Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Critique
Sekiro released to worldwide praise in March 2019, with sparse updates and no DLC since. While I enjoyed the game for its learning experience and rhythmic kinaesthetics (seriously show me a game that has such a smooth flow of animations between attacking, parrying, dodging, etc., it's hypnotic), I thought the combat was fairly shallow compared to FromSoft's last titles. This critique will focus on its lack of gameplay depth and how that plays out across its different modes of play, rather than trying to cover all kinds of other (just as valid) metrics of quality.
I'll start with describing my experience with and approach to the game, so you know where I'm coming from and what I spent 350 hours doing. Then I'll break down Sekiro's core mechanics and what depth is, do an obligatory Dark Souls comparison, and look at how broken the structure is in terms of stealth and traversal. I'll then make some broad points about content design as to how it all works in practice, and go through a lot of smaller points and subsystems to wrap up (like healing, camera, exploration).
There will be some technical language I won't explain in great detail so if you're unfamiliar with action and fighting games, a glossary might help.
Game methods
Before playing Sekiro, I played all the souls games, though I didn't complete or replay Bloodborne and Demon's Souls. I played Sekiro on launch (v1.02) on PC with a controller, getting the Shura ending blind (35 hours) and then 100% Purification with some online hints to get Owl (Father) (23 hours). I didn't do Butterfly early, and spent a lot of time exploring, stealth killing everything, and running away. Flame Isshin was pretty tough but once I beat him I understood the game and got Sword Saint in ~5 tries.
I then did a no beads run (no health upgrades), where I had to actually learn Sword Saint, a few prosthetics only runs which are janky cheese (not recommended), and then new game without Kuro's Charm and with Demon Bell, where I did bull skip because the early game was so tanky. I came back much later to do two randomizer runs with these settings: run 1, run 2. While writing this I got the 1.05 patch and did the boss rushes with some new boss variations.
Core Gameplay
So first let's establish depth. Celia Wagar has a lot of writing on this, and in the most direct and practical sense is her four criteria for what makes a mechanic deep, dynamic and efficient:
Using this as a framework, let's break down the actions available to players in Sekiro and how they do in terms of these categories; tradeoffs, versatility, modulation, and interaction with other elements. Your primary offensive options come in the form of a normal and a charged melee attack. Whether seen as a modulation or two different verbs, it's a classic pair of options with key tradeoffs. Charging takes time (if the enemy is able to get their guard up, that time lets them parry it right away), but gives the attack longer range. Charged attacks also deal more damage to their health, but less posture damage. Posture is a second form of health that regenerates faster the higher health the character has, and builds up even when blocking an attack. If your posture maxes out you get stunned shortly, while for an enemy it has the same result as if you emptied their health; letting you take off one of their health bars (mini- / bosses have multiple).
In effect, charged attacks let you gap close efficiently, take advantage of larger openings, and chip down their health; whereas normal attacks progress the fight primarily with posture damage and are easier to land. As they require you to be in melee or close to it, their main interaction is with positioning and the other verbs that affect or are informed by that. There's also more powerful attacks unlocked later, many weapon arts and the axe prosthetic acting as straight forward slow but powerful attacks. Beyond that they work very similarly with the rest of the game and enemies.
For how these attacks interact with enemies, enemy states are somewhat complex. If you hit an enemy they will stagger and come out of whatever animation they were doing (unless it's a hyperarmor attack). This then puts them into neutral; a state devoid of any actions being taken or effects affecting either side. They block in neutral to take posture rather than health damage, and after blocking 1-2 attacks they parry you, which gains them frame advantage (your recovery is longer than theirs, so if you both attack they will usually hit first). You can't just spam attack, it goes in phases and the attacker will usually have the advantage until parried. These phases are pretty uninteractive, you can predict and avoid the parry (which deals little posture damage) by stopping your attacks early, but you still have to switch between offense and defense as the game dictates.
