 So it's been more than a couple of weeks since my last video because I've been busy playing games I'm gonna write about. I played the Division 2 right through to the end game and I'll have a long one up on that at some point I've got a video about how I think the move to micro transaction supported free DLC actually sucks and has only led to crappy little Updates being called DLC. I'll have a video about that and I'll have a video about value in indie games focusing on how we should judge a game's price But today I'm going to talk to you all about the newest game for my favorite developer from's new title Sekiro This is going to be a critique and I want to make clear I'll spend more time talking about the things I think went wrong than what I think went right Because much of what went right is what has always gone right moments of moment combat Lore art design mood and tone I don't think anyone needs to listen to me make the amazingly profound statement that combat is fun in Soulsborne games So my disclaimer is I sure do like Sekiro and at the same time there are things that could be improved Today I'll talk about what I think Sekiro does amazingly well What I think it does well, but not quite as good as the other games and the games problems and there are some it does have problems From hasn't made a perfect game before and Sekiro isn't there first after the logo performance So let's start with this Sekiro is an excellent game and many of its changes are positive There are a bunch of changes I don't like and I don't think it's from software is best game like seemingly everyone else in the world does But the game is already with Metro likely to be one of my favorites of the year It's new combat system is fresh enough to make the game feel different and the focus on mobility and stealth Bring something completely new to the formula I'm actually surprised at just how much fun I've been having with its stealth and traversal mechanics And I've really enjoyed the more standard storytelling that's on display in the game Still all of these changes also come with downsides and there are a bunch of other things that range from bad To neutral as well as some held-over mechanics that annoy me greatly looking at you terror None of this means Sekiro is a bad game It is an excellent game again, but I do think it means the game isn't quite as amazing as what I've been seeing and reading since its release Let's start with something the game seems to do well at first glance But which is actually a bit of a weakness when we look a little closer When you first boot up Sekiro at least on PC You'll notice that it runs in a nice stable 60 frames and that the world is quite beautiful But then you'll notice there are some problems as well When we consider that this is the same from software who brought us the original dark souls that was utterly unplayable without a moderated fix I'm not terribly surprised at its performance issues, but that doesn't make it okay Just because the souls born games are my favorite games ever doesn't mean I should just accept subpar performance And let's start with the PC here While the game generally runs quite well on max settings at 1440 on my i5 7700k GTX 1080 setup, it's not perfect and for some reason after playing for hours The game will begin having literally the very worst screen tearing I've ever seen in a video game Like it actually hurts my eyes it gets so bad. Well, I'm an experienced PC gamer That means I should go into the settings and turn on v-sync, right? So let's just hop over here Okay, and maybe we click over here in advanced then we'll Scroll down. Oh Yeah, there's no v-sync setting Presumably because the game has it on at default to provide a hard lock at 60 fps, which is kind of annoying Now that screen tearing will only go away if I completely shut the game down and reboot But the inability to use my snazzy 144 Hertz monitor isn't the only problem with the settings here The game simply doesn't offer the basic suite of options that PC players have come to expect Like for instance, there is no borderless windowed mode and Even advanced graphics options are the very bare minimum that's acceptable. There's no field of view no ultra wide support Very little control over graphic settings beyond on and off toggles Still it runs decently if not really well. I only had one crash. So that's good But there's another issue where if I play for many many hours The frame rate will suddenly tank to terrible levels requiring me Sometimes to completely close the game out and then restart my computer. I have never had this with any other game So I have no idea what it is, but that's my experience. You know your mileage may vary on PC I didn't buy in the consoles because I have zero trust with from softwares console ports But according to another awesome digital foundry video linked below that is the greatest channel ever It seems I was correct to buy on PC because the same frame-pacing issues that plague blood-borne and especially Dark Souls 3 are back again The Xbox one X apparently only hits 1440p at 30 FPS most times and even its unlocked frame rate mode is Actually poor jumping about and hovering around 37 FPS an Unstable 37 FPS is objectively shittier to play than a hardlock 30 making the unlocked mode basically useless Sony consoles fare better, but they aren't good and I want to be clear Securio is an often beautiful game and on PC. It looks great Generally, but with the quality of recent titles even on console. It's clear that from performance lags behind Even at 30 FPS locks from games can look extremely choppy when played on console Bloodborne on the base ps4 can be painful sometimes Fabric still looks kind of bad hair still looks weird NPCs lips move now But there is literally no sinking at all watch. I had to play a clip of this because it's so distracting It's actually works in their mouth not moving at all. So just watch here watch I Didn't even try to make the link sink to the words I know I should think it's cool that their mouths finally move and all but like Lip-syncing is kind of a thing in games now games have gotten insanely good at it actually and this is kind of unacceptable Frankly, it's time to get this shit right Hopefully this intermediate step from lips that don't move to lips that move but totally independently of the words being spoken means next time lips will move kind