Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Knocked out a lot of stuff today. Beat Guardian Ape (obnoxious, but not that bad once I figured out to always be on the lookout for the terror attack on the second phase, it took a while but much less time compared to Genichiro), completed Senpou Temple and got the Mortal Blade, and made it to Mibu Village. The second ape fight was really awful honestly, the camera was messing with me even harder than in the lone swordsman fight, but fortunately i got lucky and managed to somehow do it in about 5 tries or so, managed to use firecrackers to get rid of the brown ape, and i was familiar enough with headless ape's moveset at this point that it wasn't hard to take him down after.

I also chose to give Kotaro the white pinwheel even though I found out earlier the reward for sending him to the merchant would be more useful. I just felt way too bad for him lol. Also used the mortal blade to end Hanbei's life although I don't think i'll be using the tooth much.

The hardest boss in FromSoftware games is the camera. But seriously they need to work on it before it becomes a fullblown Franchise Original Sin.

So I'm pretty sure I'm up to the final boss now. I took the trouble of getting all gourd seeds and all prayer beads as well, but I dont think I'm gonna go through the trouble of beating the rest of the Headless, since they're pretty obnoxious even with Malcontent.

This game is also signalling to me I might have some kind of ichthyophobia. The great carp I find legitimately terrifying (why does it have TEETH, jesus christ) and the stealth sequence you have to go through had me shook, even though it's quite short. Divine Dragon was a pretty cool setpiece boss, probably not something you'll enjoy as much on a replay since there's not much to it mechanically but it's a lot better than most of From's other gimmick bosses.

I also took a crack at Demon of Hatred and much to my surprise it only took maybe an hour at most to beat him? Sure, he was annoying, but if you have the flame shield umbrella he's not so bad really. He reminded me of Manus, kinda. I'm sad I didn't get Wolf's dialogue with him though, I gave him one of each sake kind like I was supposed to. Oh well ):

I think for that bit of extra dialogue, you need to have eavesdropped a certain conversation between him and Emma, and then talk to him afterwards. You'll know you're getting the extra dialogue if the Sculptor tells Sekiro (spoilering just in case) "You'll be the one to kill me."

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Dec 8th 2020 at 4:13:46 AM

woah, you didn't lose any time, you're indeed at the final boss there. But yeah, sekiro's special dialogue isn't only tied to sake, you need to do what dragonfire mentionned too.

Oh, I must have missed the eavesdropping then. Too bad.

I don't really have much to do now that school is out, so when I'm not at work in the mornings I've been mostly playing nonstop :p

Apologies for the double post but:

I figured after everything I'd heard about the final boss and how it was one of the hardest bosses From Soft ever did, how it was total bullshit and an endurance match, brutal as fuck, etc, I probably wouldn't get very far, especially since I only had like an hour or so before I had to go to bed.

...turns out, it only took me like 5 attempts to beat Isshin. Legitimately, I spent more time on Genichiro (the most by far, it was several hours' worth of attempts), Owl Father (probably second) and Guardian Ape than Isshin. I even managed to redirect the lightning, multiple times (turns out it's not that hard really, it's mosly in the timing). Unlike Owl, you can actually get through his phases fairly quickly with mostly deflections, so his four phases are a little misleading in that sense IMO. I feel like I got a bit lucky, because I hadn't managed to figure out the tells for Isshin's perilous attacks yet and it felt like a bit of a crapshoot to guess which was which. Fortunately it all lined up in the last attempt, especially with all the lightning deflections, and I got him in the end.

Overall, this was a very good game but I understand why some fans of Souls games weren't able to get into it.

Because they're RPG's, Souls games always had a variety of ways you could get past obstacles. There were so many weapons, various magic spells and items, summoning other players, and sometimes even cheese strategies you could use in a variety of situations, and it always felt like it was all valid. And there was the "gettin gud" element, but really, most of the difficulty especially in DS 1 was because a lot of the mechanics were obtuse and cryptic. What's more, the games (especially the pre-bloodborne ones) naturally favor a defensive, conservative playstyle which fits well with people who aren't necessarily good at action games.