As for your own defense, you can recover from maxing out posture and can respawn a few times if your health reaches zero (as per the "Die Twice" gimmick), but otherwise it's much the same as enemies. A perfectly-timed block results in a parry (there's a half second window so it doesn't need to be quite perfect), which also increase the enemy's posture. Both blocking and parrying is directional, so using it against several enemies at once or without being locked on is tricky (some attacks that involve the enemy moving can hit you through block despite locking on, e.g. Oniwa's jumping attacks).
This is your main defense, as it can progress the fight by damaging enemy posture, and if you fail to time it you're likely to still get a block and take no damage - you can spam the button to have a decent chance to parry and almost never get hit. With no animation to commit to and instant activation on top of that, there's not much of a tradeoff. You also have a dodge, which you want to use in some cases where you need to get HP damage since their posture will regenerate faster than you damage it. Dodging behind the enemy prevents them from blocking your follow-up since their block is also directional. Since you're getting a longer window to attack them and may be further away, dodging goes hand in hand with charge attacks, which take more time to execute but have longer range, and do more HP damage at a cost to posture damage.
Dodging has a lot more nuance than parrying, letting you dodge in several directions on top of the varying timings, and it interacts with your positioning both before and afterwards, informing where you should dodge and the dodge informing your options afterwards. This creates tradeoffs in combination with melee attacks, as dodging away might be safer or more efficient in some way, but prevents you from being as aggressive. However, parrying gets you more posture damage, more safely, while getting similar amounts of HP chip damage in, so it's very rare that dodging is more beneficial against regular attacks.
Then there's jumping, which lets you cover more distance in one go compared to dodging, and gets you some verticality, but otherwise is inferior with fewer invincibility frames. I made a quick Paint job showing how jumping is better for moving a medium distance (enough to outdistance most melee attacks) faster than dodging does, but has a longer recovery, doesn't transition into running, and offers no control during that longer action. So it works as a panic button (especially versus grabs since dodging doesn't have i-frames against those), as well as its obvious use to bypass environmental obstacles. The fact that you can jump forward, backwards, sideways or straight up gives it some modulation even though you can't move or do much in the air. You can also get skills that let you do weapon arts and prosthetics mid-air which do a lot to make the jump more versatile and interesting to use. If you can use the jump's i-frames to dodge an attack that doesn't have a follow-up, you can then start a powerful punish option while doing that, provided you have the right skills and enough spirit emblems and the option equipped and selected...
So grabs are a special "perilous" attack (marked by a red 危 meaning danger), and there's a couple more that go against these foundations due to being unblockable. Grabbing is usually best countered by dashing into a run, going away from / around them, and doing a running attack once the hitbox ends (charge attack to time it for x1.5 damage as grabs have long recoveries). It's FromSoft so the hitboxes are pretty wild at times, but as it's pure positioning to avoid, it works pretty well in interacting with your melee offense.
Perilous swipes and thrusts are hard coded to have silver bullets through iframes and counter moves. Frame data source here. You get more than a second of invulnerability when jumping a swipe, nothing else matters, just press the button at some point and you can also do a goomba stomp on them for a lot of posture damage so you get most rewarded for the easiest and safest option. Very binary, their weapon can go straight through your model, no nuance or interaction as positioning and attack hitbox don't matter at all.
Perilous thrusts are simply parried by default (no blocking though, so fail the timing and you're hit), and your forward dodge has no i-frames against them. I'm not sure what dodge you get when not locked on, I've had some janky as hell thrust hits and misses but it could just be hitboxes. When locked on you have 360 degree dodging though, so at the forward-facing diagonals you may get 0.3 seconds of invincibility or nothing, making for some jankiness. Once you unlock Mikiri Counter you can dodge into thrusts to do a ton of posture damage to the enemy, so you want to stand still (so they track and hit you) and press the right button at the right time. Same as parrying or jumping a swipe, very much a hard counter with no nuance or tradeoffs. It's also janky as you want to get hit but part of the counter is moving which may cause the enemy to miss - which definitely happens, they can even miss when you're standing still parrying.
Having more buttons in a rhythm game doesn't make for more decisions, and perilous attacks are akin to that. It's more complexity in controls, but not in strategy. If all these attacks were countered by the same defensive option it wouldn't change much as they don't have tradeoffs or much interaction with other actions.
