Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - From Software and Hidetaka Miyazaki's new game for PS4, XBone, PC

OK, now we're cooking with gas. Got past the giant snake (it never killed me, but leaping to my death did), and just took down my first boss! Maybe ... three or four tries? So far the best strategy on mini bosses and bosses seems to be keeping your distance, but then finding windows of opportunity to be hyper, hyper aggressive. In this case, I used the firecracker trick and the grappling hook, which ... yeah, if I didn't check out a guide this fight would have been dire, like one of the tougher DS bosses. Looks like it unlocked a bunch of abilities to explore, so I'll do that next time I play.

BTW, not sure I like the titular "die twice" mechanic, which I'm sure will turn out to be a plot point but for now is just kind of weird to deal with. You kill the enemy, but then have to kill them ... again. Why not just give it two phases? Also, dragonrot: I've cured it once, so it doesn't seem like it for sure be a huge problem the next time it comes up, but I was wondering how many times you have to resurrect or die or whatever for dragonrot to spread. Like, if you go a long time without dying and resurrecting, is there an invisible counter somewhere that resets? Or is it kind of a cumulative effect that you can't impede? Could you be, say, 5/6 on the invisible dragonrot meter, go a long stretch without resurrecting, and then once you hit number 6, bam, dragonrot?

I really loved that snake part the first time I saw it. I thought the game was just going to be a bunch of dudes fighting each other until then.

I do like that you only seem to incur modest fall damage here, and only in egregious circumstances, and that you can swim, too. Those are some nice changes from previous From games. I hope there are some perma-buff items coming up that will boost my power and give me at least a little more of an advantage over at least smaller dudes. I know I unlocked a latent skill that I *think* helps me heal a little with every deathblow? I should test that out. For all I could tell that helped me with the boss on a a horse, these fights are so fast and frantic.

OK, I killed the Giant Drunkard, then I backtracked to the Bull, which is ... pretty energetic, to say the least. I have a feeling it will take me some time, but I think if I went the other way, back to Hirata, the next (only?) boss there is apparently another roadblock for many, so I have to pick my punishment, I guess.

God I fuckin loved this game

I take it back, the bull wasn't too bad, or at least I got really lucky. I was playing not locked on and I kind of got trapped in a corner with it, so for most of the fight it was, in true Dark Souls fashion, slash at its butt, pivot, slash at its butt, pivot, etc. Went on for that long enough that I started to get a little freaked out, honestly, until I finally got nudged from my magic spot and almost killed. Backed off, healed, dove in and finished it off! Explored a tiny bit further, unlocked I think three (!) more idols, and suddenly there are lots of routes to go.

Yeah the bull felt weirdly like a Dark Souls boss, I remember playing unlocked and running around in a ridiculous manner. Apparently you can deflect/parry the bull, but that's too scary.

I'm sure I deflected it once or twice by spamming the button, but the bull is such a spazz it's hard to know what to do with any fleeting window of opportunity. I did almost die to the enemies that immediately showed up after before I realized what was going on.

Like, someone yells "the enemy is not dead!" or something like that, and my immediate thought was that the bull was coming back to life. Then I realized, wait, *I'm* the enemy, and guys with swords were trying to kill me.

OK, getting stronger now. Took out the next general at the castle, fought a bunch of PIA roof ninjas while hopping from house to house. Unlocking more skills and got some more gourds. Explored a dungeon and fought zombies, this game's version of DS skeletons, I guess, because they come back unless you do extra kill stuff (that I had to look up).

I do find this game pretty manic at times, which is very different from the long spooky stretches in DS and Bloodborne. Everything is just so aggro that I feel a bit like a human pinball.

This dragonrot mechanic is total bullshit. It's bad enough that when you die you lose half your (non-banked) XP and money, but then after x number of deaths everyone gets dragonrot, and until you cure it (which is admittedly easy enough) you can't advance their quests or make them do the thing you want/need them to do. It's just an annoying roadblock, an irritant. Related, I was losing to my first of those blue samurais, which are pretty tough and fast and force you to focus on your parry, and given the choice to revive or just die I figured, eh, I'll just die. I'm right by the idol and don't have much stuff, anyway, and besides, I don't want to add to the dragonrot meter. So I choose "die" and immediately, blam, like five people get dragonrot anyway. wtf? If dying a lot alone is enough to spread dragonrot, then there's going to be a lot of dragonrot.