Sekiro completely flips the script. You do get options to make things easier like skills and prosthetic upgrades, and they do help noticeably, but this doesn't really compare to the breadth of options in the Souls games, and even then while they help they don't trivialize any of the bosses except maybe the firecrackers with the bull. Not only that, but playing defensively and conservatively is, most of the time, a bad idea because of how posture works. You have to maintain a decent level of aggression with the bosses because otherwise the fights will just drag on and on, increasing the chances of you making mistakes and just making the fights less fun as a whole. There are some exceptions like the Ape, Owl and Demon of Hatred that force you to chip their health considerably before you'll realistically be able to get their posture up, but they're exceptions.

It's much, much more of a "sink or swim" experience. In fact, the early game of Sekiro has one of the most brutal learning curves of any game I've played in a while, you're so limited in what you can do and every mistake is so punishing, regardless (and maybe especially) if you've played fromsoft's other games. It also forces you to play in basically one way with not much room for player expression, meaning if you don't enjoy it, you'll fundamentally not enjoy the game, and even if you do enjoy it there isn't as much incentive to replay without rpg elements like new builds to play around with.

Also, maybe this is just my bad luck but I feel like in part because of the greater mobility of both yourself and many of the bosses, there's a higher degree of "camera getting in your way" type issues here. I'd heard that about the other Souls games to some extent, but I didn't feel it was as much of a problem in Sekiro. Even with Demon of Hatred which has a ridiculously expansive arena, he jumps around such great distances that it's very common for him to end up at the ends of the arena which means you either have to chase him and risk a bad camera, or have to put up with his longer range attacks until he catches up to you, which are way more annoying to deal with.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Dec 8th 2020 at 11:46:12 AM

I guess the implication is that the the Great Carp was yet another Immortality Seeker Palace Noble who went way further than the rest. Note that the rest have fish-like features.

The creepy thing about it isn't just that it has teeth. It's that the teeth are all molars for some reason.

Edited by M84 on Dec 8th 2020 at 10:50:33 PM

It gets even creepier with the pot noble sidequest. They give you poisoned bait to kill the great carp to "replace" it...and then you come back to them and they've turned into carps with red eyes. It's unsettling as shit.

It's part of the whole Who Wants to Live Forever? and Immortality Immorality theme the game has going. Is immortality really that great if it means living as a giant creepy fish?

Come to think of it, that's also something Sekiro has in common with its Soulsborne predecessors. Whether it's being bound to a Nexus in a demon infested country, existing as a mindless Hollow for eternity, or being trapped in an endless nightmare city full of madmen and monsters, immortality in those games has always sucked.

Edited by M84 on Dec 8th 2020 at 11:06:31 PM

yeah, the camera occasionally screwing you out is a blight upon this game. if there's ever a sequel or a similar game, I hope they improve upon it.

In any case, congrats on beating isshin ! He may not be the hardest of the franchise, but he's certainly up there as one of my favorite bosses of the franchise.Now try your hand at the boss rush. Or at NG+ without kuro's charm

Did you turn on the Bell Demon at all, Draghinazzo?

If not, it makes the game a lot harder.

So apparently this thread exists huh. Thanks for nothing, forum search function.

(Beat Sekiro recently and it's one of the best games I've ever played. Not perfect, but extremely cohesive and tightly designed. Raised my esteem of what I thought From Soft were capable of.)

I finally beat Sekiro today. The Demon of Hatred didn’t take me as long as I thought it would, though I played it’s third phase very safe and used a good chunk of my stockpiled items. The Final Boss against Sword Saint Isshin was quite easy and I beat him very quickly. By that point I was very used to deflecting attacks, had every available battle memory, and maxed out my health and healing gourd so the boss gave me little trouble and was significantly easier than I was expecting.

Sekiro's got that weird difficulty curve where it's for the most part pretty easy once everything has been learned. SSI is hard for a Sekiro boss, but he actually tests the mechanics you spend the whole game working on.

Things like the Demon of Hatred tend to throw it off by working more like Dark Souls. Empowered Mortal Draw it is.

I just stuck with Ichimonji Double.

