April 13th, 2019
I’m not able to pin point the exact moment I fell in love with ninjas in video games, so I’ll just blame it on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (though Scorpion in Mortal Kombat was pretty cool too). Gray Fox walking down that hallway in his “first” appearance, completely untouched and effortlessly blocking bullets certainly made an impression, and subsequent playthroughs of Ninja Gaiden didn’t help dissuade my enthusiasm. Now here we are with Sekiro, a difficult game that tries to truly embrace a brutal fantasy ninja experience…albeit with a magic prosthetic arm.
Liked
Combat: The combat in Sekiro is similar to what you’d find in Nioh (the OTHER Dark Souls-style game set in historical Japan) where the whole point is to break down your enemy’s defenses and then hit them while they’re staggered. The key difference in Sekiro is that a hit on an enemy with broken “posture” will land a “deathblow” that will either outright kill basic enemies or remove all of the remaining health bar of a boss’ current phase. Posture damage is inflicted by hitting your targets but also by perfectly deflecting enemy attacks with your sword, and this is where the game really becomes exhilarating. When it’s just you and a boss clashing weapons together after you finally “get it” and perfectly deflect all of their moves while taking no posture damage of your own…it’s just an absolutely sublime feeling. It helps that the deathblow animations are also incredible to see in action and very rewarding to pull off against difficult enemies.
Perfect Hitboxes: Dark Souls and its ilk have always had a strange relationship with hitboxes, leading to “unfair” hits and infamous videos where you take far too much damage for a giant stomping the ground ten feet away from you. Sekiro’s hitboxes don’t have this problem, most likely because the entire game is designed around perfectly blocking oncoming attacks. It’s extremely satisfying to barely block and dodge enemy attacks and never feel like the game is cheating you out of your knife’s edge dance. That being said, there is one boss that does break these rules (ironically the boss that feels like the most like it’s from Bloodborne) but one enemy out of dozens isn’t bad.
Stealth: The Souls series has always been about planning your approach and not rushing into fights blindly. Typically this meant not just running straight into obvious ambushes, but Sekiro takes it a step further with a large emphasis on stealth. It’s a very simplistic type of stealth, where all you need to do is avoid line of sight or hide in some long grass, but it can be very important in many areas of the game where enemies will horrifically ambush you if you don’t pick off as many as you can before you engage anyone that doesn’t have their back to you. This can also be used to ambush bosses and take off entire portions of their health, which is extremely helpful against some of the most frustrating enemies.
Unblockable Attacks: If you read my Bloodborne comments from years ago you’ll remember that I hated how only certain attacks could be parried with your pistol, leading to irritating trial and error sequences where you lose half your health just to figure out if you can use your visceral attacks. Sekiro’s solution to these unblockable moves (and it certainly needed one since the game is all about blocking attacks) is to flash a giant warning symbol as an enemy starts one of its harder/impossible to block attacks, generally categorized as a thrust, a sweep, or a grab. Thrusts can be either blocked at literally the last possible second or you can dodge into them with an unlockable move called the Mikiri Counter, sweep attacks need to be jumped over and can be followed up with a kick to the face for massive posture damage, and grabs have to be dodged or quickly jumped away from. This may sound like a bit of an easy mode and it can certainly feel that way to a point, but the key when you see the warning sign is to figure out exactly what type of move it is in the half a second before you’re hit by it. Overall I think that this is a good change compared to Bloodborne’s guessing game, even if it ruins the “cinematic” quality of fights with an occasional warning sign.
Enemies are Real Threats: I’m sick of action games (and Sekiro is definitely an action game) with enemies that hold your hand. Ninja Gaiden taught me that an action game is only hard if even the most basic enemies can kill you, and Sekiro is one of the first action games in a long time where that is the case. My first true combat experience had me run face first into two enemies, immediately lose two thirds of my health in one combo, and run the hell away to heal back at a shrine. This is what an action game should be, none of these scarecrow or bug enemies from Devil May Cry that just roll over and die to make you look cool.