Time, Optimisation and Skill Levels
So positioning is relatively unimportant for defense, and not very nuanced for offense. Another axis these options can interact across is time. Sekiro lets you cancel attacks into any defensive option during the wind-up animation, so there's no commitment to attacking, and the main defensive option doesn't require any commitment either as it has instant start-up and no recovery. As a result, the game almost never has you make a decision on whether to attack or not in light of what the boss is doing or what you're planning for defense in response to that. Just attack constantly, and if you need to dodge or jump or parry, you can cancel the attack on reaction into any one of those.
As you get better at the game and overall success is a bit of a given however, you value time more, and can squeeze out some nuance and depth from speedrunning (not necessarily competitively, just trying to be fast). It makes for new tradeoffs, largely between safety and speed like not healing when you're damaged, or trying to parry a whole combo from a boss instead of outdistancing it and punishing the last move after it misses. Learning when to sneak in weapon arts or prosthetic tools when the boss is busy recovering or winding up can also make for subtle changes in strategy.
With Sekiro's core mechanics being fairly limited though, the biggest thing for optimising is manipulating the complex enemy states and AI, which can be really neat but aren't very intuitive. For example how to most efficiently cheese the ape, or what rhythm to use
firecrackers in to get highest DPS on monks, or dodging a parriable attack so they do a follow-up perilous that you can punish better. You figure these things out
through random experimentation and memorization rather than heuristics and feedback. This is the aspect that really lines up to Punch-Out!!, another game where on the surface it's very Simon Says and while it can be more interactive with complicated AI and states, there's no way to approach that casually as the game doesn't communicate those details very well. For me this means watching a speedrun is neat, but trying to route it myself not so much. Dark Souls captures some of this in elemental weaknesses, but it's a small optional thing added on top of solid core mechanics rather than the main way to optimise your play.
For example, running away and strafing attacks is more relevant as it hedges your bets against their unknown attacks, you may want block to regenerate posture instead of trying to run over and punish the boss after an evasive attack (which sets you up differently for whatever they then do), you'll likely need to heal a lot so you want to time that well (and set up to heal through positioning), positioning matters more in smaller arenas since you want to be able to outrange their attacks and not run into a wall, guard breaks put you in unique situations where you may need to respond to a wake-up attack or time your recovery, and enemies have more states and attacks they do in reaction to you staying away or being hit (if you need to recover they can come at different timings relative to yours as well).
At the same time, the ease of which you can run away, the amount of healing items, the generous resurrection system, and various jank and inconsistencies bring it down a notch so it's two steps forward, one step back. The jank is mostly carry-overs from Dark Souls in stored rolls, being staggered by one hit and that stagger causing an unavoidable extra hit, unintuitive tracking, and generous hitboxes (these aren't necessarily bad, since you want to get hit for parries, but on lower level you parry less in my experience). Being hit by seemingly standard attacks can cause Sekiro to do a recovery or stagger animation which is rarely intuitive and awkward to spot in time as your eyes are on your enemy, and limit your options (you can still deflect, but not block, and dodging commits you to a long recovery roll). If you play well, similar to doing no hit in Dark Souls, you don't have to deal with most of this. I say most because there's still some, like attacks hitting through block or AI fuckery. And if you're optimizing with success as a given, unfair hits and jank stuff can put you in more interesting situations without risking unfair deaths, which is why I think this is most negative for newer players.
The Souls Dynamic
Dark Souls is pretty cool, so let's compare for a moment. It has a tightly knit set of simple to understand mechanics, all centered around its stamina and positioning. Melee attacks with various hitboxes and ranges are informed by your position and stamina situation, and attacking affects both of those as well (draining stamina to different degrees depending on attack, and making your movement restricted as part of the animation).
Then your primary defense is dodging, which has nuance in its multi-directionality, costs stamina, can be informed by stamina (if you only have enough for one you may dodge away, while you dodge close if you have enough to roll every attack and/or counterattack), and is all about positioning. Since it's button-up (to let you run by holding down the button), there's also technically some modulation as you can delay the i-frame window. Since you don't get rewarded for being in the attack hitbox (parrying for posture damage) and dodging costs a resource, you are pushed to both run (independently of dodging, with its own lower stamina cost) and simply walk to avoid attacks. That's the optimal way to dodge most things, and is pure nuanced positioning.
