I'm not going to pretend this is a completely bad game or even one I didn't enjoy for a good amount of the time I spent with it, but I think it's maybe the most painful recent Fromsoft release since you can see how much they wanted to make something completely new that ended up being way too constrained by a ton of needless mechanics and design ideas carried over from the Souls games and Bloodborne. The basic framework for combat here is so good it's unreal, the flow of parrying and attacking in one-on-one fights is unmatched. But instead of making a really fun 12-15 hour swordfighting game mostly focused on duels with some larger groups to use stealth on, Sekiro is bloated to 30 hours with all the asymmetrical fights, copious amounts of consumable items, and obtuse storytelling that worked in Dark Souls and feel completely pointless and often aggravating in a game like this. The double guardian ape fight is ridiculous in a game focused on single combat (and I'm not mad, I beat it in two attempts. It's just an awful fight). You only need to use one of the dozens of different items you find, and this isn't an RPG anyway so you could drop consumables entirely. There aren't different "builds" to choose from here, everything should be in service of the sword combat, since that's literally the only way you can play the game! And drop half of the prosthetics while you are at it. The disconnected, hard-to-follow plots and sidequests worked in Dark Souls because they suited the tone of the setting and the world design. Here it comes off like Miyazaki doesn't know how to write any other way. This is a story set in real-life Sengoku-era Japan, with a large cast of normal human characters who talk to you in and out of gameplay, but the game still purposefully hides so much of its story from you in a way that now feels less deliberately mysterious and more rushed and poorly written.

(I'm going to ramble about the story for a bit so skip this section of the review if you dont care about Buddhism or lame shit like that. Also spoilers I guess.)
I went for the "true" ending and tried to follow as much of the story as the game was willing to tell me and it didn't seem like much to write home about, which was a shame because I heard that this had a more involved narrative with real dialogue and cutscenes. All you get is a weak fetch quest stretched to half the runtime of the game, and the ultimate conclusion seemed to be "Buddhism is evil and turns people into evil centipedes so we need to send it back to China/Korea/the West" (????). Maybe that's an oversimplification of the story but "man... eternal life... would kinda suck..." is a completely uninteresting take on Buddhism because yeah, that's the whole point of Samsara. As far as Sekiro is willing to delve into providing a solution for its in-game eternal rebirth is vaguely saying "The Divine Dragon must return to his homeland," which doesn't mean anything and the game is never willing to expand that into something real. It's especially muddled because Buddhism originated in India but the game heavily implies that "The Divine Dragon" came from Korea, and he's even holding the Seven-Branched Sword a Korean king gifted to Japan in the Yamato period. I think this comes from the Nihon Shoki and I guess the implication is that they're sending Buddhism back where Japan specifically got it from, but calling it the "Dragon's Homeland" makes it confusing because that's just not true lol. It's obviously not as simple as this but it really feels like Fromsoft is attempting to apply their overdone messages about how awful it would be if you couldn't die onto Buddhism seemingly without accounting for the fact that A. Buddhism is literally founded on that concept and B. Buddhism pretty explicitly provides a solution for that problem that Sekiro never even remotely addresses. Considering they worked the concept of Samsara into the gameplay itself with the respawn mechanic it would have been interesting to see Fromsoft at least attempt to write a route for this game focused on achieving Nirvana/following the Noble Eightfold Path and somehow working it into the gameplay as well. Obviously, the centipedes and the waters imply the infinite life curse is more widespread than just the main characters, but Dragonrot, the most (only?) tangible impact it has on the world, specifically comes from Wolf. You've got a perfect combination of personal and general stakes there, achieving Nirvana both to break free from Samsara and to put an end to the rot your rebirth is inflicting on those around you (to be honest I think Tokugawa sending an army in to kill everyone and burn the map to the ground in the late game flattens the impact of the dragonrot stuff anyways but that moment is way too cool for me to complain about it). I know there's an ending where you use the Mortal Blade on yourself but idk I kinda feel like a magic sword that can cut through Samsara is a complete cop-out. Maybe I shouldn't expect good writing from modern Fromsoft or maybe they just can't write a normal conventional narrative to save their lives, but I really enjoyed Elden Ring so who knows (could be attributed to an actual good writer working on that game lol)

I feel like I should reiterate that this is a very good game when the combat actually works, it's just carrying so much dead weight from Fromsofts earlier work. It's more disappointing than bad. Dark Souls 3 is ruined by (among other reasons) trying to be a Dark Souls game blatantly built on the framework of Bloodborne. Sekiro has more than enough originality to stand on its own, and its basic framework is completely distinct from Dark Souls or Bloodborne, but it's held back just enough by Dark Souls style boss fights like the Demon of Hatred, Dark Souls style side quests, and Dark Souls style item collection and weapon upgrades, all of which do nothing to enhance the one-on-one combat where the game thrives and do everything to bring it down. This review has gone on longer than I expected but I'll conclude it with a moment that, to me, summarized everything wrong with Fromsoft's recent output.