of generally at the same time as words and from 2023 title will finally have fully synced lips and words and that'll be sweet man But all in all playing on PC and aside from the inexplicable screen tearing and frame drop issues after playing for many hours The game ran well Still the lack of settings the locked 60 FPS and the continued core console performance and resolutions is a knock against an otherwise very good product and as always a work of art and speaking of art World and levels From software has always been lauded for its environmental storytelling and its world and level design Long-time fans of from's games will immediately notice some big changes when they first start playing a few of the biggest of these is the lack of a stamina bar a Dedicated jump button and a grappling hook all of which combined to make traversing the world much much faster and more fluid than any of the previous games And while the game still does have somewhat wonky movement while sprinting There's no doubt it feels better to move around than it used to although when you watch me play You should consider that the controller I'm using is actually broken now this movement is generally a good thing But these traversal tools also Mean that levels had to be longer and less cluttered to be fully utilized For as good as it feels to zip around the map Sliding into cover before grappling up onto a tree or swinging from grapple point to grapple point This speed of traversal also means that you spend much less time actually taking in the sights The slow lonely isolation of previous souls games is basically lost and perhaps realizing that players would no longer be slowly Pouring over the entire map much of the highly detailed and cluttered environmental storytelling is gone here Now the actual art design is different though still of a ridiculously high quality and there are certainly areas that feel like Self-contained rich little environmental stories But there's less of that in Sekiro than in any of the other games other than Dark Souls 2 Leaving aside that there are simply less and less diverse levels here Very few of the places you will traverse feel as real and lived in as the last two games Nothing here compares to Lothric Castle Central Yarnham the Cathedral or the Boreal Valley and we will get into the game's tendency to reuse areas and enemies later But aside from just feeling less detailed and real there's another issue that arrives from the somewhat less memorable areas You simply don't feel like you've traveled very far in Sekiro Part of this is also down to the way Sekiro breaks up its gameplay into much smaller almost tiny discrete bites The previous games all had one thing in common and that was long winding levels with fairly large distances between checkpoints Many if not most of the levels centered around careful thorough exploration Opening shortcuts finding hidden paths and items and memorizing the level to prepare yourself for boss fights Sekiro's bonfires, which are called idols are everywhere There are places where bonfires exist for one large courtyard or a corridor Sometimes there will only be five or six enemies between checkpoints Almost every single boss has an idol Directly outside its arena and one at the start of the gauntlet I'm not opposed to idols outside of arenas and I actually think it's a positive change Nobody ever enjoyed running past all the enemies for another shot at the boss But the presence of so many idols even along the levels critical path speaks to what I think is the game's Unnecessary early game and then also boss difficulty It's almost as if they made a bunch of their typical long levels and then realized the game was so ridiculously Stupidly hard early on that they need to drop idols every 60 feet to prevent rage quitting This feels like a kind of bad decision to me And we will go into this further during the section on difficulty because that's an important part of this game But for now, I think it's undeniable that the sheer amount of idols breaks the game up so severely That you never feel like you've journeyed anywhere You never feel stretched You feel less like you're on a long epic journey than on a series of five minutes trolls One of the stranger things is that the intricately designed levels aren't totally absent and a weird first for the series The later game levels are the best designs in the game by miles But for well over a dozen hours to start the game You will be passing nearly identical looking feudal era Japanese buildings and these are beautiful looking levels again But still Because you spend so much of the early game in identical looking levels the game lacks that same feeling of progress as the previous two Bloodborne was truly amazing and making the player feel like they were descending into an abyss as they slowly worked Their way across its blood-stained world and Dark Souls 3's Incredible diversity of environments makes that game feel like a truly epic voyage And even if the games levels did have the same rich details as the last two again You wouldn't really notice it because you move through these levels fairly quickly until you arrive at a stealth focused combat arena The intricate interconnected level design that from games are loved for simply is not present in Sekiro The games focus on movement and it's absolutely unnecessary level of early game difficulty Conspirer to create a very different world design than previous games I'm not saying that is good or bad. It just is for me I kind of missed the previous games level designs, but others might disagree the generally more open level design isn't necessarily good or bad It's just different and how much this bothers you or how much you like it will probably come down to a matter of taste You might prefer what Sekiro has done with the early levels. I was left feeling kind of disappointed Nothing in the world design stuck with me like the dead horse and overturned carriage at the beginning of Bloodborne Or the sky and bonfire when you arrive at the undead settlement in Dark Souls 3 or coming down the steps into Anor Londo There are still several amazing moments in Sekiro, but none of them came from just the level and world design And again, I want to be totally fair This is very possibly taste, but Sekiro Didn't worm its way into my memory in the same way And this could very well have less to do with the actual