There's also interaction between different actions through time, due to long startup and recovery animations, and variable attacks (heavy attacks are slower with more payoff, and weapons differ). If you make an attack, you commit to that action which informs your options going forward for a period, on top of changing your stamina and positioning. Enemies can stagger you, dodging techs recovery animations, stamina recovers slowly; time is a consistent concern. All in all you have this dance of priorities as you stamina fluctuates, attacking as much as possible while positioning to bait out and avoid attacks efficiently. If you could cancel attacks at any time like in Sekiro, and especially if there also wasn't stamina, you'd have little reason to do these baits and strafes since you could get in more attacks by just spamming away and then dodging on reaction any time they attack. Needing to predict and play around their future attacks since you have to commit to your own offense lets the game push you more on defensive plays that set you up well instead of just being safer or more efficient short term (i.e. the strategy people criticize souls gameplay for, saying it's just a rhythm game since they rely mostly on iframes).
This is a great core, and to structure its gameplay it also has enemies that challenge you regardless of intention, whether running past them (especially in DS2), retreating after engaging, or fighting them head on. The environment is part of that, as walls and pits inform your options and pose new challenges. Encounters with multiple enemies work well due to positioning being such a core focus, overlapping movesets make for a lot of different combinations and you can manipulate their AI through positioning and staggering them. It challenges you to explore non-linear levels in non-linear order with a variety of weapons and builds (even if the rpg mechanics can take away a lot of that pressure), connected through sparse checkpoints that limit your healing. On bosses your healing means you are always at risk of dying if you compound your mistakes, but with good play you can come back using a longer-term resource. It's clean as hell, while Sekiro stumbles in more ways than one.
This graph uses nodes for different mechanics and dynamics, with arrows that show which ones affect each other (one- or two-way). Don't think too hard about these, just a quick visualization of interaction (so excluding their relevancy and independent depth) but I think it makes around 70% sense, looked neat in Celia's article.
To justify the comparison for a second (because Dark Souls comparisons are a bit of a meme), I don't think there's that much going on in Sekiro gameplay-wise that differs stylistically from the souls formula, and compared to the other games of that formula it's quite stripped-down (just like Dark Souls combat is limited compared to Nioh). There's other ways to make a melee action game deep (let alone games at large), so I wouldn't be focusing on this if it was walking a completely different path; whether involving varied strings like Bayonetta, the wild neutral moveset of Devil May Cry, the solid in-between with fantastic enemy designs that nu-God of War is doing, or something completely new. Even if it eschewed depth in favor of really focused kinaesthetics I could see that, but I really don't think it's doing that outside of key boss fight moments. Dark Souls is also among my favorite games, and setting a lower bar would mean pulling punches out of pity.
Stealth, Structure, Death
Stealth has you perform deathblows from behind, below or above an enemy to instantly kill them (or in the case of minibosses, take off one of their two health bars). Similar to the Batman Arkham games, there's two different levels of alertness. Yellow alerts them that something is up and they go around to investigate, while red enemies know your position and will try to get to or attack you. Enemies will alert one another, but it can take a second, so even if you run up to one in full view of his friends, you can usually get the deathblow off.
Instead of getting that kill, you could also run past. In fact, there's many other factors that makes running past very easy, and doesn't complicate your situation much. They aggro slowly due to the alertness and stealth, then take out their weapon (presumably to show their readiness), and even after that their AI often remains passive waiting for you to attack them (and there's a limit to how many will attack you at once). Most likely this is to speed up combat by letting you take the initiative, but when your goal isn't to fight them it makes for very unthreatening enemies. If they do make an attack, it's slow so you can predict and react to it, and usually low range. The passivity then prevents them from chasing you once you disengage, combined with very limited ranged attacks (most throw rocks that miss you when standing still). Even if there's nowhere to run or the enemies can catch up and threaten you, you have a grappling hook that lets you zip to inaccessible platforms far away and not a single enemy in the game can follow.