Just beat the Ashina Elite mini-boss, who was my first double red dot I took down without a a free stealth-kill gimme first. Some of these more frenetic fighters almost reward spamming, since they're so fast you're bound to deflect a chunk of their attacks. Or maybe not. Either way, this dude's attack rhythm was slightly easier to time than I expected.

And *now* I think I'm on the cusp of a couple of tough legit bosses.

Just fought Lady Butterfly for the first time. I died (of course), but I did almost make it through the second phase. Granted, I had no more estus and was out of spirit emblems, but still! A good start.

Lady Butterfly is down! Wasn't *too* bad, all things considered. I was worried I would use up all my snap seeds, but I ended up killing her without needing them. Took about ... 8 tries? (Seems pretty early in the game for such cut-scene *drama*, too.) Anyway, my early (I assume) take is that this might be my least favorite of the From games I've played, but it's still fun.

Another early game qualm I have with this game: On one hand, "Sekiro" actively encourages stealth play with grappling points, tall grass, resetting enemies, stealth deathblows, eavesdropping, etc. On the other hand, mastering the parry mechanism is really the only way to progress, and the only way to master the parry is to fight enemies, not to avoid them or sneak up on them. Sure, the game gives you the zombie sparring partner for practice, but I find him pretty tedious. The flipside is that actual enemies, while much more challenging and productive, are also, you know, very potentially lethal, so while you might get better dying to them over and over again to get better at parrying, there is the downside of dragonrot, losing money, reloading, starting an area all over again, and so on, which is also kinda tedious. It forces a frustrating trade off: speed vs. skill. The easier way is also often the faster way, so you're rewarded in expediency but punished for skipping much needed parry practice. The hard way helps you hone your skills, but it's also sometimes a little boring to fight the same scrubs over and over again when you know there may be an easier alternative.

Compare that to Dark Souls, where the parry, while unnecessary, makes things much easier, a reward for learning to fight better, though even in the faster DS3 and Bloodborne the parry is just one of many options. Here the parry more or less is *necessary,* which makes even the basic enemies tougher, but that also risks turning "Sekiro" into (as others have pointed out) something of a rhythm game. Which Dark Souls et al. sometimes had going on as well, but it was never *key* to the combat to totally memorize slash-slash-parry-slash-parry-parry. Those aforementioned "so many different ways to do it (magic, ranged, poise, shields, dodge, summon friends, etc)" makes things a bit easier, sure, but they also make things a bit more varied and interesting.

you got me playing again

Right now I'm dealing with the Armored Knight, who might be the biggest troll of any of these games so far. Not long after eavesdropping and getting the information that there is a super soldier somewhere whose armor can't be pierced, not long after getting a weapon whose description specifically says something like "will strip the armor from enemies whose armor otherwise can't be pierced, making them vulnerable," they give you a mini-boss that is literally invulnerable, that can't be injured, whose armor can't be pierced or stripped, even with the weapon designed to do that, where beating down its poise is the only way to get a deathblow ... and then the deathblow doesn't even kill it! You have to time the deathblow near a ledge, in essence putting in a bunch of work just to get a built-in cheese. I guess that's pretty funny.

Meanwhile, I think I just messed up a quest, too (somehow). There is a bug crying guy that wants a pinwheel. I offered him the red and white pinwheel, having read that it upgrades a merchant. He said, essentially, thanks but no thanks, what about the white pinwheel? So I give that to him (rather than send him to the dungeon, which seems cruel), and it seems to have progressed his white pinwheel quest. Does that mean I can no longer upgrade a merchant? What did I do wrong? Right now he's asking me to magic him away somewhere, which obviously I can't do. Guess I need to do so more googling.

Hmm, maybe the NPC has dragonrot, which dragonrot-blocked me? Fuck dragonrot.

