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

so i am getting pretty excited about this now
this is inessential viewing but it has a great bit at the end that hit my sweet spot: "every game by from software arrives like a sort of birthday present just for you"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4V8HAvZcS4

Heh, that's pretty good. I am excited enough that when my partner said "I won't be home on Sunday, I have an all day continuing education seminar", um, I wasn't exactly dismayed.

having seen more footage now this looks very much not like dark souls other than being difficult. it's a stealth action game

Seems like a riff on Souls concepts, playing against things they've done before? Like getting rid of the stamina bar but adding the 'posture' mechanic that forces you to parry.

most reviews seem to think this is significantly harder than dark souls

my copy is waiting for me at home

i am psyched

mine is en route; I'm busy all weekend but will need to do some late night exploration. super psyched, may need to cancel some plans tbh!

the whole "Spider Souls" vibe i'm getting has me confounded and crazy curious

Psyched for the difficulty curve and to be bad at a new game.

this seems v promising after the first hour of play - feels good to be blowing the dust off my parrying muscle memory

where's my game mr azmazong mang

not cool amazon, get it fuckin sorted

I got the digital this time (mostly so I never have to take the DS3 disc out, lol), all downloaded and ready to go. My terrible internet appreciates the relatively small file size.

sorted! Loading! Won't be able to play until late night but making sure it's installed and updated so i can actually have a go at it.

i suppose a 2.5 gig patch day of release is sort of standard these days? this is why nintendo makes money you guys: plug and play.

a lot of Nintendo games have patches now though it's mostly to add dlc or improve performance and not to fix game breaking bugs

I picked myself up off the ground and rushed at him. He began an onslaught of attacks and, after six hours of learning his style and developing the muscle memory, I just started parrying on instinct. Each one of his swings and each arrow he fired was met with a perfectly timed raise of my sword. Every unblockable attack he lunged at me with was sidestepped or hopped immaculately. I watched as his Posture deplete, edging closer to the breaking point, and at the same time I could feel my breathing become more rapid, my thumbs beginning to tremble. I wore him down and delivered a Deathblow, backed away, and did it all over again, and a third time. In that final moment when I pierced through him with my katana, I was completely overcome with emotion. After six gruelling hours of failure, the winning battle lasted just six minutes. I'm not too proud to admit that I cried, and I'd do it all over again.

I will never play this game lol

It's not a deathblow if you have to do it three times imo

death-edging

on a scale of 0 - 450, how important is parrying in this game?

420

Only had time to go through the tutorial section, but it feels good so far! I like the new parry (deflect) mechanic. Died once.

first mini boss killed me 25 times then suddenly i figured it out and slaughtered him w/out even needing a flask/gourd. resigned myself to an unstoppable dragonrot epidemic

That guy took me awhile too. Seems like you need to be very aggressive and stay close, but also learn their attacks. I also realized that you can interrupt his special attacks, but I'm sure that's not true of all bosses.

Now I'm sword-fishing for carp.

yeah kiting him did and trying to chip away with shurikens did me no good.

also if you throw a fistful of ash in his face you can get a few hits in, enough to trigger his posture-healing routine (which can be interrupted and punished).

tenchu vibes are strong here with the rooftops and the grappling hook and raining death upon unsuspecting mooks.

Got through a lot of mini-bosses (bosses?) yesteday! I feel like I'm juuust starting to get the hang of the combat. Although, most of the bosses that seem impossible at first are much easier with the right prosthetic/skill/upgrade/stealth approach. There's probably a 'hardcore' way to do them with straight up combat. Two little things that I didn't realize until a friend told me:

1) You can do a charged thrust attack by holding down R1 (I had no idea)

2) For the secret doors in this game, you have to hug the wall

This is a pretty good characterization of the combat system (shows a couple mini-bosses from later on) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PekhBmZOd1Q

So, did you all give up, or

lol, i got nailed with work and haven't touched this beyond the introduction of the grappling hook! Likely gonna need to wait until mid-summer before i can dig in.
whats the general takeaway from y'all who are playing?

Everyone took the game back to the shop because they can't beat the Chained Ogre and consider his grab attacks to be "bullshit". Lots of soul-searching going on about how we raised such a disappointing generation of people

Ha. That's probably the easiest, most Souls-friendly miniboss so far!

