Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Type: Game

Score: 7/10

Some of the most fun combat in any video game, it even manages to make feudal Japan seem like a fun place to be. My main complaint is that I was punished for dying and that really made it way less fun to play, instead of experimenting I was watching tutorials on the optimal ways to do things instead.

Edit: 6 -> 7, after not enjoying Elden Ring I decided to give Sekiro another shot and honestly I liked it more this time. Previously I quit before like even the halfway point so I really lost out on a lot of cool experiences. This time round I've played both the true (I think) ending and the Shura ending so I'm pretty sure I have a decent grasp on the game at this point. Firstly I enjoyed the game's bosses a lot and a hell of a lot more than those in Elden Ring, they were generally pretty reasonably sized so FromSoftware's inability to make cameras work didn't become noticeable, and there were even giant bosses I did enjoy because it doubled down on the spectacle and made the fight part secondary. Also you were standing far enough away to read the dragon's attacks. Of course there were bosses I didn't love, generally due to their size. Gyoubu Oniwa had a little jank, luckily he was pretty easy and had such a bombastic personality that I can forgive it, Demon of Hatred was a lot worse however and was probably my least favourite boss fight in the game despite how cool it looked especially when this fuckin guy had a trillion HP. The Guardian Ape was like 10% too big too and there were attacks like his sweeping attack that you could dodge and yet it didn't even look like your guy actually dodged it which felt a little weird. The rest of the lineup however was great though and really complimented the awesome rhythm game-like style of combat.

Unfortunately combat is only half of this game though (more like three fifths but shhh).

FromSoftware made the brave choice to add stealth to their game while not knowing or caring enough to actually add stealth to their game. Enemies in this game are all idiots who have the memories of goldfish and can have a murder committed five meters away and still not notice. It's not immersive at all and is generally a pretty tedious process so I'd have just had preferred no stealth at all. I'm aware that it's optional but it also happens to be optimal in many points so you kind of just end up doing it.

In my previous comment about the game I hadn't really talked about the way the levels were built which I found pretty impressive (though not built super well around the stealth system apart from grass sometimes). Despite most of them being rather linear, there are moments where you can split off into branching paths and find new cool stuff and areas like the other FromSoftware games which is fun. On my first playthrough there were even bosses I managed to miss which was honestly pretty cool, made the world feel more expansive than it really was. There are some pretty hidden paths (they seemed that way at least to me) that made progression a little weird though, near the beginning I found a door that was locked and at that point I had thought I exhausted every area available to me so I was stuck and had to watch a video on how to go further which was a sucky feeling. I'm sure if I spent another hour hunting around I would've found the correct way but sadly I don't have infinite time to play video games these days. Performance in some of these areas was pretty terrible too, I don't have the best PC but it was strange how I was able to get a constant 60 FPS on Elden Ring at medium graphics anywhere and yet in some parts of this game I had to go to low and still sometimes couldn't get 60 FPS. Thankfully this wasn't an issue in boss fights but frankly this shouldn't be an issue at all and more optimisation work probably should've been done. Like how is it that any explosion immediately slows my PC to a crawl? I also just hate that fucking gun area it ruined my life for like thirty minutes and made me more pissed off than any other part of the game. I also straight up died more times to that miniboss with the gun the first time more than any other boss in the entire game. Maybe I was just having a stroke.

The story was a lot more interesting than other FromSoftware games as is the trend for this game at this point. This is largely not because the story is actually good and more because it's told to me in a comprehensible way instead of needing to scrounge for breadcrumbs like in previous (and unfortunately future) FromSoftware games. The rendered cutscenes were pretty too but that's not specific to this game I guess.

Now I'm just gonna rattle off some more miscellaneous complains which are the reasons this can't get scored any higher (for now at least). You will find that most of the problems here are just that it was made by FromSoftware but what can you do I guess. Firstly, as usual, the glyphs are always XBOX even if I have a Playstation controller plugged in. I should not be needing to install mods for things like this especially not on a game that costed $50 even on sale. Secondly, while it's not as bad as in the souls games the UI is cramped as fuck and I'd prefer some more built in tutorials for things rather than just reading a bunch of textboxes which could be the least immersive part of any game other than leaving the game to Google what to do. Thirdly remnants are such a bad feature that the game would've been better just not having them, I don't know why FromSoftware insists on adding online functions to every game they make but the only affect they've had on the world for me is that now there are loads and loads of purple bits everywhere and none of them have anything meaningful to say. Its to the point where I just turn online mode off but it just feels bizarre for them to exist at all. The audio in this game is pretty terrible too, not the audio itself, in fact it's generally pretty good even if the music doesn't reach the highs of other entries in this series, but the volume of sounds are completely fucked, the sound of finishing an enemy is so horribly loud I had to turn the sound volume down but since it's so much louder than the rest of the audio in this game suddenly I can't really hear anything except a more reasonably loud finish sound effect. For a game priced $100 when not on sale I expect things like this to not be issues which is why it's so odd to me when I constantly find nagging problems like these. How hard could it possibly have been to add two sliders, one for combat sounds and one for ambience like walking? Finally I still dislike losing half my EXP (from the current level I'm on) and half of my money at death. It forces me to spend it all before boss fights which means if I don't have enough to get something I'm going to have to grind trash enemies which is such a boring aspect and really doesn't fit at all and is especially weird when the rest of the game has pretty great pace. The only reason I can think of is that FromSoftware wanted to ensure they could use their current tools properly before letting them play around with new stuff but to me it just makes the game less fun so I had to fight the urge to install a mod to disable this feature. I'd be fine with it if there was a way to collect this money and EXP lost like in other souls games but you just can't. Unless you get lucky it's just gone forever... This is only compounded by dragonrot which certainly is a feature. It's so weird, it kind of does nothing especially because you can cure it so easily so it just kind of feels like it's there to waste my time??