Yet another of my long-shelved Fromsoft playthroughs that I have finally completed. As it's only from 2019, that will bring my average time-to-completion down just a smidgen before I finally take down the last outstanding title on my plate...
As for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice itself, this was a fantastic mixup to the Fromsoft action RPG formula. I don't think they nailed everything they attempted, but the important parts more than made up for that, making this one of the most distinct and memorable action titles in many years, even among its siblings. I do think its fated to be a bit more niche because of that uniqueness, however.
I'll start with what I found to be the most consistently good part of the game, and that is the visual design and graphical implementation. I played the PS4 version of the game, so not even the full fidelity possible (even with the FPS boost of playing on a PS5) and frankly I'm quite surprised by how good it looks 4 years later. It's soft, but not too blurry; detailed but not noisy; muted for the most part, but pops with color when it matters.
I'm pretty used to coming back to Dark Souls and seeing that 360 era mess, and even DS3 doesn't quite measure up to the AAA standard of its time, so I tend to forget that Fromsoft really picked up on this one. They didn't really improve the technical fidelity of their tech all that much, seemingly (save for maybe improved shading and LOD resolving), but the design of terrain, models, and textures goes one step up from DS3 in delivering a feeling of "fullness" and "cohesion" to the world.
Off the top of my head, I can't remember a single "bad" looking part or model in the game. Other than some normal-human character models still having that "Fromsoft" look to them, the seams of the world are quite well hidden.
And the world is just so darn interesting and pretty. Reminds me of how I felt playing Jade Empire as a kid, but now with a twist of dark, Japanese mythology.
The soundwork is great, too. Can't quite call it the most "inventive" since a lot of it is bells, chimes, metal clashes, and sound cues from Japanese tradition — the stuff you'd probably expect from a samurai/shinobi flick — but it is well executed. Each distinct cue has a distinct meaning and gels with the visuals.
Music is mostly background, but it's pleasant and sets the right texture for the proceedings.
With all of that out of the way, the gameplay is probably what most people are coming to this game for and where the depth of the discussion lies. Primarily, to me, because while the broad strokes remain very similar, Sekiro is a large depature from Fromsoft's most popular titles (at this point in time). In Dark Souls, there is a significant statistical element to combat and an expansive toolset of weapons, thus as players encounter its many challenges they can choose a path of least resistance by adjusting their stat advantages or pulling up one of many alternative strategies. As often comes up in discussions of its difficulty, it naturally tailors itself to the player, if the player cares to meet it halfway.
Sekiro throws that out, gives the player a sword, a couple arm gadgets, and a very limited set of playstyles (relatively), then requests the player learn those or stop.
There are still optional items, equipment, and potential stat bonuses but, in variety and effect, they function much more like power-ups in the action games of the 90s and early 00s. There are no stat-increase choices to make, you only get higher Health/Damage at curated points by killing elite enemies and exploring the secrets of the world. The only real "RPG" aspect is a combat skill tree that unlocks through experience, but in implementation its no more complex than what you'd find in many "pure" action games over the decades.
Thus, the real meat of gameplay revolves around you learning the dance of single sword combat. Thankfully, that alone has enough depth for the runtime of the game. The pattern of combat is very close to what you'd find in a fighting game, with multiple options for offense and defense and each coming with its strengths and weaknesses. And most fights will actually make you use at least the core set of those options, which is usually enough to create fairly complex, ryhthmic patterns to the fights.
And what really makes it jive as a combat system is the use of a "posture" guage separate from basic health, which rewards clean gameplay by allowing for accelerated executions of enemies. Keep a steady offense and a precise defense, and the enemy's posture will break well ahead of their health depleting, allowing you to land a deathblow then and there.
It is immensely satisfying when you get the flow down.
It can take quite a bit more trial and error to learn than even Dark Souls, though. It's worth it, but there will just naturally be people who can't grasp it. Not necessarily even because of lack of skill. If you only had one character in a fighting game, then even some pros at other games just aren't going to be all that hot on it.
That comparison isn't 1-to-1, though. Being singleplayer makes the process of adjusting to its rules much easier to do gradually than a competitive title, and the mechanics aren't actually as deep as most fighting games, so its open to a wider variety of players as a result.
And there are some suberb fights on gorgeous setpieces in waiting for you to enjoy once you do get a handle on the system system.
There are also a handful of fights where (for me) either the amount of learning effort required didn't really pay off in a satisfying conclusion or where the posture bar was effectively a non-factor so you just had to hit the bloody thing 80 times and pray you don't screw up too many times in the process. These were the minority of boss fights, however... but they were there.
