The Sekiro Critique - The Most Replayable Fromsoft Game

why is sekiro a masterpiece what is it that makes sekiro's special artistic achievement unlike any other do you know that feeling when you're watching an anime like Naruto or berserk or an action movie like Star Wars and the characters are locked in an intense sword fight where every swing in the storm of blades comes so close to chopping both characters heads off but they use their extreme level of skill to block every hit and then after getting caught off guard by a kick the anime character falls on the ground only to dodge at the very last second before the blade could split them in half I've always wanted a video game that could emulate that feeling the feeling of an intense anime duel but no game ever could it was too unrealistic too complex games are just hit boxes at the end of the day there's no way there could be a game that truly makes me feel like I'm the main character at the end of an anime deflecting blows at lightning speed no game until now technically three years ago sekiro is that fight on repeat locked in an intense duel where you can deflect every hit Dodge at the last second after the enemy breaks your posture jump over attacks while kicking the enemy in the face and deflect the literal bullets in the blink of an eye with your Superior swordsmanship and if the boss tries to stab you instead of dodging or blocking like a normal game you can just berserk reference step on it and that's amazing because sekiro is amazing sekiro also has Naruto and berserk references so it's clear where its influences lie you play as wolf a Shinobi who lost his arm in a fight and now has a mechanical arm that's also a weapon in its place and wolf faces off against his rival konichiro who has medium length black hair and uses lightning magic and your reward for beating kanichiro is literally Ninjutsu sekiro is the only video game where the high budget intro cut scene looks less cool than the actual gameplay and the cutscene doesn't even look bad normally a blizzard World of Warcraft cut scene looks like a completely epic fight only for the gameplay to be this while in sekiro the opposite is true what is this eachine toe stab fight in the cutscene where's the giant 10 attack halberd Katana combo that ends with him catching a literal lightning bolt out of the sky to use as a weapon sekiro managed to do something incredible that I've never seen before it was able to make the combat system in a game look cooler than the intro cutscene and almost as cool as a sword fight in a real anime sekiro combat isn't just different from Dark Souls combat it's the evolution both games are about reacting to animations but sekiro allows a skilled player to become the boss through perfect deflections combined with Alpha aggression it should be obvious that I love sekiro because I do but this video isn't called the sekiro critique the greatest from soft game ever but instead it's the sekiro critique the greatest from soft game ever to replay because I had some issues with sekiro on my first playthrough this critique will be spicy there will be be some hot takes if you are an avid fan of Dark Souls or sekiro you'll probably disagree with me on some points so I just ask you to keep an open mind the word flawed Masterpiece has become a bit of a cliche in the souls born video essay Community yet there's a reason why we all say it many from soft games contain a once in a lifetime experience that can never be emulated Again by any other game company or even by from soft themselves and sekiro is no different however many Souls titles like Dark Souls 1 or Elden ring will do something so extremely stupid in their ambition that you're just left wondering how such a bad idea could have even made it into development and sekiro is no different I feel almost as conflicted with sekiro as I do with Elden ring and that's really saying something on one hand I really dislike sakiro at first now I know that some people will just comment get good as all the super intelligent Dark Souls fans are known to do however this issue goes deeper than me being bad at the game sekiro has the most diff difficult combat learning curve in the series yet for some strange reason they also decided to make the learning process as painful as possible and to make things worse there are less ways for a player to adjust difficulty than in any other from soft game to date congratulations from soft you decided to craft the game or even eye a person who says that Dark Souls isn't hard and its reputation is overblown can tell all of his friends that yes indeed sekiro is hard in fact sekiro is the hardest game I have ever beaten in my life except for maybe the DLC of Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 3 at level 1. that means that the base game of sekiro with leveling and no cheese is more difficult for me than any of the base games of any Dark Souls titles even at level 1 which should speak for itself as to how difficult sekiro really is similar to the first time I beat my first Dark Souls game beating sekiro made me feel like I fought in a real war no I've basically served basically little thing called Dark Souls after you play you come back different the main flaw that makes sekiro a flawed Masterpiece is that the developers go so far in punishing a player while they're learning the mechanics that many will either give up or use items to make the encounter much easier causing them to not be prepared for the later bosses where items don't help as much however if a player just Saddles up for an overly punishing early game and learns the mechanics they're awarded with some of the coolest most fun boss combat experiences of all time unfortunately it doesn't start off that great so let's begin this critique by talking about why the beginning of sekiro's flawed by walking through the tutorial which is actually pretty great but before we dive into things I should mention that in preparation for this critique I have beaten sekiro four times to get every ending and finished every boss Gauntlet without any non-healing items or weapon Prosthetics both because I wanted to have an in-depth understanding of all of the boss mechanics and because it was fun to master all the boss fights and when I say beat all of the boss gauntlets without items that includes the final boss Gauntlet that forced me to beat every single boss in the entire game in a row first try including the one versus two ape fight that is terrible and every alternate hard mode version of every boss I currently have almost 100 hours in sekiro and in addition to writing the script for an over two hour long video essay and doing all the editing I'm looking at hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work that went into making this video so if you do like the video please give it a like And subscribe and if you want to see more content and help out the channel I do have a patreon and would really appreciate any supports that I can keep making more videos also this should be pretty obvious already but this critique has spoilers for sekiro however there are no major end game plot spoilers until this time stamp so if you are all right with the early to mid game areas being spoiled for you then you can watch until then safely and with that out of the way let's start covering sekiro sekiro starts off with our tragic hero wolf succumbing to depression and rotting away in a dungeon because Sasuke stole his child the child in question that Sasuke stole as the Divine Heir who is an immortal child and his blood is infused into wolves causing him to rise from the dead like a regular Dark Souls protagonist Wolff was tasked by his father to protect the kid but Sasuke wants the secrets to immortality for his own so he used his army to kidnap the child for some reason wolf is the only guy who actually tries to help when his phone gets an amber alert telling him that a kid's gone missing so after receiving an encouraging message from Emma he decides to get up and do something about it so wolf leaves his dungeon only to realize that there's a convenient path to sneak past all of the guards and re-kidnap the Divine air through a hole in the wall the first thing a new player is bound to notice are the tutorial pop-ups these tutorials are pretty annoying and pop up way too much in the beginning of the game my biggest issue isn't even the fact that they exist just how wordy they are it seems like Activision Pride themselves on forcing players to read multiple paragraphs and picking up a loot when literally all the message should say is hold X to pick up loot that's it nothing more I really hate it when ux designers think that they need to write as much as possible to justify their position at a game company and to make matters worse Dark Souls 1 already fixed this just put the messages on the ground that are simple to the point and optional to read after reading a few paragraphs wolf gets back his Katana and goes on his first Killing Spree of this game the first thing a player is bound to notice is how strong they are and how weak the enemies are all a player needs to do is press o to dodge into a run not press and lift off like in Dark Souls wolf attacks faster than the enemies and can cancel his attacks and can block and can deflect all the enemy attacks so this first group of enemies are cleared pretty easily in Dark Souls the main character feels like a normal enemy with a good Dodge roll who faces off against terrifying monsters that are way stronger than you while in sekiro the main character feels like he is a boss battle just with very low Health one key component of sekiro's combat system that everyone is sure to notice right away is the lack of weapon variety wolf is dead set on using his single Katana in every fight no matter what which turns some people off from playing this game and guess what I don't care in fact I care so little that this is the last thing I've written in the script for this video because I completely forgot to talk about it and had to go back and edit it in in Dark Souls I really only care about boss mechanics and view every weapon is the same the only real mechanical difference between weapons is the amount of damage dealt and the wind-up time outside of this the only other difference between weapons is how they look to swing which doesn't matter too much to me I almost always use a single Katana or long sword when I play Dark Souls so I didn't even notice that sekiro is lacking anything maybe that makes me boring or maybe I'm just a realist either way the tutorial ends with the Divine Child somehow doing a bunch of power our core over the moat to get to the tunnel to escape ashina unfortunately this tunnel only leads to a broken bridge and the edge of a mountain so where were they planning to escape there's nowhere to go in this Boss Arena plot inconsistencies aside the end of the tutorial is pretty cool the main character confronts his bitter rival konichiro who I was calling Sasuke until right now sorry about that this end of tutorial fight reveals every difference between the boss design of sekiro and Elden ring because they both start off with the same idea but have vastly different execution have the player face off against a late game Boss that is way too hard for a new player to beat however there is one key difference between the game's design after beating sekiro once I'm able to have a very good chance at killing anichiro first try without getting hit once or at the very least getting very close because I memorized his moveset I know when to deflect him when to attack when to jump so it's easy to just skill diff gonichiro on a new playthrough on the other hand I've beaten Elden ring four times the same amount as sekiro and I could never do a melee kill of the tutorial boss and if I did it would just be a 10 minute long fight of baiting out one or two openings that I know are safe sekiro bosses get more fun as the player's skill increases while Elden ring bosses get more boring I'll talk about this in more depth later in the video when I cover the boss fight system in sekiro but for now I'll say this the sword fight dual sekiro bosses are some of the greatest bosses in video game history overall this introduction to sekiro is really great minus the tutorial pop-ups I would say that this is my second favorite from soft opening second only to Dark Souls 1. the parkour is simple but kind of fun killing regular enemies as wolf is easy and a fun way to introduce the new combat system and the final fight with konichiro in the field of flowers is an epic way to start off the game even if I don't know where we were trying to escape to after dying to gonichiro or beating him and then dying to a cutscene the player wakes up in the hub world the dilapidated Temple this Hub is probably one of the worst ones in the series while Dark Souls 1 or Dark Souls 3 or Elden Rings Hub worlds had NPCs coming and going that helped make the world feel more real The sekiro Hub World always feels oddly empty there's the sculptor who doesn't talk much unless you get him drunk a training dummy guy and Emma who is one of the only women to be found in all of Japan and she upgrades the amount of healing gourds a player can hold there's just a whole lot less to the dilapidated Temple than any other Hub World in any of the Dark Souls games which is a bit disappointing I will give some brownie points to sekiro's HUB since unlike Dark Souls 3 it at least connects to the real world however similar to Dark Souls 2 some of the ways it connects makes absolutely no sense but we'll get to that later when I talk about sekiro's world design and maybe I'm just dumb but I never found a way to get to the other side of this broken bridge in the hub I was so certain that I would the other side of this bridge and realized that I was looking at the Hub world but this moment never came I'm so surprised that I still think it's my fault and that someone in the comments will prove me wrong and say that you can get to the other side but as of right now all I can see is more missed potential in the ways the Hub could have felt like Dark Souls 1 and connected back into itself but it didn't zipping through some easy to Traverse level design leads us to the best part of sekiro's early game the samurai General fights this mini boss is a little work of Genius these generals are all basically just kenichiro if he was more of a [ __ ] than he already is which is great because inner ganichiro is one of the best fights in any video game ever and this is an easy mode training dummy to teach the player sekiro combat it's so fun that not only do I not mind that this boss is copy and pasted throughout the world but I also wish that I could re-fight him at any time at the bonfire so that I could have practiced sekiro combat when I was worse at the game game on my first playthrough I would also like to be able to re-fight all of the mini bosses at the bonfire too but you can't have everything right fromsoft knows that they need to teach a new player how to be aggressive since later game bosses have rapidly healing posture bars and as a way of teaching this in a less difficult manner the boss will Dash away and heal a large amount of posture if the player is Ever playing too passive and far away this isn't a Dark Souls boss it's a sekiro boss which means that the player needs to be both aggressive and reactive in their sword fights the