentioned the tight visual theming of hirata earlier the fiery environment is very impactful and owl himself is very large so he stands out for most npcs will meet in the game the first encounter with a video game character can be the most important because it sets the baseline on which we build the continued relationship with them and it's what we juxtapose their storylines to character introductions like most things are very understated in fromsoft games but they utilize every feature at their disposal to tell the stories and in the initial encounter the posing is something worth discussing for owl i think the way he was posed and how he conducted himself makes him immediately read a sympathetic but also very honorable and i think the image of him as a defeated old man really helps sell him as sympathetic early on which is great for the juxtaposition later on when we learn that he's faking it the poses characters have are often very defining for who they are or for who the game wants you to think that they are at a given point in previous games this communication was sometimes a bit clunkier because the characters we met in the world were using the same animation rick as the player and so often times their poses were once the player skeleton could be configured into having but this was also the approach we saw there when you need to say a lot but you have such limited resources to say it you get creative think of how striking an image the crest fallen warrior defeated sitting is how patches is zika pliad hunch always poses him so that he's angled below the player like he's some sort of gollum-esque creature to be pitied how solaire's introduction had him be plopped down facing the sun because that's his whole spiel or how in demon souls the holy man saint urbain was introduced in a cave which we can also get thrown down into after being promised riches inferring that's how he might have gotten stuck it's not just the actual poses it's oftentimes the environments and the inferences we make about that character from the environment which is important just goes to show that there is a lot of code insideration done behind the scenes to make the experience as engaging for the player as possible which the player will likely passively gain a lot from even though they might never consider it for sakura when i think of the sculptor i immediately see someone who is defeated and i think the postseason really adds to that when we first met kuro he was reading which is an introduction post we don't see a lot of in these games interestingly owl is one of only three characters in the entire game which wolf will kneel to when he talks to them the other two being kuro and ishin and that's another showcase of posing being used for characterization later on in the game after completing the senpu temple area we'll unlock the puppeteering jutsu art which will allow us to take control over enemies if we manage to perform a backstab death blow on them i think that the senpu temple is the best area to head to for those who are struggling to advance early on because it's entirely unlocked once you first reach asiana castle play only locks on progress or bosses it's relatively easy to grapple your way through the bosses are very easy and mostly because finishing it rewards us with that ninjutsu art if you're struggling the puppeteer ninjutsu will allow you to create makeshift allies for certain boss fights which will smooth over some of the more difficult curveballs the game throws our way from time to time interestingly though this here is the only boss in the entire game where we are gifted a fight companion free of charge i mean i suppose there are some warriors with us fighting the blazing bull and there are some interior ministry goons in the demon of hatred fight but they're there to die right away and they aren't allies as much as they are just there when the boss starts fighting i think nogami gensai's assistance here might have been included because after extensive enough play testing fromsoft found that the juico boss fight was very unsatisfying when confronted in a conventional manner i've seen in the online discourse that some players have had problems defeating juzo himself even after clearing out the enemies i can see where they're coming from because he can poison the player and he deals a lot of damage with each track of his sword but juiso is really easy to cheese if you just run around him and wait for him to finish an attack animation to get some free hits in and if it wasn't for the enemies around him i think struggling players would have found this out because confronting him would have taken less time and so experimenting with his ai would have been less risky because you wouldn't have had to risk wasting the time clearing out the mobs juico is exploitable and players can feel really smart when we uncover tactics and exploits like this one but during development qa testing almost certainly picked up on it and notified the developers if so then from might have thought about ways of improving the fight and might have ultimately decided that altering his ai wasn't worth the financial investment of assigning to him an extra coding and animation budget and if so just decided to fix him by getting creative like in some of the worst drums of bosses the challenge in this fight comes from the mobs hanging out and fighting alongside the boss as a solo fight justo is very easy but the added enemies alter the engagement from being a sword fight against a slow and clunky enemy into a more tactical assassination challenge and i'm noting now that there are two more versions of this boss we'll fight later on in the game actually three if we fight his reappearance and the revisit to errata and those encounters also surround the player with a bunch of smaller mobs which i think lends cretans to my theory that from was well aware that this boss didn't stack up as a solo encounter in the run-up to the lady butterfly boss we meet the inosuke family which we had to interact with earlier to get the young lord spelchy arm item which we needed to access erada in the first place these two are another example of how good sakiro is at parsing out npcs to contextualize actions to explain the narrative i'm particularly a fan of them because they are both coded to pass away when lady butterfly has died her illusions burnt in osuke nogami's eyes or compelled him to claw them out and it was her illusions that drove the mother to madness so i feel there's a bit of cathartic release in them getting peace after lady butterfly has been dealt with i'd also like to note that this is another example of us being handed an item which is immediately useful the snapseeds we get from inosuke can be used to dispel illusions i talked a bit earlier about spirit emblems and how i think them not being regenerating consumables hindered experimentations with them and i'd add to that that i think the same of items like dowsing powder oil and snapseeds there's a big difference between these and the spirit emblems though and that is that these items are mainly acquired by finding them in the world i enjoy the exploration in sakhiro but i think it's not as good at incentivizing it as its soul's predecessors were and largely i think this is because there's less build customization and less of an investment behind every playthrough and so the relative value of taking a detour here to pick things up if we calculate it with something as tangible let's say money is just lower than it was previously lower but not non-existent i'm not the biggest fan of how they are implemented but i maintain that the lootable items are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting and encouraging exploration since they're plopped down in the environment players can see their glow and they'll likely want to check out what that item is but i think this setup hurts the ninja fantasy because experimentation is costlier and i think the lady butterfly boss is a prime example of this inosuke gave us one snapseed which is not exactly experimentation fodder i'd like to remind everyone watching of the corpse begging on the gate outside of lutwick's boss arena in bloodborne who gave five blood vials every time he was killed to make the economics of fighting ludwig a bit more generous i know i'm coming across as very nitpicky about how this game handles these lesser consumables but i think it's warranted because sakiro is going for a fantasy experience which i genuinely think would have been better served by loosening up the purse a bit when it comes to distributing items the soft tutorial we got for the snapseeds pays off in the second phase of this fight when lady butterfly leans on her speciality and summons illusions to fight wool i think the reason wolf is immune to the madness and hypnotisms she inflicts on other characters might have to do with him having faced her before when she was teaching him how to fight she is tied into the lore of the hidden forest which we'll be revisiting later and yeshin's coup she lai gao fought under ishin when he retook ashina from the central forces and she again lagaol throws away whatever honor she might have had at some point in the reckless pursuit of immortality the arena we fight her in is covered in flames and there's a gigantic statue of the goddess cannon here she is the goddess of mercy and if there's some symbolism to her placement her being on fire might be another example of fromsoft taking for granted the readability of the cultural symbolism they are employing you can read this as the central forces choosing not to show any mercy to the hirara family or the ashina family for that matter the inclusion of the hirata estate chapter is very interesting from a design perspective because it allows for the game's two separate narratives to run in parallel those being one the looming happenings ahead the interior ministries march and the spread of dragonrot and then two what we've talked about throughout hirada the events which have already occurred wolfe is trying to rescue kuro and then fulfill his will of immortal severance but he is also plagued with his failure to rescue kuro in the past and even in his actions in the present wolf is sort of handcuffed as a protagonist in that he doesn't act on his own will and he never has the present narrative is played up with anticipation the past with mystery and intrigue and when they collide in the end game it's really beautiful so in hirada we connect to wolf's past in the main game we connect to its present which is why i think the setup we have for the endings is really beautiful because provided you've obtained the necessary materials for the ending you want the choices are ultimately wolves to make he gets to finally exercise initiative after a lifetime of servitude while i'm not sure how i feel about the revelations in hirada being spoiled in the main plot and how wolves integration of these events can happen off-screen if a player doesn't make it here in their first playthrough i think the setup as is is preferable to one where hirada would be the opening because it allows us to have the two narratives converge rather than follow a linear progression and i think it's better gameplay wise because it opens up the exploration of the game the conclusion that the lady butterfly fight sees wolf get stabbed in the back by owl big spoilers like i said i'm not convinced that errata was the tutorial at some point but i think it's really weird that its conclusion repeats the conclusion to the current tutorial kuro being apprehended by an opposing faction and wolf being severely wounded and left for dead but for the intervention of a third party the sculptor in the tutorial kuro here gifting wolf the dragon's blood and with it the magical powers of rejuvenation if we look at the story in a linear order then we have wolf try to rescue kuro but failing after being defeated only to then three years later attempt to save kuro and being defeated rather than wolf losing his hand here and then wandering the land as a vacabond for three years until he meets the sculptor and is gifted the arm and sets out to redeem himself and rescue his lord or something like that if you structure the game like that then there's no moon viewing tower rescue in the beginning and rather than kuro gifting us a sword whose name is communicating the bond between him and wolf we see that bond established in errada instead with the two saving each other and in that hypothetical version of the game we'd probably not meet kuro again until after we've cleared out the ashina outskirts invaded the castle and made our way to the top of it speaking of which that's precisely where we'll be headed now to finish fighting genichiro the story of kenichiro is the story of tremendous expectations he is the bastard grandson of ishin who was adopted into the ashina family after his peasant mother passed away from that point on kenichiro began to view the very lands of ashina as his mother and he devoted himself to protecting it he managed to rise through the ranks to lead the clan and is currently tasked with saving the land from the interior ministry even though he is lacking the abilities which made his grandfather able to take it in the first place to make up for his lack of strength gennichiro crosses heretical boundaries and employs any and every tactical advantage he can conceive of so he'll conscript giants he'll use the blazing bull he'll master the lightning of tomoe he'll initially screw up trying to but he'll get it to work and most importantly kenichiro will kidnap the divine heir of the dragon's heritage and try to be conscripted into his oath gaining the power of the dragon's blood kinichiro's goal is to create an immortal army to save the land but and this is a big reoccurring theme so pay attention moving forwards kinichiro's actions tend to make things worse and a lot of the corruption we find in our adventure can be traced right back to him or at least right back to the deals with the devils that he made i think that among the voice acting performances kinichiros is my favorite in the game but it comes with a territory of being voiced by the one and only kenziro suda this is completely outside the scope of this video but i've loved his work ever since i first watched yu-gi-oh with the original japanese voices kenichiro is a well-designed boss i think in some interesting ways for example the extended combo attack he does is the same as we can unlock in the floating passage combat art which is also used by the okami women we can find in fountainhead palace the reason being that he was trained by lady tomoe who was an okami warrior herself clashing blades with kinichiro has a real sense of flow generated largely by the game's generous input reading so when we are trading blows with him the game will register our hits and prompt for kinichiro to defend himself even if he might have already started an attack animation but there's always a limit to how many attacks an enemy will defend until they begin striking back and that limit is visually signaled with the large sword collision flash we can still attack after the flash sure but the enemy will begin their counter-attack here so unless you want to get greedy it's best to start deflecting but this isn't the only way our input is read to make combat flow better it's also seen in the mercury counters which the player can perform to deflect stab attacks to deal massive posture damage when an enemy decides on that attack they'll signal it in their animation and with the appearance of the red kanji the interval between the attack starting and it landing is the time we have to trigger the makiri counter and the moment we do the attack will be negated and the enemy and us will be locked into that move this even has some fringe applications when dealing with mobs because you get iframes once you've blocked the counter in it's direction and timing sensitive though so there are times when you'll dodge into the attack and still get hit because the game fails to register that you triggered it this was a very hard move for me to grasp early on because it felt more intuitive for me to wait for the attack to almost land and then do it but the inverse is actually true you want to trigger this as early as you can to guarantee you'll pull it off in the allotted time when clashing katanas getting the perfect deflection off is a very timing precise task but the mikiri counter is more forgiving and i think intuitively it's a bit problematic in that the deflection teaches us to hold back as long as we can whereas the mekiri counter is best triggered right away meaning it runs counter to the timing the deflection mechanic asks of us to get the best results deflecting always rewards players for playing on the racer's edge when it comes to the timing of countering the enemy attacks my favorite version of the input read though and it was in this motion that i realized that this is what the game was doing is when after we've created some distance from kenichiro we heal us healing will trigger kinichiro to pull out his bow and try to shoot us but here's the thing the timing on his aero release is just a bit longer than the actual healing animation but it is also coded i believe to happen the moment we press the dodge button so the moment i finish healing i always have to dodge to clear the arrow if my intuition here is correct it means that i'm actually pulling the shot which i think is pretty funny another component of the fight that i quite like is that it fakes out after you get the second death blow in i think this fight was a big hurdle for a lot of players it certainly was for me and this is where you kinda had to get the game to advance it is possible to cheese out a win against kyobu but kinichiro is cut from a different cloth design wise he can be stunned momentarily by the firecrackers sure but the arena is too small to avoid and he's better at closing the distance than gobo was so he's just gonna be in your face more often the path to genichiro is completely safe and it's very short so if you die a lot getting experimental is not expensive and for the fake god i love it because i think the third phase is exactly why i think many people come to from soft 4 even though they might not like it in a minute to minute the fromsoft games are built around the idea of giving the player a sense of accomplishment after overcoming a difficult obstacle and i think beating kenichiro was made all the sweeter by him having just that one extra face which comes to steal our victory from under us i think a lesser developer would crumble to the pressure of having some sort of checkpoint variable be flipped after the first two death blows against kinichiro had been hit and made it so that the third phase could be fought independently of the first two after we'd unlocked it that setup was actually used for the final bosses of dark souls 2 but for this fight i can't stress enough how right i think it is for the game to have thrown us this curveball if we consider it purely from a gameplay perspective we can say that since we are hitting the large crossroad of the game which will take us to the second act of the story it makes sense for the challenge locking it off from us to be worthy of the upcoming encounters and i also think that ludologically this communicates kenichiro's ferociousness his determination more so than a cutscene possibly could it's one thing having him say he'll cross any heretical boundary to save his country but i think him actually breaking the established rule of the boss encounters and having another go at us after a midfield cutscene makes this character quirkivist come across in the mechanics if you're struggling at this point know that kinichiro's opening thrust attack gives you enough time to heal and still get the mekiri counter off this third face against kinichiro has the environmental design taken a more hostile appearance with less sunlight and snow fog and lightning all being incorporated but this is actually the easiest phase of the fight and things like the timing of the opening thrust that the player is given just enough time to heal are examples of what i think are deliberate design decisions made by from to give us a helping hand at crossing the kenichiro hurdle another difficulty release valve we have in this phase which makes it very easy is the lightning of tomorrow which we can redirect if done successfully geniciro will take a huge chunk of damage and he'll be stunned opening up a safe window for us to heal or do a few more attacks on him of course being hit by his lightning if you miss time things comes with a hefty bit of damage to you so there's a bit of risk versus reward to pursuing this i'm not actually very good at using it myself but the lightning reversal is actually my single favorite mechanic in the entire game at first glance you might assume kinichiro just learned this trick from his mentor lady tomoe but his visual design suggests that she might not actually have taught this to him if we look at the design of the okami women and sword saint ishin the other humanoid fighters who can use this move then we'll see that they all wear fabrics and with the exception of yeshin's helmet which guinea wore in the first phase here by the way with the exception of that helmet and maybe the chest piece of the okami women they all wear non-metal armors kinichiro wore a sort of pancho dealy actually called manto so it might have been hard to see but he was armored with some sort of metal underneath it and the implication from his blackened arms is that he burnt himself bat when he first tried to perform the lightning of tomoe because he was still wearing armor and that the armor might have fused to his skin so he needed to have it peeled off i really like that if it's true because it's very emblematic of him as a character in that his relentless pursuit of more and more power tends to do more damage to him and others in the end than whatever the power was intended to deter or overcome kinichiro manages to rise again because he's crossed the heretical line and used the power of the rejuvenating waters there will be time to talk about those and the sediment later but right now is a good time to get into how the game handles npc interactions i consider this post kinichiro section in the ashina castle to be the worst part of the game so the way npc interactions work is fairly straightforward you go up to them and can press a button to initiate a dialogue every now and then we're given branding choices on where we want an interaction to lead to but that's about it this system has made its way from demon salts all the way to sakura and the only notable difference sekiro makes is that our protagonist will also have dialogue to exchange that doesn't change anything on the interactive side it just means there's more of a back and forth this system is incredibly simplistic and in that simplicity there's a lot of strengths and a lot of limitations the biggest strength of the system i think is that it allowed for wallpapery npcs who didn't serve as time sinks or massive diversions from the experience and were rather just given enough personalities to feel distinct and made for one minute or so little detours for chats these games are very experience ribbon and this simple system focused the npc interactions to congeal to a more ambient experience because there's not a lot of places it can go but that can also be seen as a limitation since we didn't have a voiced protagonist until now character dialogue has had to be mostly self-contained little ramblings of the characters we meet rather than an actual exchange and it makes for writing which feels distinctly distant at least more distant than it would have felt if we would have been able to jump in from time to time the limited choices we were given in dialogues before went some way to remedy this but i actually don't think this is necessarily a bad thing i wouldn't want this dialogue system in every game but i think the distant feel actually works to these games favor mood wise one byproduct of the way it's set up which i do think has capped the expressive range of the games is that it often assumes ignorance from our character in dark souls we could destroy the illusion of gwynevere and that would alter the script certain npcs were given when we interacted with them this was probably easy to implement maybe the actions we performed the destroying the illusion flipped the variable which the npc's read to see how they should approach us or maybe it flipped a variable which had the game loading different versions of those same npcs which were hostile to us rather than friendly but when it comes to non-explicit stuff the games didn't know how to handle our information a lot of the story is in the item descriptions and the level layouts but the games never altered the interactions based on our understanding of the world in bloodborne alfred would gain new dialogue if we have the cainhurst summons in our inventory but we can go to cainhurst and kill logarius and then go back to alfred but there will be nothing changed about how he interacts with us in fact if we prompt him to talk he can recite his second-hand knowledge about cainers than legarius to us and even though we would clearly be more informed than he was the game wouldn't register as much likewise in dark souls 1 we can piece together how the fate of fire linking is actually a trap created by gwyn and the game will have no way of registering it so even though we're fully aware of the lie if we talk to frampt there will be no change the system can't handle a lot of nuance so it relies on the player actually triggering changes in areas or in interactions with the characters having finally concluded the ashina castle chit-chat section i'm gonna hit two birds with one stone and meet our old friend in nosuke nogami to complete his quest as well as help emma find a cure for dragon rod the conclusion for emma will be to have the players sacrifice a dragon's blood droplet at a sculptor's idol if these things are at all related to the sakura droplet an item lady butterfly drops which forms when an oath of immortality fails to form then sacrificing these droplets to restore the life energy of those afflicted with dragon rot might be thought of as a process of reversing the life-draining effects of immortality by giving it up to help those who've succumbed to the sickness rather than having people succumb to the sickness defeat the immortality narratively this works but originally there was a plan to have the player have to manually run around and gift afflicted npcs a dragon rot pellet item which would cure them if you look at zekiro as a game about a shinobi coming to an afflicted land and cleansing it removing and destroying the impurities which have caused it to rot that version of healing dragon rot makes more sense but if you think of sakura as a game without a lot of tedious walking sections then that version probably sounds worse i really appreciate that it's all done in the sculptor's idle menu because i'm not the biggest fan of needing to constantly go back to areas to the other dialogue and hand over some items i also think that system might have undercut the third act's invasion because if we were tasked with going to the npcs we care about to heal them it might have highlighted just how localized the ashina invasion at the end really is and might make the interior ministry come across as less of a threat than what they are meant to be unless of course the npcs would move from their last known location to someplace else like the dilapidated temple there's something else about the hypothetical dragon rock pellets that's interesting to consider though in cut dialogue emma notes that she can create a medicine to cure the sickness in exchange for some of wolf's resurrective powers what i assume that would have meant is that a portion of our pink resurrection orb would be drained to make one of these pellets but i quite like the idea of actually foregoing some benefits of resurrection to make these as an additional difficulty challenge like the demon bell and kuro's charm so maybe wolf would recover resurrective power slower or perhaps he'd revive with only a sliver of his full health something like that i don't think the npcs are ultimately of enough value as is that many players would opt in to that sort of trade-off but i think it's fun to think about regardless going back to our talk on the dialogue systems a lot of nuanced interactions you could reasonably expect for these games to have are simply not there for example in dark souls 1 in new game plus we can wear quinn's entire attire and frant won't register it as weird we can talk to goff wearing ornstein's armor and he won't register it as noteworthy i suppose you can excuse that one because his helmet was filled with a resin which blocked his side but you know what i mean i think what we have is a good dialogue system for the experience the games we're going for don't get me wrong but like everything there's always more you can do with it it's not like those games sell you on their ability to dynamically adapt to minuscule choices you make though so the absence of this more involved system isn't one of those things which just screams at the player the system was fine at delivering but now we get to sakiro and i think it's starting to show its age since its plot is more reliant on npc interactions i think it was the wrong approach to re-incorporate this low range and distant feeling dialogue system and this is actually one of those rare cases where i think cutscenes probably would have been a better option because there's really not enough choice in the system as is to justify the time it consumes i think skipping over all the dialogue i had with kuro emma and eshin in ashina castle takes longer than it would take to skip a single cutscene if that's how this segment would have been presented that might not seem like a big deal to you watching but i actually cut that segment down from a solid 23 minute long version admittedly i exhausted everyone's dialogue there in case i needed the footage so to say it was 20 minutes of standing around and waiting for audio to finish playing might be a bit much but in every replay i've done of the game i've always felt the real deadening of the pace when i reached that area i think it makes sense plot wise to give us a bit of quiet time and i also think the segment did a good job of actually informing the player of where they need to go next but i think the gamification of this quiet time that we are just waiting for people to stop talking or we are skipping over their dialogue to speed through the game is quite clunky feeling i think the extended talking section we had in ashina castle is emblematic of the worst utility of npc interactions conversely though i think black hat badger who we just talked to and bought the loaded umbrella and anti-air death blow from and tengu coming up both showcase the best kind of utility and not just because interacting with both of them is quick i think the system just lends itself better to these sorts of optional encounters than it does the mandatory ones these gates we're walking through are called tori gates and they signify a crossing into a sacred area this path takes us to the serpent shrine which leads into the sunken valley where the holdouts who still worship the great serpents reside i'd like to note that the defining feature of the architecture and constructions in the sunken valley whatever of them there are are notably older than what we see in the rest of the human world or at least it's in a more pronounced state of disrepair statues overrun with apes rope bridges and sunken shrines indicating just how far this clan and this worship has fallen since the arrival of the sakura dragon into ashina the warriors of the sunken valley clan all wear heavy bandages this might just be a reference to studio ghibli's nausicaa of the valley of the wind a studio fromsoft likes to pilfer from but there might also be a medical reason if we look at the sunken valley warriors who are stationed outside of the sunken valley it's notable that they are always isolated from the rest of the enemies they are plopped down in towers and other elevated geometries which might be because they're artillery and function best when they have the high ground but it might also be that it's to prevent the spread of whatever illness they might have another point in that favor is that there's no ashina oil in the sunken manly almost as if they're avoiding any interaction with them the hypothetical illness of the sunken valley clan might originate from the rejuvenating waters and if so then it might culminate in them becoming the centipede enemies they are also dressed in bandages and there will be a centipede boss in the gunfort this area has the religious connotation that its deep valleys and ravines are appropriate places for offering oneself in marriage to the great serpent i wonder if the sunken valley was conceptualized around the serpent or if it was fitted to this place during development this is because the sunken valley is the most uniquely designed area in the entire game considering our core movement scheme no other area has this skewed a ratio between spaces we can actually walk on and space we need to grapple over as the sunken valley does this is a very different kind of mobility challenge from what we see in the rest of the game there's not a lot of environmental hazards to be on the lookout for for most of the game and then we have this massive valley whose walkable region is mostly little cliffs i think it's fun to reverse engineer design decisions like this but often people can be let down the wrong road if they hit their wagon to the wrong horse i theorized that the thinking process behind the sunken valley went something like this we have a giant serpent in our game what kind of level do we need where it makes sense for it to be located in somewhere with a lot of open space well we also have the grappling hook and a plain field will undermine that core mechanic so it must be an open space