"Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice" Review - Git Gud no Jutsu

Available for: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Hello, dear readers, and welcome back to the Broken Leg Review Saga! Given the rate at which games have been releasing, this is likely one of the last entries (if not the last one) in this saga of reviews that I'll be writing while recovering from my broken leg. And really, what a great note to end the saga on! 

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice isn't just great, it's f***ing brilliant. It isn't the kind of brilliant that everybody will be able to appreciate, but it's undeniably one of the most well thought-out and put together games of this year, maybe even of this generation. In fact, I'm so excited to begin talking about it that I don't want to keep this introduction going any longer. So grab your katanas, ready your most racist ninja war cries, and join me as I explain why From Software's latest is worth your money.

In a break from the From Software tradition of game settings rooted in western mythology and fantasy, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice takes place during the Sengoku period of Japanese history, and the inevitable supernatural elements are more rooted in Japanese folklore and traditional Buddhism than standard fantasy. With this in mind, the story of Sekiro starts off resembling something along the lines of historical fiction. In the world of Sekiro, Isshin Ashina, one of the many feuding warlords vying for control over Japan, has established a solid hold on most of the nation. However, years after Ashina's conquest, war once again looms on the horizon, and Ashina's grandson, Genichiro Ashina, seeks out the divine heir for help to maintain his grandfather's legacy. This call for help eventually turns into a kidnapping as Genichiro spirits the divine heir away. You play as "Wolf" (or "Sekiro," to some), a Shinobi in the service of this same divine heir. That should make your overarching goal here pretty clear. All-in-all, this is an unusually easy-to-follow story for From Software. Even if you don't grasp the deep Buddhist philosophy that permeates the story, you can still grasp the relevant themes and their importance, and you can do so without having to rely solely on item descriptions and the like. But even so, there's no shortage of mysteries and questions left unanswered, so you can still count on being able to sit and really think about things in spite of the fact that the story is more directly spelled out than usual. 

As easily digestible as the story is in Sekiro, the same cannot be said of the gameplay. From Software is, of course, known for games such as Dark Souls and Bloodborne, games with a cult following surrounding their infamous difficulty. This cult following has resulted in a culture I referenced in the subtitle of this review: "Git Gud" culture. This culture is something of a perversion of the point of From Software's titles. A typical From Software game is punishing, but every challenge can be overcome by finding a playstyle that works best for you and simply mastering it. I infamously made it through 75% of the plot of Dark Souls with the reinforced club I got towards the beginning of the game because I'd memorized the timing of its swings well enough to be able to overcome any challenge with it. So yes, From Software games are difficult, but they typically leave you a number of ways in which to "git gud" and surpass the difficulty. I say all of this as a way of prefacing the fact that Sekiro is not so forgiving. I'll say this here and now: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the most difficult game I've ever played in my life. Unlike any of the Souls games, you have one playstyle you can use, and the game demands absolute mastery of that playstyle if you want to succeed. This is what I mean when I say that Sekiro isn't the kind of brilliant that everybody will be able to appreciate. This is a game for which the credo "git gud" really is the only way to proceed. If you aren't good at the existing combat in Sekiro, you have no other avenues through which to progress. This is partly due to one other major departure from the Souls games: Sekiro isn't an RPG. 

You gain "experience" and "skill points" as you kill enemies, sure, but those are spent on a variety of skill trees to give you either more attacks (which only work when used in conjunction with the existing combat style) or latent skills (which only serve to make the existing combat style more effective in certain, small ways). Gone are the days of farming for hours to have the souls to raise your maximum health high enough to survive boss encounters based off sheer luck. Gone are the days of upping your base damage alongside your defense to buy you a few precious seconds. In Sekiro, the only way to improve your health/posture or attack power is by making progress in the game. Health and posture (which we'll discuss later) are increased by created prayer necklaces from 4 prayer beads. Prayer beads are dropped by minibosses and can sometimes be found in the environment, so if you want to increase your health, you'll need to kill 4 minibosses in order to do so. Likewise, your attack power can only be increased by defeating "proper" bosses. The line between bosses and minibosses is blurry at best, so it's kind of a shot in the dark. Essentially, when you defeat a major plot boss, you gain a "memory" of the encounter. This memory is then used to increase your attack power level. Eventually you can get a hidden item that actually allows you to use skill points to raise attack power like in a proper RPG, but that doesn't become available until right near the end, so it would be best not to count on it. So, part of what makes Sekiro such a challenge is its insistence that you adhere to one combat style and its lack of RPG elements to give players a tangible, customizable edge. But the rest of what makes it such a challenge is the combat itself.