sweeping attack is also beautifully done since the hitbox is just small enough for the player to sometimes Dodge away from it unless they're too close to the boss which eases a player into the idea of jumping over attacks this mini boss is a good time to explain sekiro's combat system for those who are unfamiliar every boss with the sword can block every single one of Wolf's attacks like an anime villain resulting in zero damage actually being dealt to their health bar this this means that for just about any boss that isn't a big dumb ape the actual boss's HP doesn't matter instead the player damages a boss's posture with every successful hit similar to the boss wolf can also block every single one of the boss's normal attacks like an anime protagonist but there's one catch Wolff has the tiniest posture bar in the game and will lose every fight if he only blocks the boss so wolf has to block at the very last second to deflect the attack this causes less posture damage to harm wolf and causes the boss to take posture damage this essentially means that with perfect timing the damage from every single one of the boss's attacks can be reversed right back at them some people say that sekiro combat is like Dark Souls that the player had to Parry every other second but this is straight up wrong parrying in Dark Souls is more awkward in its timing and positioning requirements in reality sekiro combat is similar to how I first played Dark Souls 1 where I beat bosses by lowering the shield to regain stamina and then raise using it at the very last second to have just enough stamina to absorb every hit without having my stance broken deflecting in sakiro is essentially a more focused and challenging version of Dark Souls 1 raising The Shield at the last second combat as opposed to an actual Dark Souls Parry the boss's posture is also constantly healing so that a player needs to always be applying pressure so they don't lose the progress they've made on the boss fortunately fromsoft allows for Wolf to cancel his attacks into a deflect so wolf essentially has no reason to not always be dealing damage to the loss the game expects wolf to always either be in an attacking state or a deflecting state which means that every sword fight in sekiro ends up being a beautiful dance of blades due to the system sekiro combat is amazing because if a player memorizes the boss's deflect patterns and special attacks and executes it all correctly then not only does wolf become stronger than the boss wolf becomes the boss wolf doesn't just beat a boss he dominates them wolf gives the boss no room to breathe and reverses all sources of damage right back at them and it feels amazing unfortunately outside of the Samurai generals this amazing combat system is not at all the focus of the beginning of sekiro and I have no idea why instead we have some mediocre stealth sections and bosses that encourage hit and run tactics like the next one chained ogre and sakiro the Dodge is very hard to time which makes sense as it incentivizes deflecting as a player's primary form of evading damage but the chained ogre also has a hard to dodge grab attack so good luck deflecting that I will say that the chained ogres grabs feel more fair than the teleporting air hit boxes seen in Dark Souls yet Wolf's tiny Dodge is so pathetic that it ends up feeling similarly aggravating naturally I decided that the best course of action would be to never Dodge roll and just run circles around him baiting out attacks to hit him from behind not a terrible boss also not a really fun boss but my main issue with the chained ogre isn't if he's fun or not I simply don't understand why he exists the game is trying to teach the player sekiro combat so they can be prepared for the more difficult late game bosses the samurai General was an amazing easy mode version of a sekiro duel that teaches the player to be aggressive and reactive while the chained ocher is just a Dark Souls boss that encourages players into using hit and run tactics to win which is a strategy that won't work on 90 percent of sekiro bosses after beating the chained ogre we arrive at the enemy encampment that surrounds another Samurai General boss this is the first of many enemy stealth Arenas found in sekiro instead of incentivizing a player into using stealth through more Force means like a Zelda guard that one shots the player from soft instead opted to make the punishment for failing stealth B for the player to have to either engage in a multi-fight as the mini boss chases them down or the player has to leave and hide somewhere until the enemies calm down so they can stealth kill them again a mini boss surrounded by enemies the player has the option of stealth killing is a recurring encounter throughout just about all of sekuro of course there are some encounters where stealth is actually impossible so a player has to do a multi-fight with the mini boss but stealth is usually possible so let's talk about why it kind of sucks the stealth really isn't that great enemies have Eagle Vision and can not only spot a player across the entire encampment but they can also see a player on any elevation it doesn't matter if I'm 10 feet above their heads if the enemy is below me for some reason they are always looking upwards to see me no matter what I almost just wish that sekiro enemies behaved like actual video game enemies that only look directly in front of them rather than a bunch of homeless people on a scavenger hunt for crack I have a theory on why this is true I think that originally from soft set out to make a stealth system with a grapple hook more similar to the Batman Arkham game series but then they realized that it was too easy for players to run reliably clear all the enemies without getting hit so in order to ensure that their game remains hard from soft increase the vision of all enemies to see the player from both far away and from above the head to make it hard anyways the result is that every stealth encounter either has Zero Solutions so a player has to do a multi-flight or one solution which is generally the only correct path a player can take to kill all of the enemies without getting seen spending time doing trial and error to find the one specific way the game requires of me to avoid all of the enemies with 20 20 vision isn't really that fun and it gets even worse for many of these stealth encounters including the first one the correct solution is to run past all the enemies look for an idol and then kill them from behind they require the player to run past all of the enemies to make the stealth winnable it's just stupid of course another way to win is to get caught kill a few enemies then run away or hide until the enemy AI gets confused and stops being aggroed this is the most time consuming and boring way to get through these stealth sections not to mention it doesn't make any sense how the enemies keep dropping their aggro when they know I just killed one of their friends but I guess realistic AI would make the stealth sections take longer which would be terrible since it's already the punishment for death but fromsoft needed to do is add more mechanics to make stealth engaging they could go the route of the Batman games and Advance more ways to enter and escape and encounter more ways to distract enemies and maybe give the enemies better ranged attacks that can kill a cop player more quickly so there's more of a punishment for getting caught outside of maybe a bit of dust and a grapple hook wolf is a pathetic Shinobi to the point that I was confused when other characters called me that listen guys wolf is not a ninja he sucks at that crap wolf can't blend in with the environment and enemies spot him from a mile away why am I a Shinobi because I sometimes throw up a cloud of dust wolf is pretty much a samurai through and through because sword fights against boss battles is what got the bulk of attention in this game's development not sneaking past past enemies of course the biggest issue with sekiro's habit of sticking multiple enemies around the boss isn't just that the stealth is bad no it's because seki Rose too punishing now I know this is where I'm going to start to lose some people so just bear with me here sekiro has the most difficult and complex combat system in a from software game to date you can block at the last second to deflect the attack Dash away from the attack Dash into an attacked mariki counter jump to avoid sweeping attacks and always know when to attack the boss and when the boss's hyper armor and the player needs to stop or cancel their attack it also takes a lot of time from the player to practice and eventually develop muscle memory to correctly time every one of the boss's deflect patterns and that's great I love spending time to memorize every boss's unique attack timings and learn what special attacks they use like sweeping or stab attacks that mix things up and make it all more exciting what I do not love is how punishing it is and how few difficulty options there are when a player gets to the first encampment with the samurai General they will probably only have three gourd flasks and most likely all three seeds if they've explored and seeds are basically life gems from Dark Souls Two that slowly restore a small amount of Health over time the only issue with seeds is that they are consumable so a player can't use them in every try against every boss without running out and you can only hold up to three at a time so depending on if a player is deciding to risk using his pellets to beat a boss whose moveset they haven't memorized a player has three renewable heels and one Revival from death and just to make things worse wolf dies in two to three hits from just about any boss and just to make things worse the bosses in sekiro are more difficult to learn than any other Souls game and just to make things worse again a player has to do boring stuff that takes a lot of time to start fighting the boss again and just to make things worse again again some of these encounters can't be solved with stealth so a player genuinely has to do a multi-fight where if they take one hit of damage before fighting the boss they may as well give up because they have so few heels sekiro is hard on top of punishing on top of hard on top of hard again the point is that sekiro is hard for the sake of being hard while also providing few ways for the player to adjust difficulty essentially a player has four options they can either a get good no matter how long it takes and beat all of the smaller enemies without getting hit wants to have a chance with the mini boss b look up cheese strats against specific bosses using Prosthetics and items to secure the win with less skill and less time invested or C skip fighting the mini bosses until later but they all drop prayer beads which are the only item that increases player health so that's not a good idea and I don't like any of the options so how about option D just introduce more ways for the player to adjust the difficulty now there is one solution to adjusting the difficulty in the game already and that is looking up on a guide where to go to get all of the gourd seeds as early as possible I dislike this solution since that would make anyone's first playthrough less of a journey of Discovery and more finding new areas through a Wikipedia which is the least satisfying way to explore a video game I also need to complain that two merchants in ashina sellagord seeds the most important collectible item in the game and it is located directly at the bottom of their shop why why is the game hiding the healing items from me so that I either need to look up on the Internet how to get gourd seeds or have the intuition to check every single item from top to bottom from every single Merchant in the hopes that maybe fromsoft decided to have one of them sell a gourd seed do you know how sekiro could have had adjustable healing without forcing players to either look up where gourd seeds are on the Internet or have them just survive with very few heals Joseph Anderson has been saying this since day one it's time from soft listened bring back bonfire kindling this is a mechanic found only in Dark Souls 1 that allows a player to consume a valuable resource to increase the amount of heals a player will have when they arrest at that specific bonfire kindling was a very smart way that Dark Souls 1 introduced an easy mode option while still making it feel like it was part of the greater world since the player loses their valuable Humanity to access easy mode for a single area there's a give and take to it and if this was in sekiro if the player fast travels the healing amount would be determined by the idol the player traveled to rather than where they last arrested I can't remember if Dark Souls 1 did this or not but in the game that gives the player fast travel from the beginning this is a must-have so that the player can't just fast travel to one fully kindled bonfire rest and then fast travel to a non-kindle bonfire with maximum heals while I say that I want bonfire kindling back I disagree with how many flasks they should give for each level of kindling Dark Souls 1 was 5 10 15 20 which never really gave me the amount I wanted for any boss I always prefer to have seven or eight heals and no one should ever really need 20s so I prefer if it went more like 4 8 12 16 or something like that and maybe all the late game sculptor statues would start with a single level of kindling to help the player in more difficult areas some people will say that there already is an easy mode in the form of weapon Prosthetics and items and doing a stealth death blow to the mini boss to cut his health in half but this introduces new problems if a player doesn't start to learn the difficult combat mechanics on the easier mini bosses then they won't be prepared for the much harder bosses later on and trust me when I say that you must have precise execution of sekiro's combat mechanics because later on the bosses require Perfection from the player and from what I've seen items don't seem to help too much for the final boss so many people who didn't learn the mechanics might literally not be able to win as a result of how the developers allowed them to skip the learning process with items in addition to this problem I also simply don't want to look up how to make the mini bosses easy because then Victory feels Hollow I want to memorize the boss's patterns on my own and feel the satisfaction of overcoming difficult odds but like every other Souls game I want more ways of adjusting the difficulty to my liking especially on the first playthrough if fromsoft just let the players adjust the amount of healing through bonfire kindling the beginning of the game would be so much better I will say that sekiro's problem with being overly punishing is solved by the late game when the player has collected a lot more gourd seeds and none of what I've said is true past my first playthrough because I'm better at the game I just wish the game didn't make the process of learning to get good as painful as possible sekiro puts its worst foot forward because they want to have their cake and eat it too fromsoft wants to have their most difficult to learn combat system be included in their most punishing game yet while offering players less ways of adjusting difficulty than any other game they've ever released and guess what we're not done talking about