Honestly I'm loving this game. It's been relatively linear so far but seems to be just starting to open up.

not had as much time to play this as i’d hoped but it’s an intriguing new twist on soulsborne so far - finding it a bit of a challenge to get a handle on but it’s a rewarding one

honestly tempted to either say fuck it to everything else in my life and disappear down a GIT GUD rabbithole or else just watch minimized youtube/twitch of playthroughs
being a grown up is not cool

I feel you, I've really only been playing on the weekends when my partner is working. A friend of mine, who is a professor and "on spring break", has been texting my constantly about playing it. We are very mature adults.

OK the boss fight at the top of the castle is fucking amazing

Like if Ornstein and Smough were fun

"mid-air lightning parry" is a bit of a fkn heavy duty mechanic to introduce during the third stage of a gruelling boss fight though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp7Ofgpfxoc

OK the boss fight at the top of the castle is fucking amazing

Definitely a highlight so far. I got to the third phase on the first try, then died many times trying to get back to it (classic!). It felt like a real leap of faith to let yourself get hit with by the lightning w/o dodging, and then reverse it.

I'm just finishing up the temple, and it seems like there are some real branching paths at this point in the game, or at least it seems like you can do big areas in any order (and also get to them through very different routes?).

Also I am really bad at exploration sometimes, I entirely missed the way to get to one area because I didn't look to the left.

The boss in the temple that wandered in from Dark Souls is pretty funny all around

Give me a DLC where I kill Genichiro over and over forever

Also, this game shouldn't have had a block function. Parry perfectly every single time or die imo

Have people getting routinely sliced to pieces by mooks in the tutorial area, smashing up the game disc, baying for blood, it's the right thing to do

Bushido Blade 2019

Getting into the endgame now. The rhythm of throwing yourself at a boss until you learn all their moves + how to respond to each might not be for everyone, but this is an an excellent game for me.

Kinda wish there were more areas after the point where they can guarantee that you have all the abilities/prosthetics, it makes for more interesting level design possibilities.

This dork beat the game in 27 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Mt6YRSlHQ

Joke's on him, that's the "bad" ending

This is easier than Souls and Bloodborne, right? Every souls game I've got stuck somewhere after a frenzied two weeks of play at release and then come back to it months later. I've made pretty much constant progress through this and I've never been stuck on a boss for more than an evening, without being able to summon anybody. I mean it gives you a looot of other powerful tools as you progress

It's brilliant anyway, like a more breezily paced, easier on the eye Hollywood souls. The sword fights are really visually entertaining. There's nothing like the mounting despair of thinking you're going to be stuck on a boss for an Ornstein and Smough amount of time, and then the next thing you know the deathblow icon's appeared on screen because you got the rhythm down and obliterated his posture in a scandalously short amount of time. And it's 1am, sure

The one flaw is the lack of replay value, I'm not replaying a game with no character customisation just to get a different inscrutable souls game ending

finding it very difficult to wait for this to come down to a sensible price /skinflint

i am bad at this, and definitely find it harder than bloodborne due to how aggressive the boss AI is - the speed is way higher and i guess i've got old man hands. irritating thing i've been banging my head against Lady Butterfly because now i've finally got her timing down to a no-damage 45 second first phase, i've run out of snap seeds and phase 2 is a bitch without them.

the great thing about this game is you don't get quite as locked out of game exploration as you do in bloodborne/souls - i've been stuck on a combo of being beaten by Lady / Seven Spears for a few days and i've just gone and explored a shit ton of other areas

Feel like a lot of the human-sized enemies require sprinting towards them to close the distance and prevent posture damaging/non-interruptible mid-range attacks. There's a major later game boss where it's surprisingly easy to interrupt most of his close range moves if you hold your nerve and keep attacking until he parries or jumps away

Lady Butterfly is kinda bullshit though. I used up three snap seeds in unrelated areas when I meant to heal cos the default item switch controls are stupid

It just sucks that you can't farm for them like you can most other items - unless i'm just being unlucky/missing something obvious

I didn't use snap seeds tbh, just ran around until she dispels the illusions (or turns them into butterflies that she shoots at you, and you need to keep running or stand behind a pillar).

Oh I struggled so much with even some of the minor minibosses. Chained Ogre took ages

Every one of these games have a couple of bosses that are just absolute pushovers. No idea why. If memory serves, just about every other boss in Sekiro is a huge, imposing challenge, with the exception of one novelty boss level.

the pushover is a delight in sekiro. just a lovely gimmick boss level.

I just googled to remind myself, and man, there are some bosses and mini bosses that gave me sooooo much trouble.

It was the Demons Souls bosses that confounded me the most. I think I only had major trouble with about three of them? And half of them went down first time. Some of them barely put up a fight at all, just stood there letting me wail on them

Stuck between a bull and a butterfly. The procession of bosses and mini-bosses is relentless, which is a shame because I definitely like the stealth/explore parts of these games more than trying to work out the best combination of moves will help to cheese which impossible boss. Drunkard Juzuo took at least 20-30 tries.