with a lot of verticality built in so let's go for a huge mountainous crevice and then they playtested this and concluded that it tipped the challenge away from combat and over to platforming and from there they might have chosen to go for sharpshooter enemies here because that's what best can deal with the core mechanics as they are applied to navigating this environment but it might actually have gone the other way around the thinking process might have gone we have just exploded the player's range of movement and with it we've lifted a lot of the design limitations we had to work around in previous games this has altered what kind of areas do and do not feel good to navigate we should build areas which highlight the strengths of the new movement scheme how about one wherein the player has the dodge sniper fire this requires open and exposed areas for the player to run through which need to be broken up with moments of safety so the epin flow of the gameplay isn't disrupted we all remember when we first fought the anor land of archers after all so we'll have open spaces linked with tight cage-like tunnels how about a mountainous crevice it fits all the boxes for these design parameters and then when they were assembling the game they might have initially intended for the serpent only to show up in more scripted encounters like that first one but then realized that the sunken valley level geometry was very much in line with what made for the best serpent levels and decided to make the sunken valley where the serpent hangs out alternatively it might just be that nothing took precedent they were all planned to inhabit the same spot from the get-go it's very easy to think of games as these massive visionary projects which come out fully formed where every area is fully realized in contrast to every other area but that's not the case especially not for fromsoft games bloodborne data mining has hinted that the final area of the game might have originally been a dragon castle accessed in a mountainous region behind the grand cathedral dark souls's lost isolate was changed from a swamp level into a lava level and dark souls 2 might have originally ended in a sunken water kingdom which they reused as the lava castle in the final game suffice to say things get moved around a lot and it's probably better to focus on the ideas which areas mechanics and such are trying to convey rather than the precise nature of how they came about i just finished fighting snake ice shirafuji and although i don't have much to say about her as a character i think there's some interesting points to consider number one the translation of her name might have gotten it wrong rather than her being the eagle-eyed sniper with the moniker snake eyes she is the eyes of the snake she watches over the entrance to the sunken valley to make sure nobody comes for it note that there's another snake eyes boss guarding another entrance to the serpents specifically her arena connects to the house in the cave where the serpents rest we can't actually go from her arena to the serpent it's a one-way connection but in lore you can reason how the connective tunnel might still be something they'd like to keep an eye on another thing i'd like to note is that her name is shirafuji that's going to be important shortly because she's a descendant of the okami women she has a weakness to the poisonous sabi maru prosthetic tool there's often a prosthetic tool which is optimal for dealing with a certain boss or enemy if you're having issues with them this ensures that there's always a way to advance if you're having trouble getting the attack timing right one danger of implementing a feature like this is that you can theoretically collapse the experience into one where the player just continues to experiment with every item until they finally find the optimal ones for the task rather than adapting to the challenge sidenote i suppose this is the best argument i can see for the prosthetic tools being a limited resource you have to purchase in game however i think this setup where there's usually an optimal tool for a given task is very in line with the ninja experience the game is going for and i also think the encounter setups are differentiated enough that even though you might have the optimal tool for a given task there's still the added challenge in figuring out how to make maximum use of it this will often include mapping out your intended path through enemies getting some stealth attacks in and separating some foes from others there are encounters where the use of a single tool or item lets you brute force through but for the most part sakura requires more thought than that for this boss fight i think we have a very fun setup the area is incredibly cramped made more so by the fog which blocks off a huge section of the room and the boss is pretty quick on his feet as well but rather than be a lock on breaking geometry obfuscated disaster i actually think this boss is well balanced around the environment we're fighting in because it directs the player to deflect rather than move around much this boss is easily posture broken with a few deflections but if the room had been bigger i think players might not necessarily have picked up on this what i will criticize here maybe is the name of the boss long arm centipede giraffe is a localization of long arm centipede jira fu the jira foo part of the name is written in karakana which is not a normal way to write a name in japanese indicating that it might be a pun or something like that what i think happened here is that in the narrative this boss is serving under snake eyes shirafuji and took on a name similar to hers so shira fujii becomes jira fu see we're starting the ginsamon kumono quest right now but i don't have much to say about him just yet rather i'd like to talk about the shadow in the well which might very well be the worst boss in the entire game for one getting a free sneak attack death blow on him will be needlessly obtuse we'll first have to exhaust his dialogue then run away to deacro him then we can sneak back down and get the hidden this isn't the only shadow boss we'll come to fight and his moveset isn't actually that hard to read so if you haven't played the game you might not immediately pick up on what it is that makes him uniquely bad considering there's mirror fights of him to come but the initiated know very well what i'm talking about i just celebrated jirafu's boss design being able to make a fast and aggressive enemy play well in a really cramped area now i'm gonna complain about how this guy has the same shtick but none of the refinement jirafu mainly went in two directions at us and away from us this guy on the other hand is all over the place couple that with a tiny fight arena and we're watching the camera struggle to actually show us anything of value most deaths here come about because the player can't see the enemy and counter appropriately i'm not very good at the game in general so i'm chasing the fight but i think it's important to note that the hang-ups i have with this fight are just the way it is set up i think the enemy is fine i think the battle arena is fine and for the most part i also think the camera system is fine it's just when these three meet in this encounter that it misses the mark and i think this fight also showcases just how good the camera system in sekhiro usually is the camera has new features like how if an object obfuscates the view it'll become transparent so that we can keep our eye on the action returning features include the camera tilting downwards from a raised perspective during lock-on to give us a better look at the enemies what with wolf obfuscating the view and all another couple of tricks which they pulled to make reading the enemies easier is that the camera is zoomed out just a bit further than it was in souls and bloodborne and enemies are actually larger than in previous games which might have been intended as storytelling where we're seeing the potent powers of ashina's healing waters in just how big every creature in ashina is think of the giant roosters and the giant bull or the horse which gobu wrote which is much bigger than any japanese horse in the sengoku period would have been but i really think it's a gameplay consideration first and foremost when the player has a manually controlled camera in a third person game the standard setup has its rotation axis be locked to the player character and if you want to see something you can never unsee go and check your favorite games for just how often your player character happens to be slightly shorter than everyone you come across so that your player character doesn't obfuscate the enemies as you're trying to fight them there's a lot of these sorts of tricks in games like how video game walls are usually much taller than walls are in reality also a trick done to accommodate the camera i was talking about long arm centipede jirafu's localized name before setting track on the path to meebu he might have been a victim of the way translations are done for these games where individual translators might be assigned different lists of names for characters and places which may not have any associative imagery to link the name to who the character is and even if there are images translators often do not get a playable copy of the game sent to them so they can't necessarily connect the different ideas they're working with which often leads to the themes being buried a bit dark souls 1 was very straightforward about its central theme of stagnation but it got lost in translation solaire was supposed to say that time is stagnant in lordran but he ended up saying it was convoluted that sounds like a much more pleasing sentence but the word choice stagnant was very important for the idea he was supposed to communicate to the players that early on in the experience dark souls 2 also famously had the god zinder translated to have two different names across different item descriptions yes sandro and zinder are the same god jirafu is written in karakana and i think what went wrong in the translation was that the assigned translator might have thought to jirafu was an animal moniker like okami mujina kawasemi shojo ocho or fukuro them being wolf badger kingfisher orangutan butterfly and owl respectively on this note interestingly long arm centipede senun's name is written in kanji which might mean he's more of an insider to those in power if we assume the name was gifted after they obtained a certain level of deformation rather than being a birth name the difference in writing style katakana or kanji can have some significance when it comes to naming characters and understanding the creative intent behind the character katakana is much less formal than kanji and is how for example an english word would be phonetically translated over to japanese so the japanese translation for giraffe is kirin but if we want to move the word giraffe over to japanese and write it out phonetically it becomes ji ra foo emma's name is written in katakana which has led some people to think she's a foreign descent that makes sense on a cursory glance because if you're not japanese your name would have to be written out in katakana in japan but i actually think that for emma this is supposed to invoke an outsider someone who is mysterious additionally her name might be a reference to the buddhist deity emma oh who is the overlord of jigoku the buddhist hells who judges the souls of men there is much more translation stuff i'll be going over in a bit but for those who've never played the game i just did a lot of warping without giving context to anything i did in the centipede boss room in the garden fort i picked up the large fan but i didn't open up the door to the sunken valley passage instead of proceeding from there i warped back to the ashina reservoir and made my way through the dungeon to get onto the meepu village branch of the game the reason i'm structuring my playthrough like this rather than completing the sunken valley path in a single go is because the branching paths all contain items which are relevant in the other branches so to have the cleanest route through the npc quests without having to do a lot of backtracking this is how i structured it i'm not a fan of having to warp a lot but i quite like the setup here because it builds in replay value by shaking up which quests the game lines up for you to finish in a single go through of an area the next time you play the game the sunken valley branch has the large fan which i need to advance kotoro's quest in senpu temple meebu has the breathing technique i'll need to get the infestation chapter for the divine child of rejuvenation in sempo and sempo has the papajiran ninjutsu which i'll need to get the dried serpents viscera in the sunken valley there is also unlockables in each branch which incentivize players going backwards through the levels to explore a bit the guardian ape drops the finger whistle which is particularly good at dealing with the monkeys of the sunken valley shampoo's papajiran jutsu is used in sempu to reach the great serpent and the mebu breathing technique lets us explore the water in meepo proper rather than fight shirahaki i decided to make liberal use out of arguably the worst exploit in the game and have her poison herself to death this takes about seven minutes to do and i'm sure it's something the developers discovered in play testing but chose not to patch out interestingly though this might have made it to launch because of lore reasons it would probably not have been hard to beef up shirahaki's poison resistance but the snake eyes weakness to poison is a big deal in lore because they're the descendants of the okami women so from would have either needed to shuffle the boss placements around which undermines the micro story of how they are blocking off the accesses to the great serpents they could have changed the poison resistance which undermines the heritage of the sunken valley clan they could have shipped it as is which they did and not worry too much about it in sakiro every tactic is valid even waiting out an enemy's poison resistance we're now heading to the hidden forest where we'll have to navigate into the house with a misnoble and kill him to open up the path to meebu village the function of this upcoming place is to hide mipu village from onlookers and i figure it's because meepu has the entrance to fountainhead palace this poses a bit of a challenge design wise because the enemies need to make sense as being loyal enough to fountainhead that they'd want to keep it hidden unimpressive enough to look at that the fountain had twist wouldn't get spoiled and inconsequential enough that their function in the world would still make sense these limitations might have asked for some sort of secret ninja clan who are loyal to the fountainhead nobles for some reason but instead the enemies are characteristically ignorant there's a headless boss there's a drunkard boss and assuming he's here on behalf of the interior ministry in search of fountainhead how would he ever find it and then there are the giant roosters monkeys and samurai apparitions which works about as well enemy motivations might not be the first thing you think of when you think of the separate elements that make an experience immersive and internally realized but it's one of those things that really jumps at you when it isn't handled correctly without an internal development policy ensuring placements and motives make sense in canon something out of place like an enemy is bound to sneak through the cracks and its placement will serve to undermine every other enemy placement if the hidden forest also had some unexplainable centipedes it would invite the player to either start drawing up connections which don't actually work because they're based on something that wasn't meant to be in the game in the first place or it could give license for players to dismiss phenomena which they don't like on the grounds that if one enemy was misplaced who's to say that some other one wasn't if you want to make a believable world it's probably best to not open up too many avenues for the player to start picking holes into things but on the subject of asset reuse this isn't something i get annoyed by all that much there are of course gradients to this like everything else and i don't know how long i could stomach to play say a massive open world game which had one rock model one house one tree and one mountain continually plopped down all over the place though even that would largely be a question of how well it's pulled off for togujiro here i think it's fine in a way the drunkard bosses are sakura's version of dark souls 1's asylum demons where it's an enemy which will show up three times and one of those times it gets a fire makeover but because every drunkard boss is optional the game doesn't arbitrarily slow you down and have you redo the same boss fight over and over again in dark souls 1 i think three asylum demons two mandatory ones was pushing it but interestingly they can reuse the same mob enemies over and over again without it getting stale those are much faster dispatched with and once you know what to expect the encounters are more so about optimizing where you're located when dealing and deflecting damage but i think another reason players don't mind mob reuse is that mobs don't carry the burden of spectacle like bosses do for better or worse togejiro here had the exact same moveset as juso had in the hirata estate and the tactic from there worked just fine on him now note also what i said back in irata that i think the way they overcame the chi strat against this guy somewhat was to simply surround him with mob enemies this time monkeys they're easy to take down so the run around the drunkard strat is still viable but the setup at least adds some novelty to the encounter the hidden forest has a shockingly small presence in the game considering how interesting the environmental design and challenge are and it culminates in one of my favorite bosses of the game the miss noble this boss's placement and how he's responsible for the mist indicates to me that he's sealing off the entrance to meepo village keeping it hidden because it houses the entrance to the fountainhead palace this boss is a good example of how the strength of these games is often more in the experience they provide rather than the refinement of their combat mechanics it's not a very challenging encounter but it leaves a much deeper and longer lasting impression than most other fights even some of the best execution challenges the reveal of his monstrous physiology is akin to when in bloodborne the mid game let us go to birkenworth and all of a sudden the gothic werewolves and witches game we'd been playing was replaced with lovecraft here the relatively subdued and realistic in quotation marks and compared to the out and out fantasy games from submit before relatively subdued and realistic ninja game opens up to the more fantastical third act we're in the second part out of three of the game so this is where it makes sense to start building up the crazy magical third act and what i like is that every branch from ashina castle has this moment the meepo path we're currently on has this misnoble and then the meepo villagers the sunken valley path will have the encounter with the guardian ape and the senpu temple path has the hall of elusion the divine child of rejuvenation and the mortal blade design wise the sunken valley is my favorite area in the game but structurally craft wise i think the meepo path might etch it out the idea behind meepu is that this is deep down in the flow of the rejuvenating waters from fountainhead earlier when i talked about impurity and corruption when i talked about kegare i noted a design motif in miyasaki's games where power is situated in a high elevation and that its effect flows through the lands beneath it like how rivers are born from rain and that like rivers the effect runs through the land until it reaches its final destination where it becomes stagnant i noted how this was showcased in dark souls 1 with anor londo being the sunny city of the gods high in the mountains and that as we descended further and further down the human world things became filthier and more corrupt so undead burg leads to the depths which leads to blighttown which leads to the demon ruins this was also represented in bloodborne where the highest elevation in the world was the cosmos where the dreamlands are and that as we enter yharnam the highest point is the choir who seek enlightenment through meditation and the lowest point is the advent plaza where menses had their ritual menses being the we're ready to use the blood now faction and deeper still there was tumaru the way this idea is represented in the world of sekiro is in the fountainhead palace being the highest point of elevation where the sakura dragon rests on top and the okami women great carp and palace nobles all reside that area is built on a massive body of water which pours into ashina with the waterfall which becomes the river which partly pools and stagnates here in meepo village fun fact meepo is japanese for water life zakiro's sippy movement and freely accessed fast travel makes compartmentalizing the world harder than it was in demon souls and dark souls but a good way to see how this idea maps onto the world design of the game is with the little optional map they give us in the fast travel menu the massive ditch we had to jump down to reach the hidden forest was one way the game communicated the low elevation of this area but i think the environmental variety on the path was a deliberate design choice to have the player feel like they were covering a lot of distance we go from diving down deep caves which feel quite long to traversing a misty forest whose obfuscating mist makes it feel larger than it really is to jumping down the branches of trees to reach this area even though we went through it as fast as we did and even though each area was as small as they were and they were small it always leaves me feeling like i've just completed quite an extensive journey we're talking to basketwear sosuke right now the key visual represented within meepu is water the giant lake outside of his house pours down from the fountainhead palace and the villagers drank it but they actually did a bit more than that our last encounter against kinichiro ended with him restored after being defeated and his glowing red eyes are the same as we see in the chained over and the dowsing questline hints that the experiments with rejuvenating waters are what causes this kenichiro is searching for immortality to save ashina and in lieu of kuro's near-perfect immortality he has chosen the rejuvenating waters immortality is parasitic in every form but the red eyes of doujin's experiments and the general insanity of the meepu people is not caused by the water it's caused by eating the water's sediment the mud it sits on shosuke's role was to inform the player about how meebu came to be how it is and to tell them where to fetch the pine resin ember once it's been picked up i'm fast forwarding the video a bit here to showcase how his story ends he becomes hostile because he to his thirst and drank the sediment after i obtained the meebu breathing technique i'll showcase the meepoo villagers who drowned eating the mud in the lake but for now keep an eye on the moveset of the meepo villagers particularly those villagers who dig themselves up from the ground this idea of the water being maybe all right but the sediment being bad comes back to our talk on flow and impurity the flowing waters carry impurities until they sink and stagnate and stagnation is the cause of corruption to harness the rejuvenating waters another medium than mud is needed mud just sits it is stagnant eating it is likely how people and creatures catch those centipedes so to harness the water we need the inverse of mud something dynamic something which sits above the water and transforms what we need is rice and i'll talk more about this when we meet the divine child of rejuvenation shows case thirst was caused by drinking sake which the mayor of meebu had everyone here drink sake is an alcoholic drink originating in japan and it's made by fermenting rice the mayor's approach to ascension is correct except zasaki made everyone get thirsty and head to the lake which was where everything went wrong in addition to its rejuvenating qualities consuming the sediment also empowers the flesh sekiro increases difficulty throughout the game in two ways increasing the proficiency and skill of the enemies will be fighting and varying up the kinds of encounters in front of us the sunken valley's challenge came from the unique setup of having to dodge sniper fire but once we got up and closed with the snipers themselves they were pushovers the early games enemies are largely trained soldiers so the sediment is how the developers justified the meepu villagers posing a larger threat than the enemies of the early game did even though these guys are just random villagers they also respawn and can attack us from the ground like mole people so there is some varying up of the challenge on display here but mainly the enemies here are an obstacle because they are tough rather than because they are a unique challenge the bosses are tougher we'll be fighting orrin of the water now to finish up ginzaman's quest and she's an interesting mini boss in that she's arguably tougher than the actual final boss of this area the trick with her and why so many people bail on the fight when they get here which is made easier by how you have to manually activate the fight each time the trick with her is that she is an apparition type enemy and she can make herself intangible rendering her immune to damage if a player hasn't intuited the posture rhythmic dance combat by this point orin is a big hurdle to get through and since she is very skippable i think a lot of players bailed on her fight rather than buckle down and study which is a shame because i think she's one of the better straight up sword fights in the game i talked in my bloodborne commentary about character action games and their scoring systems the idea i was getting at there is that the way games direct players through a certain experience can be with overt methods and covert ones in the devil may cry games the higher level of combat skill was achieved by players who emphasized style when it came to dealing with enemies the game had visual cues like the style meter which encouraged this sort of playing and it also just it felt best to play the game like that because that's how those games systems were tuned story wise this had ramifications on those games and that dante's personality was written around that high level of skill where he's kind of a goofball who oozes style the ps2 era god of war games had the combat survey characterization function as well except it didn't make kratos use style it made him come across as brutal and violent completing sakhiro's main narrative is not as rigid and experienced as it was in bloodborne sakura is way more open-ended but there's more non-gameplay sections than before especially if we count the chitchat times bloodborne did not have a style meter but mechanics like the rally system which gave aggressive players the ability to recover health still directed the game to deliver on the intended fighting for one's life experience and so optimal play allowed for the player to eat some hits because they could always recover lost damage sakiro is a much more straightforward action game than bloodborne was and it also has some fairly non-intrusive methods of directing the player to the optimal ninja experience there's a simple stuff like how the inclusion of a stealth system enables stealth or how the overall emphasis on allowing the player to tackle problems with different solutions lets us get a bit into the mindset of a ninja who will use anything at their disposal what's most interesting to me though is that there is no style meter i really don't like trophies or achievements in games because i think they focus people on ways of playing the game which often times does not show the game's greatest strengths likewise i think visual feedback and internal rating systems which tell us how well we're doing are often as much hindrances to the experience as they are beneficial it's nice that they tell us what the combat system is expecting of us but they can also discourage players finding their own identity in the mechanics when there's a mathematical formula which tells you in no uncertain terms which input the system prefers from you at a given time or in a given encounter then any choice you make for the sake of the intrinsic value you attach to that choice say you like it better rewards you with a worse score than if you had solely been playing the game to appease the scoring systems bloodborne did not have such a system and so it came across as a game that wasn't fussed about how we got the job done i said as much in my video on it sakiro is much more about competent play and experimentation than bloodborne was but it is also more focused the posture bar is a scoring system its function is to pivot the player towards combat in which they trade blows with the enemy and there's a natural epin flow to the offense and defense this does stretch the definition of scoring systems a bit though in fact you could argue that if the posture system in secure accounts then the stamina system in bloodborne should also count since it can be used to assign raw numerical values to approaches through areas the big danger with scoring systems and this is my issue with trophies and achievements is that they can get it wrong and reward behaviors which the game suffers from you engaging in too much but sakura has enough experimentation to be done that there's really no strategy which is always optimal and so it like bloodborne isn't fussed about how you get the job done if you beat an encounter by throwing oil at an enemy and burning them to death good job if you beat a boss by using the firecrackers good job if you like i do to all the drunkard enemies if you beat a boss by abusing its ai good job it actually empowers the anything goes fighting philosophy of the game that it is set up this way and i think that's really beautiful the idea behind jinzan's quest likely is that oren is his dead mother who now lives on as a vengeful ghost trying to get her baby back after completing the quest orin will say lord sakuza brought me that man in his stead which is a mostly accurate translation but it's missing some new ones which indicates that she's talking about her son also when gentlemen dies we obtain jinza's jesus statue it's a unique kind of bundled statue with a unique item description the regular ones read small buddha effigy found in red cloth raise in prayer between one's palms to restore a note of resurrective power to and swath a jesus statue is to express feelings of paternal love the bundle of cloth is to at least ensure that the little one goes on in peace while ginza's statue reads buddha fiji bound in light pink cloth raised in prayer between one's pawn to restore a note of resurrective power to and swath of jesus statue is to express feelings of paternal love lord sakuza please take this cloth and use it to bundle this little one so that he may live on in peace that last line was probably delivered by orin as is hinted at with the actual cloth being referenced the ginza's jesus statue has a unique image attached to it from the other bundled jesus statues and the cloth worn by it has the same pattern as the outfit or rin is wearing and the actual wrapping of the cloth is in both cases of the jesus statues explained to be a paternal act there's also its name ginza's jesus statue ginsa might actually be ginsamon's actual birth name with the ammon being added later orin references the sakuza as does the statue's description the names jinza and sakusa both end in za and this sort of partial name sharing was custom in japan during this era see also how the eighth prayer necklace references that the lone shadows are the sons of masatsuna oribe and that we have a lone shadow called masanaka so sakuza might have been jinzaman's father who jinsman told us was the one who told him about meepu village in the first place we've met the mayor of meebu village now and he has started us on a quest to fetch the water of the palace since we just finished fighting warrin and are starting the corrupted monk fight now i think it's a good time to talk about fairness in my bloodborne commentary i talked about how unfairness and the feeling of unfairness were very distinct entities which are often carelessly lobbed together the feeling of unfairness is ultimately a fairly nebulous term but for video games a functional definition for like 99 of cases is when there's a disconnect between what you expect from actions and their actual consequences because the surrounding environment has been changed in a manner not conductive to the behaviors previously communicated to be functional if not optimal often with this change having not been communicated to the player so think of using a controller and having none of the buttons work and how frustrating it can be when your input isn't registering the thing is though something feeling unfair and being unfair is often a hasty thing to classify because a lot of it is in the player's head so using a controller whose buttons do work but you simply aren't using it the right way if you ever peruse the negative reviews for fromsoft's games you'll come across numerous examples of what amounts to being more or less the same review it goes this game is bad can't believe i wasted my money on this trash hitboxes are terrible story isn't interesting the ai is bad etc strangely the issues raised in these reviews often sound more like someone justifying to themselves and others why they couldn't beat it and they seem to be more a reflection of the person reviewing it than it is the game somehow they always seem to have more issues with the hitboxes and enemy