i'm of two minds about Sekiro. at times it feels like a great game hiding inside a mediocre one, and sometimes it feels like a mediocre game hiding inside a great one. there are moments where it is a deeply electrifying experience, and there are times where it feels utterly indistinct from the stock AAA formula.

let's start with the good: the one-on-one swordplay in this game is a delight. on a very fundamental level, it's not too dissimilar from the Batman Arkham combat that took 2010s AAA game design by storm: you have dodges and parries that you use in response to specific diagetic and non-diagetic (glowing swords, markers over people's heads) tells, and maintaining a consistent rhythm of combat builds up a meter that you can use to defeat enemies in one hit. sekiro is much more difficult than it's contemporaries in this style in a way that may obscure this similarity, but it is very much there, and it works brilliantly. sekiro has some of the best one-on-one swordfights in the medium, battles of constant aggression where backing off for even a moment to heal gives your opponent time to recover their posture, where a single mistake on your part changes the game, and where perfection is tantalizingly within grasp once you adjust to the game's rhythms. designers Masaru Yamamura and Yuki Fukuda and their design team - along with the game's fantastic audio and animations - are to be applauded for making a game that is experientally not a thousand times removed from a Batman Arkham/Punch-Out!! hybrid feel utterly fresh and unique. the game's combat admittedly loses something when you aren't up against human opponents: the all-too-frequent times you are up against animals strip away the core loop of perfect parries and well-timed dodges into a much less elegant game of hammering the dodge button to get away from unparseable flails of limbs, but even then it rarely devolves so much that the core enjoyment of the combat is no longer present. it's only once you slink away from a duel, back into the shadows, that the flaws begin to show in the game's technique.

the stealth...exists. i hesitate to call it bad but it's certainly not remarkable: if you've played any AAA open world game made in the past few years you know what you're getting here: hiding in tall grass or on branches and rooftops from patrolling enemies that you can kill in one hit by sneaking up behind them, and some distraction items and moves that you'll rarely if ever use because it's much more effective to just stab them in the back. stealth rarely feels like it is the cornerstone of an engaging encounter - only the sniper miniboss in Ashina Depths really felt like something that I had to make careful and considered use of stealth in order to make it through, and that may just be because I got there far too early - and usually either falls into thinning out a couple of enemies before a fight, or slowly picking them off one-by-one Arkham style. the one interesting thing Sekiro brings to the table is that you can take off one of a bosses (usually two) health bars by getting the drop on them, but this has a knock-on effect for the design of those bosses where if you don't get a drop on them, you just have to fight them twice, with only major bosses having different moves and patterns for different phases. technically speaking this rewards the stealth but I'm very tired of the go-to reward for this kind of AAA game being the ability to skip repetitious content. ultimately, like a modern Assassin's Creed or Horizon: Zero Dawn the stealth here would be unable to carry a full game, and just barely meets the boundaries of acceptability for what increasingly seems like an element these games simply must have.

this feeling of weary obligation manifests narratively as well. thematically, I dig what it is doing. this story about how clinging to life after one's time has passed produces a sickness of the soul that mutilates the self and destroys the world around you to sustain yourself is often resonant and occasionally powerful, but it's the moment-to-moment writing that really lets it down: characters are routinely flat and one-dimensional (the character of Owl is notably ill-served, being absent for almost the entire game before making a bizarre cartoonish turn to evil), the game is too eager to show you it's mysteries to really make the environmental storytelling sing (the monastery is theoretically my favorite narrative arc here but because The Deal is unveiled almost immediately there's no real escalation of information: you learn almost immediately that these guys made themselves into undying monsters through these freaky worms and there's precious little left to discover in the course of your adventure), and the game's refreshingly restrained storytelling for a big AAA game ultimately dooms this narrative to fade from the mind as quickly as it passes through the body. perhaps this could have been solved with more dialogue, but given that attempting to explore the narrative further "rewards" the player with a "true" ending that is total MCU sequel hook rubbish compared to the poignant normal endings, I'm not sure this is a quick fix. I do think the storytelling here is ultimately too slight, as the lack of space given to characters like Genichiro or places like Ashina to be understood as characters who have a coherent belief system or culture or context they are clinging to robs the game of a lot of the resonance it could potentially bring out by boiling things down to the point that the metaphors struggle to be gleamed through the Proper Nouns, but I think the wider problem is this game is far, far too long.

again, this is something sekiro very much has in common with it's contemporaries in the AAA space. Sekiro took me just over 30 hours to finish - with at least 4 hours dedicated to Final Boss Attempts alone because Good God - and I think you could have halved that and it would have twice the impact. i'm not really interested in speculating on what a hypothetical half-long Sekiro would look like, or Sek if you will, but certainly the game as it is empties it's bag of shinobi tricks (generously) about two thirds before the end, and relies on quite a few palette swapped enemies and bosses (it is a crime that the Chained Ogre is in here at all, let alone twice) as well as some truly sloppy designs (Demon of Hatred, Headless Ape) that don't gel at all with the experience the game is aiming for. somewhere in the imagination there exists a 12-15 hour Sekiro that excises the bosses that Just Don't Work, and focuses on the supremely polished, rock-hard core of the game that is consistently electrifying, but instead we have this bloated, confused, game that gets messier the more you step away from that ironclad heart.

inevitably, I am brought back to the question that dominates all my thoughts about sekiro: why? why is Sekiro like this? why did it feel the need to be 30 hours long? most linear action games without Open Worlds tend to clock in at either half of or a third of that length, so why does this have the length of an RPG? speaking of RPGs, why are the countless vestigial elements of currency, upgrades, that do little to enhance the core design here as well? why is this game riddled with unnecessary elements that either do not help it or actively undermine it? i'd almost say that it feels trapped in the poisonous swamp of some other, predecessor franchise from which many of these vestigial design elements originate from, the fanbase of which would expect a game with certain features and considerations and of a certain length, a fandom that would give tremendous benefit to this game by only viewing it through the narrow lens of the other games in this series rather than the wider industry design trends that it is clearly in conversation with, and that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ultimately wounded itself in order to accommodate a formula set down by these prior games that the developers are tragically wedded to despite said formula not truly fitting with the core design of this fundamentally distinct experience...but I couldn't possibly think of what that might be. i'm pretty sure from software didn't develop The Surge, after all.

perhaps we should count our blessings: at least it didn't try to infect itself with an Open World.