The final boss of this game has four phases and is, to put it lightly, ridiculously difficult. I beat every boss in this game in less than 5 attempts, as far as I can remember, but the final one took me more than 50, easily. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but because this is a modern Fromsoft game the bonfire equivalent is right outside the boss room. The first twenty times you think "oh that's nice I don't have to run past any enemies to get to the boss fight again," but somewhere around attempt 27 you realize what that actually means is that you are running through a completely pointless hallway where you can't die to anything for like 15 seconds every time you try again. Then you remember that this game has the functionality for instant respawns, like actually instant respawns. It's basically the core mechanic of the entire game. So all the bonfire placement actually does is force you to walk down a hallway again and again until you finally beat the boss instead of just instantly respawning and having the boss get a full heal/phase reset whenever you do. In Hotline Miami 2 if you spam the "R" key fast enough you can be respawned before you even see the death screen, and despite being a much harder game than anything Fromsoft has ever made I never got mad while playing it like I did while fighting the final boss here. I'm not even saying it would be easy to implement an instant respawn that also reset the boss or anything, but it would do wonders for setting this game apart from its predecessors and making it feel like a genuine evolution of the formula rather than constrained by it. If every new Fromsoft game is going to let you spawn right outside the fog gate without having a runback they might as well go the distance and let you just respawn in the arena, but I genuinely think they are too set in the design choices they've been relying on since 2011 to even consider the possibility of making a game without bonfires in it. Even in their most sincere attempt at branching out from the style they've become known for, they can't commit to any changes beyond the most superficial.





Some extra notes I don't want to try and add back into the review now:
- The soundtrack is fine but very repetitive. I don't think a single track is going to stick with me for more than a couple of days, I already have trouble remembering any of the music. Par for the course with modern Fromsoft I guess
- Similarly, the game looks really ugly. It's not quite as bad as DS3 but it's way too muddy and grey despite the setting theoretically lending itself to nice vibrant visuals. Fountainhead Palace looks amazing but that's not enough to make up for the entire rest of the game. As with the writing Elden Ring improves this and I can only hope they stick to putting actual color in their games from now on.
- I hated the minibosses at first and they do feel a lot more difficult than most of the real bosses but once you get the puppeteer ninjutsu they become much more fun and manageable, you should probably just have that one from the start
- same for the Mikiri counter, which feels like a core part of your toolkit here and the only consistent way to get good posture damage on a few bosses but you have to unlock it through the skill tree for some reason? weird.
- The Armored Warrior miniboss was really cool and I wish he was more involved in the story, even any more detail about him and his son who I assume are Portuguese traders would have been nice. Or just more unique minibosses like that in general. Maybe I should just reinstall Total War Shogun 2.

a bad story, badly told, experienced through the re-animated corpse of a video game that no longer exists. 2.0 doesn't have the dramatic and mythological death of 1.0, but as you run through silent zones all alone talking to absolutely no one, playing with skill trees balanced for an endgame four expansions away, you realise it is equally dead and gone.

mmos are social moments as much as they are video games, and the moment of time that was a realm reborn has long gone. to play it now is to simultaneously understand how a game that was heralded as the greatest redemption story in history is now seen as an albatross around ff14's neck. the half measures put in place to 'solve' this only highlight the problem more than solve it, as now it's quicker to get through, but the rhythm of the zones is absolutely killed as side quests are less than useless, the sense of space is obliterated, and the ratio of time spent watching awful cutscenes as opposed to playing the video game slides drastically in the wrong direction.

that said, the video game? is good! the world is beautiful and delightful to explore, the simplified rotations are still enjoyable and the faster levelling means you aren't taking too long between getting new skills. the lack of cross-class skills is a huge shame however and does feel like a piece of the game's soul is ripped out, the core identity of a job system streamlined away in the (probably justified) cause of endgame social convenience. but there is a joy to exploring eorzea and running dungeons that all the streamlining in the world can't kill.

the same cannot be said for the story, which is a car crash of multiple decisions made due to the reality of this game's nightmare development, that nonetheless conspire to ruin my life. cutscenes are stock animations and textboxes, so everything takes ten times too long and i can't button through fast enough. but the dialog itself has been localised by satan, so you have to slow down to read the most overwrought purple prose without tripping over it. the story is meant to be a tragic tale of struggle after a world ending calamity, but they're reusing all the assets from the last game so bahamut's casualty list is reduced to one old guy and every unnamed town NPC's entire family. it simultaneously wants to be a serious political study of navigating deep rooted conflict between nations and people, but it's also a cartoon for five year olds where the solution to every problem is "believing in hope" and you're the most special boy ever who has solved every problem look the president is here to throw you a party.

