The game that has an entire Reddit thread about how difficult it is
This was my first game from From Software, and after this
I’m not playing any other game from this studio. Though Sekiro might be their
worst game ever, and the other games such as Dark Souls and Bloodborne may be
better, I’m not taking any chances. This game was a looooong journey of frustration
and moments of rage and I’m not ready to go through it again.
The game begins all right. Way better than all right, in
fact. From the opening cutscene it becomes crystal clear that the game will
contain beautiful graphics. I was enamoured by the graphics, seriously. The
opening level takes place on a full moon night and the lighting was
breathtaking. So the beginning leaves a great impression on the player, and
first impression is the last impression, as they say.
Well, Sekiro botches up that saying in a truly grandiose
manner. The first few levels are good, I went through them seriously,
religiously, taking in every aspect of the game and learning it thoroughly.
Though I’m not an RPG fan, I still meticulously followed all the details of
different attacks, items, combat techniques and the works because I wanted to
really play this game rather than just skim through it. That was
primarily because of its setting – feudal Japan. I’ve always been fascinated by
the Japanese culture and felt that this game would give me a peek inside.
Boy, was I wrong. More about this later.
So like I said, initially I caught whatever the game threw
at me and inspected it meticulously. When I was defeated by the first boss, and
then defeated again, and again, I even went to train to hone my skills. I aced
the training, every move landed perfectly there, but when I returned to the
boss I was defeated once again. Also, before reaching the boss I had died
countless number of times and become familiar with the harsh penalties that
Sekiro imposes whenever a player dies. It did feel too strict at that time, but
I dismissed it. Every game is unique and has its own mechanisms. This was just
Sekiro’s way of reminding me to be more careful, but I didn’t know it wanted me
to be perfect, not even near-perfect.
I generally like to complete any game without any external
support. I refrain from watching walkthroughs or guides. It gives immense
satisfaction to complete a game by yourself. But for Sekiro, I broke all the
rules, just like it breaks all the rules of typical, hack-and-slash
action adventure games.
My first moments of distress came when I met the Chained
Ogre. Prior to this the game was shaping up to be a stealth adventure, but
Chained Ogre changed it all.
This boss is of a huge build, and that naturally strikes
anyone as a cause of reduced agility. But Chained Ogre does it all. He
jump-kicks, pounces, grabs, throws…and with surprising speed. Sekiro, the
protagonist, who is a Shinobi for god’s sake, wasn’t nimble enough to dodge these
grabs. The foremost difficulty here is that the Ogre will follow you wherever
you might be sprinting, even when he is in the air! His hands follow Sekiro
like magnet. And this was just the beginning. Countless more bosses, more
difficult than this, were to follow. I watched my first walkthrough video of
Sekiro here.
I was somehow able to reach Lady Butterfly by my own and
with some support from walkthrough videos, but she proved to be my undoing.
Sometimes it didn’t take even 10 seconds for her to kill me, at which point I
put the game on hold and decided to try out the Arkham series. Compared to
Sekiro, those games are child’s play. I completed Arkham City and Arkham
Origins on hard mode, and I didn’t get frustrated once. Okay, maybe once or
twice, but strategizing for Arkham was still more enjoyable than Sekiro.
The problem with Sekiro is it needs you to be perfect. I
can’t stress this enough. Before taking on a boss you have to clear the area of
the remaining enemies or else, they’ll swarm you and you’ll be dead long before
you reach the boss. Each enemy, even the less formidable-looking one, has the
ability to finish you off in a matter of seconds if you’re not careful. You
have to block at the right time, and attack at the right time. Oh, attacking. There’s
a 0.5 millisecond window in which you can attack. If you miss it, you better
flee to regain your composure because the next blow is sure to be the last one
you’ll ever receive. If, somehow, you painstakingly clear the area, stealthily
moving in the grass and killing off enemies one by one, hiding here and there
to remain unspotted, planning out every move, you still have the boss to deal
with.
Some bosses are easy; you have to drain their health bar
only once. But there are those who require two, or even three drains to finally
be killed. Again, if you miss dodging a blow, you’re done for. Keep poking at
the boss in that tiny window you have, infinite number of times, and maybe
you’ll have a chance.