design work and more to do with just how quickly you're moving through the game itself And that's not something that could have been done differently considering Sekiro's combat systems The width and length of the areas are needed to make the stealth gameplay work, and it really does work But I also greatly missed the tight focused ambush laced levels of the previous games There are very very few enemy ambushes in the game because the levels are so wide open and because enemies are so powerful Early on that almost all of them are two hit kills and I honestly can't recall opening even one useful shortcut I of course found doors that said does not open from this side I wrote an elevator, but I never once used a shortcut Now this isn't some travesty, but it's kind of disappointing Sekiro has an interconnected world, but it simply doesn't feel like it's interconnected It feels like a hundred tiny micro levels to traverse from idle to idle being fair and rating against previous games I don't think that anyone could argue that the world on level design here is as intricate and detailed as the last two games the focus on stealth Difficulty and the combat system all combined to make the previous level design impractical for a variety of reasons from a design perspective and it's the thing I missed most I Love the way Sekiro's feudal Japan looks and I love the way it plays I just didn't love moving through it as much as I did yarn them The sense of exploration and being on a long journey is here occasionally, but only rarely and only in certain specific parts of the game It is much closer really to the level design of Dark Souls 2 not bad But not as good as Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 of course Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 have like the best level design ever So you know take that criticism for what it's worth Variety is the spice of life My other video about Sekiro was months ago when all the articles were about how much different this game is and how All of the RPG mechanics were gone My main concerns hearing that was a lack of variety in the gameplay No way to dynamically adjust difficulty and a lack of replay value So let's look at all of that but first I want to address something that's kind of annoying to me I make the mistake of being on reddit a lot. I mean a lot when I play a game I'm generally up in the forums Every game has problems and those problems inevitably end up in forum posts Most from software games have posts that point out something stupid or annoying and those op's are always shouted down as Disgusting noobs who just need to get better at video games because that's usually important in life Don't like having to watch three loading screens because you need to warp to hunter's dream to then warp anywhere else fuck off Noob and get good it is beyond stupid But such is the Dark Souls forum life But something strange happened with Sekiro all criticism is of course met with some sneers of get good But there's a new one that has popped up and replaced more than half of the get-goods and that new response is this isn't Dark Souls Bro, it's Sekiro. It is a totally new game Let me address that as succinctly as possible bullshit man Sekiro is without a doubt a souls born game There are some little tweaks on the formula, but saying this isn't a souls game is utterly ridiculous You do actually have RPG mechanics. They're just implemented kind of poorly in my opinion You still have vendors many of the same animations are taken directly over there is poison Slow movement swamps grab attacks Cheasing enemy AI is now fully implemented as stealth with a flashy animation But the reality is that we already did this from soft Brilliantly, I might add took the way we already played the game and implemented it as its own mechanic with a skill tree We used to throw pebbles and enemies to pull them toward us. We'd run away and come back We would sneak up for back stabs. This always felt like exploiting the game and we called it cheesing But the simple fact is the game felt balanced around those things So from took those techniques added a crouch button and implemented actual stealth It is an amazing change to take something we were doing anyway and makes it Insanely more fun than it had been It is a total stroke of brilliance But that doesn't mean it's some utterly new thing You don't have stamina now, but you have posture You won't dodge very much anymore instead of pressing B to perfectly time your dodge through attacks Now you press LB to perfectly time your reflections to attacks these changes take getting used to but once they click You will find that playing this game feels almost exactly like playing any of the other games The mechanics are more shuffled and changed the encounters are more tweaked than Transforms and that is great because I happen to think that the from software combat system is literally perfect and only needs occasional tweaks But again, this isn't some totally new game in a whole new genre That'll be totally alien to souls players It is a souls game where you block instead of dodge and cheesing is now called stealth I love it, but this game can be compared to the others It keeps a shitload of mechanics items and systems and as such we can examine those things and see what's better than the other games What's worse than the other games and what's as good, but different than the other games Let's start off with one of the things. I was most nervous about Weapon and build diversity I didn't own a ps3. So my souls experience begins with Dark Souls Dark Souls had a shitload of weapons and an almost absurdly complex system for upgrading them With several blacksmiths different upgrade trees a stupid amount of crafting materials Dark Souls 2 had a ludicrous amount of weapons and an easier upgrade system, but the game also kind of sucks So we won't really talk about it here Dark Souls 3 has a lot of weapons a good amount of unique move sets It added weapon arts, which ended up being pretty useless outside of a few weapons and kind of annoying because they used your fucking mana So if you weren't a caster you could use them like twice, but it was there Bloodborne has the least weapons of any of the games But each one was totally unique and all of them were viable for a particular play style Added to these systems was sorcery Miracles hexes pyromancies in the