And that's all fairly subjective. What more often frustrated me, however, were the movement mechanics' finickyness and the resource economy of the game.
It has to be prefaced before any talk of movement, that this is another big departure for Fromsoft. We've seen many 3D game franchises labor over the decision to have jumping or not, and this was Fromsoft's point to finally go all-in on having it. There's a grapple hook, there's wall jumping, there's ledge hanging and ducking, and stealth and all kinds of shinobi things.
And 90% of the time its really fluid and effective.
... but I'm an ape raised on twitch shooters so if given any leeway, I will turn that 10% into 30. The heavily animation influenced (not quite "based") movement was quite grumpy with the kinds of maneuvers I was trying to pull, but it also wasn't so inflexible that I was forced to accept it like I would with a Resident Evil game. So for the 30+ hours I've put into this title, I'm still struggling to meet it in the middle many times and find a consistent way to play it.
I don't necessarily think the implementation is "bad." I think there are improvements that could be made, but I'm willing to admit that I'm half the problem (or more than).
However, my other frustration is one I see more as bad design on the game's part.
It is practically tradition in a Fromsoft game at this point that you lose your money and experience on death, but in past games you could potentially recover all of it. In Sekiro, you lose half of what you have (or thereabouts) and have no recovery option. For experience this doesn't start bad initially, as it locks in at every new skill point, so only the visible bar is at risk...
... but money starts fairly scarce and experience becomes scarce halfway in. So eventually it reaches a point where "losing half" can mean losing an entire area worth of money and experience with no recourse. And even with the nifty option to self-revive on the spot without losing it "immediately," with its limited usages some of us will inevitably (or quite frequently) still end up with a hard death. And Lord help you if you're on a difficult boss: those bars are gonna hit 0.
I think the Dark Souls style checkpoint recovery is a much healthier system. Yes, you can still lose it all, but as long as you can keep getting back to the point you made it last time, you can get everything back, plus change for the latest attempt as an additional reward for being mostly consistent. Here though, you slip up and get screwed, end of story.
Thankfully, those resources really aren't nearly as important, but it comes too close to being a full-on negative feedback loop.
----
If I had any more points to make, I have forgotten them and this review is now too long for my liking. In summary: Game is good, you should try it. You might not "like" it all the time, but give it a good effort because it'll reward you with some very satisfying, memorable experiences.
Even if you have to chip away at it in bursts over several years, like me. 😂
As for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice itself, this was a fantastic mixup to the Fromsoft action RPG formula. I don't think they nailed everything they attempted, but the important parts more than made up for that, making this one of the most distinct and memorable action titles in many years, even among its siblings. I do think its fated to be a bit more niche because of that uniqueness, however.
I'll start with what I found to be the most consistently good part of the game, and that is the visual design and graphical implementation. I played the PS4 version of the game, so not even the full fidelity possible (even with the FPS boost of playing on a PS5) and frankly I'm quite surprised by how good it looks 4 years later. It's soft, but not too blurry; detailed but not noisy; muted for the most part, but pops with color when it matters.
I'm pretty used to coming back to Dark Souls and seeing that 360 era mess, and even DS3 doesn't quite measure up to the AAA standard of its time, so I tend to forget that Fromsoft really picked up on this one. They didn't really improve the technical fidelity of their tech all that much, seemingly (save for maybe improved shading and LOD resolving), but the design of terrain, models, and textures goes one step up from DS3 in delivering a feeling of "fullness" and "cohesion" to the world.
Off the top of my head, I can't remember a single "bad" looking part or model in the game. Other than some normal-human character models still having that "Fromsoft" look to them, the seams of the world are quite well hidden.
And the world is just so darn interesting and pretty. Reminds me of how I felt playing Jade Empire as a kid, but now with a twist of dark, Japanese mythology.
The soundwork is great, too. Can't quite call it the most "inventive" since a lot of it is bells, chimes, metal clashes, and sound cues from Japanese tradition — the stuff you'd probably expect from a samurai/shinobi flick — but it is well executed. Each distinct cue has a distinct meaning and gels with the visuals.
Music is mostly background, but it's pleasant and sets the right texture for the proceedings.
With all of that out of the way, the gameplay is probably what most people are coming to this game for and where the depth of the discussion lies. Primarily, to me, because while the broad strokes remain very similar, Sekiro is a large depature from Fromsoft's most popular titles (at this point in time). In Dark Souls, there is a significant statistical element to combat and an expansive toolset of weapons, thus as players encounter its many challenges they can choose a path of least resistance by adjusting their stat advantages or pulling up one of many alternative strategies. As often comes up in discussions of its difficulty, it naturally tailors itself to the player, if the player cares to meet it halfway.