punishment am I playing a from soft gamer watching BDSM in addition to secular being the hardest Souls game and the most punishing there's now also a permanent punishment for death just what I needed route accumulates every time a player dies and if they use the Revival mechanic then more rot will accumulate in a game series about learning through death I have no idea how introducing a mechanic that counts a player's deaths and continually punishes them even got written down let alone put in as an actual game mechanic originally from soft made rot to punish a player even more I've heard but right now all it really does is get a bunch of NPCs really sick so they don't want to talk to you it's also reversible with the dragons tear later on but I still don't get why it's here at all sohiro does everything in its power to be overly punishing and difficult for new players to get into and when I see that I've accumulated rot for just attempting to learn how to beat a new boss I get so demoralized especially since when I first started the game I didn't know how meaningless rot was there is a story reason why Rod exists as when someone who has perfect immortality like wolf dies the World incurs damage rather than wolf himself while this is a cool story idea as a game mechanic it only serves to further punish players who are already trying to memorize a boss's deflect patterns and that really sucks the rap mechanics just make a player feel worse when they die to a mini boss who already requires the player to kill his entire game just for one more attempt speaking of dying to a mini boss near the camp with the samurai General we find a note warning us to stay away from the enemy in the nearby dungeon being a fromsoft protagonist I won in any ways and immediately died to the Headless I decided from there on out to follow the advice of the note and never fight the Headless because they are impossible to beat without items and I never had any reason to kill them so I never tried to kill them the Headless leave me alone and I leave them alone and that's that after this death I pushed on to find the serpent that I've seen in a bunch of YouTube videos the creature is animated very well but he doesn't strike fear in me like some of the other from soft big dragon type creatures this is because the correct stealth path is so obviously communicated to me that I know there's no way I'm going to die trying to get to a tent that I obviously need to get to because it's the only thing in front of me to get into the bridge dragon in Dark Souls 1 is Iconic partially because it's a somewhat cheap death but also because the correct way forward is not overwhelmingly obvious to a new player if I book it for the stairs will I make it should I bait out a fire breath and then run for it in sekiro the player goes through the most obvious path and then defeats the serpent in one hit I will say that the moment does look really cool with how the serpent peers into the tent slowly only to jab him right in the eye despite the cool factor I can tell that fromsoft didn't fully flesh out player interactivity with this set piece because after being stabbed the serpent will be put in an infinite Loop of pain and for some reason they even put down an item that would require a player to walk past the spasming serpent to get which encourages the player to see how they didn't finish the game after being stuck in a death Loop animation the serpent breaks out and chases the player whenever the player chooses to leave and then it's over either way surviving the first serpent attack leads us to the first real boss of sekiro although sekiro does have many bosses surrounded by a bunch of extra enemies all the major bosses usually have very little punishment for death which is usually just a short Boss run like in Dark Souls 3 and that's great because you're gonna die a lot and the first boss is one of the easiest yet I still die to him a bunch of times because I'm bad I don't know how to pronounce his name so we'll call him the horse boss so the horse boss is an okay fight they want to teach a new player how to deal with deflecting a boss with a lot of Combos and delayed attacks without having to worry too much about the enemy's posture bar since it heals very slowly at first I kind of hated this boss since he wouldn't stop running away from me but then I realized that if I just stand still and Play Patiently his AI will always just come come to me eventually and you can also grapple hook onto his helmet but I didn't do that in my first run because I didn't see it the fight teaches a player a bit about deflecting without forcing them to be aggressive as future bosses will and after a few decent quality bosses we get to a real stinker the Blazing bowl and let me assure you that this boss is bull [ __ ] I don't really understand what fromsoft was going for here we're still early enough into the game so deflecting is hard for a new player and yet they decided to make the player take fire damage through getting successful to flex and just to make matters worse Landing a deflect against the charge attack still inflicts a huge amount of posture damage and fire damage since I take fire damage no matter what I thought the intended design was to roll which brings us to an important part of sekiro's combat which I like to call the limp dick Dodge roll while bloodborne in Dark Souls 3 have a very good dandral to incentivize players into using dodging as their primary form of evasion sekiro complete gimps the Dodge roll the Dodge roll timings are so strict and difficult to land that it almost feels unfair and that's completely intentional in sekiro the player's default must always be to deflect in order to make this true bosses have to have very good tracking and have extremely difficult Dodge roll timings to incentivize deflecting as the safer method of avoiding damage I thought the fire meant that I should treat the bull like a dark souls 3 boss but I was wrong this is still a sucky robot and the player still needs to deflect the enemy's attack patterns whether it hurts them or not since the alternative is landing a bunch of very difficult Dodge rules that don't deal damage to the enemy's posture if I met a boss like the bull that required me to deflect while taking fire damage at the end of the game as an additional challenge I might like it and that exact boss might actually exist we'll get to him later but putting such an annoyingly difficult boss this early into the game is done it is far too early after intro reducing the deflect mechanic to have the player wondering if deflecting is a good idea at all also the way the Bulls AI won't stop running in circles if the player gets behind it is also pretty annoying and overall this boss just isn't Fun furthermore if a player uses hit and run tactics to slowly Whittle down the boss's HP which almost seems like the intended way to win since he deals fire damage through your deflects end blocks and is really hard to dodge roll then you will be happy to know that these tactics won't work on almost any other boss that we will be fighting in sekiro I guess fromsoft wasn't trying to teach players much with these earlier bosses just to ramp up the difficulty later before moving beyond the bowl to the ashina castle area we are going to have a blast of the past three years specifically to Hirata estate if wolf brings some bell that a crazy old woman gave him to a statue of the Buddha then he is transported inside one of his own memories at first I thought that the Buddha himself made wolf time travel only to realize that the Buddha is more allowing wolf to relive a memory that he already had kind of like how the protagonist of Assassin's Creed games relives the memories of his ancestors through that machine Wolverine lives his own memories through looking at the Buddha I guess I actually really love this as it was an interesting way for fromsoft to add context to Wolf's story in a mystical sort of way of course the player still has all of Wolf's current tools that he didn't have three years ago like weapon Prosthetics and coming back from the dead but this memory isn't real anyways so I don't really mind up until now I have neglected to talk much about the level design because the way I feel about many of the early game levels can be lumped together into this one section of the video seki row level design is weird so the player gets money and experience for killing enemies experience while useful in the early game becomes less useful in the late game after a player gets all their necessary upgrades if a player is trying to make a boss easier with a specific item or weapon prosthetic then money may be useful but I never did this so I never needed the money essentially what this led to was a lack of reasons to kill enemies entirely and even if I did need some money to buy items to make the boss easier I probably would have just used all those money bags in my inventory rather than grinding enemies so unless a player is exceptionally low on money or they want to upgrade a skill tree quickly There is almost no reason to kill the enemies in the sekiro level after all money doesn't really buy Power in sekiro like it did in Dark Souls through leveling if a player dies in sekiro they lose some XP and half their money the player's level can never fall below whatever it currently is so losing XP was never much of an issue but losing half of your money is a larger punishment and unlike Dark Souls the player cannot pick back up their lost money or experience it is gone forever so not only is killing enemies not worth much but the money that I do have from killing enemies is always at risk of being permanently lost if I do die with all of this being said why would I even want to kill enemies in sekiro the benefits are small and the punishment for dying to enemies negates the tiny benefit that experience and money give now I'm aware why fromsoft did this in sekiro the grapple hook combined with how close the checkpoints are makes it all too easy to get back to where I last died and the revive mechanic plus stealth makes it pretty hard for the player to die unless they're stubborn like me and never Retreat so they decide to punish the player for dying twice without any way of getting back what they lost because it's too easy to get back what you would lose if it was like Dark Souls I think the intended design is for me to run past enemies while occasionally fighting them if I feel like it and if an enemy kills me I should revive and Retreat back to the nearest idle checkpoint to not lose any money so essentially there's no threat in these levels in addition to there being little incentive for a player to kill enemies in sakirao and a reason for a player to not kill enemies at the threat of losing money I find no logical reason I should fight any enemies that aren't surrounding a mini boss although I dislike having to kill a bunch of enemies as punishment for dying to the boss with very few heals if fromsoft took out this feature there'd be no reason to fight a single enemy on repeat playthroughs ever and to make this statement even more true in areas like ashina and harata estate there are a bunch of roofs that a player can jump on to make them safe from all enemies so the player is more mobile than the enemies has little reason to kill the enemies and has the threat of permanent lost to de-incentivize them from fighting enemies I'm genuinely baffled by all of this from a game company that is usually so in tune with giving the player a reason to explore and fight enemies sekiro doesn't know what it's doing I still thought just about all the enemies in the early and mid-game areas for fun and while the multi-fights are somewhat enjoyable knowing that I could easily Escape all danger and run past the enemies destroyed any genuine feel feelings of Triumph in getting through these levels Dark Souls 1 was good because of the tight constricted level design that encouraged killing enemies while trying to not get cornered in hallways or die from falling off the edge while sekiro provides the player with so much Freedom that they can just run around on rooftops and avoid all of the enemies if they'd like there also isn't much of a reason to get off of the rooftop and fight the enemies unless I'm specifically grinding for levels or money it's almost like every rooftop is one of Wolf's personal safe spaces in the world where no harm can come to him except for this one part of ashina Castle where there's these crazy Kamikaze guys that fly into wolf at mach speed if Sakura wanted to give the player more Mobility options while making it hard they needed to give the enemy's Mobility to match like these crazy rooftop Ninja but usually the enemies don't do anything but yell from a distance as I run past in addition to running past enemies being very easy in these early game areas there is a checkpoint idle around every corner so the game doesn't even pretend to have tense level design of course the enemies are so easy to run past that I wouldn't think it would even matter if there were fewer Idols since it is too easy for Wolf to get away from danger either way in psychiro the levels are pretty looking somewhat fun to explore and overall fairly non-offensive but it never goes beyond this because wolf is too mobile and there's no reason to kill the enemies even if he wasn't traversing through the estate leads us to the memory of the death of his own father who is also named after an animal Wolf's dad owl dies in The Burning estate that he swore to protect so wolf sets out to find and kill the one who betrayed him only to realize at the end that it was none other than his longtime Mentor lady butterfly this old woman taught Wolf the way of the blade to now betray ashina and take the Divine ears immortality for herself of course wolf wouldn't let her do this so they must now fight to the death and the fight is mostly fun I enjoy the rhythm of this boss because she blocks with her feet by kicking the sword and her gimmick of jumping on strings to launch different attacks the player is pretty fun the only real issue is that she leaves the fight in her second phase to summon a bunch of extra enemies that eventually disappear and turn into a big damage Source sort of incentivizing the player to not really fight any of them this essentially means that every time lady butterfly does this the player has to run in circles until the enemies go away it's a boring gimmick but I've learned from fighting lady butterfly in The Gauntlet that if I play very aggressive she either rarely or never summons her illusion enemies so it's not all that bad and I think that the shuriken prosthetic can get her off her webs quicker but the player can't really commit to the fun melee fight when there's a bunch of extra enemies around her to stagger chain wolf to death so Prosthetics probably wouldn't do much to offset the annoying gimmick anyways all in all lady butterfly is the best boss we've covered so far by a lot the first real Duel of the game other than the samurai generals and her posture heals at what feels like a fair speed for a boss this early in the game after wolf murders his former teacher twice she dies for real kinda like you but as the estate is burning down someone stabs wolf in the back oh no who could it be I guess we'll find out later luckily this memory ends with the Divine air finding the wolf before he can die for real