It is a weird balance, when I think about it, between stealth and totally aggro relentless fights required to advance.

So far I've either aced a boss or struggled loads and had to rely on semi-cheesing (deaggroing them then backstabbing)

Tbh I don't remember maintaining stealth very often in this game.

This is probably the least cheese-able game out of all the From games, in terms of bosses. It's been awhile but they all use the mechanics in a slightly different way, and force you to fight on their terms (some are more about doing vitality damage, others are more about breaking their posture, etc). I guess the 'cheese' comes in using items or ninja skills that they're weak to.

Highly recommend checking out some of these silly but informative videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMFJMCWtY-w

Ok I think I'm going to have to start another playthrough :)

that fuckin bull tho.

Half the reason I want to play this again is that I now know you can parry the bull.

The stealth stuff, iirc, involved hiding in tall grass, leaping from roof to roof, etc, then zipping down for a kill, stuff like that.

I did forget that you can often use stealth to get rid of one of some (but definitely not all) bosses' life bars.

yeah, so this was the only way I could beat Juzuo the Drunk (the sumo guy on Hirata Estate).

There's a way to sneak through the building on the left hand side, sneak up behind one of his aids, backstab, run behind the building again until they de-aggro, and repeat. You can then get a cheeky stealth backstab on the boss before fighting him properly (with the help of that fella standing in the water to distract him).

If you don't kill all his aids first, it's a really tough fight. Even if you do, it's tricky as anything. I was subsisting on left-hand dodge rolls and then hitting him in the back a few times. Bu the rhythm would be interrupted when he would push me into a corner or against a rock.

I don't know whether things like the "sneak/backstab/de-aggro/repeat" method is the "right" way to do it, or indeed if it counts as cheesing, but it's in the game I guess? If this is how hard the early minibosses are, god knows what to expect for the rest of the game.

I'm really bad at knowing which moves are being telegraphed, and more often than not I just can't parry or do the correct type of riposte anywhere close to in time. There have been points where I SWEAR I've hit the correct button and just watch as the enemy picks me up and stomps me to an inch of my health bar.

i think in that sort of fight you’re certainly expected to pick off the minions, before tackling the big boss, though that back route feels a bit cheesy, as you say. mainly because they do not react as their mates fall to the ground around them.

my general approach is “absolutely do not care how i achieve beating this boss, the easier the better”.

Great general approach. Anything else is insanity tbh

I started a new game and it's feeling great so far.

You're totally right about there being no right way to win - items, backstabs, 'cheese', whatever. But later bosses might be harder to beat by slowly chipping down their vitality and running away, because they have huge health pools or are really good at blocking/deflecting your attacks. So you'll probably be forced at some point to win by breaking their posture, which requires you to keep on top of them (basically deflecting their attacks, and attacking when they stop attacking, and dodging/countering their perilous attacks - the ones telegraphed by those Japanese symbols and some sort of movement tell).

There have been points where I SWEAR I've hit the correct button and just watch as the enemy picks me up and stomps me to an inch of my health bar.

Yeah, you'll never be able to parry/counter a grab attack, those are the ones where you need to get a sense of the telegraph move and just jump back/dodge/run out of the way.

Man, early ogre grab attack, giant monkey grab attack ...

Also tbf I don't think you're supposed to constantly deflect/parry huge enemies with huge swords like Juzou, because they're huge and cause a ton of posture build-up.

And also once an enemy's vitality gets low, their posture doesn't recover as fast, so maybe you can use the hit-and-run strategy for most bosses? But it will probably take way longer and be harder for some of them, and also it's fun to stay in their face and swordfight. It's definitely an adjustment from Souls, which drill dodging and spacing into you. One of those Saint Riot videos makes the point that a lot of early game bosses in Sekiro (Juzou, the bull, maybe even Lady Butterfly) do in fact require a lot of dodging and spacing, and maybe it would have been good to include more deflection-based fights in the early game.

Ok I'm deeply back into this game now, just got past Genichiro on the Ashina Castle rooftop (and whatever comes after this is a bit of a haze in my memory until the end game). Such a fantastic fight.

Stealth is a *much* bigger part than I remembered, I had gotten used to fighting multiple enemies in Souls/Elden Ring but you really really don't want to do it here. Also using a lot more items and skills than in my first playthrough, I think.