Sekiro throws that out, gives the player a sword, a couple arm gadgets, and a very limited set of playstyles (relatively), then requests the player learn those or stop.
There are still optional items, equipment, and potential stat bonuses but, in variety and effect, they function much more like power-ups in the action games of the 90s and early 00s. There are no stat-increase choices to make, you only get higher Health/Damage at curated points by killing elite enemies and exploring the secrets of the world. The only real "RPG" aspect is a combat skill tree that unlocks through experience, but in implementation its no more complex than what you'd find in many "pure" action games over the decades.
Thus, the real meat of gameplay revolves around you learning the dance of single sword combat. Thankfully, that alone has enough depth for the runtime of the game. The pattern of combat is very close to what you'd find in a fighting game, with multiple options for offense and defense and each coming with its strengths and weaknesses. And most fights will actually make you use at least the core set of those options, which is usually enough to create fairly complex, ryhthmic patterns to the fights.
And what really makes it jive as a combat system is the use of a "posture" guage separate from basic health, which rewards clean gameplay by allowing for accelerated executions of enemies. Keep a steady offense and a precise defense, and the enemy's posture will break well ahead of their health depleting, allowing you to land a deathblow then and there.
It is immensely satisfying when you get the flow down.
It can take quite a bit more trial and error to learn than even Dark Souls, though. It's worth it, but there will just naturally be people who can't grasp it. Not necessarily even because of lack of skill. If you only had one character in a fighting game, then even some pros at other games just aren't going to be all that hot on it.
That comparison isn't 1-to-1, though. Being singleplayer makes the process of adjusting to its rules much easier to do gradually than a competitive title, and the mechanics aren't actually as deep as most fighting games, so its open to a wider variety of players as a result.
And there are some suberb fights on gorgeous setpieces in waiting for you to enjoy once you do get a handle on the system system.
There are also a handful of fights where (for me) either the amount of learning effort required didn't really pay off in a satisfying conclusion or where the posture bar was effectively a non-factor so you just had to hit the bloody thing 80 times and pray you don't screw up too many times in the process. These were the minority of boss fights, however... but they were there.
And that's all fairly subjective. What more often frustrated me, however, were the movement mechanics' finickyness and the resource economy of the game.
It has to be prefaced before any talk of movement, that this is another big departure for Fromsoft. We've seen many 3D game franchises labor over the decision to have jumping or not, and this was Fromsoft's point to finally go all-in on having it. There's a grapple hook, there's wall jumping, there's ledge hanging and ducking, and stealth and all kinds of shinobi things.
And 90% of the time its really fluid and effective.
... but I'm an ape raised on twitch shooters so if given any leeway, I will turn that 10% into 30. The heavily animation influenced (not quite "based") movement was quite grumpy with the kinds of maneuvers I was trying to pull, but it also wasn't so inflexible that I was forced to accept it like I would with a Resident Evil game. So for the 30+ hours I've put into this title, I'm still struggling to meet it in the middle many times and find a consistent way to play it.
I don't necessarily think the implementation is "bad." I think there are improvements that could be made, but I'm willing to admit that I'm half the problem (or more than).
However, my other frustration is one I see more as bad design on the game's part.
It is practically tradition in a Fromsoft game at this point that you lose your money and experience on death, but in past games you could potentially recover all of it. In Sekiro, you lose half of what you have (or thereabouts) and have no recovery option. For experience this doesn't start bad initially, as it locks in at every new skill point, so only the visible bar is at risk...
... but money starts fairly scarce and experience becomes scarce halfway in. So eventually it reaches a point where "losing half" can mean losing an entire area worth of money and experience with no recourse. And even with the nifty option to self-revive on the spot without losing it "immediately," with its limited usages some of us will inevitably (or quite frequently) still end up with a hard death. And Lord help you if you're on a difficult boss: those bars are gonna hit 0.
I think the Dark Souls style checkpoint recovery is a much healthier system. Yes, you can still lose it all, but as long as you can keep getting back to the point you made it last time, you can get everything back, plus change for the latest attempt as an additional reward for being mostly consistent. Here though, you slip up and get screwed, end of story.
Thankfully, those resources really aren't nearly as important, but it comes too close to being a full-on negative feedback loop.
----
If I had any more points to make, I have forgotten them and this review is now too long for my liking. In summary: Game is good, you should try it. You might not "like" it all the time, but give it a good effort because it'll reward you with some very satisfying, memorable experiences.
Even if you have to chip away at it in bursts over several years, like me. 😂
Moogetsuu
1 year ago