and the air gives Wolf the gift of immortality for his service this level serves as a prologue that explains Wolf's connection to the Divine Heir and why he is a literal zombie ninja that can arise from the dead of course I technically died and rose from the dead while fighting lady butterfly so I guess my Wolf's memory of the lady butterfly fight is a bit faulty now that we've killed the memory of an elderly woman we can proceed past the Blazing Bowl to the area that surrounds ashina Castle this area is actually a fork in the road that splits off into four different paths there are the ashina depths senpo Temple the Sunken Valley and ashina Castle itself on one hand I really like how the game opens up every New Path leads to a new mystical magical place and I have the freedom to do it in any order I please but on the other hand from soft arranged the path is very questionably ganichiro is a giant sword slash combo that may be hard for a new player to deflect and the Wolverine mini boss is a smart way to teach the player how to deal with a giant deflect combo and it has no Boss run at all unfortunately in order to get to what might be the easiest path Sunken Valley a player must first realize that the path onto the castle isn't the door on the ground then realize that they can reach a section of the castle roof if they hook shot to the highest point in the surrounding City and make the jump after killing some rooftop Soldiers the player will probably find a window that enters them into the castle get the idol and then to fight The Wolverine boss they have to promptly leave the castle and realize that there's a new city level area on the opposite side of the castle and then finally explore it and find the path to the monkeys in the sunken Valley okay that's a lot to get to the best first path for a new player and guess what I didn't even realize I could get to the yashina castle roof which leads to the third easiest boss and guess what else the first path I easily found from exploring the castle level led me back to the original tutorial level and eventually the path that starts where we had the tutorial is actually the hardest path of the ball and it gets worse unlike Dark Souls the enemies in the area do nothing to warn the player of the difficulty the monkson senpo temple are much more difficult than the ghost in the Hidden Forest but sempo Tempo has the easiest bosses the game does nothing to signal to me that I'm on the wrong path but I guarantee you that I was on the wrong path however I only knew this in retrospect since in the moment I never felt under leveled after I went on what is arguably the hardest path ashina depths first I love the idea of sekiro's open-ended World design but I just can't stand the execution easy boss that are great for helping new players practice their deflects are hidden while the seemingly easy paths that lead to the hardest bosses are in plain sight why do they just want all the bad players to give up at corrupted Monk and come back later it's okay when Eldon ring throws in a hard boss in the early game because it is an optional fight that the player can come back to no one wants to overcome every obstacle and get to the end of the path just to give up and come back later look up how to cheese the boss this is clearly not a good design approach they should have swapped sunken Valley's location with ashina debts that much I know for sure but from soft Juan sekiro's combat mechanics to be as hard to learn as possible so they put the hardest route in plain sight which a lot of players myself included went on first besides who doesn't want to revisit the dungeon that the game starts in right returning to our dungeon reveals to us a pretty annoying mini boss who is hunting wolf down the kickboxing champion himself alone Shadow long swordsman that's a name this boss kind of sucks and it has nothing to do with the boss mechanics themselves the dungeon where we start the game in is way too small of an arena to fight a boss and the long swordsman's kick combos quickly drain a player's posture even with perfect deflects this means that a player needs to Dash and run away from certain combos but there's no room to do so and then I'll run to a wall the camera will get put into a weird position where I can't see anything and then I die this fight really did piss me off for all the wrong reasons the fight of running away from kicking attacks and deflecting sword attacks is a fun one and I like this mini boss when he appears later outside of this Arena but he has no business being placed in such a small room after killing the guy who was trying to kill us in our dungeon we use our grapple hook that we didn't have in the tutorial to reach a ledge that leads to a whole new area I do like that the game decides that the dungeon where we start is also one of the four paths towards new content that was quite clever me yazaki You Beautiful Bastard this leads us to the ashina depths I had a lot of trouble with the mini bosses here specifically partially because I was a few gourd seeds short since even though this is one of the hardest paths there just aren't any gourd seeds here which did make the beginning of this extremely punishing game more punishing I'd still prefer to be able to Kindle the sculptor statues but instead I opted to just endure it near the entrance to the Hidden Forest there is an NPC who warns wolf of the men further ahead that have betrayed the path of the Buddha and then Wolf's reaction is so serious one who opposes the Buddha I found this so funny wolf is so shocked that anyone would consider abandoning the Buddha but honestly buddy I don't know if you're the best example of Buddhism we control wolf as he goes from slaughtering an Army in a village and really anyone who stands in his way I thought the Buddha was about inner Enlightenment and peace well if you literally murder as easily as you breathe the whole game has been a blood bath I don't think the Buddha would approve very much of your actions maybe it has less to do with the Buddha himself and more to do with how those who abandoned the Buddha as we'll see later lust after immortality and the NPC might have only been trying to convey that message but I still thought it was funny how wolf is a mass murderer who is surprised that anyone wouldn't follow the path of peace and Enlightenment I guess wolf is the edgy anti-hero of Buddhism or something the Hidden Forest is probably the first level that limits Wolf's Mobility options enough to actually start challenging the player a bit there are invisible enemies here that are a little bit annoying but probably needed since the normal enemies in sekiro are too weak to present any challenge to me without some type of added mechanic one large issue I have with the Misty Forest areas how from soft arbitrarily limits Walt's movement options to make the level design work even if it makes no sense in this level wolf needs to reach the roof of the temple so that he can kill the noble inside for betray trained the Buddha however wolf cannot grapple onto the roof despite always being able to Grapple onto roofs that's like a big part of the game based on the previous level design I simply cannot believe that the character wolf can't figure out some way to park or grapple onto the Trier building Dark Souls has never had this problem because as unrealistic as it was that we couldn't ever swim or jump we just got used to the fact that we didn't have those abilities and just accepted it as a limitation in sekiro Wolf doesn't have any limitations since he's a skilled should nobody who can grapple onto trees and buildings but then fromsoft realized that it's hard to design a good level around such a mobile character so they just took out grapple functionality when they felt like it because wolf forgets how to use his grapple hook for this level we have to kill gragas and his monkeys which leads to the tree in the temple roof I actually died a lot to this gragas I just have to be honest after murdering The Immortal snail man the spell is lifted so the fog has left the forest this is an interesting way for fromsoft to allow players to re-explore the old area for anything they might have missed when it was originally foggy lifting the spell also reveals that A New Path is opened up that leads us to mibu Village at the end of this Village the player meets a crying woman who turns into a psychopath and tries to kill us like usual right guys if I'm being honest when I first fought a Rin of the water I thought that victory was literally impossible she turns invisible and has a faster healing posture bar than any boss I've fought so far and I couldn't make any progress after a while I realized that the player isn't really supposed to be too aggressive in this fight and just learn how to deflect all of her attacks whenever she decides to start attacking you but it took a good half hour for me to beat her either way I felt very accomplished after overcoming this Challenge and I was a fool to think that way if there's something far worse lie ahead I think that every secular player knows exactly what I'm talking about that moment that wall when you finally say oh [ __ ] this is impossible I can't win Dark Souls has this wall for many players who get stuck but in Sakura it's a whole lot worse not only can I not win I can't even get lucky the boss's posture literally heals every second of the fight in Dark Souls I could always survive for just long enough while chipping away at the boss's Health pool slowly to pull a victory out of my ass but in sakuro that just doesn't cut it a player needs Perfection perfect deflects perfect positioning perfect attack windows and perfect responses to sweeping and stab attacks for very long stretches of time without making any mistakes at all welcome to the corrupted monk this boss taught me what sekiro is and that's bullsh Perfection complete Perfection memorize every deflects pattern stay on the boss perfectly make zero mistakes it feels like a level one run on my first playthrough and that's weird because corrupted monk doesn't even have that hard of a move set no that's not the reason why this boss is hard corrupted monk is hard because she heals her posture faster than any other enemy in the game a player can land a series of skillful deflects make a single mistake and then lose all progress on the boss in just a moment because of this bring more healing doesn't even help much since if the player is getting hit and needing to heal then they probably won't get a deflect combo long enough to counter her extremely fast posture regeneration corrupted monk doesn't want the player to get good she wants the player to become Perfection with that being said I still have some real issues with this boss specifically there are certain attacks like the huge spin combo where the corrupted monk will start the attack by healing posture and if her posture bar is low enough she can literally heal all damage while winding up an attack and there's genuinely nothing a player can do you also if she dashes away she will heal all of her posture in a second so the player has to run after her and immediately attack to stop her posture from healing the problem is that once the player arrives to the corrupted bunk she can already be winding up an attack with hyper armor and the player cannot cancel a running attack so either a the player Sprints after the boss with a running attack so that she can't heal her posture damage but then the player risks taking damage or B the player doesn't attack right away and just watches the corrupted monk heal at the speed of light especially in the beginning of the fight every other boss in the game is well balanced around wolf never really needing to do a running Dash so I believe the correct solution here would either be for corrupted monk to start recovering posture later after dashing away or for her to never do a hyper armor attack after dashing away so the player could always land the running attack the good news is that sekiro bosses heal posture slower the closer their posture gets to Breaking but getting to that point can be extraordinarily difficult in order to be corrupted monk a player just has to accept that she can heal to full whenever she likes it and hope to start a giant chain deflect combo to rack up enough posture damage so that she will start healing slower and while someone could argue that corrupted monk only heals her posture damage so fast because the developers intended most players to use an item to deal more damage to the boss this simply isn't true although corrupted monk May heal her posture faster than any other boss in the game there are much harder bosses later on who heal posture at about the same rate maybe a little bit less either way using an item to beat corrupted monk will leave a player without the necessary skills to beat the harder bosses later on who heal posture very fast and have more difficult move sets to deflect and so I just grinded it took over four hours to perfect every bit of the corrupted Monk's moveset and come out on top four hours of intense sekiro getting good no four hours of intense sekiro becoming Perfection but then something strange happened in New Game Plus I beat corrupted monk in two tries and then it took a little under half an hour to get hitless on corrupted monk afterwards this would never happen in Dark Souls if I was hard stuck on a Dark Souls boss for four hours to Edge out a single Victory I wouldn't be able to get hit list in 25 minutes in New Game Plus the issue with sekiro should be Beyond evident by this event the game requires a player to learn just about 100 of a boss moveset and to almost never miss a deflect to be able to win which just wasn't true in Dark Souls and I have to wonder if that's for the worse in Dark Souls I never really know how to dodge and respond to 100 of a boss's moveset without taking any damage since the game doesn't require that of me that's actually one of the primary reasons why I do level 1 runs in the first place to more fully learn and appreciate every bosses this move set by memorizing how to avoid every attack sekiro requires the Perfection of a level 1 run on a player's first playthrough if they aren't using any items on the bosses which is an extremely brutal level of difficulty so sekiro is a game that's brutally difficult unless the player employs some cheese to eliminate the difficulty where have I heard this before back in my Eldon ring critique I stated that none of the Dark Souls games except the remaster of Dark Souls 2 were overly difficult and that the reputation was unearned the way I see it Miyazaki created a new genre of reactive based enemy-oriented combat the player is weak and the enemies are Godlike with their combo chains and damage so a player needs to stop attacking every two seconds like other games memorize one to dodge where to run when to attack and then they will be victorious you just need some patience but then from soft ran into a problem unfortunately after the release of Dark Souls 3 too many players like me figured it out we understood that Dark Souls wasn't hard and that it's just a moderately difficult game that can be beaten with some patience and memorization this posed a problem to from how can we give the player the feeling of overcoming impossible odds if they've mastered the simple combat system of roll roll attack and some positioning Elden Ring's answer