souls games and that basically utterly pointless arcane tools and bloodborne Dark Souls has an absurd amount of ways to kill things many of which are bad Bloodborne has like a dozen ways to kill things all of which are good So what is Sekiro like well Sekiro falls in between Dark Souls 3 and bloodborne What this means in practice is a lack of weapon variety that leaves the combat somewhat limited The much advertised prosthetic arm weapons are rarely very useful as they all have Ridiculously long wind-ups that are more dangerous to use than it's worth outside of very very specific instances Although in those specific instances, they are super useful, but it's rare Later in the game when you can take a hit without instantly fucking dying and you've upgraded the tools You can finally start to play around with them and they are really really fun Which makes it all the more disappointing that you simply rarely use them and like never use them in boss fights outside A couple of very specific things Now this combat system is still super duper fun But I failed to see why other weapons couldn't have been made available to the players to mix things up more Enemies use spears and halberds and axes I'd have liked to use those and if they wanted to keep you with the sword for narrative purposes I would have very much preferred if from had figured out a way to allow the player to make much greater use of these kick-ass Prosthetics the games very very best combat animations are all tied to either the shinobi skills or the prosthetic tools They all have kick-ass blood-borne style animations and they all feature cool particle effects and unbelievably good sound design But the combat balance and speed and aggressiveness of enemies means it's almost never ever safe to use them Against regular enemies using your shinobi arts almost always means getting hit and you simply cannot get hit in Sekiro without everything going to shit the game demands near Perfection from the player and punishes you so hard for getting greedy The entire game is constantly slapping you in the face for even one missed deflection or trying to get one extra hit in It actively teaches you to never try anything crazy And then all of the tools feature huge long wind-ups that have no hyper armor at all Really, you can easily get repeatedly interrupted and killed as you try and get off any of these tools or skills Other than the firecracker which has a near instant cast Likewise enemies are ridiculously fucking good at blocking So you almost always end up spending ammo which is spirit emblems in Sekiro to start a huge long wind-up Only to have the enemy block the strike most of the tools don't do all that much more posture damage than your sword and Leave you unable to block so you're almost always always better off not Using the cool new skills and weapons that they designed. It's a serious issue I took risks and used them because I felt like it but anytime the game got harder I used the tools and skills less the only time I used them was on enemies I could have easily killed with my sword That sounds kind of like exactly backwards to me It seems like the tools should have been super powerful weapons with high risk high reward that you'd only use on the toughest enemies Instead they are high risk low reward So you only use them on the weakest enemies with only one sword Skills that are ridiculously situational can only be equipped one at a time and take forever To unlock and tools that cost ammo and are almost always either unnecessary or actively dangerous to use There is basically zero weapon and build diversity in Sekiro. This isn't open for discussion You can think that's a good thing or not a good thing But you can't think it's not true the combat is still awesome and timing your blocks perfectly before Showering blows down a cowering blocking opponent feels really really good, but it's a missed opportunity I hope there's a second row too and they realize they can greatly improve this system by making the coolest abilities Actually viable outside of niche boss fights and weak as fodder enemies in Dark Souls or Bloodborne When you get a bit bored you can really switch things up by changing your combat style I recently played Dark Souls 2 again as a caster for the first time I used hexes and a Zwee hander and I felt a lot different in playing using a straight sword and parrying shield in Bloodborne using the saw cleaver feels quite a bit different from using Ludwig's holy blade or the moonlight sword It's not a different game, but it's just enough variety to keep things interesting Sekiro has all the tools needed to have the same thing, but it just doesn't do it The long wind-ups and high risk is a leftover from the previous games They should have made all the tools totally uninterruptible Given the player total risk from the long wind-up at the very least you'd trade taking damage for doing big damage It'd be a different way to play Instead the game's best animations go basically to waste because you won't really be using them Okay, let's move on There was so much talk about how Sekiro had dropped the RPG mechanics totally I heard and read tons of stuff about how farming for souls was a thing of the past Imagine my surprise when I found that Sekiro still has RPG mechanics and that one particular design choice ended up meaning I farmed more in Sekiro than I ever did in Bloodborne of Dark Souls RPG mechanics For all of that talk about how much different Sekiro is it retains a remarkable number of progression mechanics from the previous games Death carries a harsh XP penalty The penalty is lower than the previous games But you also cannot go back to the place you died and reclaim the dropped XP if you die You lose progression permanently for the first time money and XP are separated out into separate currencies And you lose half of each on death There is a mechanic that gives you between a five and thirty percent chance to be spared the penalty But it is basically no literally totally random and for the most part death means you lose your progress With one odd exception that ends up causing more farming rather than less Let me explain Rather than simply getting XP and trading it for levels Sekiro leaves all of its build progression spread across several skill trees These trees include things like new attacks better versions of existing attacks and new movement