This results in encounters having no commitment, you can run headlong into a miniboss and its cohorts, then run out / past before any one of them makes an attack. Stealth deathblows also let you kill an enemy without risking anything since you don't have to engage them in combat. Souls games (can) have more aggressive enemies that aggro faster (without two get-out-of-jail-free cards, grappling hook and resurrect), and also require at least some risk to kill one and make a dent in the number of enemies between two checkpoints. I don't have a big issue with running past enemies, that's relatively easy in every souls game besides Dark Souls 2 (though doing so without knowing the layout and while picking up items not so much). The bigger issue is how it affects the stakes of combat.
Since it uses souls-style checkpoints (enemies only respawn when you die or rest), and enemies lose alertness quickly, failing stealth still lets you easily disengage and reset the fight without those enemies you stealth killed. If you take a lot of damage and are going to die, just grappling hook out and go rest. With how easy it is to run past things, the traditional soulslike death system wouldn't work, but with how easy it is to run away, the system they replaced it with doesn't work any better. That being losing half your money and XP when you die, unless you randomly don't (a throwaway immersion mechanic, Unseen Aid has no impact on the game's design). As a result risking death is essentially never worth it, as you can't mitigate/prevent the punishment through skill like with the bloodstain in previous games.
So against bosses you avoid fighting them until you've spent your money and gotten to the next level if you're close, at which point there's no death punishment besides the run-back - and speaking of, by getting rid of the bloodstain system, making running past enemies very easy, and segmenting levels into smaller chunks than the idols cover, the souls-like limited checkpoints also serve little purpose except as teleport stations. There's no gauntlets of enemies that you have to fight all in a row as you resources dwindle or anything.
Then against
regular enemies, you can't constantly use your currencies so you're
risking a bit by dying there, except death lets you respawn at least
once so no matter how monumentally you fuck it up, you always get a
second or third or fifth chance to reevaluate. At any point you can
decide it's getting too risky (like after resurrecting in a bad spot)
and simply grappling hook or sprint away while the enemies, as always,
can do nothing but watch. The
resurrect token only refreshes once you rest at a bonfire too, so
there's very little reason not to go back and rest (maybe spend some resources) any time you go down. Before getting to that point, stealth kills let you take out enemies for free at no risk since failing stealth still lets you just disengage and reset. There's just no risk or tension or commitment to the regular fights, the game heavily pushes you to play passively as unplanned deaths are so harshly punished, on top of essentially being optional as long as you don't get stuck in a fog gate.
Content Design
I considered a boss review but they don't have that much going on individually so it's mostly about common traits (below) and core mechanics (above). I wrote some thoughts on the boss remixes in the 1.05 patch in the next section, and here's a tier list in case you're curious how I reckon they measure up: https://i.imgur.com/oDbWpBy.png
Limited Behaviour
Due to parrying being the main defense and perilous counters being just as shallow, hitboxes of attacks rarely matter, nor does enemy movement as part of attacks unless it's away from you (such as Genichiro's dodge back to shoot his bow). This results in a lot of different flashy animations, but mechanically the only difference is which button you press when, without circumstantial factors to consider as to "what" and "when". This limits content design and its impact a lot, as each move has to be a discrete attack to be pressed a single button against, with few exceptions. The set rhythm of combat is also a factor limiting nuanced behaviour. For comparison's sake here's some Souls bosses that use movement, positioning and diverse hitboxes to good effect:
- Dancer has very different attacks depending on which side you're on and how far away you are.
- Gael and Artorias move around a lot, so keeping up with them and optimizing your own movement to stay on the offensive is neat.
- The Rotten has different body parts to attack to disable certain parts of his moveset, and fire pits in the arena that you have to avoid.
- Gargoyles and dragons have area denial with breath attacks.
- Smelter Demon does damage over time when you're close to him.
- Old
Iron King, Darklurker, Fume Knight, Aava, Princes, Midir, Quelaag,
Manus, Ebrietas, Aldia etc. have ranged or AoE attacks with complex
patterns or movement to avoid.