was to make the bosses deal a ridiculous amount of damage and never stop attacking sekiro's answer is to make the most mechanically complex bosses in any fromsoft game while providing the players with the smallest Health pool fewest heals and the fewest ways to adjust difficulty and you need to be perfect with your deflects to win sekiro is by far the hardest game I've ever played and I'd say this critique could have been called sekiro hard as The New Normal which is what I called the Eldon ring critique the normal I want to beat the boss's melee with few items mindset and sekiro is hard mode and usually Prosthetics don't help much unless they borderline cheese the fight and enter the game into easy mode now some people may hear that sekiro requires a player to memorize and execute 100 of a boss's mechanics perfectly and think that's how it should be I want this game to be brutally difficult to make me feel accomplished and I agree with the mindset that overcoming challenging encounters make Souls games feel like a Triumph but I must also state that every human interprets difficulty differently based on their own reaction time and ability to develop strong muscle memory what took me four hours to beat may take another two hours or eight depending on how quickly they learn furthermore the person who beat the boss in two hours may feel Triumph while the person who spent eight hours on the boss will only feel a frustrated sense of relief that it's finally over now I know from South fans recoil At The Mention of an easy mode but if I'm being honest every Soul's game already has an easy mode it's called leveling up I know I just trolled some people who expected me to say summoning allies is the easy mode because summoning is another type of easy mode in Dark Souls if a player can't beat a boss they always have the option of accessing an easier difficulty through a multitude of ways leveling is a very intelligent way to make the game easier since the player is able to fine-tune the difficulty to their own liking over many small incremental improvements and sekiro the only real way to increase health and damage is gated behind many bosses and real bosses so murdering normal enemies on repeat doesn't help fine-tune the difficulty much it's also worth noting that there are levels in the game already but outside of a few upgrades most levels just unlock a new weapon art that doesn't really do anything to change the overall difficulty I want a leveling system that would allow a player to alter their stats in addition to taking out leveling sekira also took out summoning so every boss must be beaten alone at a specific level of course I'm not saying that introducing spirits summons are adding an actual easy mode in the form of an extra koros charm should be from soft's First Option but I am saying that there should have been more ways for the player to adjust difficulty in addition to bringing back bonfire kindling as I mentioned before as it currently stands sekiro is an extremely brutal game where multiple bosses took three to four hours to beat at least for me and newsflash just because a player can skip a few bosses with cheese that doesn't mean that the game shouldn't have an easy mode that's a pretty bad argument you're basically telling unskilled players that sekiro's good because the game has options for people who give up on trying to beat the boss with the actual combat system and you can just kill it in one hit if you do this thing of course you can stun lock them if you do this thing and then and then it's and then it's easy it should sekiro have an actual easy mode probably not but should it have some sort of leveling that adjusts player health and damage that both encourages players to kill all the enemies in the level and helps them adjust difficulty I would say yes before moving on I should more fully address the counter argument as to why some from soft fans are happy about the exclusion of difficulty options in sekiro these fans are happy that there is a Souls game that is the same brutal level of difficulty for every person who doesn't use cheese to ensure that we all go through the same difficult experience of learning to become the greatest swordsman in all of Japan and honestly I do understand where these fans are coming from and why they will probably dislike this part of the video but I still disagree with them I personally value the experience of the individual over the collective so I care more about what is hard for you as an individual and what level of difficulty makes you feel like you've overcome difficult odds then what is hard for the other people around you at the end of the day the important part of a game's experience isn't if it's appropriately hard for others but if it feels like an accomplishment to you Dark Souls is brilliant because gaining a few levels doesn't tip the balance so much as to make overcoming the boss not feel gratifying especially since I put in real work and hours into grinding those levels to access the easier difficulty it feels earned if you disagree and want more from soft games to be just like sekiro with few ways of adjusting difficulty to ensure that everyone who beats the game needs to go through a similar amount of suffering to become a master swordsman I do understand where you're coming from even if I disagree but I must also question why from soft fans are still okay with all of the boss cheese for unskilled players seems like a bit of a contradiction either way after training in the ways of the blade with the corrupted monk for four hours to finally perfect sekiro's combat system I set out on a spiritual journey to become one with the Buddha at sempo Temple but all of the Buddhists who wanted to kill me so I just went on another killing spree and to my surprise slaughtering Buddhist monks was my favorite part of the non boss enemy design in this game the enemies in the beginning of sekiro are too easy to kill while the enemies later on that we will see are too ridiculously strong these Buddhist monks are just right they have enough in their kit to mix things up and catch me off guard with a Punch Kick combo that are hard to dodge and drain a player's posture quickly but their posture is still low enough to feel Fair it wasn't until the final area in sempo Temple where it got a bit too ridiculous when fromsoft throws multiple of these Straw Hat enemies at the player at one time despite each of them having mini boss level posture bars and it seems pretty difficult to stealth kill them since they stand right next to each other luckily sekira is the easiest Souls game to run past all the enemies so even if the game ever feels unfair there's always an easy way out outside of some enemy spam near the end sempo Temple might be my favorite level in the game it has an absolutely gorgeous Autumn View with a wonderful color palette for all of the tree leaves and there is the only non-speed running parkour jump in the entire game that takes some skill to land I view sekiro as an amusement park where every boss battle is a main attraction and every level is just me walking through the park do I ever feel threatened no if I do feel threatened can I just skip the annoying enemies and run to the next ride yes since there's so little reason to kill the enemies in sekiro I only ever do it for my own Amusement making all the killing sprees that much more evil I I guess I'm really not a Buddhist but it also means that the levels always feel harmless in demand little traversing the easy levels in sakiro is the exact opposite to the feeling of overcoming the bosses in sekira which are some of the hardest from soft has ever crafted simple Temple is my favorite level because it looks pretty and killing the enemies is moderately fun however even the best level design sekiro pales in comparison to the level design of Dark Souls 1 or 3. the levels aren't an engaging and difficult experience to figure out and over come more just to walk in the park and I don't hate a walk in the park it's fun I also don't love taking a walk in the park I love the feeling of being lost in Dark Souls one at low Health after I've run out of Estes flasks to rejoice in the pure Bliss at the sight of a bonfire I do not love senpo Temple but I do like it and although it might be my favorite level to Traverse boss wise sempo Tempo is the weakest of all the paths in sekiro to be fair that doesn't mean that the bosses are bad because sekiro doesn't really have Bad Bosses except for the plays in Bowl it really just means that there wasn't a boss on this path that I really love to master like the other ones the first major boss is probably the funniest in the game though the armored Knight this is a Dark Souls character on a quest for immortality to save his brother Robert I think and his European armor is impregnable to Wolf's Katana because of this death blows don't do any damage to the night the way a real life Samurai I would handle this situation is by getting a blunt weapon that could damage someone through their armor but wolf is unable to pick up weapons because it's a video game so I guess that won't work the goal of this fight is for the player to realize that the boss destroys the walls of the Arena as they fight and then get a death blow close to the edge to push him over after doing this we get a satisfying Robert scream as the white man falls to his death showed up in the wrong neighborhood Punk at this one part of simple Tempo we find a demon Bell which offers the player hard mode and I will say that it's funny how sekira has two hard modes and zero easy modes kind of a developer troll for anyone who wants the hardest from soft game to be any easier right next to the Bell is a wall the player can flip over to reveal a tunnel this tunnel has a headless in it that I ran past like all of the other headless to reveal a new snowy location I originally thought that this tunnel led to a higher elevated Snowy Mountain on the other side I grappled into this new level and was surprised to find the easy early game team enemies this far into SEC hero and then I realized oh crap this is the beginning of the game and I just passed the first headless that I saw over 10 hours ago one thing I love about sekiro is how the seasons change while the player undergoes a spiritual journey of murdering ex-buddist and sempo Temple ashina transitions from fall to winter I thought the way this shortcut tricked me into thinking I was in a new area because of how the seasons changed was incredible World design that was until I realized it didn't make any sense the world design of sekiro wants to be Dark Souls 1 but it's really just Dark Souls 2 all over again so I'm in a mountain in the middle of sempo Temple and I just came from over there so how in God's name did I wind up in ashina outskirts magic and then this got me thinking the whole world of sekiro feels like Dark Souls 2. we arrive at ashina Castle to split off into four paths each path has a player Traverse a dungeon for a bit until they wind up in an extremely different location that doesn't entirely make logistical sense we can see sempo Tempo many miles in the distance and we sure don't travel anywhere near long enough in the dungeon to maintain this illusion when viewed from a distance the world design of Dark Souls 3 wasn't one to one with how the levels connect but they were pretty close and it never tried to fake being Dark Souls 1 for a cool moment sekiro tries to be interconnected like Dark Souls 1 even if it makes almost no sense my only explanation is that flipping over these walls has the player enter a separate dungeon that takes over an hour to Traverse until they get to another wall spot and flip that over to get to the other part of the map and I just think that's dumb I'll still say that sekira world design is a lot better than Dark Souls 2. since there are a lot less moments of the world making no sense than in Dark Souls 2 but these tunnels are unnecessary although getting back to ashina through sempo Temple felt amazing in the moment in the long run it caused me to realize how fake seki Rose world is and now I can't stop seeing it Sunken Valley and ashina depths don't try to connect back into ashina in a way that makes no sense so their placement in the world feels more believable after arriving in the main hall of sempo Temple I talked to the leader of the immortal snailmen only to realize that I couldn't finish the area this is because I had assumed that the way into ashina Castle was unavailable to me until I finished some other piece of content this is the only time in all of Securo that I had to use the internet to progress which is unlucky but I had no idea what to do so instead of going to ashina Castle I went on a giant adventure in the ashuna deaths and sempo Temple to prepare for the battle ahead to prepare for the moment where I could reclaim what I had lost and re-kidnap my child from Sasuke's evil clutches after being assaulted by the Kamikaze roof divers we sneak into the window where they can't find us and we are now on the inside of ashina castle at the very tippy top of ashina Castle awaits Wolf's Grand reunion with the man who cut off his hand and the boy he swore to protect we've traveled far and wide we've perfected our sword fighting skills by defeating the corrupted Monk and we've sought spiritual enlightenment only to go on a murder spree in senpo Temple do we now stand a chance against the leader of ashina himself kenichiro ashina or does ganichiro underestimate my power with my new skills I'm no longer Wolf the video game character no I am the boss battle gunichiro is the video game character he needs to get good to be able to beat me I beat gennichiro first try and to just add salt on the wound it was a real first try this little [ __ ] didn't even kill me once in a game where I'm allowed to Die Twice let's get something straight in each hero I'm Naruto your Sasuke eat a dick I'm the main character of this story [ __ ] the corrupted monk taught me to land all of my deflects per perfectly while never stopping at being aggressive with my attacks to counteract a rapidly healing posture bar while it was a good teaching lesson I think there could have been some easier ones in between to ease me into it either way I didn't just beat kanichiro I dominated him like I was the boss sekiro Through The Eyes of a skilled player is like Dark Souls plus Mortal Kombat although sekiro doesn't have the combos to memorize like in Mortal Kombat if a player is able to react perfectly to all enemy attacks while applying extreme levels of aggression then the boss becomes the [ __ ] and if the boss is hyper armor I can always just cancel my attack quickly to still survive this means that a skilled player in sekiro fights a boss like how a Mortal Kombat Pro with over 10 000 hours in a special Gamepad beats someone with only 10 hours which is by pounding them in the corner and never letting them do a damn thing about it dark souls rewards a skilled player with simply defeating the boss while sekiro rewards a skilled player with dominating the boss and it feels so much better to dominate I was just talking about BDSM a moment ago in this critique beating ganichiro finally made me realize that I may be playing a masterpiece at the beginning I had so much to learn about sekiro combat I didn't just beat the corrupted monk I trained with the corrupted Monk and with my anime training Arc complete