Oh, and if you die, this happens:
-All the enemies that you killed with so much patience and
strategy will be resurrected.
-All the money you’ve earned and the skill points you’ve
gained, which you can use to upgrade your abilities, will be halved.
-Someone in the world will catch a deadly disease named Dragonrot,
and this will be conveyed to you through something called Rot Essence. The more
you die, the more people will catch Dragonrot, and the more vulnerable your
vitality and posture will be. I think that’s what it does, I’d died so many times
that I didn’t even bother to check how Dragonrot affects me, despite having
been caught by someone else. Bye bye, logic.
I know, I know. Savepoints. The good old strategy of saving
the game after clearing the enemies and before facing the boss. You can. In
fact, the game auto saves when you quit, so when you start it again, you’ll
still be at the same place, with all the enemies dead and the boss waiting for
you. Except if you die (which is highly probable), you’ll be transported to the
last Sculptor’s Idol (Sekiro’s equivalent of a savepoint) that you communed
with (saved your game on) and the above three things will take place.
You do have some relief too, though. You have a healing
gourd that replenishes half your health when you drink from it, there are
medicinal pellets that gradually restore your health, and a bunch of other
things. Some of these you can find lying around in the environment, but some,
especially the healing gourd, can not be found anywhere. It can be replenished, along with all the
other supplies, by resting at a Sculptor’s Idol. Neat little trick, huh?
Nope.
When you rest, all the enemies you cleared out will be
resurrected.
Yep, you read that right. Apparently the “Shinobi code” of
From Software seems to be that players should go through all the suffering
again in exchange of the relief they’re getting, which seems awfully small in
front of the ordeal of going through all the enemies again. This strategy of
resting at an idol still works in situations where you know you won’t be
returning to that environment again, so you won’t have to face those enemies
again.
Unfortunately, combat isn’t the only problem in Sekiro. The
levels have been designed rather poorly. The visuals are appealing, no doubt,
but the design…you can roam around a landscape for hours and you’ll keep
hitting dead ends. There are so many paths branching out that it becomes hard
to discern which one to take. It becomes difficult to keep track of progress,
and after some time you kind of forget why you came here and where to go.
Not surprisingly, the game doesn’t offer any help. As far as
maps go, there’s only a painting depicting the isometric view of the entire
land. And it’s nothing more than a scenery, with snow-covered mountains and grasslands
and a castle. There are no paths, no
guidelines, nothing of assistance. There’s no objective window. Throughout the
game I kept on wondering why Sekiro was here in the first place. What is his
aim, what’s he trying to achieve?
You can get some idea by talking to people that you
encounter on the way, but there are no logs recorded anywhere, so you have to
remember all your conversations and where they took place. This is so because
every now and then some NPC makes a demand of you and hours later when you
finally acquire the item that he wanted; you forget where you met him.
The next problem is that there are too many things to
remember. Now I’m sure those fond of
RPGs wouldn’t have faced this problem, but I sure did. Too many skills,
techniques, items in the inventory…I found it overbearing and burdensome to
remember which item does what, and hence didn’t even use 70% of my inventory.
To make matters worse, the gameplay is not at all
straightforward. Sekiro can travel back and forth between Idols, and thus can
jump to any location at will. This makes it harder to keep track of things as
it often happens that an item that you need at a certain location will be found
at some other location. And you can’t just trace your steps back, because
there’s no way to. You’ll have to make
the jump. This might sound convenient, but the threads that link entities on a
board can often become tangled. That’s exactly what happens here.
Moreover, when you get stuck on a level, it might be because
you don’t possess the item/s required to proceed. The game does nothing to
suggest this. And this happens just because of this ability to jump between the
idols. In my case there was this one level where Sekiro was supposed to pray,
but the pray option didn’t show up. I kept on roaming around in that cave but
couldn’t find anything. Later on, I got to know from a walkthrough that I had
to travel to the top of a castle in another part of the land and acquire a
couple more items before I could pray in the cave.
