Now Playing: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a really dumb name for a pretty good game. I say ‘pretty good’ because Sekiro, unfortunately, falls a little flat towards the end for reasons I’ll explain later. It doesn’t ruin the overall experience, but it does drag it down. If you’ve read my first impressions of Sekiro you’ll know I found the opening of the game to be pretty tough. You begin with very little health and very few combat options.

This can lead to a lot of frustration but stick with it, because once you get your first health upgrade, unlock a few shinobi tools and come to understand the important difference between health and posture, Sekiro becomes a challenging – but fair – and extremely fun game to play.

The story of Sekiro is . . . fine, I guess. It does feel like a missing piece, at least for me. I know a lot of players won’t care or won’t think it matters, but for me it can often be the difference between liking a game and loving it. I wanted to keep playing Sekiro because I was enjoying the combat and I loved exploring each new location, but I never really cared much about why I was doing so. I didn’t care because I didn’t really understand why.

The story is infuriatingly obtuse and vague about everything. A few times in the game I killed what seemed like a pretty important boss and was rewarded with what seemed like an important, story related item, but the game gave me no direction on what the item was actually for or how to use it. I ended up reading an online guide and discovered it was part of one of the game’s multiple endings, but to proceed with that or other endings, you had to perform specific actions.

Very specific actions. In one case, you had to ‘eavesdrop’ on a character multiple times by hiding behind a specific pillar in a specific room at a specific point in the game and then ‘resting’ to reset the eavesdrop prompt each time. How the f**k is anyone supposed to know how to do this without a guide? I mean, I guess someone figured it out, but I ain’t got time for this shit.

At one point I killed a boss only for him to scream ‘Robert!’ and I don’t know what the f**k that’s all about. Maybe there’s some lore text hidden somewhere in the game that explains it but there’s too much vague bullshit like this all throughout the game. I think that’s fine, to a degree – to let the player explore the world and uncover hidden stories and put the pieces of lore together themselves.

But you can take it too far – and Sekiro certainly does – resulting in a game where you don’t really know or care that much about what you’re really doing or why. Now, like I said, not everyone is going to care. But for me, caring and understanding why I’m doing something – fighting a boss or searching for an item adds a little something extra to the experience. But I never really did in Sekiro.

The good news is that though the story falls a little flat, the gameplay certainly doesn’t. There’s a strong emphasis on stealth for much of Sekiro. You’re given a grappling hook that allows you to zip about the environments, taking position on rooftops or tree branches and plan your attack. You’re like Japanese Batman, taking one enemy out at a time without alerting the others.

Because a stealth kill, in most cases, is a one-shot kill, so if you’re faced with an area full of enemies, it’s a good idea to use stealth to your advantage – hiding in long grass, sneaking beneath buildings, and using tools and particular skills to distract, lure or blind enemies as you see fit. And stealth can really help with a lot of the boss characters too.

Bosses have multiple ‘lives’ – typically two – that you need to clear with a ‘deathblow’ in order to defeat them. And a stealth attack can instantly clear one of these, making a fight a whole lot easier. Obviously, you can’t stealth attack every boss, but most of the optional, mini-bosses are fair game. And once stealth fails or you’ve done as much as you can via stealth, that’s when the fun really begins as you get stuck into the combat of Sekiro.

If you’ve followed my blog you’ll know I love it when a game gives me options – it gives me lots of tools and ways to play and fight and approach encounters in different ways. And Sekiro certainly does this with a decent selection of shinobi tools you can unlock and upgrade as you progress. These tools, if utilised correctly, can make fights easier to manage and – in some cases – kind of trivial. But the game doesn’t force their use upon you – it’s up to you to experiment with them and figure out the best way and time to use them.

Primarily though, you’ll be fighting with your sword and playing to the strength of the health-posture system. There are some unique combat skills you can unlock, but like the shinobi tools, they’re more situational. The most important lesson to learn about Sekiro is the difference between health and posture.

You don’t kill an enemy by removing their health – you do it by breaking their posture and initiating a deathblow. That’s not to say that health isn’t still important – the lower an enemy’s health, the easier it is to break their posture. But you don’t really need to. In fact, there are some boss fights where you can posture break and kill your enemy despite them having a full bar of health.

You can break posture in different ways but primarily you’ll break it by deflecting enemy attacks by correctly timing your blocks. Every deflection builds their posture bar which, when full, will break and put them in a weakened state that you can use to initiate a deathblow and finish them off – or move onto the next phase if they’re a main boss with multiple lives.

Once I wrapped my head around it, I f**king loved this system because it rewards good timing and studying enemy attack patterns so you know when it’s best to deflect, attack and if necessary (because some enemy attacks can’t be blocked or deflected) dodge the f**k out of the way. It’s rewarding and satisfying, especially when you take down a boss without taking a single hit. It requires you to play aggressively, to get in your enemy’s face and stick with them, because the more hits you can deflect, the faster you can kill them. It’s a perfect risk / reward system.

The problem Sekiro has towards the end though, is that a few of the bosses stop playing to the strength of this system – their posture is almost impossible to break, even with very aggressive play. It’s like the developers decided to make these enemies ‘harder’ by forcing you to whittle down their health so you can break their posture instantly – but this goes against the strength of Sekiro combat because you’re then pretty much forced to play more defensively, using hit and run attacks to chip away at their health bar.

It’s tedious and nowhere near as much fun. And the final boss is a good example of this. Although you can posture break with aggressive play (though it’s not easy), the fact that the boss has 4 stages that you have to tediously repeat if you die at any point means it’s much safer to just chip away at their health by learning their attacks and waiting for an opening. It’s actually really easy to beat if you do that, but that goes against the way the fight should work.

Making things more tedious and difficult for the player just for the sake of it isn’t really ‘challenging’ especially when you’re making it very difficult for the player to play to the strengths of the combat system and instead play in a different (more cheesy) way in order to progress. It’s a real shame because I was thoroughly enjoying my time with Sekiro until the last third or so.

That’s when it starts to make fights more tedious than fun and also starts to recycle various bosses you’ve already fought. It wouldn’t be so bad if these were a new twist on the previous boss but aside from maybe one or two new moves it’s just the same fight, again.

I started Sekiro being a little frustrated by it because of its difficulty, then I really started to love it once I’d wrapped my head around how it plays, and then I ended the game being frustrated once again, not because of the difficulty, but because of how the game stopped playing to its own strengths and resorted to a series of bosses I’d already fought, and more tedious bosses that forced me to play in a way I didn’t really enjoy.

Overall, I’m glad I picked up and played Sekiro, and at one point in the game I was more than ready and willing to do multiple runs because I really was enjoying it a lot. But the last third of the game kind of spoiled it for me and makes me reluctant to jump back in, especially when I worked out how much I’d need to grind materials and money to unlock the last of the skill and tool upgrades. So I’m glad I picked it up and I’d recommend checking it out on sale, but I also can’t say if it’s a game I’ll want to play again.

7/10