animations than i do and somehow the bosses they fight are never quite as deep as the bosses i fight you wouldn't say mario is bad because trying to play it as a first person shooter makes for a bad experience and likewise you probably should get to know the intent of sakura and how it's meant to be played rather than wrap your desire for another game over it and then get mad when those desires aren't met but whatever man i'm not about to tell someone that their bad experience with the game is illegitimate just because i happen to like it what i will say though is that the real issue behind most of these reviews is that the person did not play the game right and like our example with a controller being used wrong this is a user issue nevertheless it does still undermine their ability to enjoy the experience and the longer they last without wrapping their heads around the combat the more painfully unfair the game is gonna feel i can understand people having issues with this because of the obtuse and unconventional design ethos these games employ but i'm not really sympathetic to this plight because i think that's largely the appeal i don't want to sound like a fanboy or anything but i do think the triple-a industry is better when there are more companies willing to release multi-million dollar budgeted games which make these sorts of decisions make these sorts of calls rather than fewer companies when there are more studios willing to let the player shoulder the burden of engagement and is willing to severely punish those who play it wrong it can feel unfair if you don't appreciate that style but it's just that it can feel unfair and if you absolutely do not want to adapt to the game's terms then there's no reason to be surprised when you come out the other end having had a bad time sakiro actually makes strives to address some of the complaints players have had with fromsoft games over the years first of all you have a brief window to cancel your attack by hitting the deflect button objects which go in front of wolf will go transparent to keep him in focus the overhauled jump function gives us a whole new dimension for dodges and the grapple hook almost eliminates being cornered in a dead end another massive change from souls is that memorization is less important than ever before you're gonna do much better against the bosses when you know their attacks and know what to expect but the rhythm-based combat actually tells you everything you need to know to finish them off in your first try if you're good enough at the game the back and forth of combat is communicated with the flashes of the attacks and deflections clashing i talked about this earlier but when you successfully deflect an attack there appears the bright orange splash to visually communicate the impact but the final attack of the enemy always flashes much brighter and with a much larger effect this is the game's way of signaling when it's your move to attack then when the enemy starts deflecting you should probably ease down again throw in some perilous attacks and status ailments for a bit of pattern breaking here and there and you have a combat system which is very direct about when the player should do what at what time the corrupted monk is much easier when you know her moveset when you know that her spin attack lasts for five consecutive circles and know when her perilous attack is a slash and when it's a stab but for a first timer it's a totally legitimate and useful strategy to simply not attack until the game has told them the enemy is done attacking them the corrupted monk's posture bar recovers really fast in the early part of the fight so you might get a bit anxious about getting that one extra hidden but like every enemy its recovery gets slower once you've dealt a bit of damage another point for fairness is just how many bosses on the mandatory path of the game can be skipped without any repercussions i imagine most players will skip optional bosses which are giving them a lot of issues and i think this gives the game a lot of replay value because once you're good enough at the game you're gonna want to seek out that extra bit of challenge boss is like oren who has some unique functions like her floaty almost hovering animations and how she can become intangible really shine when you're at that stage of the game where you really know what you're doing but to reach that point the player does need to understand the game's language rather than get mad whenever their predetermined approach doesn't work the question of fairness is often a question of communication and i think it's clear that if you pay attention sakura does communicate the challenge well another reason for the focus on fairness when it comes to these games is that with higher difficulty comes more scrutiny if you think of more audience friendly games like say the last of us you're thinking of games which are much more forgiving about the players screwing up screwing up in terms of the most optimal paths to play and you're also thinking of games which simply do not ask for as much dedication at the entry level as sakiro does the reason fairness isn't often brought up when those sorts of games are discussed is because those games simply do not have as much writing on the experience being fair if they were obsessively cruel and unfair that'd be one thing and people would get mad probably and i think rightly but as is being bad at those games doesn't change all that much from being good at those games because their experience doesn't rely on the interactive components as much as it does the cinematic ones ultimately i don't know if the average player doesn't want to be challenged or if they've just been conditioned to resent a challenge by playing so many games which are so very forgiving and accommodating but i think the existence of games like sakhiro games which are unrelenting and not accommodating to low commitment players is a good thing for the industry with the apparition of the corrupted monk out of the way we can enter the wedding cave lord wise i think this boss serves the same purpose as the miss noble did and that was to guard the entrance to fountainhead palace the final boss before reaching it will be the true form of the monk for now though we're just here to pick up the shelter stone for kuro's ritual before leaving for sempu temple however i promised earlier that i take a dive in meepu so let's go way earlier i also talked about how the explosive mobility of sekiro meant a lot of unnatural looking geometry and architecture was needed to block off paths in that talk i did say that some of these locks on progress were quite inspired and i think the water in meepo is one of the best examples of this done right meepo isn't the first time we've been able to interact with water but it hasn't been as central to a location's visual design as it is here maybe with the exception of the errata estate and even then in the water we can see the villagers who got stuck and drowned eating the rejuvenating sediment and the posing of the legs and the obfuscated upper bodies are actually a reference to the movie the inogami family and if we're talking about inspirations it might warrant drawing attention to how the original idea for the mayor was that he'd asked the player to fetch for him fresh in smith livers i'm sure everyone knows this much already but insmith is the town in hp lovecraft's shadow over in smith which served as a major influence on bloodborne's fishing hamlet so if you've ever thought these two areas look similar there you go i'd actually like to call attention to the idea of jukoku again here the buddhist elves those were a big inspiration on bloodborne's old hunter dlc as well and the meepo villagers seem like something right at home in one of those illustrations that's not to say that meepo village is actually hell but rather that i think from was trying to connect it to that idea as if to say this place is hell-ish particularly the idea of a gaki a spirit whose gluttony has overwritten every other impulse to the point that they will eat feces of the ground in hopes of having their endless appetite finally sated the path to senpu temple takes us through the abandoned dungeon where we'll meet the dr daljin he's a victim of my playthrough and that i won't be completing his quest it requires i sacrifice either kotoro or jinzamin and i like their quests better than doujins so i had to make the choice for this same reason i'm not doing the anayama peddler quest because it forces me to waste kotoro and i like kotaro's story better than i do on ayamas the exact function of this npc event scripting seems to be mostly unchanged from souls or bloodborne npcs have code telling them where to be at a given time and this code is updated when the player does something or advances to a certain point and they also have code telling them what their relationship to the player is like hostile or friendly what dialogue they have access to at a given time etc for the doujin quest what i find to be most interesting is that there is no branch for it to advance to if the player neglects sending a test subject there could have been a variation of the quest where the player has completed the kotoro and ginsuman quests that doujin will obtain a test subject of his own and then maybe send that subject out as an assassin to take out the player that assassin could then drop a note or something with instructions about their task which lures the player back to doujin and continues advancing his quest design wise i think these sorts of dead end quests are very uninteresting because there's always a way to incorporate another decision-making tree to the game might cost a bit more but still that being said i do think it's interesting to think about this in a more conceptual sense if not every quest can't be completed in a single playthrough it should incentivize curious players to go in for new game plus that might be justification for this setup if this setup was intentional but i think it still undermines doujin as a character when he has no progression through the story unless the player pivots him in a certain direction that's a negative way to view this but players should consider that there are cases where this lack of dynamism is preferable the most famous frames of the nbc is undoubtedly solaire and most players will know that his fate in isilith can be avoided by using the chaos servant shortcut to kill the market before it can get to him what most players may not know however is that there's another way of saving him if you were to aggro solaire in the sunlight altar after going through anor londo then he won't advance to isolath meaning you can go through it kill the maggot and then have oswald of kareem give you absolution which will deacrosolaire and make his quest advanceable and since there's no sunlight maggie to capture him since there's no point in the player going back to lost izalith that branch of his questline is cut off this is the best example of what giving the player control over the npc stories can do likewise nogami gensai who helped us fight juice of the drunkard in hirada had to be talked to first rather than seeing us fight the enemies and decide to jump in that might seem unrealistic and out of character for him but if you think about that encounter from a gameplay perspective then it makes a lot of sense to have it set up the way it was if the player is trying to sneakily take out the enemies then you don't want an ally raising the alarms and his passivity also gives the player full control over when he joins the fight meaning he's not going to be wasted fighting some archers so there is a case to be made for passive npcs for doujin however i think the way his quest is designed leaves a lot to be desired it doesn't need to be a one size fits all for quest designs there's room for passive npcs and active ones and i think doujin should have been more active considering he has a goal he's striving towards regardless of our involvement right as we entered tempo we had three more npcs to interact with those being the divine child of rejuvenation who will conveniently set up the theme of the area being how the senpu monks have embraced corruption and neglected the teachings of the buddha mwah to whoever decided to place her there i love this we then had kotoro who will give us a fetch quest in this area and finally there's baniter who's as stumped about maintaining the kite extended as we are you'd think there being two of us we could help one another but apparently not the divine child sets up the theme of sempu but it's also seen in the sempu skill tree and the monk's loot their unlockable skill tree is all about getting better drop rates for items and money and their loot is some of the best early game farm material if you need money in the early games senpu is the place to go and while i'm a fan of this setup i think it highlights the downgrade sakura makes from souls that i talked about earlier where there are fewer incentives for exploration the money is nice and all but the items we find outside of upgrade materials are mostly negligible and there are no equippable armors or new weapons to find as for the money sakura splits the currency it uses harder than previous games did and the lack of conversion between the separate resources means not every interaction can be as easily translated to those aspects of the game you decide to hone your build around and this has some significant effects far beyond what might be immediately obvious in dark souls there was explicitly one currency souls but functionally this was not the case there was also the titanite materials which you spent upgrading your weapons and armors and covenant currencies like sunlight metals which could be traded for covenant exclusive resources but the kicker was that you could always exchange those four souls if you were playing that game and decided to go for a pyromancy build you still had an incentive to pick up weapons and items your build wouldn't use because you could sell those and use the souls for leveling up or buying the equipment and pyromancies you would need another currency from that game was humanity whose primary gameplay function was to unlock the online multiplayer but it was also a last-ditch healing resource which beefed up defenses and curse resistance so even though you had no interest in the online the item was still valuable for other reasons humanity also increased drop rates so if you were farming for some other resources you'd want to have them you could use them to further kindle bonfires in order to get more estus to make areas easier for yourself and if all of this wasn't enough they also sold for 1 000 souls each which compounds to a decent amount during a playthrough bloodborne then followed this model quite nicely in that game we had blood echoes and insight acting as our currencies they were also somewhat interchangeable though since we could buy items from the inside messengers and convert them into blood echoes with the standard bath messengers again one central currency which everything else for the most part can be converted into meaning no part of the animal goes to waste so to speak the big difference between sakura and its predecessors in this economy department is that leveling up is no longer done with the same currency as the one we used to purchase wares or pay for services rather we get upgrade experience from winning fights and we can loot send from around the world or from fallen foes both are reduced by 50 when we die but there are mechanics on hand to minimize these costs for experience we buy upgrades with experience levels and once a level threshold is reached the xb halving will be adjusted to only apply to the experience we have on hand in excess of the level threshold for sen we can buy coin pouches for merchants which cost an added 10 percent of the value they hold so even if we die we lose 10 rather than 50 and these coin pouches are something that i really like because they add a bit of insurance risk management decision making into a ninja action game which i think is pretty fun but the big difference between sakura and its predecessors is that these two main currencies are not interchangeable upgrade materials and carp scales can be bought and sold so those have conversion rates with sim and the downstream ramification of this change is significant to exploration in some crucial ways i said this earlier but sakiro doesn't have armors or weapons to pick up so these aren't incentives we're exploring in the first place but sellable items whatever they may be still don't manage to incentivize exploration in sakhiro to the degree that they managed to insult because sen has fewer utilities than souls had in souls there's also fewer things of value to be purchased in the first place i mean we have spirit emblems court seats prayer beats and prosthetic upgrades note again though that the purchasable spirit emblems disincentivize the use of the prosthetic since there is so little enough value to be purchased there's also less of an incentive to make money in the first place meaning there's yet another downgrade to incentivizing exploration with extrinsic rewards ludologically there's a harmony in how the sempu temple delivers rewards in the story of the monks who neglected the teachings of the buddha that much i'm a big fan of games are ultimately often constructed by compromising between some systems and this is another area where exploration might have been undermined somewhat compared to souls the mobility we have means exploration is a faster activity than before the harder segmenting of the game's numerous extrinsic rewards means mechanically we're not as incentivized to explore as before and finally i think aspirations for exploration sometimes fall a bit flat because the areas are so combat focused i've talked a lot about this on this channel over the years but i really like it when games present scenarios which their core mechanics aren't equipped to presenting well or when the core mechanics are seemingly purposefully being sidelined so if you've ever played the silent hill games you know what i mean the movement scheme there is basic tank controls and tank controls create a feeling of rigidness and claustrophobia in and off themselves so i really like when those games dump the player into a large open area because the mechanics maintain the feeling even though the environment doesn't impose it another great example of this was in the previous souls games when they did platforming the movement scheme in souls was very cavemany and primitive so when we were asked to do some platforming it always came across as somehow more engaging than it often was in actual dedicated platformers because the games were making us rethink how we approached navigation and were asking us to rethink our basic assumptions about even the more realistic environmental layouts sakura's core mechanics are tuned around intense combat and speedy navigation so i think there was a lost opportunity to have more areas without a lot of grappling in combat where we could just have wolf walk around and take in ambient little environmental pieces there are some like the detour back to the demon bell here in sempu but not as many as there could have been i said this earlier but i think the from software level designers are really good at theming levels when they have control over the routes the player can navigate through and i think including a few more tightly focused areas ones that needn't have any combat and could be optional and quick to complete might have given the player a deeper appreciation of the world they are playing in i admire the blink and you'll miss it style of the sunken valley but i also think there's something to be said about the quiet times of fountainhead palace the moments of ashina's majesty that we do get are great like the great serpent encountered earlier the hidden forest and fountain at palace just to name a few but i also think the balancing is tipped a bit too far into the combat aspect of the game and not enough into just giving us little moments of scenic tranquility to just unwind for a few seconds the souls games did this really well and i think it would have made ashina a bit more special if there was just a little bit more time spent observing and interacting with the land as a living breathing environment rather than as a host for combat encounters i think the reason for why areas are more combat oriented than before might be because there's less of an incentive to explore so the developers might have felt that there needed to be fewer exploration areas in general i think these sorts of relaxed environments would have helped the game in smoothing out the tension cycle by inserting a bit of quiet time and i also think it could have helped if the themes of the game had been presented in more relaxed environments where players can pick up on them in peace rather than having to clear out an area to see what's going on but as for the theming we do have i think sempu is one of the game's best designed locations i'm currently fighting the armored warrior who might just be the best fight in this game conceptually speaking he's not my favorite but i think the gimmick of him only taking posture damage and needing to be kicked out of the bridge is nothing short of genius i also think this guy looks a bit more than a little like the giant dad pvp build from dark souls and if we translate posture to poise it might be that he was an intentional reference in lore he's the father of robert robert from robert's firecracker fame robert and considering this game takes place during the sengoku era the duo might be portuguese or maybe dutch this guy brought his son to the monks of sempo in hopes that they could cure his illness the monks agreed and seemed to have stationed him at the bridge to defend it against invaders in actuality that the monks just used poor robert as a subject for their experimentations because of this backstory i find the armored warrior interesting in that we don't actually have any antagonisms with him directly we just fight him because he blocks the way many role-playing games like to include non-violent resolutions to enemy encounters and if sakura had one boss which i think could actually be improved somewhat by having such an option it's this guy maybe if we use the firecrackers against him he'd stop fighting us and we could have a dialogue with him then maybe if we showed him some evidence of the monk's corruption maybe we could have him join us in an assault on the final temple these sorts of ideas are always easier to pitch than implement and i really doubt that there was ever a plan to have him be someone we could ally with now i know i already talked about how the allies can break the boss fights but i'd like to note that the two bosses left the fight in sempo would be inaccessible by the armored warrior if he was an ally of ours the centipede is behind a wall which we need to grapple over and the folding screen monkeys have us teleport by ringing the congosho bell if he was an ally the posture gimmick employed by the armored warrior could be recontextualized to be a bit tragic if an enemy managed to kick him off the cliff and as for a satisfying resolution to a storyline maybe we'd see him meet the divine child of rejuvenation and dedicating himself to protecting her maybe even joining us on our journey in the dragon's homecoming ending the most important visual element to the story of sempo are the children they destroyed trying to create a divine heir but fromsoft doesn't really like violence against children so the kids are invisible and the allusions to the happenings here are mostly subdued and clean having the parent of one of these kids to interact with might have bridged the gap a bit and really hit home just how awful the sample monks really are the main imagery which from software has used to symbolize impurity in their games has been centipedes well parasitic insects really but mainly centipedes in demon souls centipedes were used to showcase impurity in latria with the man centipede enemies in dark souls we had the actual centipede demon who was part of isilit which was full of insect and parasite imagery itself in bloodborne centipedes were showcased in vermin where they actually lived in filth and were the root of man's impurity which is more or less how things operate here in sakura those who imbibe the rejuvenating sediment eventually grow centipedes in their bodies the centipede has historical associations with impurity in japan think specifically that spiritual term kegare and it has long since been thought of as being the enemy of dragons in western culture dragons are thought of as fire-breathing creatures but in the east they're generally associated with water and the wind going back to our talk about how flow connects to purity and stagnation dragons are the river centipedes are the lake the japanese name for centipedes is mukade and they appear in many myths from the region an important one for sekiro is tawara toda monogatari there's a few versions of this story out there but tell me if this is sounding familiar there was once a warrior called fujiwara hidesato who came upon a lake which he needed to cross there was a bridge spanning over it on which there lay a giant serpent oh yes this serpent has scared away those who sought to cross the bridge but fujiwara was undeterred and made his way across it where he proceeded to step all over the body of the serpent this aroused its notice which is when it transformed into a strange man some versions have it changed into a beautiful woman some a dwarf some something else for our purposes it's a strange man he explained that he had waited for someone brave enough to cross the river to take on a task that he had the strange man was in reality at dragon king which lived in the lake he explained that his enemy the centipede lived in the mountain and that he wanted for fujiwara to slay it the two hung out in the king's underwater castle for a while but once they heard the sound of the centipede fujiwara got going the centipede was over a kilometer in length and seeped poison from every pore it was making its way from the mountain to the lake at a fast rate so fujiwara did not have long to act he had three arrows on hand and immediately shot one into the centipede's forehead he hit his mark but it did nothing to stop the creature the second shot likewise in its mark and likewise was unable to stop the centipede it had now made its way to the lake which was when our hero realized that human saliva is the most surefire way to kill a centipede and he spat on the final arrow before releasing it into the monster's forehead this time instead of rebounding like the other arrows had it flew straight through the centipede's head and killed it then and there as a reward for his task the warrior was gifted among other things and please note that different tellings amid some gifts was gifted a bell a sword a suit of armor a roll of silk which never grows smaller and finally a bag of rice which never emptied shampoo alone has giant centipedes a magical sword and rice both in the location marker item i didn't purchase and from the divine child of rejuvenation and the centipedes here are born from the corrupt immortality of the dragon as for our story it concludes with our warrior changing his name from fujiwara hidasato to tawara toda [Music] corruption is evident both in the environmental design of sempo with the buddha being disgraced and insects like mantises and centipedes overrunning the place evident in gameplay with the loot and skill trees of the area being quite generous and evident in the visual design of the monks themselves who have obtained quite a rotted appearance compare the generic monk enemy here to kotaro and it's quite obvious that their deformation wasn't just part and parcel of living in temple in the cave we ran through to fetch the skill tree we can find a room with many of the monks sitting having been mummified in reality this practice of self-mummification known as sokushinbutsu was thought of as being a step towards enlightenment for preparation monks would eliminate all fat from their diet and then reject all liquids so that they'd internally dehydrate then they'd start meditating until they passed away the monk would be entombed during this process and 100 days later the tomb would be opened if the body had rotted the monk had failed so far only 24 successful sokushinbutsu monks have been found and for sekiro i have a theory about the ones which we can find that they are all sitting in an abandoned cave might symbolize that they are the previous monks of sempo who weren't corrupted by immortality note that if we venture to sempo after defeating genitiro the leader will be stationed there whereas if we come to sempo before kenichiro he'll be inside of the temple voicing regret about what they did that might mean that the leader decided to go into the cave and commit himself to the practice of sokushinbutsu after rejecting immortality and funnily enough if we were to hit his body he will bleed indicating that he might still be alive in there just deep in meditation speaking of meditation the folding screen monkey's boss fight is also quite meditative and since i'm no coward when it comes to courting controversy i'll remind you that i prefer demon souls grass healing system to dark souls esther system i'll tell you right now that most boss rankings of sekiro have it completely wrong and this fight is one of the best the game has to offer but acer you might reasonably ask how can that be when this fight is more about patience than it is application of skill and when the danger is mostly in fall damage and mid-fight enemy spam fair points let me explain this fight might not make for the most exciting combat but there's more to sakura than clashing swords sakiro is a real outlier in the miyasaki era fromsoft library in that the combat is actually quite well thought out in that there is a lot of room for application of skill which changes up exactly what the point of the bosses is and how i value fighting them there are still obstacles the player has to overcome to unlock more of the game that much has not really changed from souls what has is that the execution challenge bosses are actually worthwhile because executing the combat challenge well is an engaging activity the combat used to be a way to amplify the harsh unforgiving nature of the world so i was always more of a fan of the set-piece bosses like bloodborne's mikalash demon souls's dragon gods dark souls 4 kings and bat of chaos and dark souls 3's cursed rotted great wood then i was the night artorius or suralon fights i know that a lot of the set-piece bosses are terribly designed but i mean i'm a bigger fan of them conceptually than i am the more skill intensive fights because i think the set-piece bosses when they are well designed fit the experience these games excel at better and because i think the previously shallow combat mechanics made execution bosses very samey across a lot of the library sakura's more involved combat mechanics allow for more interactions with bosses which makes it easier to retry their fights than it was in souls where there was often just an optimal strategy which you just had to repeat for four to seven minutes and usually that strategy was to roll through three or four strikes from the enemy and then slash your sword once or twice at their feet or crotch i'm not saying that those fights were necessarily bad just that i pivoted more towards the set pieces sakiro flips this around a bit i'm in favor of the set piece fights but the line differentiating them from the skill flights is more blurred than it was before the sakura dragon and these monkeys are surely set pieces but how about the demon of hatred our father or ishin the sword saint and for the sakura dragon and the folding screen monkeys it's not like we're all of a sudden playing a different game like we often were in souls the monkey fight doesn't introduce any new mechanics which the game drops once the fight is concluded aside from maybe the fourth hidden monkey it's just about moving through the environments fast and luring the monkeys to where they are vulnerable and when i think about how much more mobile wolf is than the slayer of demons chosen undead or the dear hunter all were i think it would have been a real shame if there hadn't been at least one fight which made mobility the whole point luckily we'll have a few more of these sorts of bosses some like the carp i quite like others like the underwater headless not so much i spirited kotoro away to the halls of illusion and his request so he could once again be reunited with the children of sempo if we look at the number of bundled jiso statues in the environmental design of sempo and if we assume that each one has at least one real child which it correlates to then we have to contend with sempu having destroyed a lot of children which is uncomfortable but like i keep saying immortality in sakhiro is parasitic also uncomfortable is the buddhist health you go there if you accumulate bad karma and life and unfortunately for the children of sempo dying before your parents do is one way of doing just that and so the children which the monks destroyed are doomed to go to hell for no fault of their own this is why it is incredibly important thematically that kotaro asked us to spirit him away so he could find them the bundled jesus statues are named after an actual buddhist monk called jizo and he wasn't just any monk he was a bodhisattva someone on the path to actual buddhahood in my bloodborne commentary i talked a lot about the buddhist hells and i showed this image of patches poking the messengers with a stick turns out that this is actually the bodhisattva jiso in hell which he volunteered to go to to teach the dead children about the buddha and rather than poking the kids with that stick he uses his red robe to conceal them from malicious spirits which is why the gso statues we get in the game are bundled in a red blanket because jesus protects the souls of