techniques But also crucial things like better healing from items better stealth More Shinobi tool ammo and better item drop rates as such Some of these skill nodes are the kind of thing a player feels they need to unlock Sekiro doesn't eliminate its RPG mechanics. It just jumbles them up some Previous games increased the healing power of your flask by finding items out in the world now their skill tree unlocks Increasing health and stamina used to be acquired by spending XP now you find them in the world These changes seem kind of arbitrary to me and serve only to increase the difficulty of the early game for No real reason other than changing things for changes sake The one caveat here is that as you acquire XP you fill up a bar until you earn a skill point Once you get that point it is banked, but any more progress is lost on death Now do you see what's up here? There's an inbuilt incentive to farm for XP because the benefit of getting the bar to fill up is so huge Thank God it took me more than half the game to figure this out because once I figured it out I could not unlearn it if I was more than halfway to a point It seemed irresponsible and stupid to not simply keep killing the nearby enemies until I had unlocked that point and because XP accrues slowly and skills are both stupidly expensive and require you to unlock all the previous nodes Getting a skill you really want like I don't know your health flask restoring more than 15 percent of the bar takes a long-ass time This means that once you find a nice little group of easily killed enemies The temptation to keep killing them until you've banked enough points to get that skill You're looking at is nearly irresistible not needing to farm is something everyone was praising But I never once farmed in blood board for anything other than blood vials, and I fucking hate it having to do that I still think it's basically one of only a handful of problems with that game and I very very very rarely farmed and Dark Souls or Dark Souls 3 The only time I did it was if I was close to using an item I wanted to try if I had a level up two levels of strength to try a sword I was interested in I would farm up an area to quickly level that skill I did farm in Dark Souls 2 because they made the asinine decision to put the effectiveness of dodging Literally the core skill of the entire game behind an RPG stat, and I hated that But beyond those very specific instances I did not farm in Souls games because you lost all of your XP on death in those games There's really no incentive to farm By locking in these skill points someone like me will always be peeking at the bar to make sure he's not really close to a point And if I'm closer to a point than not I will just farm up the damn points And this is bad because in general the tree is basically superfluous So as you're farming you'll end up thinking to yourself Man, this is a lot of effort for really no practical benefit I've already gone over how rarely you end up using the combat arts But because those very few important things are way down the ladder you end up farming to unlock a bunch of skills You will literally never use once just to get to the one that lets your flask heal more Okay, so the game that supposedly eliminated farming Tripled the amount of farming I did in this game, and I don't think that's going to be a rare occurrence I can say here that I think this RPG system is objectively inferior to the previous games in every way XP comes slowly. It has a system that encourages boring fucking farming And you end up farming for nothing anyway because none of it really matters outside of like four nodes Which brings us to build diversity There is none. There are no builds You can choose a different combat move that you won't use and you can go crazy finding the materials for upgrades on your shinobi tools that you'll use But not very often and yet I did because that's how I play games And I'll bet lots of other people did too because this is basic player psychology If there's a skill tree, I unlock it. If there's an upgrade material, I go get it I've been playing games for nearly 40 years and this behavior is hard coded in me now I like RPGs. I love well done RPGs. Dark Souls is a brilliant RPG. Bloodborne is a really good one. Sekiro is a weird mix It's not an action game because it's got grinding, farming, currencies, and crafting materials But it's also not an RPG because almost none of those things have an appreciable Impact on a moment-to-moment gameplay loop which almost always boils down to being ridiculously precise in your combat movements There's another aspect the RPG leveling mechanics, which is how you increase your health posture and damage But I'm gonna go over that in the next section because those systems are better addressed when we've touched in the game's difficulty curve combat enemies bosses and difficulty Okay, here's where things get complicated Sekiro's combat is really fucking cool By the end of the game you will have such a handle on the deflection timing and Such an idea of what enemies and bosses do that you will be playing the game like a QTE Simon says simulator Now that sounds like a dig, but it isn't there is a large degree of rhythm that is present in almost all of the combat here It's almost always insanely intense give-and-take That being said like I mentioned earlier all the talk about Sekiro being a totally different game is ridiculous This is a souls game instead of dodging you block instead of managing stamina you manage your posture It is not a totally different system It's a tweak of an already excellent system, and I'll be honest. It is a pretty good fucking tweak man Sekiro is to bloodborne as bloodborne is to dark souls the same but different just as good Really fucking good by taking away the fast-depleting stamina meter and replacing it with a slower filling posture meter The combat changes from being player instigated to being a dance The only limit on your actions is the AI enemy's actions. This means the actual sword fights are absurdly cinematic Not only because the sound and animation work is fucking ridiculously impossibly good, and it is so so good Holy crap. It's so good also because these fights play out as sword fights play out in my imagination You attack and test your opponent and back off and wait you circle each other eyeing and opening You continue to fight