Gameplay is divided into two modes: stealth and combat, and it's up to the player to determine what kind of balance they'd like. But even then, you can't have it 100% either way. There are several instances (boss encounters, for instance) where combat can't be avoided, and there are combat scenarios that I simply can't imagine are possible without first using stealth to thin the enemy numbers. The key is to strike just the right balance: you want to be able to hold your own in combat, but at the same time, you want to be as in control of your variables as you possibly can. 

With that in mind, stealth is about what you'd expect. There are "awareness indicators" over enemies that suggest how close they are to discovering you, and you can get an instant stealth kill on most enemies from behind, from above, from below, or from behind a nearby wall. A way that Sekiro differs from other stealth games, however, is that you can get an insta-kill on any enemy who isn't 100% aware of you. That means that if an enemy sees you and starts to attack, but another enemy facing away from you has heard the commotion but is yet to turn around, you can still get an insta-kill stealth attack on the latter enemy. It's a refreshing break from the usual stealth game formula of "the second you're spotted, everybody knows you're here," even if it doesn't quite make sense that a person wouldn't turn around the second the person in front of them started screaming and drawing their sword. There are a number of tools at your disposal to make stealth more manageable, but as I said, it's up to you to determine how much effort you expend to be unseen.

As great as the stealth is, however, it's when the chips are down and the time comes for the swords to do the talking where Sekiro truly stands out. The combat side of gameplay is essentially a swordsmanship simulator. Your goal isn't to drain the enemy of all their health; it's to wear the enemy down enough that you demolish their posture and can strike directly at the heart. Enemies will block just about every attack you throw at them...but that's ok, because that's the point. The more they block your attacks, the more their "posture" gauge fills. This gauge can also be filled by deflecting an enemy blow at just the right time or successfully landing an unblocked attack on an enemy. When the posture gauge is filled completely, you have broken the enemy's posture and can instantly kill them with a "deathblow," a satisfactorily brutal kill animation that does wonders for making you feel like a badass feudal Japanese ninja. This is how you'll go about defeating nearly every enemy in the game, and in order to defeat bosses/minibosses, you'll need to perform multiple deathblows, meaning you'll need to whittle down their posture more than once. Like the enemies you face, you also have a posture bar that gets filled up as you block attacks. And though enemies don't necessarily kill you in one hit, if they break your posture and you don't get away in time, they can do devastating damage. Furthermore, for both you and your enemies, the lower the health bar is, the slower the posture bar recovers. So for some of the more difficult bosses, a valid strategy is to whittle down their health so that what posture damage you inflict lasts longer. Having said all of this, you may be wondering how this factors into the challenge aspect. Well, for starters, you can't just go up to enemies spamming the attack or deflect button. The action you take at any particular moment has to be chosen by reading the enemy's movement and responding accordingly at just the right time. As the plot progresses, Sekiro begins to demand greater and greater mastery of the combat style, and that eventually means absolute perfection in your timing and judgment. This is a difficult feat even when you don't take the four "perilous" attacks into account.

Another aspect of your judgment that will be evaluated time and time again is your ability to read and respond to what are called "perilous" attacks. Essentially, an enemy will ready an attack, and a red Kanji will appear above Wolf. As you look at the enemy's position, you'll want to try to determine whether they're going to do a slicing attack, a sweeping attack, a thrust attack, or a grab attack. If it's a slicing or grab attack, you'll need to dodge out of the way, as there's no way to deflect these kinds of perilous moves. If it's a sweeping attack, you'll want to jump over the attack and onto the enemy a-la Mario for increased posture damage. Likewise, when you unlock the "Mikiri Counter" skill, you'll want to essentially dodge into any thrust perilous attacks that are thrown at you for increased posture damage. It's literally impossible to beat this game without being able to read and respond to perilous attacks on a moment's notice, so in addition to knowing exactly when to counter and when to go on the offensive, you'll also need to be ready to take a certain kind of action any time you see a red Kanji appear above you. So yes, Sekiro is quite challenging, but once you get used to it, the combat seemingly takes on a rhythm that you just...fall into naturally. It doesn't make things easy, but it makes learning new boss patterns the slightest bit more intuitive. 