- Princes
of Lothric teleport around the place in between attacks, facing you and
making an attack when they appear. Somewhat of a state reset, but you
can manipulate teleports and leverage positioning heavily in between
resets.
- Friede
has fields of ice with status build-up that explode after a delay,
which she uses to deny space in second phase when you just want to
stay still and wail on her dad.
The
only bosses to do basically any of this in Sekiro are area of effect
attacks that you avoid with positioning; Demon of Hatred (tossing exploding fireballs),
Fire Isshin (mainly his big second phase attack), Owl (poison clouds
and firecrackers), and Headless Ape (screaming).
There's a couple more complex projectiles too, Lady Butterfly's second phase adding slow homing butterflies, and Demon of Hatred having an attack where homing shots require zig-zagging to get close and punish. Some attacks kinda break rules like the grab that can be parried, which
don't have good enough feedback to communicate their nature so it ends
up confusing and initially unfair.
This
also goes for offense, as bosses have clear and discrete reactions to
being attacked that creates this predictable flow, and other kinds of
offense, like the Kusabimaru or spear or various combat art hits,
stagger less than a normal attack or have a longer wind-up so you get
hit in between your hits despite them not parrying anything. It's akin
to enemies and bosses in Dark Souls 3 that get chained by straight sword
hits but daggers don't meet the stagger threshold so they don't stagger
them at all.
Multiples and Drunkard
Then there's multiple enemy encounters, of which there isn't a single good one in Sekiro while they are some of the best fights in other games. Positioning is king against multiple enemies, even if you normally rely on a shield or parry in other games. Sekiro does have dodging and stays clear of straight up paired animations, so there's some potential, but there are several factors that makes them unlikely to work well even when executed better. These fights require a lot of moving around without lock-on, but doing so can stop you from progressing the fight with defensive options since your defense mostly requires being hit (case in point).
You need to face an enemy to block of deflect their attack, which can be really awkward when they move around a lot mid-combo and you can't safely lock on. There's also a lot of camera fuckery, e.g. deflecting an enemy in front of you knocks you back a bit and puts the camera more above you, meaning you can no longer see behind that enemy or around very far. The brown ape in Headless Ape's duo fight has a combo that rotates the camera 180 degrees if you parry it while locked on, so if you had the other ape in your view when it started, you won't by the time it ends.
Then there's posture regenerating over time, while multiple
enemies makes for downtime where you're just baiting attacks and
maneuvering rather than actively defending or attacking. They freely
regain posture, so only HP damage matters, dragging things out and
making a lot of situations very passive since there's little reason to
punish or optimize defense.
The closest it gets is the second memory Drunkard with a Lone Shadow:
The
issues above combine with movesets that really don't seem to be
designed for overlap at all, producing frequent unwinnable situations
for daring to fight back while close to both enemies at once. The
drunkard is impossible to focus down first because of the two health
bars, blocking from the front and big attacks, so you're left with the
shadow who easily blocks and does a bunch of hyperarmor combos - great
for getting their posture up, but terrible for getting in chip damage
and dodging a big boy at the same time. The drunkard can just drink and
stay back for a while, but that just means it's a 1v1 fight. Once you
kill the shadow it becomes just a standard 1v1 drunkard as well, so even
if it worked well 2v1 the encounter as a whole isn't committed to that. There are some great situations and dynamics too, but with so many issues the overall quality is below the shallow but clean 1v1 fights of the game.
The
drunkards alone are ok, in that video you can see a bunch of just that,
but while there's small optimization through positioning and trying to
attack constantly, simply avoiding his hits and circle strafing is quite
simple. I'd compare it to Ruin Sentinels from Dark Souls 2 (Whiff Souls shows
these a minute in), where circle strafing and staying at their back
makes them miss most attacks by a long shot. The small platform that you
want to keep the first sentinel on serves as another factor to
consider, and there's always stamina which adds a bit, but the bigger
deal is that you soon have to deal with two sentinels at once, in which
case it becomes a lot more complicated and difficult to strafe all their
attacks at the same time, similar to multiple normal enemies in Dark
Souls making the otherwise cheesy backstabs a lot trickier to pull off.