I was able to confront my Nemesis and defeat him on the first try and that was [ __ ] amazing killing ganichiro causes him to revive like a video game character because he has been drinking the rejuvenating Waters I always thought that it was a little silly how in Dark Souls a game where everyone is Undead every single NPC dies forever if they die once in sekiro only specific NPCs like wolf konichiro and the snailmen have immortality but they actually behave like Immortals ganichiro doesn't die from losing his boss fight and the snail enemies come back to life instantly after dying it's also also really cool how fromsoft decided to make the main character's rival take advantage of a similar immortality that the player is given since it makes wolf and nichiro feel connected on a deeper level through the game mechanics the Knight Oscar and Dark Souls 1 who rescues the player only to die soon after was originally supposed to be a rival for the main character Oscar would start out by being the player's friend only to later side with whatever Serpent and ideology the player doesn't side with before the player could beat the game Oscar would challenge them for a climactic anime duel over who would have the right to become Lord I always loved the idea of Dark Souls 1 having a rivalry accompanied by the story but unfortunately it was cut due to time constraints sekiro is able to tap into the potential of having a rival throughout the game to overcome and it's completely epic battling anichiro as he summons a lightning storm and shoots me with electric arrows that I can reverse it was incredible and knowing that he was my rival and the first boss of the game made it all the more amazing since we drove ganichiro from his own castle like a little [ __ ] we now have custody over our child again the Divine Heir explains how he wants to sever immortality by getting the immortal blade so that he can go through his emo phase and start bleeding when he cuts himself and wolf also has to collect ingredients to make an incense so strong that it would open the gates to heaven itself or the Divine realm actually essentially we have to go on another collect X to get y plot that requires the player to complete the three paths connecting to ashina Castle to continue and that's exactly what we'll do on a side note there's another tunnel nashina castle that connects to the dilapidated Temple similar to the last tunnel in sempo Temple it felt cool until I realized that it didn't make any damn sense and then it felt cheap if ashina Castle was somehow right next to the dilapidated Temple without me realizing it it would have been as incredible as the gargoyle elevator shortcut but ashina Castle is nowhere near the Hub world so it's just stupid before we return to sempo Temple I need to mention my favorite from soft character ishinashina we first meet him after the horse boss in Disguise as Tengu and I had no idea that they were the same person until my second playthrough I just thought huh I must have missed some event to finish tengu's storyline until I realized wait if I never saw Tengu and ishin in the same room at the same time they must be the same person when we first meet yishun in Disguise he is murdering Central forces Samurai sent to ashina after pretending to not know who wolf is ishin dubs are crippled protagonist as sekiro the one-armed wolf ishi knows that his grandson gonichiro is beef with wolf but he is too light-hearted to really care after defeating ganichiro we get to talk to ishin again in his Tower in ashina Castle the game allows players to offer different kinds of alcohol to end sees to hear additional dialogue which brought out a lot of interesting conversations with eachine we learned how he led the revolution against the Invaders and restored the ashina clan back to its former glory he's a revolutionary I love ishin so much because he understands that he is just a leaf being blown around by the karmic Winds of Greater forces that surround him but he still devotes his entire life to being the strongest Leaf possible no matter the odds when ishin loses he doesn't feel hatred because he knows that he put his everything into the competition ishin is basically like a wiser more realistic version of Goku and I love that ishin will still break bread with wolf even if he's his enemy because ishin is more concerned with our strength and integrity as an individual than our side in the war unless we make a very evil choice later on then ishin loses the light-hearted attitude since he has a karmic Duty as a good person to do everything in his power to not allow a specific evil to manifest in the world because ishin's a good guy ishin does more cool stuff later to cement his place as my favorite from soft character but I thought I'd mention now just how much I enjoy these first interactions with him right here now that I'm done simping for ishin we can finally finish what we started in sempo Temple the main hall allows us to interact with the altar in front of the Buddha only for Wolf to be transported into the halls of Illusion here wolf has to play hide and seek with four monkeys while other monkeys assault him it's kind of a cool concept yet always a bit annoying in execution I'm not even comfortable calling this a gimmick boss since it isn't even a boss more just a Hide and Seek challenge room I don't really have a huge opinion of this challenge other than that it was a somewhat fun and quirky idea on my first playthrough and a bit annoying on subsequent playthroughs and while it is true that the invisible monkey spawns behind wolf which helps me beat the boss quicker on repeat playthroughs I always just mess up while trying to kill the other three monkeys doesn't have to run around in circles for like an extra few minutes maybe I'm just bad at the challenge but I never really seem to get it and kill all four monkeys easily if there were a lot of bosses like this I'd probably be upset but I'm all right from soft throws in a creative gimmick boss at me every once in a while as a reward for murdering four monkeys wolf is teleported to the room right next to the main hall that means I did a ritual was teleported into another dimension where I went on a monkey Killing Spree just to be teleported back 20 feet from where it all started too bad wolf can't use his arsenal of prosthetic fire weapons to burn down a wooden door that reads does not open from this side in this pretty side room we find the divine child of Rejuvenation unlike the other ex-budists who betrayed the Buddha to live forever as a mortal snailmen this child has managed to become immortal without looking completely ugly kind of like our child she gives Wolf The Immortal blade after telling him not to take it out since he'll die to which wolf replies [ __ ] I'm the main character of this video game game and then he rises from the dead immediately after dying as we all know he can and has done many many many times already there is only one path left before the ritual can be completed the Sunken Valley this area begins with wolf having to run across a narrow bridge as an army of Sharpshooters trying to kill him only for Wolf to climb up the gun Fort and take his revenge surviving the gun Fort leads us to The Wolverine mini boss as I mentioned before this boss would be a great way to teach a player how to deflect along combos if it wasn't hidden away behind ashina Castle after we swing around the monkey level from soft made sure to reach their poison swamp quota here for not much reason because there isn't that much to do here the only thing I found of note was the second encounter with the serpent which I enjoyed a bit more than the first one it begins with wolf traversing around the Serpent's backside as enemies inside the walls reach out to try to kill him eventually we sneak around only to find that the only way forward is for us to Grapple directly in front of the Giant snake then the player has to use Ninjutsu on a monkey so that he can distract the serpent after you grapple up die and revive this is a fun way to use a player's Ninjutsu ability in combination with the Revival mechanic to get past the challenge Escaping The Serpent's clutches leads us back to the yashina depths where we fought the Snake Eyes previously unlike Dark Souls 1 I have no idea if this is a cool world design moment because the paths are so separated I can't begin to imagine if this actually makes any sense at least it's better than the teleporting tunnel passages though the only thing left to do on this path is to finish it with a pretty fun fight I'm certain that many players myself included got that oh [ __ ] it's a Dark Souls 1 boss with sekiro combos therefore I'm feeling from this ape and unlike the earlier Dark Souls and sekiro bosses like chained ogre the blazen bull whose existence felt unnecessary I completely understand why the guardian ape was created this boss looks like dark souls and sakiro because he is Dark Souls plus psychiro the player needs to deflect a lot of attacks but if they deflect too many attacks their posture will probably break this causes the player to position themselves to be able to avoid the boss's attacks without deflecting where they can still deal some damage the boss dies with one of the coolest death blows yet when wolf uses the ape sword necklace to cut off its own head and in the greatest from soft troll yet we see a victory screen only for the ape to pick up the sword that chopped its own head off for Phase 2 and I thought that was pretty epic this phase introduces some very delayed and awkward-looking attacks which makes a lot of sense since the ape can't see anything and to make Phase 2 a bit easier the ape will do a big vertical attack the player can deflect to cons The Headless ape to fall over for big damage although I really like this boss there is one issue I have with it and another big boss fight that we'll examine later the problem being that they don't reward or require the player to be aggressive like in Sword duels the player can pretty reliably just drain the Apes actual Health pool rather than going for a posture break kill and playing aggressive is punished since the ape has hyper armor for almost every attack this means that it can't dominate the ape like I could with konichiro if I responded to all of his attacks correctly I'm not going to say that this design is bad in fact I think it provides an interesting challenge that is fun and feels different from the rest of the game I will say however that the Dark Souls and sekiro bosses aren't nearly as replayable as the actual sword duels because the reward for getting good isn't becoming the boss I'm always just surviving the boss like if it was dark souls and don't get me wrong I still love the guardian ape boss but I can fight the harder version of gunichiro 10 times in a row at the sculptor's idol and still love every moment while one fight with the guardian ape makes me feel satisfied in not wanting much more fun fact before moving on the guardian ape actually has a tail so technically he's just an oversized monkey with the the guardian ape defeated we now have everything we need to make our special incense but oh no ashina is under attack and we've lost the ability to warp to any Idol other than the one in the dungeon only being able to enter ashina from One path allows fromsoft to craft an interesting scene where we see the ashina soldiers that we once fought now cowering in fear from the invading Central forces and no boy are the central forces worthy of our fear because they are some very tough enemies this is a good time to mention my opinion of all the boss multi-fights in sekiro they're trash if we go to kuro's room after the first Siege we are ambushed by two kicking mini bosses at once what am I supposed to do the enemies in this game literally heal after getting hit how am I supposed to reliably play aggressive when there's a second enemy ready with a chain deflect and even if I do deflect all the boss's combos perfectly wolf barely has any posture so I'd probably die anyways sekiro boss combos are just too long and the openings too short for a multi-fight to feel like anything other than a giant slog sekiro one-on-one duels are amazing because aggression is rewarded while sekiro won on two duels always have me running away like a coward while praying for an opening that wouldn't mean anything even if I did land ahead because their posture just heals immediately afterwards the only multi-fight that sort of works is the one where we fight headless ape and guardian ape at the same time this is partially because these bosses can be killed through their health bars rather than through their regenerating posture break Health but also because the guardian ape is missing half of his attacks and Roars constantly which is an opening for free damage of course when both bosses aggro at the same time all I could do is run around in circles and pray that they will chill out which gets very annoying after a while out of all the memory bosses I'd say that the 1v2 Headless fight is my least favorite and the only boss in the game that I feel comfortable saying is actually bad because of all the very strong kick Samurai on the yashina rooftops I do think that I'm just supposed to run past everything trying to do multi-fights against enemies that were once all strong enough to be their own mini boss with very high posture health is somewhat unreasonable and the game almost confirms that I'm supposed to run past everything because these rooftop enemies are a part of the next Boss run and this boss is quite hard so you'll be seeing their faces a lot wolf arrives at the top of ashina Castle to find none other than his own father Al this conniving man was behind the attack on harata estate where he faked his own death Even in our memories somehow stabbed wolf in the back and is now betraying ashina with the hopes of obtaining immortality for himself by taking our child Al gives Wolf the choice to either obey the iron code and help him obtain immortality or a fight to the death the one thing he forgot I can't die because I'm the main character in a fromsoft game so so naturally I choose violence narratively this fight is a complete plot twist not because Wolf's father betrayed him but because the man wolf idolized as one of the greatest warriors of all time is a dirty casual he uses items similar to how Scout saw Atticus as a pillar of moral virtues as a child only to realize that her father was actually gracious to the whole time in the sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird wolf grew up thinking that his dad was good at sekiro only to realize that he's a dirty casual who tries to poison the boss and uses ranged attacks pathetic all jokes aside this ended up becoming the most difficult boss since the corrupted Monk and for all the right reasons this time Al is definitely one of my favorite boss fights in any from soft game so far although Al's posture heals about as fast as corrupted monks the same strategy will not work to defeat him all a player needs to do to defeat corrupted Monk Is keep up a giant deflect combo to rack up enough posture damage so that he won't heal to full when he disengages or chooses to do a certain attack on the other hand owl never does giant combos that a player can deflect for big damage and he also tends to run away because like a real dad he doesn't know how to deal with confrontation