The Armored Knight is hilarious, definitely an in-joke about a Dark Souls character wandering into the wrong game. But yeah the clue about the loaded spear is just weird, it doesn't even feel like a From troll to deliberately mislead like that, it just seems like a mistake?

I think you're on the right track with the crying NPC, I think he shows up later and you need to use a prosthetic to send him on his way (which I'm sure I wouldn't have known without looking it up).

I think it turns out that I gave him the red and white pinwheel and then, on prompting, the white one, before I went back to that vendor NPC, so I'm out of luck as far as upgrading the vendor goes, afaict. The vendor keeps asking me to send him a big guy, and the big guy keeps asking me to spirit him away, but there is no longer a way to send the big guy to the vendor.

I killed the giant centipede giraffe (wtf?) after a few tries. It felt kind of like a troll, too. It's so fast that there really is no deflection, per se, just spamming the deflect button, which inevitably wears down its poise and lets you kill it in, like 20 seconds.

Least favorite OP common enemies so far might be those little, well, trolls, with the armored hats, that either throw knives at you or poison you, and also evade a lot of your mostly fruitless attacks, often including the ax, which is their mortal foe but which forces you to burn through spirit emblems. That's another contradiction in this game I don't appreciate. The only way to build up stats is to kill enemies for gold and XP, but some of these enemies are such a pain in the ass that you're better off avoiding them entirely, since there is a good chance they'll kill you (these mushroom guys, a couple of those roof ninjas or other spazzing spinning blade enemies), halving whatever gains you hoped to achieve. Literally one step forward, two steps back.

Can't you still use the Divine Abduction prosthetic on him to send him away

Also I remember the main use of the spear being the centipede inside of the giant ape boss, which I never would have figured out on my own

I just took out a couple of other mini bosses, some ninja in a pit and the guy with a spear (who was a huge PIA). I believe next up I have a proper big boss to face, which makes me nervous. I've now upgraded my power with four prayer necklaces, but I have no real clear idea what that means, and while I've been accumulating skills, they're getting so expensive the only way I can imagine going much further is by not dying, and ... yeah, I'm going to keep dying, over and over again. Reminded today of how much more fun Bloodborne was, as this one feels so much more tedious and one-note. Be aggressive! Keep slashing! Fingers crossed you deflect accurately, because it's the only way to beat them! Etc.

Wow at Genichiro. This mid-game boss is pretty much as hard as any end game boss in the other From games, imo. If he was half as fast I'd probably have just as many problems. That said, I've managed to make it through his first red dot and almost the second red dot, so I guess that's some progress. I suppose it really is just a matter of identifying and timing the counters just right, almost to a mathematical degree, which ... well, let's just say math is hard and can be a drag. But again: progress. Gotta love how From offered a few helpful quality of life changes in this game (endless stamina, no weapon degrading, blocking) and then threw in a few things just to fuck with you (like the whole idea of the enemy posture bar, which regenerates, as if to mock you, and making perfect parries the *default* mode of play).

I spent... so many hours on that Genichiro fight. Like more than any boss in any game ever. I will say by the time I beat him, I had the fight down like clockwork and felt pretty badass. But yeah, it was a humbling journey getting there.

I think I've been using Mikiri wrong. I thought I just had to press O but you have to dash toward him at the same time. I hope that helps me!

Oh really? I don't remember that at all, I thought it was just pressing O when you're in range. I wonder if I was pressing forward instinctively the whole time. Seems like it works either way?

I thought it was pressing O, but I've also seen push (dash) forward L while pressing O (that's what the pop up instructions I've seen a hundred times while I'm waiting for him to reload have said), and I also saw someone say you have to first deflect (not block) his attack after he jumps to earn the mikiri, but I have no idea. I've tried a few different strategies so far. One is to get in his face and just attack away, blocking as able/needed, but inevitably he'll do an unblockable grab and more or less kill me, or at least undo any momentum. The other is the death from a thousand cuts strategy, waiting him out and whittling away at his health to make his posture regain slower, but so far I haven't been patient enough. At least it finally occurred to me that you can block pretty much everything he does save for the (er) unblockable attacks, but that rewards patience, too, since eventually you have to let down your guard and get a few hits in.