until you notice a pattern They're prone to or a particular attack that always leaves them vulnerable and you punish them not only by attacking and forcing them on the Defensive but by perfectly blocking and using their own attacks against them The game does a really good job of keeping things either one-on-one or in a manageable group of weak enemies and Anytime you arrive at a huge group of enemies You know you had to stealth kill almost all of them and the game's movement abilities mean that for the first time Running away is actively encouraged Eventually you will get enough health and damage that you can go to earlier levels and play bloodborne if you want But when you're along the main path the game is a very very well-paced mix of carefully surveying the area Finding all of the easy escape routes up into the trees Slowly stealth-killing enemies before mopping up by sword fighting one or two guys Trying to fight more than two dudes in Sekiro is nearly certain death Nearly every single enemy can stun lock you to death in two shots and seconds even with the lack of weapon variety and the inefficiency of the tools and combat skills What's actually here is so fucking tight and polished that you can easily do the same basic sword fight 1000 times and still enjoy it I mean that means it's good Would the game be even better if I could use my flaming spear more or if I had a few different types of swords Yeah, I think so. I mean, I know so but even so it is really damn good And that is so important because one area the game lacks Objectively is enemy and boss variety the first three areas you will go to in this game have almost nothing beyond samurai dudes And even amongst those dudes, there's like a few variations and those variations are very small There's the dude with the straw hat. There's a dude with an axe. There's a dude with a bow They throw a couple of big troll type enemies in there But the game may be an effort to familiarize yourself with the basic combat system doesn't change up its enemies for like 10 12 hours This isn't something that actively hurts the game But it's disappointing compared to the variety of enemies you encounter in the previous games when I started it I thought it was because the game was going to stay true to being feudal Japan But it comes clear later on that this isn't the case as you are fighting headless corpses and giant snakes and cricket shooting zombies and zombie villagers It feels more like a lack of design time like they couldn't have the same amount of enemies as in previous titles And the same goes double for bosses people were upset about the asylum demon being reused in Dark Souls They were kind of annoyed about turning regular enemies to bosses in the chalice dungeons They marked Dark Souls 2 reusing a particular boss in the DLC and changing the color of his blast attack to blue But Sekiro Reuses bosses and mini bosses to a shocking degree. There are two snake eyes about five generals Two centipede giraffe fights two ogre fights three of the drunken fat guy from the commercial at least five of the headless demons There are three of the shimuchen warriors. You fight two of the main story bosses twice with only slight changes There are two Guardian 8 fights with the second one featuring both of the phases at the same time These aren't slightly changed fights usually They're literally the exact same fight with a couple featuring maybe one different special attack This one has a grab and that one has a thrust and that's the exception for most of them They are exactly the same except with a different arena. This seems like a lack of development time to me And I don't think it's something anyone could really defend Again, I love the game and each of these fights is cool enough with some of them being fantastic But that is an insane amount of reused fights There are at least ten bosses that are reused sometimes as many as five times Including main epic story bosses, and I think that kind of sucks dude I Understand reusing one or two bosses and the Guardian 8 fight is an example of reusing a boss really really well And the headless fights are kind of extra content I guess the others are kind of just copy-paste jobs right down to having basically the same name And it does the same thing with areas where you will backtrack to reuse an entire level during the main story of the game twice As the game moves on the enemy variety increases But the sheer amount of reused enemies bosses and areas is a first for the series and it is not an improvement It's a step back. I can only hope it's because there was tremendous development time used on creating a new combat system and a traversal system If this happens again, I think Frumb will deserve to get a bunch of criticism for it This game would have been immensely improved by having a bit more level and enemy variety Replacing all the reused bosses other than the ape and the headless with totally new designs I kicked the living shit out of most of these guys the second time I fought them which nicely segues into our final section difficulty Why did I obliterate those bosses when I saw them the second time? Because the first time I fought them 15 or 20 times if not more that's not an exaggeration I think I might have fought the second boss lady butterfly and genichiro ishina like 30 times I must have fought the demon of hatred 35 times easily. It could have been more Sekiro's regular combat early in the game is Ridiculously hard Especially if you're like me and find yourself somewhere you shouldn't be but decide you're not gonna let the game tell you What to do and mash your head against the wall until you win and the bosses in this game are almost all painfully Unnecessarily difficult this ties in both with the changes to the RPG system and to the structure of the game and its combat system Let's wrap this up with the most controversial statement Sekiro doesn't do a good job with his difficulty curve Sometimes it is just way too frustratingly hard so hard I'm convinced huge swaths of people will never finish this game But other times it's almost too easy like when you're replaying the same boss with the exact same moves The reason is too easy is precisely because it's too hard Let me explain that The first time you fight a boss you will have to do it so many times and acquire So much mastery that when you fight that boss again, they can't