at first I was baffled by the difficulty of this boss that was until I realized that in order for a wolf to defeat his father he needs to embrace confrontation rather than avoid it like his dad when Al predictably runs away from home to go buy milk wolf needs to say no father you may not leave I'm coming for you in other words if Al dashes away I instantly follow with an attack and unlike corrupted monk Al can't do a hyper armor attack after dashing away so aggression is rewarded tremendously and I love that getting the first death blow an owl causes him to beg for forgiveness like a little [ __ ] once wolf decides that he's tired of his dad's Bolt attacking Al causes him to throw a Shinobi dust cloud down and go in for a ninja surprise attack Al is probably the only boss in the game that makes the player feel like they're fighting a Shinobi because of all the underhanded tactics which makes the boss all the more interesting similar to the Blazin ball and another boss that we'll examine later Al Phase 2 reminds me most of Smelter Demon he throws poison on the ground and in order to keep posture damage up wolf needs to chase him and get poisoned and just to make it harder I'll also throws items that prevent Wolf's ability to heal because he's a casual who looked up online how to beat the boss and found an item to prevent Wolf's healing disgusting overall owl's mechanics are ingeniously designed to take advantage of everything I love about sekiro combat and one of the endings we get to go back to harata estate to fight Al at the peak of his strength of course this makes no sense because three years isn't enough time for someone to lose that much strength so I like to think of Al the father as wolf fighting the image of how strong he thought his dad was in his memories before realizing that he's a dirty casual in real life sorry if I offended anyone by saying dirty casual it's just a joke Al the father is a contender for top three Sakura bosses about tied with the unlockable inner ganichiro fight and the final boss for me when executed with proper aggression Al the father becomes the Ultimate Mortal Kombat fight Al just keeps jumping away until he's backed into a corner and now every time he tries to jump it's an opportunity for free damage this rewards an aggressive player by getting the boss stuck in a corner so they can pound him to the ground like a Mortal Kombat Pro playing against a new player I can fight either version of owl over and over again and never be bored because of the variability of the move set combined with how it rewards aggression better than any other boss in the game in order to defeat your father you must become the boss no you must become the father and embrace confrontation and it feels great when you finally do it not that Dad would ever know before moving on to the next part of the story let's first discuss what happens when wolf obeys his father's command and that is he runs away again to go buy milk or whatever fathers do when they leave and so wolf has to deal with murdering the strongest Samurai in ashina alone despite the army of kickboxing Central for Samurai right outside that could do it for me the first Challenger it's the most attractive and only woman in Japan Emma the gentle blade now this boss runs into a fairly interesting design issue I've heard before that the reason why frumsoft makes all of their bosses larger than the player is to make it easier to see them and now I completely understand whenever I try to make out if she's stabbing me or grabbing me it always feels like guesswork because I can barely see her I feel like there's a joke I could make about Emma grabbing me but I'm just too dumb to think of it right now unfortunately there is no way to avoid this design issue since Emma is a woman and it would be kind of weird for her to be taller than all the men so I just dealt with it and even though this is a design problem I also kind of enjoy it Emma is so easy to fight that having to guess her next move keeps me on my toes because if it wasn't a bit unfair then I wouldn't be challenged in the first place other than that Emma's combos have a nice Rhythm to them that are satisfying to deflect and I'm sad that there isn't a full two-phase Emma fight but fromsoft had something else in mind upon murdering best girl Emma ishin ashina himself comes to challenge our rule ishin has this nasty move where he sidestep iframes my sword and hits me in response and this got me killed so many times I could never attack eachine twice from neutral without risking death overall ishin is another fun sword duel in phase two he gets a bunch of One-Shot flaming sword attacks the player needs to dodge and the Dodge timings felt pretty fair and felt good to pull off yisheen's ability to conjure Flames all over the arena before doing a giant circle of cuts was also pretty entertaining especially when I realized that I had to find a path through the Flames to run behind eachine so that the circle of cuts wouldn't hit me at all now I should admit something I felt terrible doing the Shira ending I followed my spineless dad and killed all of my friends it hurt my soul especially because I'm an ishin simp you all know that though there is one part of the ending I really love it comes after wolf kills ishi and Al has a speech talking about how ashina is theirs for the taking only for Wolf to stab him in the back the same way Al tried to kill wolf all of those years ago after doing this the Divine air remarks that wolf has turned into shura as evidenced by his flaming arm and since from our already spent all the budget for the evil ending on the three-phase boss we now see a black screen as the narrator explains how wolf turned into a demon with a bloodlust for killing this is my least favorite ending for obvious reasons that I will never do again but I still think it's really cool how fromsoft decided to create additional content they allow players the freedom to deny or follow their father's orders and that makes denying him all the more impactful and deny them we shall for it's time to transition back to the first playthrough now that we've killed the corrupted monk defeated ganichiro murdered four monkeys fell one giant monkey twice and murdered our own dad the strongest incense ever has been formed and this incense is so strong that it causes the good ending of wicker man to occur where it lifts wolf up to heaven rather than killing Nicolas Cage with a bunch of bees is the Divine realm kicks off with a rematch against the corrupted monk except she now has three phases and is significantly easier maybe easy isn't the right word more that she isn't any more difficult than the first encounter which is odd since we are in the end game and have already mastered this boss move set before her posture doesn't regenerate nearly as fast as the first one and the player should have enough Heels by this point so that beating three phases is not an unreasonable task the game already required us to master an arguably more difficult version of this boss because the first corrupted Monk's posture regenerated faster than any of the phases of this one so it makes it seem like the developers were a bit out of touch and didn't realize how hard of the first corrupted bunk was this boss is more of a moderately fun Victory lap than anything else that will really only challenge people who use items to beat the first version of the boss still though I'm glad this boss was included since it's more fun to re-flight a boss with three phases then one at the sculptor Idol but it still felt a bit tone deaf to put such an easy boss as the guard for a late game area in the hardest game I've ever played moving on the next level is extremely pretty jaw-droppingly so and the level design here is more focused than the other parts of the game The Immortal snail men are back with the Vengeance as they can literally turn us into old people before sucking us out this is essentially a One-Shot mechanic that forces players to actually use stealth in case they've just been running past all the enemies or something and this is probably my favorite stealth section in the game most likely because there's an actual punishment for getting caught and the player can't just solve all their problems by hiding on a roof there still aren't too many stealth mechanics so it's not amazing but I'd be lying if I said that the final stretch here where the player has to get caught doesn't get my heart pumping this is my favorite part of the whole section because the player knows they can't get through the door without being seen so like a criminal running away from the cops to a getaway vehicle we narrowly avoid getting one shot by alerting the snailmen only to barely reach safety in the nick of time now in this next chunk of level is where my opinion on sekiro's level design started to change similar to how the difficult multi-fights found during the siege of ashina weren't fun to fight as a result of very high posture combined with complex move sets the multi-fights in the Divine realm are also a bit too difficult to be reasonable although they are more fun and easier to fight than the rooftop Central forces I always just end up running past the majority of enemies here and maybe it's also the fact that I don't care about enemy rewards that makes it really easy to default to running past but I just feel like the enemy placement was a bit too over the top for me after killing the mini boss that is actually just a normal enemy in Disguise we can swim down to the last big monster stealth section with the killer fish it feels just as scripted as the first serpent attack where we do the obvious stealth thing to survive and just as moderately entertaining easily escaping the clutches of the monster fish takes us to the next Mainline memory boss the Divine Dragon we're pretty far into the hardest game of all time and fromsoft has decided to go easy on us for once with another easy boss and trust me it won't happen again however unlike the true monk this is an actually very easy set piece boss and it does look pretty cool if seki Rose my own personal theme park Divine dragon is the cotton candy I passively enjoy the cool visuals and do the obvious things I need to do while never actually feeling threatened and with the death of the Dragon we take his tears and return to ashina to permanently sever immortality by committing domestic abuse on our own kid only to find that he has been kidnapped more of the central forces have invaded people are dying and ashina is burning Emma tells us the terrible news of ishin's death my favorite man and that ganichiro has taken the child to the secret tunnel where it all began to the same flower field where canichiro cut off Wolf's arm traveling through ashina during its final hours evoked a lot of emotion from me the city that we've explored and been a part of and experienced is burning to the ground the people we may have had our differences in the past when wolf and ganichiro battled in court over who gets custody of the kid after divorce but I didn't want to see them suffer from soft set up a lot of cool scenes displaying how the ashina clan is losing everything and I don't want them to but wolf has to be a stoic dick about it and always does the right thing wolf has to sever immortality to ensure it stops corrupting the lives of men whether it kills ashina or not while I found this scene emotionally compelling gameplay wise it was kind of just enemy spam as I mentioned before the multi-fights against the super powered normal enemies don't really work and while someone will inevitably comment you're supposed to do stealth my response is why why do stealth why fight at all by this point we have all the level upgrades and money bags we need with the overwhelming super strong enemy spam this final section of the game feels like it was created to be run past the way I view my play style at the end of sekiro is as a lone wolf running through someone else's war and it's okay to not murder everyone from the central forces in the end sekiro doesn't have the most engaging level design mechanics but it always looks pretty and in some places like the end here it does still manage to evoke a lot of emotion and the next boss is an old man who's finally expressing his emotions after a life full of suffering the one armed orangutan himself who once sculpted our mechanical arm has finally given into toxic masculinity and become the second hardest boss in the game the demon of hatred this is the ultimate big Dark Souls Boston sekiro and I feel very conflicted about demon of hatred on one hand he isn't really unfair or even all that hard because he doesn't have too many deflect combos however fromsoft still really wanted this fight to be hard so he has a giant health bar and posture bar combined with three lives combined with special phase change attacks combined with high damage fire attacks that damage a player even when they land all of their deflects perfectly similar to my least favorite fight the Blazing Bowl unlike the Blazing Bowl I think that players have been sufficiently taught by the end of the game to deflect so one boss won't make them question if they should deflect less and Dodge more since that's obviously wrong against the majority of sekiro Boss attacks the player is given a choice with the demon between Landing easier to flex while taking fire damage or doing the more difficult time Dodge to take no damage I haven't learned how to Dodge this boss so I chose to stick with what I know best and deflect while taking fire damage this strategy made the demon feel like Smelter Demon without life gens since playing perfectly always meant that I was still losing Health as mentioned earlier fromsoft also decided to add different high damage attacks with every phase of the demon and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what the game wanted me to do against the phase 2 overhead strike I eventually brute forced my way through when he decided to rarely use the one attack I couldn't avoid because I was too stupid to realize that I needed to run sideways and jump at the last second and seki Rose so extremely punishing that me not figuring out how to avoid one attack added an extra hour to my time spent fighting the boss this isn't necessarily a bad thing as it was my fault for losing but more of an observation that fromsoft punishes anything but pure perfection severely in sekiro and other than that I don't have too much else to say on this boss he isn't the most fun to re-fight for the same reasons mentioned in the guardian ape section of the video yet I'd still say that I had a fun time learning how to beat the demon of hatred when wolf finally kills the demon he says wolf thank you because he's really the sculptor in Disguise as I already said it's very interesting that the only real demon boss in all of sekiro has a human heart like a metaphor or something the sculptor could only carve Buddhas with the face of Wrath because it was all he felt on the inside and with the city he swore to protect burning away he decided to let the Wrath consume him so that he could fight back against the central forces but wrath won't consume us we still need to finish what we started we need to go back to where it all began back to the flower field back to ganichiro as the world Burns away I tend to talk about the story of a Soul's game in more depth closer to the end since