their children and teaches them to repent so that one day they might be free from hell and that's what kotaro is doing right now he is also a fully blown bodhisattva and if i'd have sent him to anayama he would have been used to loot dead corpses in a fashion fitting the story of tawaratora monogatari that story i told earlier we've ascended the mountain we've fought the centipede and now we're getting a new sword and rice in meebo village i talked about the rejuvenating sediment and how it's basically a more concentrated form of the rejuvenating waters and i also talked about how rice is the same thing except the sediment reed mud is stagnant and impure whereas rice is dynamic and clean the former causes madness the latter is harmonious you can live with the power of the waters if you use rice historically rice was the de facto crop of asia so it makes sense that it obtained the spiritual connection to life and fertility for the divine child this is interesting because her immortality is both artificial yet true she's the culmination of the monks experimentations and if we jump back a bit you might remember me picking up a dragon's blood droplet which was held in the arms of the large statue in their temple that the sample monks managed to create that thing means they had cultivated their craft to quite a degree and as much as i want to dive into that right now this connects to a much larger idea i want to fully expand on later so i'm going to ask you to keep this info on the back of your mind for the time being the divine child wears a red silk rope which has been tied with eternal knots which is another example of sakiro taking for granted that people understand the cultural significance of its imagery and the narrative ramifications it can have eternal knots symbolize divinity so if you have any doubts about whether this girl is the real thing considering her origin story rest assured that she has every bit the dragon's air that kuro is something else worth bringing up in this section is the ramifications of the mortal blade's true name the localized translation has it as gracious gift of tears but the raw translation is just gracious tears and this might have some significance the translation makes it out that the divine heritage was a gift from the dragon whereas the original wording leaves room for it to not have been graciously given but graciously accepted with or without the dragon's consent i'm usually not a fan of these sorts of changes because i think adding more ambiguity to the story than is necessary can really hurt people's understanding of the narrative i know this isn't the case for everyone some relish in the ambiguity because it gives them more room to fill in the blanks which is admittedly a design motif of miyazaki's that people fill in the blanks but this can often lead to misinterpretations of lore which is actually quite straightforward and i also think there's an issue with people neglecting the narrative that we have because their theory is different you can headcanon whatever you want but fromsoft isn't on autopilot just doing whatever they are exploring ideas with the games they create and whenever too much ambiguity is injected into the games i feel it gives ammunition for those who don't want to think of these games as having those ideas rather want to think these games are blanker canvases that the games have more dots to connect than they actually do i should be fair though and note that i might be making the story here too ambiguous myself i actually don't know if the original context for the wording written on the sword was meant to indicate whether or not the tears were gifted but there's a difference between questioning the wording and in-game lore because you want to understand the story and doing it because it lets you make up your own i'm not saying that somebody who enjoys the connect-the-dots approach to experiencing these games is wrong for doing that but for the sake of exploring what is here i feel i need to prioritize the ideas that we do have rather than how they can be interpreted if i've unknowingly injected two months of my own reading of the story into this video then i assure you that with the exception of when i've explicitly stated that that was what i was doing that wasn't the intent as for the sword bearing this name it might be that this weapon was used to obtain the tears from the dragon the first time around or it might be in reference to its power to end immortality it lets immortals die and allows people to grieve them rest in peace hambe with him released we're ready to head back to the sunken valley this final segment of the sunken valley is visually quite distinct from what we saw when we came here earlier but functionally it's very similar and that we'll still be crossing a gorge by zipping across the different cliffs you've probably noticed how in spite of sometimes breaking up the visual design the branching areas from ashina castle all have a very consistent identity in terms of navigation and they are all very different to each other although they don't 100 follow a linear route they can be thought to each hone in chiefly on one axis of spatial navigation the path to meebu began with a descent to the hidden forest which led to a descent into meepu itself the path through sempu temple began with us taking an elevator and then walking up mount congo the sunken valley is about going forwards with the challenge coming from the absence of a lot of ground areas one way to create challenges in games is to take from the players some gameplay utility or some function they take as a given and have them figure out how to solve a problem without it so sekiro is very much about mobility and undermining this is how some of the best areas in the game come about the hidden forest has all environmental visual information massively diminished and because of it we had to approach the encounters there in a more conservative fashion here in the sunken valley they just removed the ground underneath our feet and asked us to still figure out how to get from point a to point b the sunken valley is my favorite area not just out of the mid game branches mind you but in the entire game but whenever i play i find myself spending less time in it than i do in sempu or in meebu i think this is partially explained by the intrinsic rewards each of these areas offer if you spend a bit of time in sampu you can come out with a lot of money and a lot of sugars if you spend a lot of time in meebu you can speedily get some level ups the sunken valley's most valuable items are arguably the upgrade materials and with the exception of yellow gunpowder the ones here are easier to loot in ashina castle you'll have to go here for the stuff after you've gotten all lashing a castle has to offer but by the time you hit the upgrade material wall and need to start searching for it you might be far enough into the game that you'd be faster just farming enemies for it the sunken valley also has arguably the least engaging combat challenges in the entire game i think the sharpshooter setup was a brilliant way of asking players to solve a problem with their newfound mobility but once you've got it mapped out the tension doesn't quite maintain the area and the encounters while they can be punishing are never that deep enemies are mostly located by themselves on cliffs and you can easily kill them if you can reach them whereas in meepu and sempu enemies were tougher one-on-one and those areas also had more vantage points for the player to approach the situations tactically the sungen valley passage shakes this up a bit by having us fight monkeys rather than snipers and this fight here is probably the most processing intense thing the game has to offer my poor ps4 was dying trying to play through this which explains why i died in the fight lousy lacks dropping my input but all of this being said the sunken valley is still my favorite area the reason for this is probably arbitrary they often are but if i had to give an actual explanation for it i think it's the most sakurawee area in the game in that every other area could be mostly imported into bloodborne or dark souls whether they'd play well with those games mechanics is another question but i mean in the layout sense the sunken valley however is so dependent on the unique grappling mechanic of sekiro that it feels more unique i guess i also think it's visually quite impactful we've made it to the guardian aid now and this boss is probably the biggest stumbling block for most players during their first run through the game i myself must have tied to this boss at least 20 times but by now i've intuited his moveset well enough that i rarely ever die to him anymore i did once for this recording though i'll be honest enough to admit that throughout this video i've hinted at a theory i have for sekiro and i imagine some of you watching know exactly what it is i'm not going to reveal it just yet but keep in mind the faces of this boss and that he has a massive scar running down his left eye as you can see although i'm not dead yet i'm actually not triumphant over the boss either because i'm not utilizing the optimal prosthetic tools and items as well as i could be the guardian ape is strangely enough a beast type enemy so it's weak to the oil flameland combo and in his second phase he becomes an apparition type enemy meaning divine confetti is the way to go the reason the fire oil combo is so good against this boss and something like the phantom butterflies also works quite well is not just because it eats into his health but because eating into the boss's health makes the posture safety trade-offs more player friendly the bosses particularly the larger ones have a tendency to break off the encounters from time to time and run away from us turn around and then restart the encounter there's a rhythm to the combat both in the moment and overall boss fights are broken up by these engagements this is how the game gives us a breather to replenish health if needed and apply buffs if wanted if we did well enough in the engagement however we can usually chase the enemy down and get a few more free hits in gobu had a specific animation which had a grappling opportunity attached to him which if taken would give us about two extra hits while his animation played out if we did poorly in a given boss engagement we might need to run further away from the enemy to get all of our menu flipping done but this comes with the added price of the enemy recovering more posture since the duration of them not taking damage increases all in all this function of the enemy ai creates a natural epin flow and it also directs the fight a bit better than they were in souls partly i think this function can be attributed to the more expressive combat system and how much more expressive it made the fights but i think there's also to consider the standardization of attack timings the souls games did lean more into these sorts of highly directed stylized and well-paced boss fights as they kept being made with fewer bosses like dragon god undead dragon and phalanx and more bosses like artorias champion gunder and slave knight gail but i feel the comparatively unimpressive combat system was being strained to present those fights and it made them feel like they didn't really belong in those games made them feel like they were antithetical to the strengths of the systems there i've said as much already i've also said that i like when games take their gameplay into unconventional territory and while i think that's true of boss design as much as any other component of games i think the over-reliance on those sorts of bosses as the souls games kept coming made it less of a novelty and more of a hassle it's one thing fighting the husk of a once proud knight and having to reconfigure your approach to fighting it's another to do it for the 15th time but it's not just conceptually that i didn't love those fights like i do the more gimmicky ones functionally each of those bosses has to be designed around a much wider range of attack timings and must facilitate more kinds of attacks so if a player had an ultra great sword that approach needed to work on the bosses but it still had to challenge a player using a faster long sword and a player using ranged pyromancies and ultimately i just don't think they ever quite nailed this in the souls games but because sakura standardizes attack timings and has more mobility in combat these more involved fights are easier to pace and with the tighter animation timing parameters the blows can be more intense because the game can actually set the hits and deflects around really low frame counts without losing any playstyle overall sakiro isn't that dependent on you creating your own opportunities to heal it dishes them out organically and asks you to make a choice about whether to take it and let the enemy recover some or ditch it and get to deal more damage the guardian ape does let you create these breathing moments yourself oil and fire baby but the setup for those is lengthy enough that there's still some challenge when you learn about this the existence of those sorts of opt out of fighting strategies can act as a sort of last resort when it comes to overcoming the boss which allows struggling players to continue the game this can have the negative downside of the player not adequately tuning themselves into the challenge the game is presenting and have the player abandon the intended experience but since sakura is a ninja fantasy where everything is a tactic i feel like this is less offensive than it maybe could have been it's a built-in difficulty release valve like summons or pyromancy boats were in previous souls games as for why the strategy i used was so effective beyond just that it ate so much of the enemy's health posture recovery being attached to health means doing a lot of damage up front is often the best strategy because it lets you run around the boss more lets you take it a bit easier and heal more without having to content with the enemy getting back all of his posture right away all three branching paths we've had from ashina castle featured the old gods of the land and the buddha predominantly it's not exactly mind-blowing to observe that the game has mapped the narrative progression to the player's progression through the environments but fromsoft has always had a knack for threading the larger themes of their games into the microcosms of the lands we are in at a given time so dark souls 1 was about the corruption of the natural flow of the world the stagnation of it and the horrors that stagnation produced and in yolando we saw stagnation represented with deep and still waters in lost isolate we saw a corrupted new flame which produced parasite demons bloodborne likewise devoted a lot of time and assets to exploring corruption but it was represented with the conflicting states of stagnation and enlightenment and how the pursuit of the latter produced the former beasts in kin lawrence and willem the healing church and bergenworth mikolaj and menses and the choir vermin and phantasms loren and ease sakura is also about corruption but it seems to have a more shinto focused approach to this where the old gods of the land are driven out by an invading god an invading god which brings with it immortality which forever corrupts people's relationship with the magical nature of the land we saw in senpu temple monks who in their pursuit of immortality embraced corruption with a skill tree very much focused on getting better loot and the idea there was that they've strayed away from the path of the buddha here in the cave housing a great serpent there is another benzitan statue remember that she is the goddess of things that flow and it's located in a long abandoned and neglected shrine cradling the dried serpents viscera indicating how far from graves the serpents have fallen that no one pays attention to them anymore note also that the benzitan statue in the long arm centipede giraffe boss room was used to store the large fan which i assume sent the centipedes to sempu in the sunken valley we had the sunken valley clan and interestingly that's not some ancient tribe who are maintaining the custom of their ancestors and have refused to let go of their old god fun fact about this guy he's supposed to say it's head it's head but it was mistranslated to go my neck my neck anyways the sunken valley clan are the left behind or chose to stay behind descendants of the okami clan who came to ashina with the sakura dragon the reason they might have taken up shop where they did is because of the location's connection to the great serpent serpents being closely related to dragons in the amiibo village we saw the corrupting effects of the rejuvenating waters firsthand and like in dark souls's new londo there was an emphasis on deep waters the bottom of the sunken valley passage was flooded with poison and the lotus of the palace which we got after killing the guardian ape its item description reads a white lotus flower found blooming in the depths of the sunken valley where the fountain had waters pooled deeply the flowers aroma attracts female apes thus the guardian ape carefully tended to it so as to offer it to his bride one of the incense ingredients sought by the divine air for immortal severance that pool deeply line is what's interesting here because it connects to that theme of flow i talked about way earlier we're far ways from the start of the waters and as we've reached deeper the flow of the rejuvenating waters has been replaced with literal poison it's not that the waters became poison though i think the implication is that the poison comes from the great serpents if you slash at the one in the cave the stuff will come pouring out of the vents so it's clearly under the serpent's control we are well into the double guardian ape fight right now so i should talk a bit about it i think the best part of the guardian apes visual design is that he has really long claws moving from souls to sakura if there is one change you need to intuit for the game to go from a grading experience into something that's fun to master it is to stop dodging everything in combat there are times to dodge but mostly the best strategy to deal with incoming attacks is to deflect and what trips a lot of people up about the guardian ape is that this philosophy is still true his regular attacks can and should be deflected and i think the elongated nails helped somewhat to sell that idea if there is a second idea to intuit it's that posture recovers faster when defenses are up which is inversed from how stamina worked in souls while this is an optional fight if a player completed the guardian ape fight before making their way to meepo village they'd have no choice but to complete this fight as well for those players this might have been the most despair filled moment in the entire playthrough because the biggest hurdle on progress they'd faced so far at least the guardian ape is largely considered to be the biggest stumbling block until the isian fight at the very end the biggest hurdle on their progress so far just dropped down again and this time there is two of them but this fight has the ai much more restrained than it was in the original fight first of all the second phase of the original guardian ape is significantly easier than the first so defeating the original ape here is quite simple the brown lady ape shares the moveset of the original unbeheaded guardian ape except for its fart attacks and poop throwing but her posture bar is incredibly small and she takes a lot of damage from each hit so there's a good groove the player can get themselves into of triggering the terror scream from the original monkey by attacking him which removes him from the fight momentarily and then doing a couple of slashes at the female ape until she can be taken down or you can pray to god that your firecrackers will stun her fast enough that you can just death blow her right away or you can try to kill the headless white ape first which will trigger the brown lady ape to stop fighting and simply die of sorrow it might also be that she dies because she's not really there she's actually just a ghost of the headless apes old mate which is summoned here from the corpse which rests in the alcove above this arena i think this is actually an easier encounter than the original guardian ape fight but this isn't exactly a universal opinion i think it ultimately boils down to how good you are at fighting the original guardian a if you had to cheese your way through it obviously having to fight both versions at the same time is gonna feel harder but if you spent the time learning how he fights this is comparatively easy because the boss ai is so much more restrained if there is an issue i have with this fight though it's that the room is pretty cramped and it doesn't include grapple points like the original guardian ape boss arena had the first time i defeated the guardian ape he dropped the slender finger which indicates he ate kingfisher who was the shinobi you trained with the sculptor i talked about way earlier in the video that sword in the guardian ape's neck and which the guardian ape then wields in the headless moat probably belonged to her as well the sculptor's backstory had him practice his technique in the sunken valley imitating the jumping of the monkeys and the like i wonder if the reason the monkeys in the sunken valley have swords and know how to use them is because he and kingfisher practiced sword fighting against them as well the elder monkey in the poisonous ravine area has the same beard as eachine so i also wonder if there might be something going on there or if maybe i'm just reading too much into things sakiro never got its own artorias of the abyss or old hunters style dlc expansion the new map new story kind but it leaves enough threads dangling from the main narrative that one could have been designed if activision had called for it and if sakiro had gotten one i am pretty confident it would have either centered around the relationship between the sculptor and kingfisher or ishin and tomoe maybe all of them would have made an appearance in a sort of the glory days of ashina's story or maybe we would have just straight up played through ishin's coup and if that were the case then maybe even owl could have made an appearance the expansion the game did get was the one which added remnants a mechanic i hate and the reflections of strength and the gauntlets of strength and i find those to be very interesting there are new versions of some of the boss fights with new moves to look out for and although i'm not exactly convinced and haven't seen any documents stating this i wonder if those additions to the boss fights were initially designed for a potential dlc the characters who get new moves are isin owl and kinichiro and while kinichiro probably wouldn't have made an appearance in a dlc that would have had us travel 20 or so years back in time he was trained by tomoe and the most noteworthy new move he obtains is to redirect our redirected lightning which i think is definitely something tomoe could have been able to do now i've spent way too long thinking about this and if i had to pick one phenomena for sakura's hypothetical dlc to expand on it would be the great serpents aside from being cool and me wanting a serpent skill tree it would have thematic ramifications for delving a bit deeper into shinto which i feel is the most underrepresented of the game's big religions at least until the third act the dragon immortality worship is everywhere signs of the buddha though often in a state of disrepair are everywhere comparatively i feel shinto is tucked away and i think this might be because fromsoft is acknowledging the origins of the religion shinto as it is understood today didn't really exist until the meiji restoration in the 1800s when a new nationalist government wanted to purify the religion of the land and cleanse it from external influences out with the buddha in with shinto i might have used the word shinto fairly carelessly in the video already and what i've meant when i used the word was to explain that there was a harmonious spiritual relationship with the people the land and the old gods with the sakura dragon destroyed rather than the game having a religion which didn't exist yet at least not in the sense it would be thought of as existing today i think it would be interesting to get a bit deeper into how the serpents were driven out as the main spiritual power of the land and while this happened long before ishin's coup i still think there's a way to connect that time period with another entanglement with the serpents we know tomoe and takiru attempted immortal severance but could not acquire the mortal blade but who's to say that their story necessarily ended there what if dokin figured out how to return the dragon home in the previous dragonrot epidemic and we could finally have him appear in the story and that tequiro and tomoe they chose that path rather than immortal severance but maybe got stopped when they faced the serpents because they deal poison damage which the okami women tomove are weak to what if we got to explore the parasitic immortality a bit better takiru was immortal but he's no longer around ever catch those moments where kuro coughs and blames it on the dust in the library yeah that's that's not the case kuro is sick and so is takiro and every dragon's heir eventually when the blood's resurrective powers have stagnated enough and when there is no one left to leech off of or when even that capacity has stagnated the dragon's air will die and as for the serpents if bloodborne's old hunters dlc explored how the sin of the bergenworth hunters continues to cause misery to the citizens of yharnam and if the artorias of the abyss expansion explored how the shackles which gwyn placed on mankind corrupted them then i think it would be very interesting to see how the militarization of a holy land and the disregard for its old gods wreaks havoc on the people in the land for years to come remember the conclusion to the immortal plague is ultimately to send the dragon back home to where it belongs and to do that the old gods are needed well their hearts are we need the visera from the serpents to feed the divine child and as majestic and iconic as the serpents are their involvement in the story i feel is somewhat understated because it's mostly contained to obtaining an ending in the design works interview for dark souls 1 miyazaki was asked about his philosophy for creature design the answer he gave related to that game's undead dragon the original illustration handed in for it was one of a rotted creature covered in maggots and filth but miyazaki nixed that version and asked the artist mazanori varagai to ditch the grotesqueness and focus instead on the sadness of a majestic creature which had been brought low for the artorias expansion dark souls 2's sunken city expansion and dark souls 3's ringgit city expansion this idea crops up again kalameet sin and medir are all majestic dragons who are brought low which we need to finish off and if sakiro had gotten an expansion this is an idea i would have liked to see resurface have the serpents embody the innate holy power of the land have them brought low perhaps damaged by tomoe's lightning and let us fight one in a head-to-head encounter to put it out of its misery so that somebody can take its viscera store it in that little shrine in the cave where we can find it 20 years later dried out and ready for the divine child to consume also i would have liked to have gotten a tomoe skill tree as well so we could summon lightning whenever no long-winded explanation for why i just really like those attacks and would like to be able to generate one myself i think it's a shame that we didn't get an expansion because there usually were the strongest isolated content of these games can be found game development is not a straight vision to implementation process by any stretch of the imagination there are so many moving [ __ ] in a single studio and while there is a director keeping the project anchored to a vision there's always stuff which can't be used which gets changed and which just no longer works when slotted into existing areas from software has gotten a lot of mileage out of this unused content and concepts in their dlcs dark souls artorias of the abyss expansion was planned in advance and the main game was designed with it in mind dark souls 2 was all manners of shuffled around in production to the point that the game which they released was more like a rom hack of the original game than an actual self-contained title with an actual narrative throughline and identity of its own but with the dlcs and then later the scholar of the first sin remaster they managed to tweak the game and it found its identity bloodborne was originally gonna have two dlcs but they merged them into one during development and the whole outsider hunters come to destroy a foreign civilization and steal an infant great one storyline of that game's dlc might have been fromsoft's way of reusing the cainhurst storyline after having to launch the game with that area very underdeveloped and finally many of dark souls 3's dlc bosses and areas have been found in the main game's files from software is a nose-to-tail developer in that everything gets used if not now then in an expansion and if not then then in a sequel and if not then then in another game entirely our second invasion of ashina castle has the area swarming with lone shadows and other soldiers of the central forces difficulty wise they're a big bump from the ashina soldiers we fought earlier and what i appreciate about them is that they lean into the more expressive capabilities of the new combat system for that increased difficulty they aren't more difficult just because they hit harder and have more health and posture they're harder because they have a more expressive moveset this is something i've placed the game on all throughout but i think in comparison to earlier souls games this improvement is very visible at this stage in the game because after the midpoint was usually where those games began to exhaust their combat system's ability to contain the experience in dark souls post anor londo fights play out very differently to pre and orlando fights with a lot of the main enemies in given maps just not staggering when hit anymore and dealing much more damage than enemies did in the early game dark souls 2 was pretty bad at enemy placements all throughout and dark souls 3 while the late game didn't have drastically more annoying to fight enemies it didn't accomplish this with any ingenious design rather the late game is just not that hard the souls games which come out the best when looking at their late games prisakiro are demons souls and bloodborne demon souls manage this by having the end game consist of one level where we go from the tower knight's boss arena to the tower where we fight false king of land it was the hardest spurt of the game but it was also very short so the unimpressive enemy selection of that late game and the simplistic difficulty scaling didn't really have that much time for it to feel uninspired bloodborne tackled the late game difficulty by overhauling the combat somewhat while not nearly as deep as what we have in securo that game's combat was expressive enough that the developers could squeeze out a few more challenges in the late game which didn't rely solely on enemies having more health and dealing more damage sakiro clearly picks up the threat from bloodborne on this front and it has easily the most elegant difficulty scaling in the entire lineup the placement of enemies underneath yeshin's room here can result in speedy players having to deal with a lot of noise being made when they're trying to listen to ish and talk this setup can be pretty annoying and can take you out of the experience because the presentation can be pretty comical i used to feel that there should have been a function to immediately disaggro enemies when the player is talking to npcs which are located outside of the enemies range no one can actually make their way to eastern's room i used to think that would be a better setup but what we have right now actually makes a lot of sense characterization wise i don't think this was something someone had from necessarily put any thought into i think it was purely accidental but i've grown to like this setup because the noise is very loud and it's just underneath isian's room but nobody is responding to it because one ishin is the ruler so no one has any reason to attack him two the enemies don't chase us up here because they believe ishin can deal with wolf and three wolf and emma both drop their guards and sit down to talk to ishin knowing full well that even in the middle of an invasion they're completely safe being around him they're both very accomplished fighters in their own right of course but it doesn't exactly hurt having ishiin here too on the topic of enemy designs i've noted already that i think the luda logic way in which the world is laid out is really beautiful the world maps central idea is a flowing river and we explore the areas to which it flows then move on to the actual waterfall itself which is the second time the game will have a mandatory diving section the first was a few minutes ago when we began re-invading lashina castle the way the levels and how we navigate them threat together with the larger themes of the game is really incredible but the enemy layout of the game is equally well tied to the story being told in the beginning we had scrub enemies because the player was just learning the robes that journey the player goes on is the same as wolves where he is himself very rusty at the start and when we enter the midpoint and the enemies get tougher the original enemies are still around and they're used to juxtapose with the new ones we find their dying corpses scattered around everywhere and we encounter them running from the interior ministry this tells us how much more powerful the new enemies are but it's also one