The joke has been made time and time again of this game: "you're going to die way more than twice," and given the game's immense difficulty, that's a true statement. However, death isn't necessarily the end. When you die, you're given the option to either accept death or resurrect. Wolf essentially has two "nodes" of restoration, and in any given run, choosing to resurrect disables one node and prevents a second resurrection for a limited time. Resurrecting gives you the opportunity to overcome the challenge that killed you in the first place, and though you only have two nodes of restoration, if you play your cards right, kill enough enemies, and avoid dying for long enough in a run, you can end up having the ability to resurrect more than twice. More often than not, however, you'll just have the two nodes and that'll be it before you reach another sculptor's idol (which functions identically to a Dark Souls bonfire)

There's one last thing I'd like to touch on from a gameplay perspective before we move on, and that is the "Shinobi Prosthetic." After the tutorial, Wolf finds himself lacking an arm, and after being taken in by a sculptor of the Buddha, he is given a prosthetic arm with the ability to perform various functions. The first (and most fulfilling) function is a grappling hook that you can use to either avoid combat or fulfill your inner dream of being in Attack on Titan's Scout Corps. Beyond that, there are a bunch of other prosthetic tools that can be loaded into the arm and used in certain situations. Many of them are one-and-done tricks to help in certain boss fights, but many can also be used in standard combat. My personal favorite of the prosthetic tools was the Shinobi firecracker, which I consistently used to stun bosses to whittle down a little bit of health. If you're like me, you won't have a use for 95% of the prosthetics, but they're still cool to have, and they still provide some options for experimentation if you're open to it. 

Now, given that this is a From Software game, the level design must be touched upon. Let's just get this out of the way right off the bat: There will never be a game with level design as intricate and brilliant as Dark Souls. Sekiro does try its best to emulate that high bar, though. You aren't constantly unlocking back doors into places you've already been, but at just about any point, you can look in the distance, think, "wait, I was looking over here from there a couple days ago!" and feel a distinct sense of place. Also, much like in Dark Souls, if you take time to explore, you'll almost always find a new area with new enemies and items to discover, so going off the beaten path is almost always rewarded. An added bonus to level design that hasn't previously been included in From Software games is a distinct sense of verticality, thanks to the introduction of the grappling hook mechanic. Any given area will have several layers of verticality from which to choose, depending on your preferred level of stealth. It doesn't make a huge difference, but I always prefer level design with verticality in mind to the alternative. 

And with that, we arrive at the technical side of things. From a graphical perspective, Sekiro is easily one of From Software's best looking games. However, it's good looking in that usual From Software kind of way. That's a bit of a difficult thing to describe, but if you've ever played a From Software game, chances are you know what I'm talking about. Though I've heard reports of corrupted save files on the PS4, I never experienced any crashes (hard or soft), texture pop-in, audio or animation glitches, or serious framerate dips. In spite of that, Sekiro isn't a perfect technical package. Though dips in framerate are never serious and never actually interfere with gameplay, there are moments when the framerate does noticeably drop. Furthermore, the soundtrack, while good, lacks the variety and memorability of other From Software OSTs. Lastly, in the heat of certain battles, it felt like the game had some degree of difficulty keeping up with my button inputs. I would try to execute a Mikiri Counter only to watch as Wolf stood there with his finger in his ear. If my timing had simply been off, that would've been a matter of user error, but as it stands, there appear to be rare moments where button inputs don't register after a long series of attacks or deflections. Now, none of these negatives are dealbreakers. Even the rare moments of non-registering inputs are few and far between enough that they don't really have much of an impact. However, they're still worth noting.

Folks, as I hope I've gotten across, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an absolutely brilliant game, but it isn't a game for everybody. It's a rewarding challenge to overcome, but the challenge itself can be so overwhelming that it's easy to see why some folks wouldn't think it worth the time. So if you're the kind of person who needs to be able to surmount difficulty your own way, you may want to let this one slide. If you're the kind of gamer who tends to enjoy stats + precision-based gameplay, but not solely precision-based gameplay, you may want to let this one slide. And you know what? It's perfectly fine to just let this game slide if it isn't for you. However, if you're the type who can stick with an at-times overwhelming challenge, you're likely to find Sekiro one of the most rewarding games you've ever played. 

Let us review:

Technical issues - 0.3

The final score for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is...

9.7/10 - Absolutely Outstanding

Excellent work, From Software, excellent work