It's an amazing workhorse. Though if I'd known Mortal Draw is bugged so that if you do it while jumping the first slash does the same damage as the charged Empowered version, it would've made some parts of the game a lot smoother.

Agreed on SSI being a lot easier than I expected him to be after all the hype, but I like to think I had gotten pretty good at the game by that point — I pretty much 100%'d him before. No such boasts for DOH though, he took me a ton of tries and that was making copious use of the Malcontent and Lotus Umbrella. I think I even ended up using Fine Snow (which is borderline broken for extended fights) and Divine Grass because I'd run out of healing items, in part due to slashing my health with the Ceremonial Tanto for emblems. Really good boss though, even if he throws you off due to how non-Sekiro he is.

Y'know, how many bosses in the game are actually structured around dodging/slashing instead of deflection/posture damage? The Chained Ogre might be the first one.

If we're counting minibosses, arguably the Shichimen and underwater Headless? Blazing and Sakura Bulls too, to a degree.

The obvious problem is that this tends to frontload the game with bosses that don't want you to play like it's Sekiro. Annoying bunch.

Overall I’d say that Sekiro is possibly better than any individual entry in the Dark Souls trilogy and is one of the most purely fun and thrilling games From Soft has made, and feels like it has the least amount of frustration of any game they’ve made (Bloodborne had Rom the Vacuous Spider, the twin witches, Micolash, and Laurence while Elden Ring has several annoying boss reskins) with the difficulty being extremely well balanced and fair despite being the hardest game they’ve made (and a good candidate for the hardest game I’ve ever beaten legitimately). The combat’s greater emphasis on a high learning curve also helps keep the game from getting frustrating as I always felt like I was getting closer to mastering a boss, while also being very deep and potentially even better than the rest of From Soft’s catalog. The level design was also among the best From Soft has made, with each area feeling distinct, being fun to traverse, and having a lot to discover. It does lose out a bit in terms of replay value due to the lack of builds and I felt that the prosthetics were fairly situational and I rarely felt like using them was better than just fighting normally. Those are minor nitpicks however in what is an overall masterfully executed game.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Jun 7th 2022 at 2:30:04 PM

I'd say it just winds up being too hard to compare because, despite the similarities, they're really different genres.

True. On that note I accidentally put Orphan of Kos instead of Rom. The Orphan is actually a good boss fight while just thinking Rom is enough to make me want to vomit in my mouth. Bloodborne possibly has some of absolute worst bosses in From Soft’s catalog (only 3 are actually bad but they’re insanely bad). Dark Souls 2’s bosses were more mediocre than anything (even as a huge fan of that game even I will admit that).

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Jun 7th 2022 at 2:34:42 PM

The main thing about sekiro is whether you can click with the combat or not. I know quite a few people personally that just couldnt gel with the combat mechanics in Sekiro.

Even if you can it might take a while to get there. I feel like the games combat didnt really click for me until Genichiro, which is where you're basically forced to understand how the game works or throw in the towel.

Genichiro took me a whole day to beat but nothing after that took anywhere near as long. Isshin only took about 5 tries or so.

Yeah, the games' single-minded focus is a bit of a double-edged sword. Paring down your options like that means they can polish the enemies' movesets (particularly the bosses') to a shine and make them difficult while feeling entirely fair, usually. But then, if the system of timing parries and counters isn't your jam, then you're shit out of luck because that's 95% of the game. There's also very little in the way of alternate paths, cheesing, or power levelling to ease your way through tough bosses, other than the odd exploitable weakness like the Ape and firecrackers. You play the game the way it wants you to or not at all, which is offputting to some Souls fans that enjoy the build diversity and roleplay component. It's an extremely fun game, but it's not for everyone.

I'll also say that the way the game implements its difficulty curve is excellent. Most Souls games get a lot easier on replays because a lot of the difficulty is based on unfamiliarity with the systems, enemies and environments, Sekiro gets easier because you're that much better at the game. It's one of the most rewarding action games I've played to learn — Genichiro took me hours the first time and now I can beat him in my sleep, because the fight was so fun I replayed it over and over. Reflection of Strength is the best addition ever.

(There's a bunch of complaints I do have with the game, but that's for another day.)