Coming back to the combat mechanism. It frustrated me so
much that I ended up modding the game. Prior to this I had only cheated in GTA
games (no excuses for that), but modding in this game was more out of necessity
than having fun. At first it was a simple mod to reduce damage by 50%, so I
could withstand enemies more easily. This was when I met Lady Butterfly. I
defeated her and was cruising along until I met some more bosses. Then I had to
install a new mod that reduced damage by 75%, but I still could not defeat
those bosses. Call it my poor gaming skills, or whatever, but this
harder-than-hell combat was sucking all the enjoyment out of the game.
I really wanted to finish Sekiro, partly to uncover the
story and partly to enjoy its scenic beauty. The story turned out to be crap,
which we’ll disCUSS later. After reaching the peak of my frustration and
seriously contemplating uninstalling the game midway (which I’ve done only for
GRID 2 so far), I decided that Sekiro didn’t deserve the fair treatment I was
bestowing upon it.
I tweaked the mod. Now it reduced all kinds of physical
damage to 90% (which was 100% at first, but then everything seemed too easy.),
while damage from abnormalities (burning, being terrorized, poisoned or
enfeebled) remained the same.
From then on, it was a cruise, and I didn’t even feel any
sense of guilt whatsoever! Sekiro had sucked every last bit of honesty inside
me. I would have uninstalled the game
instead of cheating it to such an extent had it not been for its graphics.
But before getting to its graphics I want to talk about the
story. It seems simple enough at the
beginning, but gets more and more complex.
Random characters appear out of nowhere. Remember how I said I felt this
game could provide a window inside Japanese culture?
Well, the Japan portrayed in Sekiro is highly fantastical.
It has fighting monkeys, giant serpents and fish and apes, ogres, abominable
sumo-like dwellers and whatnot. And they just appear out of nowhere, without
any explanation of their origins or purpose. It’s a land where you have a
drunkard protecting the entrance to somewhere, spouts poison out of his mouth,
and requires two people to be killed. Two well-trained warriors, one of them a
ninja, to kill a glutton drunkard. Seriously?
It has a young lord of the country whose lineage makes him
immortal, but upon watching the destruction that the greed for his blood has
caused, he decides to get himself killed to end his lineage. And he uses Sekiro
for this. This skeleton of the story has been embellished with unnecessary
elements of fantasy and mystic lore, much of which feels irrelevant and forced
upon, just to beef the game up. It’s very easy to lose track of the main story,
fighting all the bosses and traversing the vast land.
The only good thing about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and
perhaps the best, is its graphics and visuals. Brilliantly designed, and
aesthetically pleasing, this was the only thing that kept me going, and in a
way made me cheat. I have no regrets about that. On many occasions I stopped at
the edge of a cliff or on the roof of a pagoda to admire the scenic beauty
around me. Even took screenshots. The graphics are so good and the landscapes
are so beautiful that I can’t appreciate it enough. Even now the memory of roaming around in the
game feels real and fresh in my mind.
Sekiro is made for faithful gamers, who are ready to invest
their time and patience into it. It’s made for those who can devote themselves
to it. In many ways it’s akin to, and as difficult as shinobi training where
you practice, practice and practice, perfecting every move so much that it
becomes second nature. If this game is completed righteously, it will bring
immense satisfaction to the player.
I’m not that kind of a gamer. I play for fun, for enjoyment.
It is my mistake that I expected Sekiro to be such a game. It contains
everything that I desired of a game – good visuals, Japan, choices, multiple
endings, softcore RPG elements – and I would have gladly completed multiple
playthroughs of it to reveal all the alternate endings that I missed, but sadly
the combat ruined it all for me. Lacking the option to decrease the difficulty,
but having plenty of options to increase it, it just isn’t playable for me
anymore. I don’t even feel the desire to download save games and continue from
there to reveal all the other endings (which I did in fact do when I reached
the Shura ending which is the worst ending).
It could have been a much better product and the best game
in many gamers’ opinion, but it has been made as difficult as it could be,
which ruins its experience. I’ll even go so far as to say that the whole Sekiro
team was a bunch of sadists. How it won the Game of the Year award is beyond
me. I really pity its testing team.
This is one game I’ll be glad to bid adieu to, though I’ll
miss traveling its landscapes.
Sayonara, Sekiro.
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