even touch you From's games have always required players to learn what the game demands, but they haven't previously required perfection Several of these bosses I ended up beating without getting hit because the game literally demands that level of perfection to progress And this goes right up to the last boss. It was just ridiculous This undoubtedly makes you feel like Superman when you actually do it But it also makes you want to break things getting to that point Let's try and break this down from two perspectives, okay? For a veteran player of souls games learning the different tweaks to the system was punishing Almost every enemy after the tutorial area did like 80% damage to your health bar and adjusting to how quickly they chain attacks together Was hard if you're like me and have played all of these games five or six times each I'm sure it was a difficult learning curve Now I want to look at this as someone who has never played one of these games your average person who plays video games would have Almost zero frame of reference for this. Well, that's what we were like when Dark Souls first released you might say except Sekiro is objectively Insanely harder than Dark Souls one. It is not even in the same league Every enemy in Sekiro is like the Black Knight and Undead Berg Every single enemy can kill you if your timing on deflections isn't absolutely perfect and messing up on a boss means an instantaneous death and a restart I'm almost positive. This is why idols are always directly outside of main bosses and almost always only two or three enemies from mini bosses There are no gauntlets to run here because boss fights end in seconds The first time I fought Genichiro I think I literally died in three seconds the first time I fought the last boss same thing bosses have ridiculously large move sets and more those moves are at insane speeds Their special attacks are almost all instant kills if you aren't at absolute full health And they're almost all impossible to react to until you've seen it many many times I ended up getting the second face of Genichiro only after beating his first phase without taking any damage because that's what the game basically demands of you Then I was instantly killed by phase two when lightning one shot me by the time I beat that phase I ended up beating both phases without healing because I'd fought him easily 20 times easily probably more man Bosses almost all heal punish. They attack almost constantly have tiny damage windows They are simply incredibly difficult and require more pattern recognition and better Reflexes than any boss in any of the previous games outside of maybe Medea I booted up Dark Souls after this just to see the bosses and in Dark Souls They look like they are moving in slow motion compared to Sekiro now I don't think bosses should be beaten on the first try One of the things I hate most about Dark Souls 2 is that the regular enemies are annoyingly hard to deal with But almost every single boss I beat the first time outside of a very few like fume knight and sin But I also think asking anyone but weirdos like me to fight a boss for two hours and 35 tries until you've got it down so much. They don't even hit you is way way way too far over the line Previous games had a built-in way to avoid this There was an inbuilt difficulty setting that allowed players to adjust the game to their own skill level it Naturally let the player adjust until it was just hard enough This was called RPG leveling if a boss was one-shotting you you could just spend some points on health Get it up to three shots and make the fight more manageable. It didn't make it easy mode Dark Souls 3 had very challenging boss fights even over leveled at endgame. Nameless king is kind of a nightmare But you can get that fight to where it doesn't require you to play absolutely perfectly to progress Likewise, you cannot level at all if that's what you're looking for and make it so every boss one shots you And there's a happy medium in here somewhere somewhere between me fighting the guardian ape So damn many times the next time I fought him I didn't die at all even though there was a second guardian ape in the fight Sekiro keeps many many systems. There's a swamp that slows you. There's poison. There's fire There's a stupid amount of consumable items. You'll end up hoarding because you don't want to waste them I have like a billion fists full of ash But tying damage and health upgrades to defeating story bosses and clearing levels seems Pointlessly cruel to me for a good segment of players Eventually in Sekiro like in all of the games You'll reach a point where you finally feel properly leveled for regular enemies, but never for bosses The game gets significantly easier not only because you've mastered its systems But because by halfway through only a few enemies can kill you in one and two hits The boss fights only get easier as your skill increases though Tying leveling to boss wins means they've balanced these fights to be hard and given players No way to progress if they just aren't good enough at games or if they simply don't have the patience for the punishment This game meets out I have often heard the argument that souls games shouldn't have a difficulty slider because the developers have a certain vision for the Experience they want the player to have but that line of thinking completely misses an entire point Not all players are equally skilled. I have been playing games for 40 years I am a healthy guy who has good enough hand-to-eye coordination that I played baseball all the way into a division 1 junior college And I played a shitload of souls games My experience with Sekiro and even for me this game was frustratingly difficult and infuriating at times But my experience is fundamentally easier than someone with severe arthritis or Slower reflexes or someone who has never played a souls game. I Will play a different game than someone who's 63 I will have a much easier time than someone who has worse eyesight My game is easier than somebody who just isn't good at games The only way to actually ensure that the developer vision of the player experience is upheld is to allow players to match the difficulty to their skill level Previous souls games could have benefited from a direct difficulty setting like Celeste has They don't have that but they do have something almost as good. Maybe even