of those design decisions which managed to mask an application of game design standard practices you would expect enemies to get tougher as a game progresses but because these are new enemies all together the player is likely not going to pick up on how overt the difficulty scaling that is happening under their noses is because the game is not trying to mask it i'm not usually a fan of when a game forces me to interact with it as a standardized system instead of an immersive experience and i really like whenever these sorts of practices are masked coming up now is the owl fight considering my talk about how the game has done difficulty scaling in the enemies i should note that the same has occurred with the bosses owl is fought in the same arena as kinichiro was and he is not harder to fight just because the numbers behind him his damage output his health and posture have been insanely cranked up but because he employs more underhanded tricks and you need to do a bit of abstract thinking to piece this fight together kenichiro required that the player understood the combat owl requires that the player can think creatively with the combat because he's so underhanded and he has absolutely no respect for his opponent owl shows up four times in the game in the opening cinematic in the hirata estate in the alternate herada estate and here in our second invasion of ashina castle and in all but one of these appearances the alternate hirada one he reminds wolf of the iron code the actual bushido code was an ever-evolving and changing set of chivalrous moral ideals which samurai ought to abide by during these in goku jedi the most important tenets were loyalty honor and reputation and owl is interesting here because his feeling of betrayal might suggest that his morals draw more on a chinese tradition compared to wolves japanese one chinese confucianism has five important relationships which individuals are all a part of and confucian thought maintains that if these relationships are honored the society will prosper and be stable the relationships are father and son king and subject husband and wife older brother and younger brother and older friend and younger friend and the idea is that the former should always be respected by the latter and in return the former should be kind to the latter these relationships also follow this defined hierarchy but the chinese japanese split occurs in that the chinese confucianists place the father-son relationship above the king subject one something japanese confucianism inverts so here we have potentially another example of a cultural idea being expressed which will go over most players heads another confucian idea which the fromsoft community has noted in regards to owl over the years is the idea of self-harm any damage done to your body is a sin against your parents notice that owl has clearly never cut his hair wolf on the other hand has lost the other hand which owl might see as a sign of disrespect to him of course owl is by no means a man of much honor and there's an alternate reason for owl's corrupted bushido code and that is to imply that he was grooming wolf to be a weapon all his life and to that end he purposefully inverted the hierarchy to try and keep wolf forever loyal to him above anybody else if owl has a fighting philosophy it's to win and any tactic that accomplishes that is a good tactic this underhanded fighting style was cited by miyasaki as why this is his favorite boss in the entire game and unsurprisingly owl's tactics are the same tactics as the one we can employ throughout the game and these similarities don't end there it should be expected that wheat fights similar to owl since he's our mentor and father in the game but we actually have access to many of the same tools as he does and the actual timing and animations of our swings are largely the same and when i say the same i don't mean we kind of sorta almost if you squint have similar attacks i mean we have down to the exact timing the same attack patterns this is one of those things that's very easy to miss because when he throws those attacks out you're likely going to be more concerned with timing your deflections than you are trying to read anything out of his moveset this is the sort of understated storytelling which these games really excel at wolf is a very silent guy and he doesn't let his emotions show very often but stuff like this gives us a glimpse into what his life might have been like he learned how to fight from owl and he managed to mimic his style perfectly or as perfectly as he could considering the size difference and on size owl is huge wolf is smaller than most people in the game but owl is almost comically overgrown i think this trips some people up into thinking he's more of a bruiser when we fight him rather than being as mobile and speedy as he is his attacks do a lot of damage but if you look at him and set yourself up for a fight like juzo's where the boss's strength is balanced out by their lackluster mobility you'd be setting yourself up for failure i think most players who make that mistake will understand as much after they die once and then alter their approach as much as i think owl's fight exemplifies the best practices of characterization through combat and maybe not just in sakiro but in the entire fromsoft library with the possible exception of that whole red nine or the human plus affairs in armored core as much as i think i will exemplify the best of characterization through combat the best thing about him might actually be that the path to him is as short and safe as it is this fight is really rewarding to fight when you get into experimenting with the combat and there are so many maneuvers owl this is out which no one else does that in a way this is the closest we get to a pvp fight he throws shurikens firecrackers and he can do mikiri counters but he also has poison attacks smoke bombs and he can throw out a no heal status affliction which lasts for 30 seconds i'm certain that if sakhiro would have had pvp it would look nothing like this fight though and would instead just have the two players dashing around each other throwing out the lassolite shurikens or something the boss fights manage to be as focused as they are because the ai handicaps the bosses to give us openings for healing and counter-attacks programming wise it might be harder to make a computer play chess at a casual level than it is for it to play at a masterful level you need a certain continuity for moves so that the player knows roughly what to expect and when you dumb an ai down this consistency can get lost for example one way to dumb a computer down would be to randomly have it make bad moves which will contrast very hard against the good moves it makes another way is to make the computer calculate what the best moves are by mapping out the shortest path to a checkmate and then have the computer maybe pick the fifth best move every time but that can be problematic in its own way because the fifth best move for one board might be much much more masterful than the fifth best move for another board this idea of casual play sometimes being harder to simulate than masterful play is not exclusive to jess for sakiro the ai might not know how to make the best use of elevation in 3d space but it could have been coded to have owl simply hover to wolf and do non-stop perilous attacks or something i imagine the bosses and enemies actually share a lot of their code with the biggest difference being in the animations they fetch for their objects and in the variables governing timings and such for example bosses and enemies might have the exact same code for attack cooldowns with the only change being the bosses having the governing variable set a bit higher competitive play always tilts towards the most efficient most powerful ways to play and this has caused an issue i've had with the other fromsoft games in that the paths to pvp viability are never quite that enjoyable and pvp has never felt balanced to me when i got invaded in those games very rarely did i feel it was by someone who was playing the game at the same level as me because the invader was sometimes meta gaming and using items and equipments which dealt better with opposing players whereas iowa stacked out for the main game there's also to consider how horrendous the lack in those games was conceptually i think pvp and invasions are very interesting for these games but i think the executions have always fallen a bit flat i think the strength of the online and previous games has always been in meeting up with players in the levels not invasions pvp or in the bosses while i think the boss co-ops are better than the invasions the bosses very rarely felt properly coded for engaging with two or more combatants so two players will enter a fog wall into the boss arena and then the boss would often act really dumb in those fights because the ai could only lock on to one player at a time the lack of an online insecure might have been a choice made specifically because of the bosses because they are so much more focused this time around and because the real fight is most often the posture bar fight it could be that the bosses just couldn't be made to deal with more than one player at a given time overall i'd say the owl fight is among the best in the game and it's made better by how there's another owl fight where he is a bit younger and a lot stronger showing us just how much he has deteriorated in skill in such a short time showing us why he would be interested in the power of the dragon's blood the upcoming conversation with kuro is about the ritual which we must perform to be taken to fountainhead palace and that area suffered from the worst kind of translation issue where a double entendre from one language could not be transferred over to another one it's called minamoto palace and minamoto absolutely does mean fountainhead which is an appropriate name for the area in english considering it's built on a massive waterfall from where the running waters of the game worlds all originate it is literally a fountain head so i think they did really well considering what they were tasked to do here but minamoto is also the name of an ancient japanese royal family which is supposed to be evoked with the name of the place see also how it uses a heian period architectural style a style we don't really see defining any other environment there's actually a few more interesting things to talk about with regards to the sakura translation and since we're just chatting and eavesdropping for the next few minutes i think this is a good time to go over this but first i want to put it out there that i don't really fault anyone for the things which went wrong frog nation the studio which handles the translations for fromsoft have caught some flack over the years but i think the issues we have are just problems of the development pipeline more than anything else and short of having a translator on hand during development to formalize the speeches and convey the ideas as the developer intended or having the translator play the game obsessively during the translation process so they can connect the themes themselves and understand the contexts in which characters and ideas are being conveyed there isn't necessarily a super elegant way of doing this any better throughout the video and for what remains of it i for the most part use the translated names and terminology this is because most are really good and even the ones which are a bit iffy it's better to use the terms viewers are familiar with than to introduce new ones arbitrarily the exception being when i think the mistranslation is especially off like when the original script is trying to get some important idea across and the translations don't accomplish as much things the translation got wrong ranged from little stuff like how gopu introduced himself in the boss fight his line is sort of a meme at this point but it was probably written as a much more direct i am onimazataka a much more proper samurai warrior greeting but there's also stuff which has a bit more bearing on the story like the little conversation wolf and kuro had before i fought lady butterfly the subtitles assigned to what wolff said to kuro said do what must be done but the line contextually was presented a bit wonky he was saying this about himself so rather than him sending a message to kuro about what kuro must do wolff was telling a still dizzy kuro who was breaking out of the illusion and doesn't quite recognize wolf that he that wolf will do what must be done as in he was telling kuro that he's his servant and that he's going to confront lady butterfly on his behalf and lady butterfly herself didn't transition to english perfectly either i noted this when i talked about the long arm centipede to giraffe or jirafu that lady butterfly's name is ocho but in full it goes mabaroshi ocho or phantom butterfly in the sunken valley when i confronted snake guys shirafuji i noted how the title snake eyes gives the wrong impression of what those ladies are that they are the eyes which guard the snake rather than having the eyesight of a snake but their names shirafuji and shirahagi actually translate to white wisteria and white hagi which are both flowers every mid game branching path out of the castle includes some annoying little mistranslation the meepoo path has orin of the water's name which is weird when you consider they left meepu alone when translating the village's name as i noted when we were in meepu mipu just means water life and she's supposed to be orin of mipu as in the village of mipu not orin of the nebulous water the sunken valley path culminates in the guardian ape whose japanese name is shizhisaru shishi means lion but has mythological and monstrous connotations saru is just monkey so something like abomination ape monsters monkey or great simeon probably gets the idea across better might not sound as cool in fact my choices probably sound a bit silly but guardian ape doesn't quite have the appropriate connotations of a mythical monster to me it sounds more like some nice monkey the hero would meet on their journey and speaking of monkeys the final sempu temple boss was the folding screen monkeys whose japanese name translates to the seeing monkey hearing monkey and speaking monkey this might seem like a harmless translation because the idea behind them was reinforced as often as it was in that fight and around it but for whatever reason i'm sure the imagery went over some people's heads regardless but it probably hadn't if it had been written out near the health bar there is something to consider about this one though and that is that the literal translated name is quite long joining the laundry list of game design things which players never think about there is a fixed character limit to place names and character names because they just have to be formatted to fit into the ui so if a place name is really long it might be too white for the screen when the place name pops up upon reaching it that leaves the devs either having to shrink the font minimize the spaces between the letters or allow for more than one line of text there's no place name which is a long essay but there is still an upper limit to this as for character and boss names the boss health bar always notes the name and it might look silly if the name section was way too long compared to the actual hp bar so again someone at some point needed to decide which approach was going to be taken with this font size changes spacing changes extra lines or an upper limit to character names it's less of an issue in japanese because kanji can write more info in less space which incidentally benefited the japanese market in the early console gens when it came to writing stories but even then there's an upper limit i just talked about the fountainhead palace being the minamoto palace but there's more translation changes in that area one of them is the old dragons of the tree or shiraki no okinatachi which should be named elders of the white wood i imagine this was a stylistic change and it doesn't really bother me at least not compared to what they did to the dragon the divine dragon's name is sakuraru which means cherry blossom dragon or sakura dragon this is one of the worst translations in the game because cherry blossoms have specific thematic connotations which aren't carried over in the new name likewise mentions of the ever blossom tree should be sakura tree or cherry blossom tree because sakuras are beautiful specifically because they are impermanent they do the opposite of ever blossoming they last for a very short time and in that their beauty is contained and so the sakura dragon as i think it should be called its majesty is in its impermanent nature which is being corrupted by those who seek immortality i could forgive this wording as being a misconception by the inhabitants of the world but it shows up in item descriptions as well on a positive note though there are also changes frognation made for the better two i'm quite fond of are tomoeru ashinakinichiro going from tomoe style ashina kinichiro to kinichiro way of tomoe i like that one because tomoe style sounds to me like he's about to break out a skateboard and out alias or something and the other change i quite like is kensei ashina ishin going from master swordsman ashinayishin to ishin the sword saint which i think sounds much better in the beginning i talked about sakiro taking for granted that the audience would understand the subtext of imagery and iconography which nods to the game's influences and stories with definitive meanings the game is trying to convey by name dropping them and we now have to consider that the audience might not understand that nor the actual stated stuff because things were being mistranslated from time to time like how this guy's name has him be a spear bearer when the idea is supposed to be that his kicks were as powerful as spears the setup to this fight is very reminiscent of the kappa demon encounter from dark souls 1 what with us being in a cramped space against the boss who has dogs with him but that he has to manually summon the dogs makes it a lot more palatable i said as much earlier but bosses have an ebb and flow and massanaga's dog summoning can be used to heal if the player is doing poorly and believe they'll be able to shuriken to death the docks which do show up for action games the conventional failure state is death there's also running out of time getting captured having some other character die things of that nature but gameplay-wise most of the failure states in action games are the player dying this isn't breaking news to anyone i'm sure but this is because surprisingly action games have the player put in charge of a lot of conflict and failure states always go over better when the player can't pin losing on someone or something else if an ai partner dies resulting in us having to restart an area from the last checkpoint that can get very grating in an action game because the gameplay assumably is about fighting and the failure state was outside of the player's control or if not outside of it at least it didn't spring out from it the introduction of alternate failure states can be a great way to shake up the experience and have the player approach the game from a different angle for example it's a very different feeling to fight to kill the enemies versus fighting to stay alive for example being in a small house and fighting an invading horde of enemies continually losing ground and having to retreat deeper and deeper into the house even though both of these situations i talked about can be presented with the same core mechanics they feel very different in your hands because you have intuited the function working in one context and not necessarily the other sakura does not have any of these alternate failure states failure comes about when we die no player can be expected to perform perfectly forever and if a game were designed to require perfect timing from the player from the moment they picked up the controller it probably wouldn't be a very successful game it's one thing for rhythm based games to have the player train up to a perfect performance but those wouldn't be nearly as successful as they are if the player had to restart the experience whenever they made a mistake and the more you abstract the idea of a challenge the more wiggle room the player is going to need in their approach for things to be engaging because if the designer created a much more complex and harder to define challenge than just pressing the right button when they appear on screen then it's harder for them to signal to the player what is the perfect approach to a given challenge sakura gives the player a lot of this wiggle room when it comes to avoiding failure states things like being able to run away from enemies hide from them etc but the most obvious one of these is probably healing failure is contextualized with health and when you think of screwing up in sakura probably you're thinking about getting hit rather than trying to jump on a ledge and missing and having to try jumping up to it again even though both are ostensibly screw-ups here's the difference missing a jump to a ledge and having to redo it only costs the time you put into the jump which might be less than two seconds getting hit by an enemy costs time and resources to recover from i said earlier in the video that i prefer demon souls grass healing system to dark souls estus but that's not to say that the asta system is bad or without its strengths undoubtedly the worst aspect of the grass system was that it made it very easy to stack up on more resources than you'd ever need for a given run in demon souls a player could have functionally endless copies of the grass on hand at any given time which undermined a lot of the danger and high stress experience the game was going for with its resource management system dark souls esther system smoothed this out by ensuring that every checkpoint replenished the player's health healing consumables this meant that a checkpoints were easier to place because the level designers had a standardized number of heals the player had on hand and had a better idea for how much traversal they could expect from the player based on that another benefit to the esther system is that it eliminates grinding for healing items and it also eliminates the need to place healing items in the levels and place enemies which drop the stuff in the world that last part might not sound like a big deal but if you consider the open-ended nature of dark souls's progression having to place a believable healing item dropping enemy in every area might have been a very big ask moving from demon souls to dark souls the aster system smoothed out the difficulty bumps and opened up the expressive range of the level design it was i think a much better system for the experience dark souls was going for but that's not to say that it's a better system objectively speaking for one dark souls massively cut back on resource management and item use across the board and the free healing options meant deciding whether to progress or go back to cash in the held souls when you were in the middle of a level was not nearly as big a liability as it could be in demon souls because aside from the time you spent on a given run what you spent getting to where you were was largely resources the game gifted you so there was always less on the line because demon souls grass was a non-regenerative resource every run you attempted in that game had more upfront commitment to it and screwing yourself resource wise was actually a big deal running out of healing options in demon souls carried much larger ramifications than it did in dark souls and because of this and some other design choices like dropping world tendency i've always felt that the post demon souls fromsoft games were more accommodating and much less hostile than the og that's not to say that i think the way grass healing was implemented best exemplified the effect which resource management could have on these games but i think it just needed some tweaking rather than an overhaul to get right gameplay wise sakura borrows a lot more from dark souls than it does demon souls and for this experience i think reusing the asta system makes more sense than going for limited resources like grass but while i think it makes more sense than grass i'm not so sure that the esther system was the best one sakiro could have used story-wise something like regenerating health would have made much more sense because it would gamify the dragon's heritage better to see wolf continually regenerate from damage maybe with the very enemies we are fighting losing health the longer we fight them because wolf is leeching off of them gameplay-wise though i think exploration suffered enough moving from souls and if we disentangle the inventory and the item discovery from healing altogether probably the player would lose even more interest in exploring the world that being said i think healing is best in this game when it is done outside of the items sakiro has a few different ways of recovering health we can rest at a sculptor's idol eat consumables like rice fine snow or pellets drink healing gourds use the resurrection mechanic we can perform the blood smoke ninjutsu technique on the white geckos in fountainhead palace to create a healing smoke and we can get health by performing death flows after obtaining the breath of life shadow skill and that last one last two actually but mainly the last one is what i'm talking about when i say i think healing in sakura feels best when it's done outside of item use because performing a death blow can heal the player they are further pushed towards a ninja approach to enemy encounters there's another component to the whole healing mechanic though and that is that it must play well both on the overworld and during boss fights in the levels we are empowered to approach a scenario how we like whereas in the boss fights we have to adjust to the rhythm of the enemy that means that against mobs we usually have an option to back out of the engagement heal and then come back during boss fights we have to find or make our opportunities to heal prior to recording footage for this video i'd never actually fought this version of owl before in fact i had never gotten to the second version of hirada on the original recording i managed to beat mazanaka and juzo on my first try but owl took about two hours of training and trying to get right i like to keep some optional paths of games as a treat for myself later on i decided to do the owl quest now because i needed the footage and i had to talk about this section but also because alden ring was just around the corner when i originally recorded this and i had that something there to look forward to so i didn't need to keep any secure content saved up i'm actually really happy i didn't do the owl quest when i first learned about it i was sure we were gonna get a tomoe focused dlc and was very close to just finishing this and having done all of sakura but i decided to wait and since the dlc never arrived i always had that little extra sakura experience waiting for me you won't see me getting the trophy notification though because i didn't go charmless in the recording where i first beat owl so this is actually my second time beating him but you wouldn't have seen it anyways because i don't like trophies and i have the notification turned off i talked about this effect earlier but trophies are one of those things which reward behaviors which are often at odds with the player's natural instincts in the world which often comes at the price of the larger experience if you wish to impart some meaning to the player or to have them perform some action i think the best way to do it is with the game and not with a tacked on to-do list especially not once as half-baked as sakiro has where most of the trophies simply reward the player for performing activities they'd need to do anyways in order to complete the game like defeating progression blocking bosses or obtaining main story quest items a big focus in sakura was the idea that the player would be able to use everything they had at their disposal to fully get into the ninja fantasy but it's also about you using everything and you finding your own way to express yourself with these mechanics and i think the ideal way to get there is by making those mechanics satisfying to learn making them engaging to interact with and threading the application of them into a well-constructed narrative i'm not saying that there is absolutely no value in trophy systems and i don't want to take away your enjoyment of them if you enjoy them but they're one of these things i think games could do without like how a lot of modern games will launch with some tacked on photo mode i get the appeal but i prefer a tighter package one which doesn't have all those bells and whistles on the topic of expressing something with the mechanics something i really like about the herata owl fight is that the way owl fights is just as underhanded as it was in the ashina castle fight meaning he was always a sneaky cheating bastard and while i don't think this is the hardest fight in the game i do think it demands the deepest understanding of the game's combat system because of how liberally it reads our controller input so if for example we position ourselves behind him right as he's winding up an overhead slash he'll actually not complete the attack but will go for an alternate one where he attacks us behind him which means we actually have to wait out his anticipation frames a bit longer than usual which is very tense in the moment going back to our talk earlier on unfairness versus the feeling of unfairness enemies reading our input is one of those phenomena which can definitely feel very unfair but for the most part owl's responses to our input when they trigger a change in his behavior amount to altering the direction of an attack or delaying it so that he can get the hit in an exception to this is his ability to makiri counter but that is a bit different because that's him responding to being attacked not him responding to how we respond to his attack and because that input read only requires the player to die once to learn the lesson don't stab and he won't insta-kill you but as for delaying attacks and changing his targeting this stuff isn't about us not performing an action it's asking us to perform it closer to him getting his attacks off this boss pushes the player into a riskier style of fighting than they might be comfortable with and because it does it feels very satisfying to win this might not have been everyone's experience but i'd also go so far as to say that learning how to beat this boss was also very satisfying and very very fair once i first stumbled upon the insane amount of input reading he does and once i got into the rhythm of things i very quickly adopted to the higher floor for fighting it would have been very easy for this fight to be a disastrous die and try try again engagement but it avoided this of course simply giving us the ability to avoid attacks and do attacks every now and then guarantees that a fight can't be unfair by definition but there's being unfair and then there's being unreasonable if we could only do damage every five minutes and could only slash twice at the enemy that'd be ridiculous that's an extreme example of course but at the range of what is and is not an unreasonable challenge having a good feeling for the extremes of the gradients helps if only because you have something to compare the challenge you're designing to the reasonable unreasonable question is not the same as the fairness on fairness question though they do often intersect the difference is that a challenge can be very very fair but still be unreasonable like my afer mentioned hypothetical of only being able to deal damage to the enemy every 5 minutes another difference is that a game can largely set up its own terms of what is and is not reasonable but fairness not so much sakiro has a high entry level floor as it expects that the player grapples with the revamped combat mechanics and the posture system right away but sakiro makes no promises of being a welcoming experience or holding the player's hand so the challenges it throws out are often more on the unreasonable side of things if you judge it by conventional game standards if you imported the difficulty of some of the bosses here into another game one which is less concerned about imparting on the player a sense of accomplishment for overcoming an obstacle and is more interested in getting the player to run through set pieces as fast as they can so they can see the pretty cutscenes then the abrupt changes in challenge would most likely be unreasonable a game's standards are set by the kind of experience the game is going for but unfairness is unfairness no matter what if there's a boss which can always kill you the first time you fight them that's unfair regardless of what game it is in for story reasons it can be reasonable for there to be an unkillable unbeatable boss who will always kill the player but from the perspective of gameplay it's not fair note here that the miyazaki era has only had one such boss in the first encounter with seath in dark souls 1 which made sure to give the player the ability to exit the boss arena in case they didn't want to die an inelegant solution but better than nothing and although it's a cutscene not a boss fight i suppose i should mention the alternate dragon god at the start of demon souls that game's opening requires that the player dies and so the vanguard demon was slotted at the end of the first gauntlet to do the job but that boss was killable and the insta-kill fault dragon god was only there for the small percentage of players who did manage to kill the vanguard demon you could argue that the conclusion to the kinichiro boss at the start of sakiro where even if we beat him we have our hand chopped off also counts as one of these insta-kill bosses but i disagree gameplay-wise there's not a big difference between having a cutscene