it does not work lmao. there are a few bright spots. i enjoyed a few job quests, specifically marauder and bard. rogue had a great little ending where it turned into lupin the third. the villains in gaius' tokusatsu squadron, inexplicably, all get more character work than any of the heroes despite having about two scenes each. this leads to hilarious situations where the most sympathetic characters in the game pour their heart out and make their tragic case while your guy doesn't react and silently murders them in the name of peace, because he is an mmo protagonist.

but aside from that i truly was dreading every cutscene. simply i am here to ride around on cloud's motorbike and do some damn tab targeting. and on that front it still delivers. there's even a few standout dungeons like aurum vale that has actual mechanics in the environment or the final bombastic praetorium assault. genuinely delightful moments, windows into oh right i fucking love final fantasy when the music is going off and there's an airship and also organization xiii is there for some reason.

so it is what it is. three stars. it's a video game. however mad and/or bored i got i was compelled to keep playing, because it is fun to hit a boss with DOTs. it is fun to pull like twenty guys into AOE range and feel immortal. please lower the teleport costs by the time i get to 7.0

kamiya is an arcade guy, that's his sensibility, dmc3 and 4 aren't arcades and they don't mesh well with one, here there is a pretty good base for an expressive action game that gets cannibalized by vehicle sections and qtes and a lot of stuff that either limits character expression or is outright annoying in this context, this dumb mixeup now hangs on the shadow of almost all of platinum's work and that's a shame. also this is very unsexy because kamiya is incapable of charm, he tries too hard and he isn't itsuno, nothing here comes even close to the dmc3 dante pizza intro, i won't dream of bayonetta for years to come.

After 5 years of waiting, Bayonetta 3 is the exemplification of everything I love and hate about Platinum Games, combined with possibly the worst ending of any major video game release since Mass Effect 3.

Even the smallest QOL change of being able to select specific chunks of a chapter that, upon completion, will permenantly overwrite your score with your highest, is as much a blessing to the game as an even heavier overemphasis on setpieces are a curse. For as good as Bayonetta's core combat is, offering her even more weapons to use, and a demon summoning mechanic that's at least better than the second game's Infernal Climax, new character Viola feels half finished and like she was made from Bayonetta's usual katana moveset, with the most annoying parry in gaming history, and Jeanne's stealth sections feeling like a DS game from 2006 that'd be sitting on a Metacritic average of 27. For every fun boss fight with a great cutscene afterwards, there's another that's spent playing as a lumbering demon as the story limps towards a miserable conclusion that can best be described as "Devil May Cry 5 at home".

My disappointment is immense, and my faith in Platinum in a post Babylon's Fall world is forever shaken.

i'd wager there are many who try to undertake a more fair critical analysis when writing about this game. for the sake of transparency, let's just say i can't. this isn't about a stringent inability to separate art from the artist, this is about my inability to separate art from its era.
- it is emblematic of a dark period in capcoms oeuvre, in which they repeatedly made awful creative and financial decisions in an attempt to both maximize revenue and appeal to western markets
- it is easily one of the most repugnant, misogynistic games ive ever played; it possesses some of the worst writing ive ever seen in a game while still supposedly aspiring to shakespearean greatness. none of its musings on society ever come together nor can it be enjoyed as a charming romp when so little of its characterization is either endearing or palatable
- the calvacade of capital G Gamers who were thoroughly unimpressed by this title inspired a desperate and petty form of tribalism from the likes of varying industry figures that continues to resurface to this day...
- ...which, inadvertently, largely reminds of a kind of rampant xenophobia that existed in the seventh generation of games, a quiet dismissal of anything japanese in the medium and a refusal to engage with their works on sincere grounds (look no further than the original niers critical admonishment). ninja theory felt completely comfortable disparaging and blaspheming the original franchise that they now held the keys to in an era where inescapable indie 'beloveds' like jonathan blow and phil fish rallied to antagonize an entire country's output to the medium
- ninja theory had zero right to patronize or criticize, by the way, given that itsuno had to babysit them to teach them anything at all about proper enemy design, combat design, and so on and so forth. their action game couldn't even be considered average until the release of the special edition
- honestly think the games environments look like dogshit, considering it's the one thing everyone is unanimous in praise of. 2000s movie poster type bullshit

a stark reminder of an awful time to be a participant in the medium and the sole reason i refuse to be accessory to ninja theory in any financial capacity. sacrilege if im being real. hilarious that dmc5 reconciles with this games western sensibilities to often brilliant effect by comparison