It took about three years for me to "get" this game after trying several times. It grinds down your rough edges to razor-sharp perfection, and by the end of it I certainly felt like I had shinobi reflexes like your boy Wolf. For the first time since Dark Souls 3 (my first FROMSoft experience), this game teased out those dearest emotions: frustration, ecstasy, and a hunger to improve, almost exclusively through its gameplay. The story it has to tell is uncharacteristically (for this dev team) direct, and cuts as deep as the Mortal Blade if you engage with the characters.

Phenomenal game, and makes the player work for it, even moreso than more traditional FROMSoft titles. Probably the only game in their lineup that is actually about as inaccessible as the fanbase makes it sound, at least in my experience, but rewarding and refined like few other action games can even hope to be. There are games I personally like more than this, but for what this game is trying to be (shinobi power fantasy accurate to the strengths of that archetype) it's effectively perfect, if perhaps more narrowly-focused than its established Souls-like contemporaries.