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dkirschner's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS5)
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| [May 7, 2025 03:28:13 PM]
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I’ve been playing Sekiro on and off for most of this semester and have gone back and forth between liking it and disliking it. It’s a great game, really focused and tightly designed, no doubt about it, but it is so, so difficult, and I find myself questioning if I am having fun or if I am driven by the desire to not let the game beat me, to prove that I can beat another notoriously difficult game. FromSoftware context: I tried and quit Dark Souls years ago because I thought it was too hard and frustrating, though admittedly I didn’t give it a lot of time. Then I picked up Bloodborne, enjoyed it a lot, and ultimately beat it. Sekiro is my third FromSoftware game.
My first impressions were positive. Sekiro’s atmosphere pulled me right in. It’s dark and gritty and violent, something I liked about both Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I explored around one of the first areas, the Ashina Outskirts, and discovered my first mini-boss (some general or another), though I didn’t know it at the time. Mini-bosses have two health bars instead of one. I got my ass handed to me a few times before thinking, “What the hell is this enemy?!” and changing direction.
I found another area, Hirata Estate, where I stayed for many hours of gameplay. This is where I learned about how death works system works. When you die, you lose half of your accumulated experience (at the level you are on; you can’t lose a level) and money. This means you can grind experience for skills by redoing areas over and over (and not dying!). Well, I was dying, and so I reasoned that more skills could help, so I grinded, redoing the same area numerous times, reaching the next experience level before flirting with the next mini-boss, the Shinobi Hunter, who attacks with a huge spear. I may have found another mini-boss in that area too (or just a hard enemy), but I pretty much explored everywhere I could until I determined that I had to pass the Shinobi Hunter to move forward.
You can’t beat the Shinobi Hunter until you learn how to counter thrust attacks and sweep attacks. In Sekiro, success in combat is heavily dependent on your ability to parry, dodge, and counter thrust and sweep attacks. If you can’t read enemies and respond very quickly and precisely to their moves, you’re going to die. To counter a thrust attack (indicated by a red symbol), you press circle (dodge) just before it lands, and you’ll stomp on their weapon, causing a lot of posture damage. Posture damage is something like stamina. When you block attacks, you take posture damage. When your posture damage reaches max, then you can’t block anymore. The same is true for enemies. Dealing posture damage opens them up to health damage. Countering thrusts and sweeps is good because it’s a way to hammer their posture. To counter sweep attacks (indicated by the same red symbol), you jump as they sweep, then press x (jump) again in the air and you’ll kick the enemy in the head. The timing on these has to be impeccable, or else you’ll get nailed, and it only takes a couple hits to kill you in this game. Since thrust and sweep attacks are indicated by the same red symbol, you have to learn what the attack animations look like for each enemy. Usually, it’s pretty obvious, but occasionally something that looks like a thrust is actually a sweep.
After many hours of learning the basics, grinding, and not feeling like I was accomplishing much of anything, I finally beat the Shinobi Hunter. I slowly bested a couple other mini-bosses over the next few weeks. Then one day, I sat down to play a long session, and I got in the deepest groove. Everything was clicking. I must have killed like 6 or 7 mini-bosses and one of the actual bosses, Gyoubo (the guy on horseback). I even one- or two-shot a couple. I was optimistic, like “Yeah, I can beat Sekiro!” But of course that was premature and naïve! I think that day I ended up stopping after getting killed about 20 times by Lady Butterfly, another main boss.
I abandoned her and went elsewhere, eventually getting to a mini-boss called the Lone Shadow Longswordsman. I didn’t fight him so much as fight the camera. He (like Lady Butterfly) was fast, but unlike Lady Butterfly’s fight, his took place in a tiny, enclosed space. The camera constantly got stuck, I couldn’t see him, I’d lose him, I couldn’t see where I was going, etc. He killed me over and over, and I was getting irritated. Finally, I complained to Google and found that this fight is notorious for the bad camera, and learned how to cheese it a bit. There is a way to cheese a lot of the mini-bosses for some reason. I guess it’s strategy, like if you can figure out that there is a ledge you can jump from to impale the mini-boss and take off a chunk of his health bar, then more power to you. Anyway, I learned how to start the fight with him at 50% health, and ironically I missed the surprise attack one time and beat him normally.
Fast forward to today, where I started in the Ashina Depths, stuck from last time on the Shichimen Warrior miniboss. This guy induces “terror” by shooting you with purple spirits. When your terror meter fills up, you die. So, you have to avoid the spirits and try to close in to attack the Warrior. This is hard because he’s constantly summoning and firing off spirits, and when he’s not doing that, he’s shooting flames from his staff. If you get close, he tends to teleport elsewhere, where he proceeds to summon and shoot more spirits. I abandoned him and pressed onward into the Depths until I got to another mini-boss called Snake Eyes.
Snake Eyes carries a rifle that does tons of damage, sometimes one-shotting me. I did immediately figure out how to get behind him for a stealth attack that lopped off half his health. But I could never take him down. I tended to get myself backed into a corner, where the camera again killed me as much as he did. There are other enemies in the combat area, except if you attack them, then usually Snake Eyes triggers and shoots you dead from across the room. Eventually, I figured out how to kill some of the extras, then stealth attack Snake Eyes, but I could still never get his second health bar down. I haven’t figured out how to counter his thrust/sweep (not sure which it is, but I haven’t timed it right for whichever it might be, and if it hits me, I’m dead). So anyway, I was again getting irritated by the camera and just was not in the mood to consider spending my day dying to Snake Eyes, so I looked up how to beat him. I learned that you can cheese him too. There are pools of poisonous liquid in the combat area, and apparently you can kite him into a poison pool, then grapple out of his reach, and he’ll stand there shooting at you (which you dodge) taking poison damage until he dies. I tried it a few times with partial success. The last time, he was stuck behind a rock shooting into the rock, his life slowly ticking away. I went to brush my teeth, came back, and he was dead. Just kidding. I was dead. I guess he got unstuck and killed me. I sighed and turned it off.
I am feeling very frustrated with Sekiro. Today’s session was not fun. Grinding was not fun. Dying 20 times each to Lady Butterfly or the Shichimen Warrior or the Blazing Bull or whoever was not fun. Dying itself is fine, but one expects to learn something, to do better next time, to make some incremental progress. I rarely feel that with Sekiro. On that day when I had a hot streak, I don’t know what I’d eaten for breakfast, but I was certainly enjoying watching the enemies fall like dominoes. It clicked on that day. But that was only one afternoon of gameplay out of many over the course of the last few months. Can it click again? Can I derive pleasure from trying and failing so many times, only to finally notice an attack pattern I hadn’t noticed before, or to try an item I hadn’t tried before? Probably. It’s weird thinking about quitting Sekiro because I do like it. It’s good. I’m just not having much fun. But the potential is there to have fun. Though even when I do beat a boss, it’s just like, “sigh, okay, here is the next one, who is probably going to be agonizing to learn and overcome.” That’s the thing. It’s definitely not a “come home from work and play” kind of game because it’s so brutal. On the other hand, I often don’t want to play it during my limited free time because I’d rather do something more rewarding. So, what’s its niche? Maybe when I have more time over the summer. I don’t want to give up quite yet. Maybe if I put it down and come back in a couple months, I’ll feel refreshed. Maybe if I try some other games with parry mechanics inspired by Sekiro, I’ll get some practice with this type of combat. Or maybe I’ll try Elden Ring! (And if I never make another Sekiro post, then I probably picked it up for another hour months from now and said “nope!”).
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dkirschner's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS5)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 11 February, 2025
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