Your Prosthetic Arm: The artificial arm that you use in Sekiro is one part exploration gimmick and one part Batman’s utility belt. You’ll see its grappling hook function in most Sekiro media, which you’ll use to hop from tree branch to rooftop statue in an effort to find secret areas or sneak up on enemies, but there’s so much more to it than that. Throughout the game you’ll find new items that you can equip to it to help you defeat certain types of enemies, from axes that smash through shields to a built-in flamethrower, and you can upgrade them with various bonuses that can make them even more effective. This makes the arm very endearing while also being a huge confidence boost, as you will heavily rely on it for fighting certain types of enemies but you know that switching to this installed weapon will give you the edge you need where others might have failed. And that’s before you get to unlocking the special moves that can be used in conjunction with these tools, which allows you to blend your sword attacks together with your other weapons for some great combos.
Neutral
Consumables: Most enemies in Sekiro have a weakness, but almost every one of these weaknesses are based around consumable items. Be it the spirit emblems that power your prosthetic weapons or snap peas that negate illusions, Sekiro has a lot of consumables that are either uncommon or rare and of course you don’t get them back in your inventory if you use them and then die. This matters against certain enemies more than others, but needing to use spirit emblems for your arm abilities and coolest sword skills is probably what disappoints me the most. Fortunately you can still use your flashy sword moves without spirit emblems (albeit in a much weaker state) but losing your arm weapons after only a half dozen uses never feels rewarding, especially considering there’s a whole skill tree devoted to these tools that becomes mostly irrelevant halfway through long fights.
Limited Weapons and Customization: A big sticking point for many Dark Souls fans is the removal of much of the customization in Sekiro. From Software made this game with the specific focus of you playing as a ninja, and scooped out all the stat upgrades and weapon variety that we’ve come to expect from the Souls series to focus entirely on this vision. I don’t mind this too much as a concept, but I will admit I was disappointed when an objective halfway through the game is “find a new cool sword” but instead of replacing your starting sword it just acts as a new special move. There’s also a skill tree now, a first for Souls games, that you can use to unlock special attacks, passive abilities, and combat actions. This has the normal “problem” with skill trees where you can only unlock some good abilities after you waste your precious skill points to unlock bad abilities, and it becomes especially irritating because you can only have one special attack equipped at a time, making anything worse than your currently equipped move little more than checking a box in your progress. It gets even more worthless once you unlock the overhead slash (which you can get surprisingly early) because the overhead slash is the best move in the game, dealing huge posture damage to your opponent while “healing” your own posture, and it costs no spirit emblems. After that every other move, even the end game super powerful ones, are just so much worthless flash (especially when they’re blocked) compared to the simple efficiency of smashing someone over the head with your sword.
Graphics: Sekiro doesn’t take up much space on your hard drive and that’s because it doesn’t have the flashiest graphics around. The animations are obviously great and towards the end of the game there’s some very cool looking vistas, but Sekiro is not going to be winning beauty contests against any franchise juggernauts. I was especially disappointed in the blood effects that appear on your character over the course of the game, which I expecting to be more present when you see how the stuff flies all over the place during gameplay. Considering how great Bloodborne’s on-character blood was it’s surprising that Sekiro’s looks like someone just ran a paint brush over any given part of his body, but I guess their assets were focused elsewhere.
Multiple endings: Sekiro has multiple endings just like the other Souls games, but unlike the others there are multiple bosses locked behind some of these endings. Even playing through the game with a 100% guide you’ll have to play through Sekiro twice to access these bosses, which isn’t terrible when it’s a game as good as this but it can be frustrating if you don’t have the time to put 50+ hours into the game twice.
Scripted events: From Software has gained a bit of a reputation of their games being rather…indirect when it comes to storytelling. Do you want to know what the hell was going on in Bloodborne? Well I guess you’d better read the item descriptions of everything you pick up and jump on the forums to theorycraft with everyone else…or watch the hours upon hours of YouTube videos done by other people that have spent months doing exactly that. Sekiro can also be a little vague at times but it’s also a far more cinematic experience by design, including many cutscenes or long dialogue exchanges to spell out character motivations. There’s also several frustrating “key events” that will block off your ability to fast travel to a large portion of the map and force you to retrace your steps through areas you’ve visited before. This wouldn’t necessarily be awful but Sekiro doesn’t have a great map system so it’s sometimes hard to figure out where you’re meant to be going if you’ve already opened all the doors the first time through.