of wolf triggering after we defeated kenichiro or after he defeated us the story is quite linear in the sense that wolf will lose his arm in the encounter but the feeling imparted to the player is very different if gennichiro always ended the fight right as we had gotten his health down to half then players would likely feel that the encounter is unfair and there'd be no reason to even try fighting him but since we get a slightly altered cutscene when we actually manage to defeat him there's a stronger sense of gameplay to story continuity with our play being imported into the narrative it might not branch the narrative in any significant way it's just adding a few seconds of a kunai being thrown but it's still acknowledging that we overcame the challenge which at the end of the day is all it really needs to do i don't think any of the modern from games have come as close to presenting a dark ambience as well as demon souls did and the often neglected mechanic which i think was missing from the dark soulses and bloodbornes is the world and character tendencies those were a bit complicated but the gist of it was that dying in a level while in soul form would increase the corruption of that level and make it harder whereas purifying a level by killing the demon in it would make things easier and would have enemies drop more healing items character tendency worked similarly where bad deeds would punish the player by having evil characters like mephistopheles appear and by decreasing the player's health in soul form good deeds on the other hand would result in the base attack power of the player increasing and the monumental gifting the friends ring it wasn't the most intuitive system by any means and it could have done with being better integrated into the decisions made in the world but it managed to gamify the idea of corruption as it related to the world and the player dragon rot is a similar mechanic and while i like the idea of fromsoft trying their hand at reintegrating world and character tendencies back into these games i think it really misses the mark i don't think it's bad but it's ultimately incidental to most players experience this is because it doesn't have any serious mechanical downsides it doesn't alter our damage output our defenses enemy power number of enemies type of enemies abundance of status ailment dispensers in an area or anything like that instead it's attached to the npcs if dark souls 1 would have had a system where dying and spreading corruption could kill the npcs in the world that would have probably worked to really shake up a given playthrough and hammer home the idea of impurity there npcs were how we upgraded weapons how we obtained wares shortcuts and they were also important for players who got stuck because they could be summoned to help fight bosses but for a game like sakuro inflicting the npcs with ailments like i described in this hypothetical dark souls system doesn't work as well for one wolf is so much more independent of the non-main story npcs than the chosen undead wars the vendors are a good inclusion but they aren't something you really need and with one exception more if you have the puppeteer ninjutsu there is no ai companion in the game so losing our npcs simply doesn't change the experience all that much but there's another reason importing this hypothetical dark souls system into this game didn't land and that's that this system isn't how dragon rod actually works in sakura the npcs don't die like i said way back their quests just stopped being advanceable and the chance for obtaining unseen aid lowers but the thing is this mechanic probably isn't here to direct play as much as it's here to represent the idea that immortality is parasitic wolf is feeding off the world around him and that this mechanic is attached to the npcs is a byproduct rather than the main focus this rice quest is another big lull in the game which i unfortunately don't have a lot to say about which i haven't already i should note though that the rice we get from the divine child is actually grown from her blood which is why she gets so sick after we've gotten enough rice from her after she's gotten sick we give her the persimmon which are symbolic of transformation and the reason her rice or blood eventually becomes fine snow is that after consuming the serpent viscera the persimmon like heart of the serpents she becomes a higher being and as much as i love this quest conceptually and think it's interesting from a thematic perspective that the divine child will let stories end bring the dragon back home as much as i appreciate this quest from a story perspective it is very inelegantly grafted onto the sakura framework the strength of the core gameplay is high cost action and speedy exploration and now we're being asked to wait between loading screens but this is an interesting quest from a design perspective because it probably could not function without us having access to a warp function if you ask me the least interesting quest design is the mailman quest where we are tasked with going from a to b to receive x reward like we do here my issue is that there's no application of skill to consider there's no extra depth behind the mechanics of the interactions we have at our disposal for the quest in question and the linearity makes it so that there's no way to express yourself with the mechanics on hand i talked earlier about how this npc interaction system was created to handle fleeting localized meetings back in demon's souls and that it worked really well for delivering that but now that there's a whole narrative actually dependent on you utilizing this interaction so much so in fact that entire sections of the game are just locked behind you completing a dialogue it's not so hot if you'd imagine a version of this quest where we could corrupt the divine child by maybe giving her some altered items or maybe one where we could simply encourage her to decide on the dragon's homecoming differently like maybe there's actually two or three ways to get her to that point you're immediately thinking of a quest which i think plays much better with the mechanics on hand if only because you can choose the least intrusive least time consuming way of getting this over with the best solution to a game having too slow a base movement speed is to add a run function the second best option on the other hand is to add a walk slower function letting the player choose the fastest option even though it's actually not that fast does a lot to absorb the blow of these options being so slow because at least they could choose the fastest option it's a fake choice but still a choice the divine child quest doesn't have a choice and it's at odds with the game the big idea about freeing up the player's ability to explore the world isn't served well with quests like this which have the player zoom around different loading screens to talk to characters rather than grafting the story onto our movement through the world the movement has to be grafted to the story which is fine in more contained spaces but the more often we need to warp the more artificial things begin to feel it's one thing to be dumped into a level and having an npc move around in it as their story unfurls if it's all contained within the same level there's a sense of cohesion and backtracking doesn't come across as a way to pad for content it just feels like a way to meet the character again but when meeting the character again in old spaces happens after going through loading screens numerous times the player isn't as forgiving about the artificial component sakuro has a world design philosophy which is often at odds with a game's exploration philosophy which is itself often at odds with the game's quest design philosophy now that we've finished both owls and the divine child's quest and have unlocked the materials for every possible ending we are finally going to be advancing the main story again so we'll be heading to fountainhead palace this side tangent i went on since completing the ritual to get here has lasted quite a while so i wouldn't blame you if you've gotten a bit disoriented the gist of things is that we want to sever the dragon's heritage and to do that we must obtain tears from the sakura dragon it's tucked away in fountain head palace so i needed to complete a ritual which marriage ceremonies in ancient times would use to bind earth and sky together through the ritual conductee that's why i needed the white lotus from the guardian ape the shelter stone from here and the mortal blade i got to draw blood from kuro to complete the ritual and obtain the heavenly aroma to draw the shiminawa to bring me to fountainhead this isn't the only example of marriage to the divine in the game however the palanquin i hidden near the start to stab the great serpent in the eye was also intended to be used for that purpose the idea is that women are made into concubines the localization uses brights but it's concubines they die and then get rebirthed into a new world assumably prior to the arrival of the sakura dragon the ceremony would just have the great serpent eat the bride but after the sakura dragon arrived there seems to have been an entire culture created around worshipping it and the immortality it grants marriage to the divine is one cultural idea here which from takes for granted that the audience will be able to read another is the shimano man or the rope man in case you're wondering what shiminawa means after completing the ritual his hand descended to take us to fountainhead palace but this isn't just any ordinary rope man he's an enormous animated shim in noah all throughout the game as i've run through shinto's rhines and tory gates you've been seeing this shiminawa was the thick robe which hung on them it's made from rice straws and are supposed to ward off evil spirits and to signify the presence of the spirits but shimonawa rope can also be used as well rope something which ties together the fractured components of the world like people who are in love the palanquin it fetched us out of was used for marriage ceremonies a parent and child or even the mundane and the divine the use of the imagery here however seems to be clouds sakura leans into shinto or proto-shinto imagery for a lot of its weather phenomena like lightning and the shimanawa often serves as a symbol for clowns you'll note that often in the game there are little paper pieces hanging off the shimanawa ropes which symbolize lightning this goes back to journey to the west where the monkey would travel around on a golden cloud if you've ever seen dragon ball i'm told goku did something similar so here wolf is traveling to heaven on a cloud and greeting us up here is the corrupted monk the remnant we acquire after defeating her reads the battle memory of an extraordinary foe although distant reflection of such a memory provided sustenance for the wolf the corrupted monk was among the infested standing over the fountainhead palace indeed immortality would seem a fitting quality for the eternal watcher of the palace her true name is priestessiao priestes yao is a reference to the story of the buddhist priestess yao bikuni it tells of a fisherman who caught an unusual fish and decided to have his friends come over to taste its meat but one of them entered into the kitchen and saw that the fish's face was that of a human and quietly warned the other guests to not eat it it turns out that the fish was in fact a ningyo or mermaid the fisherman eventually came with a cooked meat and everyone pretended to sample it but secretly wrapped it in paper which they hid on their person the idea was to discard the bits on their way home but one of the men who was drunk on sake forgot to throw his fish away he happened to have a daughter who demanded a present when her father arrived back home he gave her the fish and later when he came to his senses he warned her not to eat it because he thought it was poisoned but it was too late it had no ill effect on her at the time and as time went by eventually the father let the event slip into the back of his mind years later she had gotten married but had stopped aging centuries passed and she became widowed to many men until she eventually became a nun and spent her perpetual youth wandering through various countries it was on her 800th year that she finally came back to her home village and was finally able to pass away this probably isn't the exact backstory of the corrupted monk but the naming is not an accident either both she and her folk tale counterpart are blessed or cursed with immortal life there's an abundance of fish in the fountainhead waters so it might be that rather than consuming sediment that she was infested with a centipede because she ate one of them or maybe even that she had a taste of the giant carp whose corpse we can find in the bottom of the water whether that's the case or whether she maybe made her way to fountainhead after being infested and chose to guard the entrance i'm not sure about but i think her mask might give some clues it's a hanya mask and these are used in japanese theater and in shinto rituals and it portrays souls of women who turned into demons because of their obsession or jealousy priestess yao is a chinese woman who was made into a concubine and came to fountainhead that way and i wonder if the idea is that she was obsessed with immortality and was bamboozled by the palace nobles like the carp attendant so she came to them trying to obtain immortality and they gave her the sediment of the rejuvenating waters which infested her with a centipede rather than share the immortality they'd acquired and like how the carp attendant was tricked because the palace nobles seemingly don't care to look after the character themselves she might have gotten tricked because they thought she was strong enough to protect the entrance to the palace which is a story not so dissimilar to the predicament the armored warrior found himself in where they both come to a secluded place and get tricked into defending it fromsoft cannibalized themselves a lot and it would not surprise me in the slightest if the corrupted monk in the armored warrior started out as the same character but were split into two when from couldn't decide whether to place them in sempo or fountainhead they did split the main villain of bloodborne into lawrence and mikalaj seemingly because they had two mutually exclusive ideas about where their stories should go so if they did the same thing here i wouldn't be surprised in this video thus far i've hopefully been even-handed in my appraisal of the exploration parts of the game i do really like it and when i've been negative on it it's more so in comparison to its soul's predecessors than in a vacuum as a standalone title i find sakura to be very engaging to explore but i do consider that aspect of the game to be a somewhat downgrade from fromm's previous output and i think it all stems back from the lack of a robust and involved equipment mechanic and the speed of navigation the quickness breaks up the pace of the levels and undermines the environmental storytelling it makes it harder to compartmentalize the world and makes things perhaps needlessly complex and it required some unnatural and immersion breaking geometry in places to wall off the unlockable and inaccessible locations from the player the movement scheme is really fun to play with but it imposes certain design limitations on the developers fountain net panelists i think is where the level designers are at their absolute best for one we'll come to have an npc early on who talks to us about the happenings here and lays out the ideas inherent to the environmental storytelling so that even speedy players will get it there's a lot of interiors and the palace nobles incentivize using those to stay safe meaning the movement is slowed down somewhat and finally this level has my favorite contextualizations of progress locks in the entire game first of all there's the water fountainhead palace is the first area the developers throw at us which we cannot reach until after we've obtained the meepo breathing technique accessing ashina castle before fighting owl also had us do some diving around in the reservoir but that was a small challenge grafted on to an existing area here navigating the water is core to the whole thing side note on the topic of water and theming remember how i talked earlier about keikare and how power manifests on high and then descends across the land i also used rainwater as an analogy and that wasn't without purpose the metaphor is literal here in that the highest elevation in the game is devoted to a waterfall level this is where the divine healing waters come from and these waters run throughout the land of ashina also on the theming front i think it's quite fitting that the game starts with wolf in a well and that the final gauntlet is the source of ashina's running waters anyways this is the first location in the game where navigating the water is core to the whole area rather than being an objective added to an existing area or an optional way of getting some extra loot because we can dive there's more avenues for level designers to explore but there's also less locks on progress available prior to this point sakiro could have gated progress by putting a large lake in front of us and not have us be able to dive in it to reach the next area the game never did that but water has been used from time to time to punish players who fall from two great heights like in meebu village here the area needed to be designed with the meebu breathing technique in mind so while the water does serve to gate progress it's not an obstacle in and of itself so we have my single favorite lock on progress in the entire game the lightning summoning okami leader shisu if we go too far into the water she will shoot us with lightning then when we respond we're supposed to realize that there's an intended road through the level and we'll have to play through that at least until we've killed her which is when the waters open up completely and all of a sudden the player might reason that it'd be worth it to go back and explore now that there's no insta-kill threat waiting for them if they start swimming and i wonder how the decision-making tree here looked like in development was this a case of we themed the area around water because we knew the player could definitely dive when they reach this point but if they can just swim then they're gonna skip the level luckily we have lightning attacks in the game let's use one of those to strike the player if they go off the intended path or was this a case of we need to somehow lock the player out of skipping the level how about we have an enemy throwing lightning at the player say that sounds like a cool idea let's figure out other ways of incorporating lightning attacks into the game so this might have been where the lightning as an interactive element originated whatever the case the lightning puts us on the intended path and the palace nobles incentivize slow careful movement in interiors and i think this is why the environmental theming hits much harder here than in some other areas we simply can't zoom past it as easily there's also a lot to appreciate in the enemy layout here the okami women fight like kenichiro so we know how to fight them but we also get passive storytelling about tomoe then the palace nobles in addition to slowing down the traversal helping the theming shine the palace nobles increase the enemy encounter difficulty by varying up the kinds rather than the raw stats i talked earlier about how souls games before had to continually beef up the stats behind the area enemies in their late game in order to balance those areas with the player's level one trick fromsoft often employed though was to make enemies or environments played differently so that the player had to approach a familiaris challenge with new restrictions if you've ever wondered why the giant's catacomb area in dark souls 1 was so dimly lit this was why same for anor londo's rafters bloodborne had rafters in the research hall it had winter lanterns in the nightmares and the brain of menses in the nightmare of menses and every one of these games has some area housing stagnant rotted water which inflicts the status ailments the palace nobles here are a threat because they cast spells which in feeble wolf making him temporarily old and this changes up how the player needs to navigate the area the nobles are very easy to kill but if their attacks land the player is a sitting duck against any attack and they can't even resurrect if killed functionally they are mind players an enemy from dungeons and dragons which miyazaki likes to include in his games in one form or another like how demon sold says latria had literal mind flayers dark souls had the pisacas and bloodborne had the brainsuckers their job is to shoot an attack at the player which limits their movement and makes them vulnerable to everything in the area i think the palace nobles are the most interesting implementation of this enemy design since their ranged attack still gives the player the ability to move around them and because they are incredibly weak meaning they are less of a threat in a head-on encounter meaning the player has more reasons to do a head-on encounter with them they don't elicit dread quite like the mind flayers in latria did but then again few things do the way they restrict our movement is buying people in this what they are doing is siphoning wolf's youth and using it to keep themselves alive note again what i've talked about a thousand times already with immortality and sekiro being parasitic and what i talked about in meepu village the gaki those spirits who eternally hunger which i think is also one idea expressed with the panelist nobles who from soft developers have said have eaten their own flesh as for the okami women sakiro's ranged enemies are much more powerful than in previous from games likely because we are so much more maneuverable this time around the strongest of the ranged enemies we face are balanced by being less mobile than us in fact every enemy in the game is less mobile than us so there's rarely a moment where we have the low ground absolutely speaking the times when we do is usually when we've become pinned in an area where a ranged enemy is taking shots at us so when the game drops a ranged enemy in an area the challenge is usually navigating to them without getting shot or getting hit by the other roaming enemies and then when we're in their face they usually go down in a couple of hits the okami women are a notable exception to this ranged enemy rigidity rule they are very mobile and they can be without making the area a nightmare to get through because we have a lot of avenues for sneaky kills but also because we can lure them into interiors where their mobility is capped somewhat there's also a real sense of the fantastical in their movement scheme and in their names interestingly enough i've been talking over every single conversation in the game but if you've paid close attention you'll have noticed that wolf is referred to as okami there's no actual connection to him and the okami women though their name comes from the same origin as the palace noble's japanese name that being drumroll okami the reference is to kuro okomi a japanese deity which is a dragon so the palace nobles are dragons which is why they look like that and the okami women are dragon women the nobles have been transformed by eating the life force of others and i think the idea they're getting at with them is that they're not so much dragons as they are failed to become dragons which is an idea from software has gone to many times see big hat logan in dark souls 1 the imperfects in dark souls 2's sunken city dlc and oceros in dark souls 3. and if you swap out dragon for some other higher being demon souls had elent the failed to become and bloodborne had rom and the one reborn or failed to be evil god this idea of failed transcendence makes its way into sakura and is important to keep in mind when discussing the giant colored carp its japanese name is nushino irokoi which means guardian spirit carp in contemporary use the word nushi is used to denote something like a lord but in the era in which the game takes place the ideograph was used to refer to a kind of spiritual guardian so guardian would be a cleaner translation specifically these are shinto animal spirits who've developed magical powers from resting in an area for a long time in the grand scheme of things this isn't exactly a big change but again i wonder why the purpose of this creature is omitted from the localized name in favor of a more baffling one this carp is no more colored than a regular koi i suppose the initial intended meaning would fly over most people's heads anyways but i still think the original name should have been kept the carp relates to dragons through the story of the carp jumping over the dragon's gate many carps would swim upstream fighting the current of the river but only the few who'd have the courage to make the final jump over the gate above the waterfall would be transformed into powerful dragons this story is meant to express the value of perseverance and accomplishment which is very fitting for a from software game placement wise the great colored carp is already on the top of the mountain over the waterfall but there are tory gates on the path to the sakura dragon which is in a higher elevation than the water the carp rests in so it seems the carp has almost managed to transcend and become a dragon interestingly though the carp might have originated as something else its body does not give the impression of a fish and its face is very human in an interview from soft staffers hinted that the carp might be an old man which explains the beard the shape of the body would certainly suggest a human origin the story of the pot nobles as well right after defeating the corrupted monk i noted that the old woman in this area acts as a nifty little lore dump who will tell curious players what is going on ensuring that the environmental storytelling comes through when we think of environmental storytelling the games which immediately pop up for most are games like bioshock whose areas have little dioramas which infer or state in clear and concise terms what happened in that location the idea is that you give the player a better sense of the world the game takes place in when you give them a little slice of it from time to time from is actually quite good at this kind of storytelling but the stories in their games aren't so much about the minute to minute of gameplay as much as they are the larger themes that run throughout so dark souls ludo narrative is about walking from bonfire to bonfire until you can kill an old god king but the story was about stagnation the corruption of the natural law of the world and the horrors which ensued after bloodborne likewise was not about killing werewolves vampires and snail gods until you can become a squid it was about how the pursuit of enlightenment corrupts those who try to force it and about the horrors which were unleashed to achieve what ultimately was no more than the bond between mother and child and for environmental storytelling this means less nooks and crannies where the placement of corpses or audio locks tell us explicitly what happened in a given area and more flowing water like in the fountainhead palace there are more conventional implementations of this storytelling technique to be sure but they don't communicate a little part of the world as much as they do the larger themes the game is going for like the shet snake skin left hanging all over the place in meepo village or like the drowned people there another good example of from's more thematically focused environmental storytelling would be what i talked about near the beginning with a sculptor and how his butt sudan was empty but for the trail of blood leading out of it another point of distinction is that fromsoft is more subdued about those thematic elements than most games are with their little slice of life segments they do have characters like solaire and dark souls to tell the player that the flow of time and lord ran is stagnant and they'll likewise use the old woman in fountainhead palace to tell the story of the area but for the most part it's less overt especially compared to most other games and as for the big picture stuff fromsoft is perfectly fine to put the burden of intuiting the message on the player that might not sound all that impressive but remember that this is a triple-a multi-plat release whose default language is japanese and whose entire narrative is held together with allusions to folklore and mythology which its intended audience the western market would be unfamiliar with i know that i often come across as a real fanboy in these videos but i really do admire this company for daring to put forwards risky ideas like this and run with them another potential example of a theme lost in translation is the use of the color white the game is a lot of strangely white creatures and phenomena think the guardian ape and the white lotus it guarded the geckos here in fountainhead palace the sakura bull the great serpent and the sakura dragon itself with the exception of the great serpents these entities all have in common that they are tied in some way to the rejuvenating waters the color white is symbolic for death and i think the idea behind all of these rejuvenating water connected creatures being white is that they are being purified to the point of stagnation and then even when they die their stagnation keeps them alive so the geckos in fountainhead don't spew poison in fact they've been purified so much that if you perform a bloodspoke ninjutsu on them the smoke will have healing properties and the sakura bull's head is just an exposed skull another idea from is inserting into the game is that being close to death will turn your hair white so the guardian ape and the dragon's heritage note that wolf kuro and the divine child and emma in old concept art funnily enough all have strands of white hair as for the great serpents they might just be albinos which would make them higher beings the idea with the serpents is that they are not quite dragons which is also the idea with the carp and a host of other phenomena in the game as you've not noticed but the serpents differ in that they are just kami so the sakura dragon can be used to obtain a parasitic immortality but the serpents are a more folksy idea there's no inherent benefit to worshipping them but they are believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits hence their shed skin being strung up all over ashima so they have these magical properties and people revere them for that but it's not quite the same as the fanatical obsession people have with the dragon aside from the great serpents all the other white creatures have a stagnancy to them and stagnancy is death as for the carp even though it lives in the rejuvenating waters it has not obtained the white pikmin and i think the pot nobles have noticed as much and are hatching their bets on the carp's immortality being innate rather than a downstream result of the dragon hence why they want to become carps themselves they figure it's a better bet than draining the youth of others or leeching of the dragon interestingly even after becoming a carp the pot noble we choose to go with will ask us to collect scales for him meaning that even though this immortality might be different it's still parasitic like every other form of immortality in the game i'm finishing up the carp quest right now and it's a good example of how framsoft's storytelling is often more about themes than world building or precise happenings we are tasked here to pick a site between one or another partnerable and the quest has a skill the great colored carp and as the noble who's paid we fed to the fish themselves become a car aside from the conniving and elitist nature of the palace nobles there's not a lot of world building packed into this story it's more about the destruction of something sacred to fuel human ambition and it's also another showcase of the pursuit of immortality koi fish can live for a really long time if they're well taken care of with the oldest koi on record having lived for over 200 years the pot nobles i figure see that as a better bet than the rejuvenating waters but the fish still do need proper attendance and once the great colored carp has died the attendant dies as well the pot nobles kinda screwed themselves over here as it the other nobles their mistreatment of the carp attendant comes back to bite them when one of his daughters massacres the lot of them something else i did while i finished the carp quest was obtaining the pieces of the dancing dragon's mask its description reads a dragon's head dancing mask made whole by piecing the fragments back together grants the ability to exchange skill points for attack power in the sculptor's idle menu the okami warrior women would wear this to the fountainhead palace there they would dance as an offering for the dragon mysteriously the ritual left them brimming with vigor the ability to transform skill points into attack power is very useful because once a player has obtained every skill they intend to use in a given playthrough the skill point xp system becomes irrelevant given the generous nature of the send economy of the late game there's not a lot of systems which punish bad play the further we get into the game but with this mask this issue is somewhat overcome and it's interesting that this is in the game at all because it feels to me like an item you wouldn't think to add until you're making a sequel also interesting is that the mask is an optional item rather than something we obtain in the main story meaning the job it does at rewarding skillful play at the end game isn't doled out to everyone likely most players wouldn't even figure out how to obtain every part of the mask until they'd already played the game once considering how powerful a lot of the late game bosses are i