that's when the emotions hit the hardest and sekiro has my favorite story in any from soft game yet probably not my favorite lore that still belongs to Dark Souls 1 but the emotional impact from the Epic final battle is stronger here than ever before ashina was built on ishin's back after the Invaders took over ishin's home he fought to save it and with his amazing swordsmanship skills he was able to win the Revolution and claim the kingdom for himself ishin watched on as every new generation of children grew weaker than the last until he was certain that they didn't have the military prowess to defend against the stronger armies in Japan in his old age ishin grew too weak to defend ashinot and deep down he knew that his own grandchild kenichiro didn't have what it takes to turn the tides of a war like he once did at his Peak strength ganichiro had the will and ambition to win but not the Raw Talent kenichiro knew just as well as ishin that he wasn't strong enough to defend what he loved most and that feeling ate him alive the feeling of inadequacy when person only desires one thing above all else when they would sacrifice everything for that one wish but not even God will hear their cries that's what ganichiro felt and ganichiro knew that God was not on his side so he had to take things into his own hands the only way to win was to become God to become immortal and honestly I understand konichiro if this was a faction-based RPG I'd probably join kenichiro to help save ashina together but wolf can't do that wolf is a man of integrity and he can't allow a corrupting power like immortality to haunt the world of man any longer so wolf chooses to throw everything in his life away to save the lives of countless others ashina Burns away as lightning strikes out from the sky while two Immortal Swordsmen fight over the fate of The Kingdom ending immortality or preserving ashina which is more important the first phase of this final boss is pretty epic we get to re-fight one of the most fun bosses in the game Phase 2 ganichiro and we learned that it's actually pretty easy not only can a player constantly attack and interrupt him kenichiro's big anime attack combo gets very easy to deflect after the 20th death to the third phase of the boss one issue I did have with gunichiro is similar to the problem with Emma's grabs I can't see ganichiro when he goes for a stab his model crouches to Wolf's height while being obscured by flowers so I could never see if he was going for a stab or sweeping attack it seems like a minor nitpick but chances are that a player will fight inichiro many many times and losing Health to the first phase of an extremely hard boss because I couldn't see the model did start to make me very angry after killing anichiro again he realizes that even with the rejuvenating Waters he is no match for his rival wolf so he quits what a [ __ ] each hero doesn't care what he has to do to ensure that ashina exists so after realizing that he is too weak to achieve his dreams he sacrifices himself so that his grandfather ishin can walk once more honestly I respect his commitment to preserving what he loves but I too have my own dream which is to beat sekiro and I won't let anyone stand in my way one thing I always love in video games is when the game mechanics are reflected in the story and ishin does this so well hesitation is defeat is ishin's favorite line of dialogue that he tells the player every time they die and he's correct the moment a player recognizes the boss is doing a specific attack they must prepare to react with perfect muscle memory because if they hesitate they've already missed the timing and they're probably gonna die now it's about time I address the elephant in the room sekiro ends with a ridiculously hard four-phase boss and I feel somewhat conflicted about this many players say that this is an example of a hard but fair final boss that's fun and while I mostly agree I have to ask how many phases do I have to fight until the difficulty becomes artificial if the final boss of Dark Souls 4 is 6 bosses with different hard to learn move sets in a row then we can probably say that's artificial difficulty since you would have to perfect the first three or four bosses to even have a chance at being able to memorize the final phases of a potential six-phase fight while a four-phase fight would be encroaching on the territory of artificial difficulty as I'll examine later this ends up not being the case because ishin is really just a three-phase fight in Disguise ishin's third phase is by far the hardest and took me the longest amount of time to learn which was made even longer because I had to keep refighting the first two phases this is probably by Design as it encourages a player to demonstrate Mastery over the first two phases because you're going to keep dying to the third phase and this highlights the best part of sakuro's combat which is how a skilled player can dominate the first two phases of the boss easily after memorizing their move sets usually I think a two-phase boss is a good challenge a three-phase boss is a bit much and a four-phase boss is over the limit and after about 4 hours I had only been able to beat the third phase once and there's a fourth phase of course seki Rose the hardest game I've ever played so if the ending wasn't brutally difficult it probably would have been more disappointing but then I became disappointed for another reason after I remembered how to do a lightning reversal attack and I beat the fourth phase the second time I reached it this left me feeling very conflicted about the final boss having to memorize four different boss movesets in a row is borderline artificial difficulty but I didn't like that my final fight in sekiro ended effortlessly with a few easy to land lightning reversal the Final Act of the final fate shouldn't be the easiest part of the fight right however after refighting the boss a few times I believe he is programmed to do multiple lightning reversals in a row just to make the ending of the game easier on some level I wish that fromsoft just made lightning a rare third phase attack and took out the fourth phase entirely rather than having it be so easy or maybe just say eff it and actually make the fourth phase hard by making lightning appear less often than it currently does either alternative would be better than having my final thought of one of the hardest bosses in the hardest game I've ever played be welp that was easy there's a difficult to explain genius part of sekiro's Boss design that I've wanted to mention before but never found a good time to however it's on full display in this fight so I think now is a good time in every Soul's game the bosses have move set trees that can Branch into different choices based on the previous attack sekiro takes this idea one step further and allows the player to have multiple ways of avoiding every attack so the bosses have additional trees of logic based on how a player reacts to their attack it sounds really complicated to say with words so I'll use a few examples ishin raises his sword for a Charged vertical strike I can either Dodge it and he will follow up with a second attack or I can deflect it and he will follow up with a wind cutting attack ishin will also prepare his sword in a stance that indicates a big attack if the player runs away he will charge with the two slash combo while if a player plays close he will push them into a sweeping attack all of these branching movesets means that the way that you the viewer beat ishin could look completely different and have different attacks than the way that I defeated him and I think that's a pretty brilliant way to increase player expression against the boss while adding replay value if I avoid damage differently on a second or third playthrough I can now see new moves from the boss which increases replay value in a way that Dark Souls bosses simply can't because Dark Souls combat is too simple another mechanic about sekiro bosses that I love is how they have so many switch-up attacks if kenichiro does a jumping attack and I block he is the option of stabbing me doing a sweep attack a rare delayed strike or nothing at all he tends to go for the stab but knowing that he may switch it up always keeps me on my toes even after I've mastered all the combat mechanics ishin is the same he shoots me with his Japanese Glock and usually stabs but he still has the option of going for a sweeping attack so I can't go on autopilot mode to win even if I've memorized the boss 100 in addition to the switch-up attacks I really love how bosses deflect wolf with a bit of Randomness when attacking a boss they always block the first hit and deflect on the second third or fourth attack this forces players who hewed an extra attack to quickly cancel and keeps them on their toes since they never know for certain when the boss will deflect wolf and follow up with their own attack combo a little bit of Randomness to when the bosses deflect ensures that no boss will ever be 100 identical on any two fights which increases replayability even more before I played sekiro I thought Wolf's ability to come back to Life's seemed like a gimmick mechanic but I was oh so wrong Reviving is completely necessary to complete the combat system in order to make a game that gives the players so many options of evading damage challenging from soft needed to ensure that the player is always close to death however this introduces a new problem seen in Elden ring which is that dying in two hits from the boss's complete [ __ ] sakiro fixes this problem by allowing the player to revive once per boss killing blow unless you run out of revive since two of them are on cooldown if you use them you only get one for free this is a brilliant way to make every moment of the fight tense without it feeling too unfair since they can usually come back to life at least once just about every part of sekiro combat is completely genius and after I finish writing this script I'm going to play more Landing the last death blow on ishin has him bow his head in respect for his fate and honestly I don't want to do it ishin is my favorite character and it felt like an honor to be able to be his final opponent but I don't want him to die although owl might be Wolf's father ishin was the man I always looked up to ishin lived for the fight and in some way this final boss was a farewell and parting gift to my favorite character in all of fromsoft as he fails to protect the lives of all of his friends his family his kingdom and his grandson godichiro a genuine tragedy but he faces it with the Brave and honorable face ishin is more proud of who he was and how he lived than how he died and I love him for that with ishin dead wolf is reunited with his master the Divine Heir but this time he isn't there to be his savior wolf has to murder the child he swore to protect as ashina Burns away all one great sacrifice to ensure immortality never corrupts man again in sekiro Wolf isn't necessarily the good guy just an honor-bound Shinobi who does what his master thinks his best by the end I somewhat wanted ganichiro to win just because he fought so hard but then again that's the tragedy of sakiro wolf has to sacrifice all joy in his life by murdering all those close to him his teacher his father his rival the ruler of his kingdom the sculptor and even his own master all had to die so that further evil could be prevented that's part of the reason why wolf apologizes after he kills half of the bosses in the game the normal ending of sekiro is my favorite and the true ending in my head Canon because it is the most beautifully tragic one man murders everything he loves and has to live with the guilt while knowing deep down that it was the right thing to do there are many terrible war crimes against humanity that have been committed in the last 100 years and because World War III is about to break out a lot of them are happening right now but the biggest war crime of all of them was sekiro not getting any real DLC don't get me wrong I love the free DLC hard mode versions of fights and the costumes and the boss gauntlets but I want more over time sekiro has turned into my own version of OSU a fun rhythm game I can always go back to just because executing Mastery over a boss is more satisfying in sekiro than any other game I've ever played and every good sword duel is like a good OSU map that I can put on repeat the only real issue is that I want more good duels that consistently reward aggression and let the player become the boss I want more fights like Al and ganichiro and ishin because these are some of the greatest boss fights in video game history they are infinitely replayable and in a stroke of Genius fromsoft decided to Grace us with free DLC just to make the game more replayable than it already was every time a player gets a new ending they unlock a new boss Gauntlet at the end of every Gauntlet is a revamped hard mode version of the boss and they they did a wonderful job here my favorite one is inner genichiro I loved the first skinny chiro but he was way too easy so inner ganichiro has quickly turned into one of my favorite from South bosses ever as it takes an easy fun fight and makes it hard enough that I can actually die the boss gauntlets give players like me who just want to do sekiro combat for 10 hours straight a goal to strive towards which is completely genius but I still want more I want more unlockable rewards for completing boss gauntlets like costumes as well as more gauntlets in general I would also enjoy some challenge gauntlets where I have to fight a series of mini bosses or maybe some multi-fights with normal enemies as well as memory boss battles in a row to get some sort of reward essentially I want fromsoft to add more challenge gauntlets and rewards to give me an excuse to never stop playing sekiro because I never want to stop playing this amazing combat system if my only complaint about the bosses is I want the game to give me more reasons to fight the bosses and I want more DLC with fun sword dueling bosses then that means fromsoft did something very right here my most anticipated game is from soft's next spiritual successor to sekiro maybe another game in a more realistic medieval setting with tighter level design no grapple hook and the leveling to help players adjust difficulty while giving them more of an incentive to kill enemies and if we're lucky Miyazaki will get the rights to berserk and we will finally be able to play as guts then the anime comparison in the beginning of this video will come back in a Vengeance in the next critique for the berserk from soft game but for now I'll just keep dreaming until that day comes you guys know where I'll be replaying sekiro perfecting the bosses dying over and over again and when I feel like being traumatized once more I'll attempt the level one run for now I'm just sad that there isn't more oh well done farewell

Channel: Feeble King

Views: 196,893

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Id: VLklJ3aWPpc

Length: 119min 31sec (7171 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Skgota]

You can go through all the three main areas that lead away from ashina castle before geni. You can actually completely finish mibu village before facing him.

Also, idk how many souls essays i‘ve seen where they called the game a flawed masterpiece like jesus it‘s the same shit every time