Hated
The Snake: There are giant snake gods in Sekiro, and they are nothing more than scripted stealth exercises that are annoying as hell. Action games shouldn’t have scripted “hide from the guy and then run away” segments, they should be about engaging whatever foe is put before you and learning how to overcome them. This is the same problem with Devil May Cry 5 where three bosses are “supposed to lose” fights, only this time it’s a giant snake that you NEVER engage in a straight up fight. Not looking forward to dragging myself past these areas in New Game Plus.
Dragonrot: Since Sekiro makes it a plot point that the main character can bring himself back from the dead they also decided to add a downside to the ability. “Dragonrot” is what happens when someone with the power of resurrection dies but doesn’t have enough life force left within them to come back to life under their own power…so instead they steal the life force of others. Every time you respawn at a shrine rather than using one of your respawn charges will increase an unseen tally in the game, and after a certain number of deaths the NPCs around you will start to get sick. They will cough, wheeze, gag, and lie on the ground in pain, with the lore telling you they will all begin to die if you continue to fall in battle.
In reality this system seems to only prevent you from completing NPC side quests or picking up more lore. You can still upgrade your gear or shop at stores regardless of if the owners are vomiting blood, and as far as I know no one can actually die from it and it doesn’t affect any of the endings. The main reason I don’t know is because you can find a temporary cure for the disease relatively early in the game by using a single-use item to reset that death tally back to zero, and you can pick up more of these healing items for cheap from almost every shop in the game. Frankly the only thing this mechanic seems to do (other than being a neat piece of world building) is scare away players that feel guilty for “killing” everyone in the world because they’re bad at the game.
Forgettable NPCs: I have always enjoyed the NPCs in From Software games, from Laurentius to Eileen the Crow, but Sekiro’s NPCs aren’t that interesting to me. There’s an undead samurai that’s kind of fun and an old mentor character, but other than that I could give or take the rest. They try to expand on these characters a little by giving you sake that you can share with the NPCs to have them open up to you a little, but these are limited use items and you can only give them to “important” NPCs.
Ninjitsu sucks: About a third of the way through the game (depending on where you go) you unlock Ninjitsu skills, abilities that can be activated through stealth kills to give you a slightly magical edge in combat. They are conceptually cool but limited in volume and use to such a degree that I actually get sad about the wasted potential just thinking about them. The big problem is that these cool abilities can’t ever be used against enemies that really matter, which really is a theme when it comes to a lot of Sekiro’s combat options but is especially disappointing when you’d think a game about being a shinobi would have a good way to utilize “ninja magic.” The fact that there’s only three is also ridiculous considering the number and power of the ninja bosses you face during the game.
Missed opportunities: Early in the game you’re introduced to “bells,” which are items that can send you back in time to relive past memories. Many Sekiro previews highlighted this as a great potential to expand the game’s scope and learn more about the world, but they had no way of knowing there is only one “back in time area” that is activated by essentially just one bell. This is a huge disappointment for me and one that I would hope they expand upon more in either DLC or a sequel, as there’s so much potential here but for whatever reason they don’t take it as far as they should have.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is, without exaggeration, the most fun I have had with a video game in years. Five stars, ten out of ten, whatever moniker you want to throw onto a game to indicate a high level of excellence, it’s here. Almost every “flaw” is a nitpick with maybe the hardest hitting complaint focusing on the consumables and lack of great special moves, but all that falls to the wayside when you’re clashing swords with a powerful enemy before breaking his guard and striking him down. It actually struck me as I finished the game that this is exactly what Metal Gear Rising wanted to be: an action game with an emphasis on well-timed blocks, relatively mediocre secondary weapons, and optional stealth segments. Sure Sekiro doesn’t have the “Blade Time” feature, but when it does everything else so much better does it really need it? If you’re up for a challenge then I cannot recommend Sekiro enough. Go play this game.