This was one of my favorite fights, and I remember it being a matter of needing a certain response to every one of his attacks. And there are enough different attacks that it had a sense of depth, and transcended the parry/counter rhythm game.

At least this dumbass is right next to an idol. I need to rest my fingers for a while, but in the meantime, having watched a few guides, I always find it odd that when I fight these assholes their moves are soooo much more seemingly unpredictable than for the dudes who can take them out without breaking a sweat. Granted, they've probably played the games a hundred hours more than I have, but at the same time, I can't even mikiri this boss and they make it look so easy, and, in this specific instance, where they say "first phase is almost always a stab," I get a mix of grabs, stabs and sweeps that make it hard to get to phase two without almost all my estus.

I think some of his moves have to do with how close you are, so maybe staying in his face vs keeping your distance dictates how it plays out to some extent. But obviously there's some rng too.

I just made it to the third round for the first time. What kind of stupid system makes you kill an enemy twice and then ... makes you kill it *again*, a third time? Like, why give him two life bars if he essentially has three? Annoying. Anyway, not going to beat this guy if I can't figure out why my mikiri is not countering, but he's so fast and so lethal it doesn't give me more than a couple of times to even practice before he takes me out.

That being said, I have gotten him to his third phase a few times now, so I know it's doable. Now it's just a matter of the same aforementioned BS, figuring out how to properly (in this case) time the lightning deflection in the few seconds I have, before he kills me and send me back to the start again. Which, yeah, that's pretty tedious.

OK, this third round seems a little more forgiving, but will still take some time. I really don't get how ... I dunno, how *off* this otherwise well-tuned game is? Like, you fight the world's toughest dude, then he ... for no reason takes off his armor? And *then* he introduces lightning attacks? Why does he take off his gear? Why doesn't he just start with lightning? Not complaining, because it should make things easier. Just sayin'.

I killed him. The fucker. Having honed my skills enough to take him out in his first form both times several times (before quickly panic-dying to his next phase) I got really impatient and sloppy being made to fight him again and again, but then more or less fortunately stumbled onto a way to speed up the fight. The first few times I fought him I had the ichimonji combat art armed, yet given how much I was spamming block/deflect I kept accidentally ichimonjing him, which made me vulnerable to getting killed. Instead I switched to the spinning attack for most of my fights, which was less punishing to me when I accidentally used it, since I usually at least got a few hits in on him in the process. After still dying a bunch, albeit with more regular wins over at least his first round and a good number of wins over his second round, I figured I should change my fight style up a little, since it wasn't working consistently. Instead, I re-armed ichimonji (double ichimonji, as a matter of fact) and found that while it doesn't quite stunlock him you can still get several overhead hits in a row before he regroups and gathers strength again and you have to defend a bit. Yet all along those overhead hits (and other strikes you get in) have been lowering his vitality, which keeps his posture meter high, so I was able to get a rhythm down and get past both parts of that fight with most of my estus left over for his next phase. And as I noted, the next phase this toughest of tough bosses basically turns into a big pussy. "Beware my wrath! I will now ... strip off my armor, making me easier to stagger, and throw in an AOE lightning attack that not only is pretty easy to reverse, but it turns out that I, Genichiro, can be stunned by my own lightning!" And the rest is pretty fast and simple, thank goodness.

If there is one silver lining it's that dying to him a million times only got me one unit of Dragonrot, like the game was taking pity on me. Though the dickhead of course comes back to life *again* at the end, so fuck you, From. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. But sometimes three times. And sometimes not at all.

Now I'm going to rest my cramped trigger fingers.

Nice! Yeah 'phase 3' in this game is usually just trying to psyche you out with a new flashy attack, but should be shorter & easier iirc. Unlike Friede in DS3, where phase 3 was by far the most dangerous.