better, frankly They've got a hidden dynamically adjusting difficulty slider that is in case deep within the game's systems and mechanics themselves a 53 year old woman with arthritis can play Dark Souls 3 and Struggle and then simply farm souls to level up her health and strength until it's high enough to overcome her mistakes She will stop leveling naturally as soon as the difficulty becomes more manageable for her because farming sucks And no one wants to do it more than is needed That system worked well and made the games far more accessible than they were given credit for between shields and magic and bows and leveling anyone of any skill could beat the Dark Souls games Whenever I saw people going on about how deliciously hard the games were I cringed a little both because I don't think that's actually true They weren't that hard and because they were systems in the games to allow anyone to overcome them And I cringed because there's something else about this discussion that I think is important Reducing these games down only to their raw Mechanical difficulty does them a great disservice The from software titles are more than just the basics of the combat systems They are more than just their difficulty if that's all they were we would be talking about the surge as the greatest game of all Time it is definitely harder than Dark Souls and it has the same combat system with a couple of cool little tweaks in there But the surge is better than Dark Souls 3 is something literally nobody ever said I sincerely doubt the people who made the surge think it is better than Dark Souls 3 Souls games aren't only about the difficulty that is definitely a part of it I won't deny that but it's more than just that it's just how snappy and Fluid and polished the combat is it's how it's how good they feel to play it is how Unbelievably good the animation work is the art direction is the sense of mystery It's the world and level and enemy design. It is the fantastic sound direction and the unbelievably good music It's the lore and the island descriptions. It's clear and obvious loving craft goes into these games Each Souls game is clearly made by people who loved what they were making deeply loved it Item descriptions were written by people who were taking that very seriously When you watch Sekiro twirl a flaming spear around It is instantly obvious that someone worked their ass off to make that look like a thing of beauty To make it feel like you were swinging a flaming spear around Previous games let all of us experience the game at the same difficulty level relative to our skill If you are better than me you ended up needing to level less That one crazy ass dude who has beat all the games in a row without dying These games are not hard for him His experience with the difficulty is as different from mine as that woman with severe arthritis. We imagined Souls games are so good at everything they do. I don't understand why she shouldn't be able to complete the game also I am no designer But how about a dynamic system that adjusts enemy health and damage based on how many deaths you've had You can even have a lore reason call it fatigue Enemies or bosses get fatigued the more times they've killed you I don't think I would have enjoyed the game less if I had fought Lady Butterfly ten times instead of 20 In conclusion I'm gonna wrap it up here There's a lot to discuss and I am playing NG plus now so I might very well do another Sekiro video after I played the game again I also want to start a fresh game and see what the difficulties like after having already beaten it I rarely score things, but I'm going to do that here I consider Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 to be 9.9 games as close to perfect as you can get I don't think Sekiro is as good as those two games and I'm almost positive It will be replayed less often, but it is still a fantastic game and those two games are so damn good I didn't expect Sekiro to be that good But the game is still one of the best of the generation and easy nine Sekiro does so much right and it's a game that could be as good as those others with a few more tweaks. I Still very much hope for a Bloodborne 2, but now I really want a Sekiro 2 I feel like this game is an excellent transition point It tries a bunch of new things and it absolutely nails the most important of those its combat its story It's movement and art are all top-notch, but I really feel like there is a better game in here somewhere There's a nearly perfect game in here somewhere and Sekiro 2 I would like to be able to use the Shinobi tools more. I would like the combat arts to be useful I would like greater diversity in world design and a return to at least some of the winding twisting shortcut filled levels I'd like longer levels with less bonfires Importantly, I want a Sekiro that goes back to the old leveling system allowing players to level health and damage and posture With XP and moves combat arts progressions to items that are found in the world or are rewarded from NPCs I'd like either settings or a progression system that ensures a wider audience of players can finish the game and see them from the works of art They are Performance needs to improve going forward, especially on console man NPCs need to have lip-syncing PC settings need to be expanded 60 FPS lock No borderless windowed seriously dude. Oh and terror and curse and frenzy need to fuck right off Hey from please don't make boss fights have mandatory consumables I need fighting the headless requires two consumables one of which is insanely rare early on and needs to be farmed I Didn't know an NPC would eventually sell it So I ended up beating my head against the first headless for hours and beat him without the confetti And it was deeply unfun. Sekiro is so good that I want another one that will be perfect The best from software game is in here somewhere They've got the foundation of it here and should be commended for some bold choices But they also understand that we made some choices that didn't work as well as the systems. They replaced It really sucks that I'm gonna have to wait years for that game to be released. I am eagerly waiting DLC for this game I'm psyched to see what's next. All right. I got a video about the division 2 We'll be getting up but next up is a video about how free DLC sucks balls. Thanks for coming. See you next time Bye