Normal enemies are mostly really boring, some you don't even have to go defensive when they parry you so you literally spam attack. There's some cool designs like the naginata monk that jumps over your head with a ton of mobility (though they are more interesting than actually that good, what with lock-on breaking, unfair bonk as he goes over you, unpredictable vulnerable states for knockdown, uneven punish windows), but they don't really approach the bosses which are themselves too limited. They also suffer a lot from how easy and powerful stealth is, there's no real reason to fight the monks when it's faster, safer and easier to oneshot them from stealth (or simply run past, of course).
Fighting multiple weaker enemies at once is usually a big focus in these games, but doesn't work too well for reasons laid out before, whether they clump up or have more mobility to surround you. Archers are really squishy and can't block, which combined with your mobility and ease of disengaging gives no reason not to kill them first. If you don't or can't, they have uneven rhythm to their shooting, poor sound tells, quick projectiles and potentially really low downtime which leaves little room to overlap with a melee enemy (compare to how solid the melee + ranged combo is in e.g. DS2's DLCs, and in the Twin Dragonriders boss). The Hirata drunkard fights are a perfect example here, easy as pie to kill them first and ridiculously hard to deal with if you don't do that. The first of these fights also demonstrates multiple melee enemies not overlaying well, as it has 3 mooks that each take about 4 R1s to kill, while they're constantly bunched together with very frequent attacks. Basically kite until there's an opening, make one attack, repeat. All the while the boss is slower so kiting him is more feasible, but not particularly interesting. If you don't kite and cheese these, you have to deal with 4 overlaid attack patterns where getting hit by a single thing means all the others probably hit you too.
There's
a few other major multiples, like the Headless Ape rematch's second
phase where his wife joins the fray, but they are even worse than the
Drunkard + Shadow, and also much easier to bypass (the ape gets
destroyed by firecrackers, the general + swordsman has a convenient
sleeping archer to backstab for Ninjutsu). I fought the apes legit a bunch to see how it compares and fighting the wife while dodging headless can be really tight and satisfying, but it
very rarely comes together that way.
The main thing is how doing very skilful play can have zero reward, while other
times you get free damage as both are just idle or screaming (non-damagingly) for
like 10 seconds. A lot of your victory just relies on getting lucky with how their movesets overlap.
Smaller Details and Side Systems
Here I'll cover various smaller systems and elements, whether glossed over or discussed previously in context of greater points.
Patch 1.05 (boss rushes and new boss versions)
Reflections let you practice bosses, a bit harder but that's balanced out by not having to worry about consumable usage so you get to use a divine grass every time etc. Nothing too special, good addition, though I wish it let you adjust difficulty (like NG+ levels) and especially let you be with or without Kuro's charm from the menu. The fact that the fights are unlocked per run rather than the save file overall is annoying, and so is the inability to quickly retry - you have to sit through two loading screens and sitting down, selecting the same thing, and the travelling animation, each and every time. Quitting out and loading a pre-boss save file might be faster.
Gauntlets
are boss rushes, but for some reason they let you rest and reset your
resources between every boss. I fought the first gauntlet and had little
left on Genichiro but thought that was cool, having to be more careful
with both healing and spirit emblems. But no, you can't die but you can
use ~20 emblems, 10 healing, 3 pellets, a divine grass and any buffs you
want on every individual boss, whether it's a single phase of Genichiro
or an upgraded Sword Saint Isshin. There's not much point to it when
this is the case, there's a bit more tension but no longer term
consequences and interaction between the different fights. Not having
any minibosses also limits the picks a bit.
Inner
Genichiro: He's got some various alterations to make him less easily
kiteable, which is cool, and then an extra move of chip damage
shockwaves which is ok (best to dodge so positioning matters). Doing a
lightning parry in the last phase makes him parry it back, which is
really cool but not telegraphed at all so it results in an unfair death,
perhaps at the end of a whole gauntlet of bosses. He's still very
susceptible to simply continuing attacking, he still tries to use the
bow when the attack I've already queued up will cancel it easily. The
dodge back punishes you for spamming attack, but can be reacted to and
your attack can be canceled so there's really no reason to let up. Other
attacks, especially new ones but the old combo etc. too, are much more
difficult to respond optimally to and often don't even yield as much of a
reward, making the fight swingy as well.