Well, the big monkey still took hours of attempts this time around. I was pretty happy with this run though, even got some spear ripostes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-E5PUOxlk8

Beating big monkey is what eventually gave my controller drift.

Man, I kinda want to search for old reactions from the first people that faced this boss blind.

I got to Lady Butterfly and got in the mood for revisiting Dark Souls. So now I'm stuck on her, the Bull and Ornstein & Smough all at the same time!

Haha, I think a lot should open up once you get past those walls.

I managed to first-try the ape couple, aka Sekiro's version of O&S. Same strats basically, run away (unlocked, with the camera pointed behind you), and attack the more aggressive one when you can!

Thanks to a guide, I'm actually trying a different ending this time, the Purification one. I thought I had already broken it somehow and was about to kill the giant divine lightning dragon, but it turns out I just needed to eavesdrop on my crew a bunch.

The alternate Hirata Estate is no joke, just got to Owl pt. 2 after beating the ninja who keeps summoning dogs and Juzuo and friends pt. 2.

This game is so damn good, and I know I'm still missing a bunch of things (like once again not bothering with most of the Headless/undead minibosses).

Does anyone listen to the Bonfireside Chat podcast? I think it's excellent for listening to people discuss the lore of these games.

That said, I was surprised just how cold they were on Sekiro, and especially the reasons they give for not really loving it, many of which could easily be ascribed to Dark Souls anyway.

Strangely, they also dislike DS3 while stanning hard for DS2, neither of which I've played through much, but I understand goes against popular consensus

I haven't but I hate those opinions. Tbh I don't really care much about the lore though, I just let the vibe wash over me and I mostly care about the action/mechanics/pvp etc.

DS3 = best pvp, it's insane to think about the amount of time I spent on it, wish it was still more active

DS2 = I just can't, I'm glad it has its fans but it just doesn't feel good to me (mostly due to the art/animation/mechanics and timing of everything)

DS1 = best world design and atmosphere, always up for a comfort replay

Sekiro = best single-player game maybe?

Bloodborne = amazing game, love it and have fond memories of the main game + dlc + pvp, but for some reason I've never been able to get through a second playthrough. I usually stall out early on for some reason (maybe because I'm impatient and don't want to farm blood vials?).

And Elden Ring is just kind of the summation of everything, although I haven't felt compelled to go back to the pvp in the last few months.

PvP is something I've barely touched in any of these games.

In Elden Ring it seems to take forever for me to get summoned, even at the coliseums, and I think I've won, like, one match in all my time.

I have no idea how covenants work in Dark Souls either. Is it worth looking into while I'm playing the main story, or more of a post-completion thing? No idea what they are or how they work really.

I tried to get pure white tendency for Demon's Souls but that first NPC you're meant to save got himself killed. I might go back and check out black tendency but it sounds tough and the game is already tough enough!

With Elden Ring I really loved getting deep into the lore. It's so rich and well fleshed-out, and you can watch endless YouTubes about it.

Lore for Demon's Souls felt more obfuscated. I played the whole thing through and I'm still not sure what was happening or why I was doing it or what the various NPCs' motives were, despite watching a good few vids.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne - no clue. Any time I try and read or watch some lore stuff they seem to be talking about later-game events I haven't reached yet. So it feels a bit like it's the kind of thing you play through once, then read up about, then play again with a much better knowledge of what's happening.

The Daddy Owl fight is now my favorite, although it definitely took a few hours to get comfortable with. So great to be able to go back and play a new-to-me boss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbFmPCqR4YQ

And with that I think I'm done for this run, at least for awhile. Not particularly interested in learning the Demon of Hatred and Isshin fights again, and I'm still recovering from some tendonitis and this game is making it flare up (so much left hand action with the deflecting).

Just started this and it is sooo much my jam. Don't know why it took me so long. I'm on record as a huge Tenchu stan and this does feel like a worthy successor though I would have liked a bit more stealth. But I won't be greedy. I love anticipating the bosses. I love having to redo little sections and just becoming amazing at them. I love the Japanese. The stances, and how you break break them, reminds me of Bushido Blade. HIGH PRAISE. I even love how the menus etc are sort of nasty and PC-like. It is incredibly responsive. I guess that's.. I dunno frame rate or something, but it's also a decision they made for your guy to be quick.

My only real complaint? The fan on my PS4 sounds like a goddamn AIR CONDITIONER when I'm playing this, even with HDR off. Any tips?? Kinda ruins the atmos

Some people recommend opening it up and cleaning out the dust, but I don't recall my PS4 being that loud when I played this game, or any game, for that matter. I had a Slim.

Huh maybe I'll try that! I also have a slim