think giving the player the mask might have helped them grind out the extra strength to finish up the game but i'm actually glad they didn't decide to do that the item still exists if you need a helping hand and it's not like players can't search online for some tips if they get stuck so if they've fought sword saint ishin 20 times and can't beat him they can learn about the mask and there's a bit more game for them in obtaining it before going back to the final boss the key visuals of the sakura dragon boss arena are the clouds and the withered serpentine looking tree the clouds tell us that if we are in fact in a physical location if meditating near the stone in the cave actually moved us here meaning the lightning coming down when we were running up the mountain was actually sent by the dragon itself if that's the case then this fight has us in the highest elevation in the entire game okami leader shizu who i fought to gain free access to the water in fountainhead palace was located on a giant sakura tree and found that palace is one of only two locations in the entire game which has these things in full bloom the other area being meebu village i briefly noted this way back but the reason for sakura trees and not just something else is impermanence that is the pink cherry blossoms fall from the trees showcasing a beauty which lasts for a short time it's symbolic of life something whose beauty is in its impermanence the sakura dragon on the other hand is immortal meaning the symbolism is corrupted the dragon actually is the tree in the fight arena and it joins the pantheon of arguably framsoft's most bizarre reoccurring motifs corrupted trees just to name a few see reinhardt iii in kingsfield 1 the dark reality in kingsfield 4 the tower from shadow tower abyss the old one from demon souls the bed of chaos and the great hollow from dark souls the giant trees and aldia from dark souls 2 and the cursed routed great wood and pontiff sullivan from dark souls 3. i think that the idea is something which grows in an incorrect way or place whether it be because of the tree itself or because of the land it is planted in so reinhardt iii in king's field 1 becomes a tree and wanted to use the seed of evil to control the two dragons seath and gyro the tree from shadow tower abyss came from space and couldn't survive the sun so it ventured down into the dark the relationships these trees have with their environments are not harmonious and so as the trees grow they become a seed bed of corruption this is why the sakura trees in fountain net palace are so important because the sakura dragon is a tree when we confront it it starts out as a disheveled and withering bunch of branches and only after we've cleared out the mob enemies in this fight whose original name i'll remind you was elders of the white wood only after we've cleared them out will the dragon reveal itself the aromatic flowers item description reads flower of the ever blossom that bloomed in an old memory grafted by takeru who took the branch from the divine realm as a parting relic one who seeks purification may impart the dragon tears and these flowers to the divine air of the dragon's heritage thus severing the shackles that bind the immortal bearer of dragon's blood and the heavenly realm where takiru plucked a branch from a sakura tree before departing is this place this is the heavenly realm and the tree is what the sakura dragon was before it revealed itself he literally plucked a branch of the dragon which is why it is missing its left arm this connects the dragon to the sculptor and wolf in that all three are missing the left arm which i think makes the sakura dragon saki ryu [Music] now that the dragon has revealed itself we can talk a bit about it specifically how long it's been in japan the lady leaning on the stone in the cave we entered this area from was wearing clothes from the coufon period indicating that she's been there since the year 250 to roughly 500 that might be how long the dragon has rested in japan that lady by the way might well have been the first dragon's heir if her hair and connection to the dragon are anything to go by we also have to take a look at the sword the dragon wields visually it's based on the seven branched sword shichichido a real sword which looks identical besides the size and glowing texture and it was given by a korean king to a japanese ruler as a sign of friendship and it's been dated to around the 4th century which happens to coincide with the khufan period the sengoku jidai ended in 1615 which places the arrival of the sakura dragon over 1 000 years ago the seven branched sword being a gift from korea hits to the dragon's origin that being korean the game talks a lot about how the dragon came to japan from the nebulous west and some people have connected that to robert's father and the europeans but they're probably referring to korea also that sorts design is a korean tree motif again i emphasize the point i raised about from software having a weird fascination with corrupted trees as you probably expect i'm a big fan of the swimming section we had in fountain net it was another moment which leaned on delivering a memorable experience rather than just an execution challenge and for that very reason i really like the sakura dragon fight so much so in fact that i think it might just be the best spectacle boss in any of these games it has a conventional combat challenge front loaded in the first place where the player is asked to kill a bunch of poison vomiting sick dragon boys but the second phase is about the grapple hook and my favorite mechanic the lightning reversal we aren't actually made to trigger the lightning reversal in this fight game takes care of that for us but i don't even mind that because it removes an element of challenge from a fight whose strength is the presentation and the gravitas of it all it's by no means hard but it's very memorable and for this encounter one which we've been building up to throughout the entire game i think that was absolutely the right call to make there's not much left of the game now so i'll be extending the end game by cleaning out the optional bosses starting with the headless then the schichermann warriors the demon of hatred and finally ishin taking through the headless we're starting out in the ashina outskirts with the very first headless i encountered in this run the surface headless have two life bars and the fog which manifests around them nerves wolf's movement they can terrify the player which is an insta-kill move and there's no way to perform stealth death blows on these headless finally without divine confetti damage dealt to them is 10 times weaker this culminates in these guys being very expensive to experiment around but once you get the hang of them they're really not that bad they are about the least nimble bosses in the entire game so you can always create some distance if you need to heal or use pacifying agents to reduce terror buildup there's also a special umbrella upgrade which exists to block terror damage so their most powerful attack can be avoided that means the biggest danger comes when they go invisible and try to creep up behind wolf there's actually a buck with that maneuver where if you instigate a death blow as they're about to go invisible they can stay invisible until the fight is reset when they creep up behind wolf they have their hands extended outwards and if they successfully pull off their grab attack they'll seemingly tear into wolves intestines rip out a small ball and insert it into themselves the idea with that is shiri kodama a mythical mystical ball resting in the anus which houses a person's soul not a joke not a joke this is a real thing and what's more there are ghouls called kappa which lure people to dive into bodies of water so that their anus will be exposed and they can go diving in for people's precious souls yup in lore the headless were all great warriors who fought the interior ministry in days past who were beheaded but who wandered the land onwards in the sure ending owl will rejoin wolfe having beheaded guenichiro and i like to think he would have become one of these headless in that cannon i think it's a fitting end for someone who died trying to save this land and i also think it's a fun juxtaposition to the other headless that he's very lean and athletic looking whereas they're all bloated quite a bit it is possible that we have underwater headless solely because fromsoft wanted to further drive home the idea of the kappa and the whole seed of the soul idea divine confetti will increase damage taken by the underwater variants but it isn't nearly as useful as it is against the surface ones considering how they also don't slow down movement and only have one health stock they're much easier to fight so you might wonder why the divine confetti stipulation was removed for them i think it might simply be that because we can't activate the confetti when under water it broke the fights we'd have to surface every time we'd want to use it and if we surfaced we might go out of the range of the headless which would de-aggro them and could reset the fights restoring their health to full making the battles more tedious than they would be challenging but as is often the case there's also an in-universe answer to the question the item description for the divine confetti reads confetti imbued with a divine blessing made for driving away apparitions the paper is made ceremoniously whereby pulp is spread thin using water from the exalted fountainhead as the gods bless the water so too will the confetti bless one who basks in its touch allowing attacks to connect with apparition type enemies and that second line is what's important the confetti is made with the water from fountainhead and where we fight the two non-surface headless is in those very waters so the effect is given to wolf passively because he's touching the water that was used to make the divine confetti in the first place now that there's so precious little left of the game and since i've exhausted what i had to say about the headless i'm gonna drop on you my little theory about sakura the one i've been building up to all throughout the video i am not operating on any secret nda knowledge here so don't take this any further from here thinking you're in on something secret i came to this theory because i feel i have a sense for how fromsoft operates as a developer and even if the theory is untrue i think it merits discussing if only because it's a good way to talk about them as a developer the theory is that sakiro was conceived of as a bloodborne do-over in my bloodborne commentary i made note of a lot of cut content and stuff which got shuffled around some and that bloodborne itself as it launched might have been a very compromised version of the game the way from software works and you can verify this info by looking at the differently dated data mined content is that there's a story written for their games and a world designed to tell the story but then as the projects they're working on move further and further towards completion a lot of the stuff changes and gets used elsewhere dark souls 1's lost isolatheria was originally a swamp dark souls 2 was famously remade halfway through development with yui tanemura being given the herculean task of essentially rom hacking an incomplete game and that he managed to release anything is frankly astonishing dark souls 3's main boss was pontiff sullivan as the old king of the eclipse for a while and the entire structure of the world layout was heavily changed but with connective paths between areas being moved around as much as they were the reason bloodborne might not feel as shuffled around as the other titles sometimes do is because the game that launched was an incredibly concise and tightly paced and directed title but that's more so because the general plot of the game seems to have only changed once when the great ones were introduced into the vampire werewolf sequel to demon souls that they were making and once the great ones were there the details moved around but always in service of the same vision it was always about the contrast between enlightenment and beasthood about the mutability of the human form and about how powerful creatures have fewer offspring the broader themes of the game stayed intact throughout the entire development process dark souls 2 was very unfocused and it didn't really have a cohesive central message until scholar of the first sin came about and dark souls 3 doesn't have a message like that to this day i mean i guess you could say it's about things ending but then it's also introducing a bunch of new tricks which can override the law of the world for even longer like that flame that never goes out anyways bloodborne comparatively was tight but still it was very much a from game in that it was changed a lot in development and the final changes weren't all created processing limitations crippled the game so before launched a lot of the functions were dummied out like area dynamisms being scaled back significantly which had massive narrative ramifications for trying to understand the game's story by looking at what was being presented at a given time like how the red moon didn't appear in every area there is a rumor that the downgrade in the final months of bloodborne's development actually came about because sony had a stipulation that games be playable without any installs and so from had to hastily make it play from the disc alone but like i said rumor as for why this is an activision game we don't need to consider the possibility that sony might have really burnt from but rather that it was just a better deal from self-publishes in japan and getting activision to publish in the west rather than sony means not locking the game behind one platform also they have the name recognition that they can shop around for the best deal and activision according to miyasaki was very hands off they made some requests here and there but largely they left the creatives alone now as for how exactly sakura is a do-over of bloodborne there's a lot to dig into from recycled plots themes narrative structures characters etc so let's get into it both games are set in an isolated mountainous region which is currently suffering the corrupting effects of ancient magical blood both games promise the player a more subdued and straightforward adventure at the start but do a u-turn around the midpoint where they adopt magical fantastic and divine elements both games feature prominently a cult of philosophers who acquire divine blood and perform horrific experiments bergenworth in bloodborne sempu temple in sekiro and both of these organizations founding members turn away from the crazy path which their students have taken and try to overcome the horrible corruption that is spreading both of those leaders managed to create one special being with the blood they had willam managed to create rom the shampoo leader managed to create the divine child of rejuvenation and finally both leaders end up going into a meditative sort of slumber and become catatonic sakuro's shelter stone and bloodborne's bloodstones are both stones which form from blood if you thought that the presentation of imbibed corruption via centipede living inside of a body was interesting when zekero did it you might have also thought it was interesting when bloodborne did it first the image for vermin is a centipede and on those centipedes remember when i asked you to keep in mind the visual design of the guardian ape you know big hulking beast with a pronounced facial scar and a headless version where its body is animated by vermin that's bloodborne's bloodletting beast even hirata estate isn't all that original when you think about it bloodborne's fishing hamlet also told the story of an invasion into a water area whose purpose was to kidnap a sacred child to steal the secrets of its being then finally there's the smaller more incidental stuff like how bloodborne data miners have found a strangely large white serpent in that game's files or how giobulu looks suspiciously like bloodborne's cut dragon guardian boss now it's very possible that sakura wasn't literally built from bloodborne's conceptual leftovers very possible but if not there's certainly a house styled here if nothing else i think it's at least fair to say that creatively speaking sakura is a bloodborne do-over in that many of the failed or compromised ambitions of bloodbornes were fulfilled in sakiro more dynamic map changes the more action-oriented experience moving away from the demon souls origins etc all of this is not to say that sakuro is better on a whole that's more a question of what you prefer or that zekiro and bloodborne don't have merit as individual games because the other exists so that bloodborne is somehow lesser because sakiro accomplished many of its failed ambitions or that sakura was a lesser game because bloodborne did something first because this is how fromsoft goes about making games everything from development gets used and if something doesn't make it to the final game they add it in a dlc and if they don't add it in a dlc they'll reuse it in the next game bloodborne's cut dragon guardian boss is just an enemy that wanders around alden ring dark beast parl looks very much like the concept art for the giant skeletons in dark souls and dark eater madeira's model is the same as the giant dragon at the end of archdragon peak like the great channel friend quesadilla s nose to tail developer no part of the animal goes to waste i haven't talked a lot about the cut content of sakura in this video and that's a deliberate choice because elden ring has just released by the time this video is finally out and knowing that fromsoft likes to use cut content from one game in their next game i didn't want to accidentally spoil anything from eldon ring for myself so that's a little behind the scenes on the making of this video if you want another little fun fact about the making of i actually only learned that the laser beam attack of the shichiman warriors can be deflected a few minutes before fighting them the schichermann warriors are necromancers who summon the souls of the dead in their fights those are the faces on the ethereal balls around them i think fighting these is a good way to distinguish sakura from souls combat wise given the amount of things on screen at any given moment and how much we need to move around if this was a soul's boss it would almost certainly rank among people's least favorites but here they're quite manageable because of wolves own innate mobility like the headless they are also best fought after popping a divine confetti but the damage they take is only increased threefold rather than tenfold unlike the headless though these guys have some fun interactions with some of our more fringe combat tactics they are susceptible to the puppeteer ninjutsu technique so in case you ever needed a really powerful ally in an area there's that and they can be insta-killed with the anti-air death blow these guys and the headless also share the distinction of being the most easily skippable bosses of any given run when we talk to emma here in ashina castle she'll tell us that ishin finally succamed to his illness and frankly i think this is the best way to close out the story of old man isiah there is always the impulse to go overboard with a character's finale and have him fight maybe seven lone shadows at the same time and manage to kill all but one and have a final showcase of just how powerful this guy was but this outcome as underwhelming as it is preserves his dignity in a way that dying to some faceless henchmen of the central forces absolutely would not now he will be getting a final fight where he gets to showcase how incredibly powerful he really is but it's not a case of grandpa's cannot show you whippersnappers how it's done which ends with him being humiliated this way his legacy cannot be taken away from him there is a theory that kinichiro killed him to have a backup in case he couldn't kill wolf or that he killed him to obtain the mortal blade from him but i don't think that's the case for one there's no blood on the scene here to indicate a struggle yes yeshin is holding a sword but that seems to me more like he might have been headed outwards into a fight at least judging by his corpse facing an open window kenichiro obtained the black mortal blade and in a showcase of subdued story setup ishin wielded that sort in the opening cinematic meaning he had it all alone as for how he could have wielded it without being an immortal the black sword might not have that stipulation see also how owl will wield it in the sure ending though to be fair the non-immortals are never shown using its black fire effect and it might be that the black plates death curse only applies for that the motion combat arts which we get from each and if we manage to master one skill tree i didn't in this playthrough sorry to say will from this point on be given to us by emma if we have cleared the unlocking requirements it feels a bit pedantic to keep this away from the player this laid into the game but i actually like that because it gives us a sense for how much she respects isian's commands that even as everything collapses she places his word over whatever impulse she might have to give aid to wolf and kuro you get a real sense for how loyal she is that not only is she there with isian in his last moments but that she's honoring what was probably his last wish then again it's not like giving this to the player at this point without them meeting the criteria for unlocking it would change anything since the player needs to have mastered at least two combat arts to be able to make any use of this the phantom kunai tool ultimately did not make a big showcase in this playthrough because i've been trying to showcase as many prosthetic tools as i can but it's one of my favorites and i'll get to use that function i talked about when i fought the guardian ape in this fight against ujinari mitsuo that being spamming it a bunch to get his health low enough that his posture recovery gets so slow that i can safely heal whenever i need to this enemy has red eyes so he's probably weaker to fire damage i haven't checked to verify that but i'm reasonably sure of it the reason i'm opting to use the butterflies though is to illustrate something if you've not completed zakiro and you've somehow made it this far into the video totally ignoring all of my spoiler warnings in the beginning you monster but if that is you and you want to go back and you don't think you have it in you i encourage you to try the game with the phantom kunai it's available very early in the game the damage the butterflies deal scales with akko sugars and when they hit they pierce through defenses enemies recover posture much lower when their health is lower and without any spirit emblem carrying capacity upgrades this tool can be spammed seven times i said a few minutes ago that the headless and the schichermann warriors are the most easily skippable bosses on a given run but the boss i just fought was also eminently skippable and the boss i'm about to fight might be the most skipped one in the entire game the demon of hatred the headless all dropped the spiritful items which function exactly like the sugars except they don't rely on you having a fixed stock but instead run on spirit emblems and the shitemann warriors drops are generally less useful the second one i fought to drop the ceremonial tanto though which functions like the blood bullet mechanic from bloodborne whereupon use the player will get 5 spirit emblems 5 bullets in bloodborne the way sakuro locks content we'd have to have defeated kinichiro to get the gunfort key to be able to defeat the guardian ape and would have needed to fight the guardian apes so that the schichermann warrior of that area would have spawned for us to be able to get this thing placement wise this definitely feels like something that you should have had access to from the get-go but i also think this is very livable coming from bloodborne bloodborne did have a similar mechanic available from the start but i mean in the sense that there isn't more placement issues this is sadly the final time we'll be seeing my favorite npc black hat badger after he passes we'll get the meepu pilgrimage balloon whose item description reads me balloon made in the year of the dragon spring pilgrimage sealed with a prayer for healthy upbringing burst the white mebu balloon while clasping one's hands in prayer those splashed with the waters will enjoy increased gains of all sorts for the time on it is crudely scrawled to tenkichi from badger it has the cumulative effects of all other kinds of balloons it lasts for two and a half minutes and can be sold for 20 cent it's not a particularly good item though given how incidental the mebu balloons are for most players and its 10 value is basically non-existent but because it comes from badger i've always cherished this thing with a strange sentimentality if we ignore the narrative ramifications of this item and the story that is told and focused solely on its inclusion from a gameplay perspective then it might be that this balloon and other quest items like ginseng's jesus statue are unique to height the fact that completing most of the quests the game has us complete gives us fairly basic fairly generic loot but i think if there was no distinction made between what we got and the standard versions of those items it would make it harder to have any sort of sentimentality to those items even though programming wise they are likely just made by copying and pasting the original names or some of their functions and having new names and item descriptions assigned to them and i think more instances of this would have been welcome so the snapseeds given to us by inosuke nogami before fighting lady butterfly could have been called something like nogami's snapseeds they would function exactly the same as the normal ones do but they'd feel somewhat special because those might have been his last hope which he wisely handed over to wolf likewise the old hag who gifted me the divine confetti way earlier in the video when i performed the prey post three times could have given us something like the old hags divine confetti and again same function as the normal one but has some extra story and sentimentality attached to it i think little touches like that can go a really long way for building a bond with these characters and i think it's pretty funny how much i've come to value the seemingly insignificant loot i get from interactions like the one with batcher over more elaborately scripted sequences which games often include to endear us to their characters just goes to show how often times you don't need to overthink things creatively players can appreciate the smaller stuff after fountainhead palace we were sent back to the more subdued and grounded reality of theoshina castle i think the contrast between the fantastical and fountainhead with the very real and very imminent threat of the interior ministry is a great touch for one i celebrate the reusing of previous areas and how little was ultimately needed to make them feel fresh again the dynamic components like enemies in the areas and our grapple points are changed around somewhat and it feels visually distinct from the last time we were here because it's nighttime and because so much of the ashina outskirts is on fire the final mob enemies of the game are the soldiers of the central forces and i quite like how this organization is handled throughout the game we don't get to meet their leader or stop their invasion all throughout the game they've been set up as this looming threat which is set to collide with ashina and when it happens whatever attachments you've made with this land and the people in it becomes irrelevant wolf's only concern is to protect kuro and as much as you might want to help ashina that concern is the only one you can actually address the path we're on right now will take us to the demon of hatred and i think this being an optional boss is interesting when you consider the interior ministry because if you want to head canon in an ending where their invasion is blown back and ashina manages to hold itself together you might want to leave the demon of hatred alone so that it could in your head can and be the thing that the interior ministry cannot overcome that being said the sure ending of the game has ashina be bathed in blood for a long time as wolf's wrath descended on the land so maybe leaving the demon of hatred alive is the ultimate grim fate that can fall upon the land shikakichi here is the fourth time i've fought this drunkard boss and i have precious little new to say about it i'll note for the final time that he's surrounded by mob enemies because he's very easy to cheese if you fight him so low and i'll also note that this time around the boss has fire which like i noted in the hidden forest reminds me of how in dark souls we fought the asylum demon thrice and that the last time it had a fire overhaul the reason i think the fire overhaul is interesting though is because it isn't unique to shikikichi the interior ministry soldiers have fire weapons too and i think the idea is the red-eyed enemies and the beasts of ashina if you recall kenichiro intended to use the blazing bull and the giants just to name some in his fight and those are all weak to fire which tells me that his desperate attempt to use everything and anything he could get his hands on to come back to the interior ministry was ultimately in vain because they've caught on to using fire to combat him i think sakura's world is very well designed from both a logical perspective and a thematic one i've talked about what the idea of flowing and stagnant waters means and i think it's nothing short of remarkable how effortlessly the world design implements it in a way that also makes for good gameplay progression so we start the game out in a well make our way to where the rivers run and learn to swim then go upstream and swim in the reservoir behind the waterfall only to make our way to the skies where the rain comes from this is the good stuff there's also what i talked about in the mid game where the shampoo path is about going up the sunken valley path is about going straight forwards and the meepoo path is about going down for the most part the world design is impeccable i have some gripes with the minutia of exploration compared to souls but the world design by itself i think is incredible but i think this tail end path to the demon of hatred is the worst implemented in the entire game i like going back to a previous area don't get me wrong but logically this is the wrong area for us to go to for one the path we're taking will end with us warping to get to gobu's boss arena where we can fight the demon of hatred that's really strange because we're walking backwards through the ashina outskirts and the wharf idol is just a short distance away from the dilapidated temple which means the demon of hatred is actually passed to the enemy which warns us against it near the idol meaning it would have traveled through the asean outskirts to get to gilbus arena as the map is laid out it would have made more sense for us to reach the boss by descending from asiana castle going through the blazing pool area and making our way from there to gobu's arena without warping but since the fight is accessed from here it means that the forces of the interior ministry near the warp idol were killed by the demon of hatred and that it left no marks outside of that small area on its path to gobu's arena one way i guess i can make sense of this is that the original plan was for this fight to be located on the starting region of the asean outskirts right above the dilapidated temple but that it just didn't play well so they moved it around maybe because it required them to lock off the dilapidated temple's access to the demon of hatred just above which felt wrong meaning they'd have had to lock off the whole temple including all the prosthetic upgrades and they didn't want to do that whatever the case is i think it's the worst integrated path in the entire game which is a real shame because the demon of hatred is one of my favorite fights in the entire game it's a much more traditional soul space in that the posture bar can basically be thought of as a non-feature likewise the deflection mechanic you can still deflect and the boss does have posture but i meant that in the sense of dodging is not optimal and us focusing less on rhythmic timing and more on being near the enemy's crotch where we can hit his legs for damage but to say that this is just a regular souls boss imported into sakura is very incorrect it has perhaps the most mobility out of any modern fromsoft boss and the unique quirks of sakura are very much needed to survive even though it's located in the largest boss arena in the game i still feel the map is a bit too cramped that's how mobile this boss is this arena is an interesting choice for this fight because it also does not feature any grapple points for us to move around with there are opportunities to grapple on the boss himself after he does his aoe fire attacks and after he gets too far away from us but the environment itself keeps wolf firmly grounded and all the environmental clutter of the arena is very breakable if the demon of hatred gets into contact with it in the silver grass field a few minutes from now there'll be rocks to hide behind here there's nothing because the demon of hatred likes to do charged run attacks to create in close distances and if the player could chase the ai to get stuck like that it might remove the challenge on the visual aspect of this fight i think most players will get implicitly that they are encountering the sorry state of the sculptor when they finally make it to this place some will have talked to him earlier where he talked about seeing visions of flames engulfing ashina some will have revisited the dilapidated temple noticed his absence and had in the back of their minds that he was