Watching this, it's definitely not how I remember fighting him, but sure makes it look easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg73iVitFM0

(also the next bit mentions that the spear clue references "ill-fitting armor", which ok, sure, wouldn't apply to the big dumb Dark Souls knight, his armor fit very nicely)

lol, so the giant babies with diapers are the ones with "ill-fitting armor?" Whatever, From. I assume like this guy did that that's just one of a few translation errors in this game. The first time I was fighting that guy with the bell, btw, I killed his dogs and ran to hide, and as I waited for him to chill he went over and got sad about the dogs. And then later there's another guy like him who is sad about his dead monkey. What's up with that, From? Making me feel bad about these ruthless, relentless monsters.

Anyway, I don't trust shit like that video. Is he in NG+? What are the icons under his vitality? How is using something like mist raven not a cheese, but any other advantage apparently is a cheese?

Regardless, sure, if you can always do perfect deflections then you'll wear down any enemies to nothing. But perfect deflections all the time are like perfect parries all the time are like those people that beat Dark Souls with no armor and a broken sword at skill level one with bongos. Sure, you did it, guys, good for you, but some of us can't dedicate our lives to gitting so gud we've got every last second of the game timed out. We do the best we can with what we've got.

I found that deflections weren't that bad because the game is quite forgiving about letting you re-guard and try again soon after you attempt a parry too early, I spent a lot of time holding, releasing and reholding the button

I wondered if PC 60fps was somehow making the game mechanically way easier than console tho, as I am not amazing at these games and found Sekiro to be some distance easier than every other From game

You might be onto something. I generally follow the fighting cowboy walkthroughs, and he stated at the start of this one that he's playing on a PC. Maybe that explains why some of these folks have no problem mikiri countering certain enemies that seem impossible to time on my PlayStation. Genericho, for example, I was never able to consistently get the counter in on his armored form. I would go back to the tutoring dummy and try again and again on him, with no problems. But the boss himself, rarely. And yet in his final form, no problem getting to counter.

Yeah it's NG+, which gives you an option to get take damage whenever you don't do a perfectly timed deflection. Makes the game way harder obv, but also teaches you proper parry timing I guess.

I think the Mist Raven thing is because people considered it a useless skill when the game came out, and he was trying to find applications for it.

Of course, the big downside of having beat a mid-game boss that felt almost like a late-game boss is that I have no desire right now to move forward, and I suspect once I do it will be with some some serious trepidation of what's to come.

Holy shit at the rooftop monkeys in kimonos! I love not only that this "fight" exists, but that it exists as a *boss fight.* So silly. I wish From did more stuff like this, just to lighten the mood a little.

Yeah there are some more varied, gimmicky fights and set pieces coming up I think, nothing as exacting as Genichiro for awhile.

I hate the XP system in this game. In order to advance your skill trees you need XP, but every time you die (for good) you lose half your XP. And of course the amount of XP needed keeps getting bigger and bigger, too. So any time I find myself with even half my XP meter filled I feel compelled to go waste some time farming, because dying (even accidentally) to a tough enemy will undo all that work I did to even fill the meter half way. And of course just about any time you go up against more than a couple of enemies, at least at this point in the game, you run the risk of dying, so any farming you do has to be more of the easing pickings type, which is ... slow work. Why they decided to go this route is beyond me. It's a game designed to kill you a lot that also punishes you for dying.

thing is, XP are secondary to Prayer Beads, you don't really need many of the skills unlocked by gaining XP to get far in the game, whereas Prayer Beads are pretty essential

Well, you really never *need* anything, as a hundred youtubers have demonstrated with these games. Prayer Beads you do need to get stronger, gourds you need to get more estus, but XP you definitely need for skills to make things a little easier in some circumstances. Case in point: were it not for ichimonji I would have gotten even more bored fighting Genericho over and over again and possibly set the game aside a while. Though, fair enough, I can see not needing to go past a certain point in skills.

Regarding prayer beads, weird, then, that for being essential the prayer beads are generally gleaned by fighting often *optional* mini-bosses. Just another aspect of From perversity. (One of my favorite From FU moves is making you face singular tough enemies early game, then throwing in situations with several of them later. I'm at the gun fort part now.)

Pretty standard in these games to be rewarded for exploration/playing more of the game, but hardcore speedrunners (or just people who have played the game before) don't necessarily need the extra stats/gear