somewhere to be found but i think the design of the demon of hatred communicates that it's the sculptor in and of itself the orange fur he's nicknamed orangutan for a reason and the hunched posts or features only shared with him and the fiery ropey left arm and the fact that the fireballs he throws at us are actually sculptor idols are what seals the deal funnily enough though this isn't the first time fromsoft has had us fight on oversized humanoid figure with a massive arm manus from dark souls desertorius of the abyss expansion was very much cut from the same cloth as was the cleric beast from bloodborne i noted this in my bloodborne video but i think those two being visually similar was a way for fromsoft to signal the escalating threat from dark souls to bloodborne that the most challenging boss from the former was repackaged to be one of the opening bosses of the latter then in bloodborne's expansion there was a fire version of the cleric beast in the lawrence fight and now with the demon of hatred it seems like we've come full circle also if we're talking bloodborne another concept which partially made its way into that game we see reused in zekiro is the idea of beasthood creeping up the right leg so in bloodborne there was a subtle visual motif in that a lot of characters were missing the right leg or couldn't walk at all and even in the environmental design this would be represented empty suits of armors like the ones in cainhurst would be missing that leg and the old hunter trousers had a brace on the right side so the beast hood makes its way up one side and then warps people into asymmetrical misshapen monsters here this is repackaged with shura a demon which manifests within those who cannot stop killing and eventually takes over and like how bloodborne's old hunters tried to prevent bee stood by amputating the leg ishin stopped the sculptor's transformation by cutting off a limb in the dilapidated temple we could see the manifestations and consequences of the sculptor's wrath all around us like the buddha statues he carved or the damage to the temple which was clearly broken from the inside the demon of hatred itself that the sculptor becomes a demon or oni is another representation of the idea of corruption according to the description for the spirit emblems we purchase from the idols they hold the spirits of those who die and carry the karma of being slain when we buy them we are giving an offering which then frees the souls of the deceased and that there's no upper limit to how many we can buy in a given playthrough tells us just how many people the sculptor slew he carves the idols in an attempt to rid himself of the bad karma he's accumulated over the years but there seems to be no end to the impurity he has within him and it's manifested as his anger which corrupts him just like how the sakura dragon corrupts ashina in order for wolf to become shura he must make the choice to abandon his master and while i'm usually not the biggest fan of dialogue choices segmenting narratives in games when more interesting gameplay would get the job done i like the way it's handled in securo because wolfe is such a scary figure if you don't agree with the reasoning for his killing spree the game has its own rules for what constitutes actual morality and what doesn't see how immortality is always parasitic and for the sure ending all it takes for wolf to become a monster is for him to not have a purpose for his killing anymore previous miyazaki era from south games got around the issue of ludo narrative dissonance largely by having the enemies be actual crazy monsters so that there wasn't any reason to question our actions a demon boss is blocking progress go kill it stop asking questions sakura's enemies are largely just men trying to defend their country from an invasion they are acting on behalf of their leader genichiro but they are still men and for the potential issue of wolf being more destructive than he's worth for him to be the good guy in the story shura and the dragon's heritage pick up the slack however just the cause of the ashina warriors might be in a divine cosmic sense i think most players would agree that wolf's cause is more just that getting rid of the corrupting impurity of the land and allowing it to actually heal from the parasitic forces which have been acting in it is preferable to further stagnation as for shura that answers the other question sure wolf is the good guy because his cause is just but wouldn't that be the case regardless because he's our protagonist isn't the prioritization of immortal severance over the lives of those who live in the land simply a function of the perspective we have looking into this game no because shura although the characters in sakura are very well defined this is not one of those games with easily debatably good villains and evil heroes there is a larger story happening involving divine forces and we know wolf is the good guy because he isn't shura if he was not on a mission for immortal severance then he would become surah and he would unleash a chaos upon the land as the another's memory shura item description puts it fields of bodies mountains of dead down dragon spring river our country bled a fiery god demon wolf in red the difference between wolf and the sculptor is that wolf ultimately has a purpose to his killing the sculptor did not and no matter how hard he tried he was in the end not able to put the demon to rest and because of this i think it's very fitting that right before wolf cleans out the impurity of the land that he confronts the sculptor and overcomes what he could have been if he had chosen another path he and the sculptor are very similar men and their stories reflect one another's many times so i think it's fitting that it's wolf who puts the sculptor down rather than some faceless interior ministry now i may not know much about shura but i'm sure about this i found the demon of hatred to be only the second hardest fight in the game let's finish this first upgrades specifically i'm fetching the final upgrade to the loaded axe the lassolite axe a lassolite variant is the highest upgrade path for a tool to have but there's some contention in the community whether or not there are always the best possible versions of their respective tools the lassolite shuriken for example does less damage than the phantom kunai did the kunai's damage output was equal to the spinning shuriken with a 1.8 multiplier for the phantom butterflies the lassolite shuriken maxes out at 0.85 times the shuriken's damage which is roughly halved when it's attacking through blocks the benefit though is that it can fly through an enemy to deal damage to those behind them so when there's multiple enemies in an encounter rounding them up and attacking them with a lassolite shuriken will do more cumulative damage than attacking the same group with a phantom kunai would it's also significantly faster because the damage value is attached to the shuriken itself rather than the butterflies which follow the kunai on a delay as for the axe the lassolite shuriken and axe are the only last light weapons i got in this playthrough as for the axe there's a case to be made that the sparking axe its flame variant is superior it has a 1.25 times damage multiplier for the base damage of the loaded axe and it also deals fire damage to enemies you hit potentially afflicting them with a burn status ailment which shuts down their posture recovery the lassolite axe has a 1.5 damage multiplier from the base loaded axe it deals chip damage and when you smack the ground with the final attack in the spin combo every allusion type enemy in the vicinity is affected with the same effect as if you'd have used a snapseed so mobs will disappear bosses will stagger which one of these you prefer depends on whether you want to posture break the opponents or whether you want to go in for bigger numbers i think that on a new game plus the last led axe is pretty definitively better because it has more tricks of its sleeve it hits harder and the function of the sparking axe can be obtained elsewhere like the flame wet but there's something else to consider when determining the comparative strength of these weapons and that's how accessible they are by the time most players can get their hands on the lassolite axe they won't have any illusion type enemies left to fight so that function is irrelevant the chip damage is nice but considering the endgame gauntlet enemy lineups posture recovery locking is nicer on a whole i think the lassolite axe is superior but the sparking axe is so much easier to get and its utility is more obvious i think this is the right way of doing player upgrades in action games where a more powerful tools function is not as easy to utilize to its maximum capacity allowing lower level players to keep up somewhat and letting those who want a bit more depth to experiment with some more fringe tactics so while both versions of the axe are incredibly powerful and can supplement the function of each other for most cases you intend to use them one being better but not as easy to fully utilize is probably the best way to go about things lassolite weapons are created from lapis lazuli wearing jewelry adorned with lapis lazuli was thought to give buddhists a presence of mind and to drive out malicious intentions funnily enough though we can obtain the material from four places in the game we can defeat the demon of hatred complete pot noble harunagas or partnerable koremoris quest we can also buy the lapis from both of them and one is dropped by the schichermann warrior i fought in fountainhead so we can get them from a demon of deeply held resentment from two scheming noblemen and from a necromancer and for none of them does it seem like malicious intentions were driven away and frankly that's just about as fitting a sentiment to assign to lapis lazuli as anything considering the world this game takes place in the worlds of miyazaki the worlds of from software are largely not redeemable and the old evils which skulk around every corner can only be rested not overcome in demons souls the old one was created by god to cleanse mankind of their souls in dark souls gwyn's twisting of the natural law of the world stagnates it and sets in motion the horrors which humanity is fooled into perpetuating in bloodborne the pursuit of a higher state of being pushes men to destroy themselves and those around them the horrors are innate to the laws of the world or to the people living in it in both cases though it and life become one and the same sakura's world is not as relentlessly dark as previous from games of this era were but this idea of a malicious world is still there in demon souls we met the dreckling merchant who explained to us that he doesn't really care that the demons are the ones running the place and that he didn't really notice any difference in his life from when the nobles ran the place except for how he wasn't being sent to die in some battle in demon cells we also met ostrava and got a much rosier more naive view of boletaria's nobility this is an idea which sakura reuses kinichiro's drive to save ashina makes a lot of sense character-wise when you know how much the land gave to him and if you look at his story and disconnected from everything else he is an easy character to sympathize with but below the surface of the ashina nobles the world tells a different story one of a mad ruler who is destroying the land to try to preserve it and in this noble land we see child sacrifices the embrace of corruption and the degradation of harmony the land which kinichiro loves is not the real hashina because that's not a land he ever got to know he loves ashi another concept but the land he governs is an afflicted land a heretical land the real ashina is what we see in this repair in deep long since abandoned caves and while the interior ministry is not necessarily a better authority to govern the region from the perspective of corruption it is not obviously a worse candidate for that job either i talked earlier in this video about how hirada makes sense as an alternate opening tutorial area the biggest loss in that hypothetical version of the game though i think would be that the final confrontation with kinichiro wouldn't take place in the same area as our first confrontation with him did the ashina map has hirada be located quite close to the silver grass field so maybe they could have snuck in a cliff path leading up it and then had wolf thrown in the well or something after being defeated by kenichiro but however well they could have glued that together i'm sure most of you watching will agree when i say that they're simply an elegance to the setup we have now the story of sakiro takes place over one day at the start of the video i noted that the moon is an ill omen and i also noted that this idea was being connected to genichiro when we first met him now that we have our final showdown the full extent of this symbolism hits in with kinichiro having lost almost everything and soon to lose even his will to fight on this final confrontation is also closing off the experience in that the home of our first great loss shall be the location of our final triumph it closes out the ark which wolf kuro and kenichiro have note how much more disheveled kunichiro is this time around note that wolfe doesn't stumble when drawing his sword like he did in the beginning and note that kuro was the one who holds wolf back at the start whereas the latter held the former back in the opening for the fight against guineachiro and ishin at the end death is not canon this is the case for the rest of the game too but it's extra weird in this fight the idea in the game is that as wolf dies he is resurrected by the dragon's heritage by absorbing the life force of those around him stagnating them this is dragon rock we've already had this talk but for boss fights this integration of death as a failure state into the narrative is often undone cutscene fights and ones which include dialogue like gyobu's genitiros and the sakura dragons do a hard reset when we die and the story pretends as if the meeting we had when we overcame the enemy was the only one this plays very poorly with the dragon rock mechanic because the canon deaths are the ones we resurrect from and the actual deaths aren't factored into the narrative but the former does not spread dragon rock whereas the latter does meaning dragon rot is technically assigned to the incorrect death mechanic if it were the other way around there would be decision making to the resurrection mechanic other than factoring in held resources and whether the player thinks they have what it takes to get the job done or if they should just try again if they valued their npc interactions they could decide to not resurrect and just have the game not count that death this wouldn't play with the way we can keep loot after death and how xp and zen are integrated into dying but since the setup the game goes with is already bending the canonicity of death i don't think this alternate assigning for dragonrot would be an obvious downgrade going back to our talk on restarting bosses death is not canon and when we die to bosses they do hard resets the game's framework is really hard to work a story of this kind around because if wolf were to canonically respawn 30 times to attempt a fight it wouldn't make sense for the opposing character to keep fighting him when he's getting noticeably better as the player learns the fight in front of them better and better so characterization wise fromsoft must have decided it made more sense to suspend the death is canon motif for boss fights the integration of failure states into the actual game world is something i really appreciate in games when they deliver it because i think the fewer times we have to be reminded that we are playing video games the better that being said fromsoft also did this in the end of bloodborne where german would kill the player in the dream to set them free but if they refused and fought him him killing the player in the fight wouldn't count i think it's more admirable when games manage to incorporate their failure states into the story rather than having the narrative abruptly end then rewind a bit for retries and i think the disconnect sakuro makes is more noticeable here than at any other point in the game because kenichiro and ishin are using the other mortal blade even if you were the head can in a way for previous fights to be canon this one can't be because that sort severs immortality the ishin fight is already hard enough that we don't really need to add a perma-death to trying it as well but this does mean that the mortal blade goes underutilized as an interactive storytelling device in this fight we can use ours to perma-kill immortal foes in the world and to destroy centipedes but outside of being the weapon held by the final bosses the black mortal blade has no impact on gameplay whatsoever and the significance of it being a mortal blade is sadly completely relegated to the cinematic portion of the experience i don't know how i'd have liked for fromsoft to integrate it into the gameplay i think permadeath is a fun idea but it just would not work unless ishin and kenichiro were [ __ ] overs but one idea i have is that maybe the player should always be gifted unseen aid after dying here and that this unseen aid should maybe have 100 sin and xp retention indicating that there are divine forces involving themselves to help wolf undo the corruption of ashina that doesn't overcome my issue with the boss's resetting and the dragon rot being assigned to the wrong deaths but aside from the potential ramification of involving deities at the story's tail end i think it's a better answer than ignoring the black mortal blade completely there's also to consider that this is the final boss so losing npcs in the world to dragon rot losing xp or losing zen it doesn't really matter anymore in my bloodborne video i talked about how the final boss of a game does not need to be exceptional in and of itself because it obtains some grandeur simply by being the cap of to the entire experience which has preceded it and on that note you can argue that the design sensibilities of the modern fronts of games can be seen in the type of final boss we got in demon souls dark souls 1 and bloodborne the final fight was more an ambient experience than it was a tough encounter in dark souls 2 we had a multi-boss fight followed by the final boss scholar of the first sin added a third boss to this mixture and in dark souls 3 we had a straight up sword fight the games whose final fight emphasized a mood over a challenge are coincidentally the games in this lineup with the least contention of their quality that's not to say that one approach is objectively better than another that's more a question of what kind of fight that you prefer but considering how the final boss is where the final catharsis of the experience will be felt i think emphasizing mood is more important than going in for something flashy which is to say flow wise i think ishin can be a terrible boss i think he's way too hard and while i don't have a problem with a game not granting release to those who refuse to engage with it on its terms this is the final boss you don't get here without overcoming all previous hurdles so i think it's fair to say that players who did make it here are probably a bit more deserving of that catharsis than those who bailed after the first hour this fight is really hard and if we look at the game's completion stats it doesn't paint the pretty picture while i don't enjoy trophies or achievement systems they can be useful for gauging metrics and according to playstation about 25 of players who start the game managed to beat each there is always a massive drop off from the number of players who start the game and who complete the game most players don't actually finish games so a 25 completion rate isn't really that bad what is bad is that 35 percent of players manage to defeat the sakura dragon so ishin constitutes a 10 overall draw in and off himself and once we factor in that only 35 percent or so of players managed to beat the sakura dragon this is an even worse number because it means isian had roughly a third of the players who managed to get that far not go further which i think can leave a really bad taste in the mouth this probably isn't the kind of relationship you want players who've invested so much into a run walking away with as an experience i think the final bosses in these games are always stronger as emotional pieces rather than compact ones see i'll ant gwyn german and the moon presence but on the other hand this is my personal favorite fight in the entire game for one my sakiro is bloodborne do-over idea plays quite nice when you consider that both games end with a player fighting their mentor character that both of those fights take place in a field of white plant life with a full moon shining in the background where the boss has become younger and wields a gun which the player cannot themselves obtain but um the actual reason i love this fight so much is largely the ridiculous difficulty right at the tail end at the start and all throughout we've been enduring hardships and overcoming them every player will have that boss the one which they got stuck on for two hours and then finally managed to beat and more so than the souls games challenge is core to the experience here the souls games were difficult sure but compared to sakiro oof and for the final boss to raise the stakes one final time i think is very in line with the sensibilities the game has had going for itself all throughout i like it when the final boss is a moot piece and ishin certainly is in his own way but to not have the final fight of sakiro also be the hardest would have run contrary to everything that's been set up so far i admire the guts it took for fromsoft to make this call even though it was probably known internally that a certain amount of players would get turned off by this and as good as the presentation was in the beginning when we had to contend with kenichiro i don't think the game gets better than this what i find most compelling about ishin as the final boss is that sakura's plot is about schemes within schemes hatching it seems like everyone we meet is after kuro's immortality and is backstabbing someone or breaking some taboo to try and obtain it but then rather than us unfurling the deepest conspiracy in the game or something like that to close things out rather than us fighting tokugawa yayashu or his son the shogun of japan who leads the interior ministry and it being revealed at the end that they don't care at all about ashina they're just trying to get kuro's immortality too rather than that it's ishin a man with no greater ambitions than fighting a worthy opponent a man who took back ashina not because he wanted to rule but because he didn't want to be subjugated and while he was surrounded by schemers all throughout in the end it was his skill rather than ambition which won him the price everyone else sought all throughout the plot see as of crawling out of kinichiro's neck ishin is immortal it's a parasitic immortality and that it cost the life of his grandson but it's an immortality nonetheless and in a fashion befitting his character he's willing to throw it away for a chance to clash blades with someone strong challenge is core to these games and arguably no boss or character embodies this idea better than isian the man whose name literally translates to one mind after defeating asian he will sit down usually the final death blow we can perform against an enemy has a timer attached to it and if we don't kill the enemy right away they'll regain some posture and get back into the fight ishin had one of those moments right before we slashed his abdomen but if we trigger that one unlike previous bosses he won't actually die he'll sit down shout and wait for us to deliver the final strike which i think tells us something about how he layers honor into his fights which most don't he realizes that wolf has bested him and he has no desire to keep going and that the ending gives us full control i i love it the final input in the game isn't lost in the rhythm of the thing we can take a bit of a breather and choose exactly the moment for it all to end i can't stress this enough but giving the player the final button press like this is so good for closure on the experience completing the story i've chosen to join up with a divine child and return the dragon's heritage back home that does mean poor kuro will pass away but like we talked about when i fought the demon of hatred in this game there's good and bad reasons for death and ultimately i think severing ashina's connection to the corrupting effects of immortality is the best choice we can make the white field we fought ishin on was not just another one of those sakura is a bloodborne do-over things we had the same basic setup in dark souls 3 as well also metal gear solid 3 snake eater i talked about this in fountain head but the color symbolizes death possibly the death of gennichiro the death of kuro ishin ashinai itself or maybe what fromm was going for was just the idea of death the story is the conflict between stagnation and flow purity and impurity immortality and death and so i think the idea is that the first time we entered the field of chinese silver grass way back at the start it was meant to signal death and we were supposed to intuit that as this scary thing looming over and around us but that at the end we have a different context for it and rather than seeing death as something to fear as something ominous we appreciate and are comforted by it as the alternative to the parasitic and impure immortality of ashina and so saying goodbye to kuro is a pleasant act in a way earlier i talked about the tale of tawara torah how he killed a giant centipede and was gifted a bag of rice which never runs out what i felt to note back then was why his name going from fujiwara hiddesato to tawara toda was significant the localization for it goes my lord bag of rice rice is fertility and it's from the divine child that wolf can obtain it he crosses a stagnant and rotting land to undo the curse which has latched onto it and in the end we set things right by returning the dragon to its homeland i know i'm the guy who won't shut up about cake array but it's apt to bring up one final time before closing the video out because it is literally the central mechanic of the entire game we die creating impurity then we revive but the impurity remains and it rots the world and those we interact with and so in closing everything off and piecing these remaining strands from the game together what we have is a very clean narrative through line it's the story about wolf delivering fertility back to a stagnant land and that's sakura thanks for watching before i say my final words on it i'm gonna let the credits roll while i go over some phenomena which i could not fit anywhere else in the video from software's trademarked moonlight sort does not appear in the game but as a consolation price at the start kuro handed us the kusabi maru when we entered the tsukimi tower tsukimi is japanese for moon viewing so yeah no mechanically speaking the carps function like the crystal lizards from souls and the wandering nightmares from bloodborne where they're an enemy whose sole function is to move away from us and drop valuable loot if we manage to kill them the shiminawa man who takes wolf from mipu the fountainhead was made from shiminawa rope which can signify sacredness interestingly owl's hair looks to be braided like a shiminawa which might tell us something about how highly he thinks of himself ishin has a prominent sapoku scarring on his stomach indicating he might at some point have attempted ritual suicide or maybe that cut was made by someone else like tomale if that's the case i actually wonder if we'd have gotten to see her make that cut in the hypothetical dlc and whether the cut would have been made to mirror the one we give him at the end sakiro was partly inspired by the mysterious murasame castle an obscure nes title wherein the player is tasked to traverse various castles to collect gems on their way to defeat the alien entity murasame the emblem warned by the interior ministry army looks very similar to the real clan emblem of the tokugawas the clan of tokugawa ieyashu who put an end to the sengoku jedi the girl we encountered sleeping near the stone before we reached the sakura dragon might be a miko or shrine maiden the upper floor of the mayor's house in meebu has a batsudan housing a sakura branch in my bloodborne video i called that game a transitionary piece and in retrospect i think its combat should have been this rather than leveling up defense stats like we do in that game a vestigial elements from its souls and history rather than that that we unlock moves for different kinds of weapons this would have required for weapons to be bracketed a bit more with maybe all heavy weapons sharing an upgrade path there being a specific path force rated weapons for arcane weapons etc i don't think sakura's movement scheme or minute to minute combat necessarily would have made bloodborne better but i do think the trick weapons could have benefited from more variety and that upgrade paths could have been the thicket the sempu monks might have been inspired by the ikoihi real historic warrior monks from the sengoku era the malcontent prosthetic stunning the demon of hatred is very reminiscent of bloodborne where the music box could stun gas coin both get stunned three times by the way with the exception of this line every component of this script had been finalized by the time i got to playing elden ring and no part of that game's design made its way into my talk of sakura as of writing the script i'm very pleased with what i've gotten from that game and i expect i'll be making a video on it in this format in maybe a year or two videos like this one are expensive to make both in actual costs and time and if you enjoyed it i hope you consider supporting the channel on patreon or kofi if you can sakura's brand of gameplay was a turn off to a lot of people my biggest hope with this video is that you were one of those individuals and that you've stuck around until this point if you are and you have hopefully i've been able to change some of your conceptions about the game i don't think you're a lesser person for not liking it i think it's perfectly fine not to want to engage with it and i understand simply not liking what it has to offer but as we tumble further into the future and our conceptualizations for what we expect of games evolves hopefully we'll be able to align on the idea that challenge is to be embraced and i don't mean that simply in the sense of a game being hard but in the sense that we should embrace games which challenge us challenge our preconceived notions of what games have to offer and what we have to offer them this video was remade three separate times first i did the bare essentials just to have some footage to map the original script to then i went through the whole thing and fought every boss with a bell demon in my inventory i was satisfied with having completed the game like that and i had even rewritten the original script to fit that version of the video but a few days before launch i decided to bite the bullet and go for charmless as well i am not good at these games but i am persistent and i'm open to being taken away by an experience because of that i did my homework on every single roadblock i faced and in the end i feel that embracing the ultimate challenge of the game resulted in me having the best possible version of this video i could have made but here's the thing what you saw was not the game as it happened i have about 25 hours of cut content which is more or less just me dying over and over again it's easy to make a playthrough look good when you have control over every frame the viewer sees but behind what might look like a respectable run was a lot of failure but overcoming those obstacles is how this video came to be the best version of itself i decided the game was worth it to be shown in its best light and because i did i learned to appreciate zakirow even more than i did when i first set out to make this commentary no media rewards dedication to it like games can and there is no other medium where embracing challenge is as rewarding for you as it is in games so i hope that in the future you'll be proactive in accepting hardships when they come your way knowing that what awaits you at the end of the tunnel will be worth it and that you choose to not be sated with games just being okay don't wait any longer to embrace unlimited expectations for beautiful games going forwards after all hesitation is defeat thanks for watching ah we did it everyone another one of these commentaries out of the way i imagine moving into 2022 i'll be making some videos on those wonderful armored core games from software made back during the places in one era and i'll make some videos on some other stuff i'll keep you all posted as that stuff gets developed on a sincere note during the end here i'd like to thank everyone who played through my little game experiment snail and i'd like to announce here to all of you still watching that my full game will hopefully be launching in the end of 2022 i'm finalizing the prototype right now and will continue to do so in the months following this video's release so i'll hopefully have an announcement video dropping for the game soon i hope you'll stay tuned for that and until next time take care [Music] you

Channel: AesirAesthetics

Views: 143,523

Keywords: Aesir, Aesthetics, AesirAesthetics, video game, in, depth, analysis, explained, lore, vaatividya, sinclairlore, jsf, pillbeam, lokey, matthewmatosis, commentary, retrospective, silvermont, illusivewall, sanadsk, miyazaki, hidetaka, elden, ring, dark, souls, demon's, sony, from, software, sekiro, bloodborne

Id: V7Bo0Wp6v7A

Length: 399min 51sec (23991 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022