Inner Isshin: Mostly the same, but with a starting combo that hits all around and isn't very clear on what to do, and yet another hyperarmor combo with a variety of unblockables that you have to memorise or kite. Plays out very similarly, hyperarmor isn't telegraphed and goes hard on the rhythm game aspect.
Inner Father: The chip damage thing is alright, not sure if he does it in certain situations or just randomly, it's really hard to dodge so may just have to learn to parry it which would suck. The feather dodge move is awful and downgrades the fight quite a bit, hyperarmor teleport with no tells to indicate when the attacks out of it, can't dodge on reaction since he teleports on you with unclear tracking. In second phase the teleport does one of two different combos where he disappears between each attack, it's just a rhythm game at this point. All they had to do was make the second phase's blue and red owl attacks more interesting.Stealth
While accommodating running past too easily, the stealth is pretty decent systemically. Enemies patrol around, levels have multiple paths to traverse along, and the different alert states makes for varying AI and situations (it's not just a puzzle to optimize a single solution for, there's likely to be some differences that encourage improvisation). There's not a strong gameplay loop though, as failure results in combat that is easy to run away from and reset entirely. Compare to The Last of Us or Mark of the Ninja (I've not played many stealth games I'm afraid) where messing up leads to having to deal with combat, resource loss, or a new kind of stealth puzzle to figure out. Here you can just run away to remove aggro, then go back in. With the limited checkpoints, I think they should have just made enemies permanently alert so if you want another go at stealth you need to rest and reset entirely.
The
argument against being a coward here is just time, which doesn't work
so well when combat is meant for drawn out 1v1s. Playing fair means
attacking a bunch, getting parried, going on the defensive and parrying
them.
Even the smallest fodder human enemies will usually require this,
versus dying in five seconds to a stealth jumping attack, and larger
enemies can take half a minute to kill in combat with perfect execution and no other enemies nearby (a rare set of circumstances). A new player
who isn't confident they'll beat the encounter without stealth is
willing to trade time for power, but that's not even necessary here as
stealth is safer and faster. Running away to de-aggro from a few enemies
and then killing them with stealth might well be faster because of how
slow multiple enemy combat can be. If stealth deathblows didn't give experience points I think that could be sufficient in encouraging you to not rely on it in every situation.
Whether alertness is permanent (without spreading to other enemies) or not, the alert levels are a bit wonky. Fully alert (red) enemies track you through walls, which increases tedium at the cost of strategy as you need to run further back rather than using the level layout smartly. Half-alert (yellow) enemies on the other hand have no big difference, only having a faint idea of your location and letting you deathblow them freely. Cut the true sight, make at least red alertness permanent, and have some dynamic added to yellow, and it would be a more solid core. Maybe you can stealth kill yellow enemies but they will always alert their friends as you do, so you have to evaluate the situation, other enemies, the level geometry and how threatening this enemy is to determine if you should go for the stealth kill, how and when.
A mechanic that could be interesting is resurrection. It seems like it should be great to catch enemies off guard after failing stealth and dying, but too often they're just clunkily moving around your corpse and aggro automatically when you make some resurrection sound or whatever. This would give some purpose to the resurrection mechanic beyond immersion, and would invite you to stay and see if you can stealth kill some enemies instead of just going back to rest and regain the resurrect token.
Anyway, my biggest issue with stealth systemically is on the player side, where your tools are really limited to interact with enemies without killing them or being spotted. For cases where you can't get close to an enemy without being sighted, which is frequent, you need to tactically get spotted and half-alert enemies to lure them over. This is the main reason I think yellow alertness shouldn't let you deathblow them freely, it leads to this tedious cat and mouse gameplay, where messing up as usual just leads to disengaging. More ways to interact with their pathing would go a long way, even something as simple as the rock throws found in western AAA amalgamations. Stealth is naturally quite slow paced with waiting for patrols and such, so without the depth to sustain that pace it quickly ends up boring, as opposed to combat which is at least straight to the point.
It's also really unclear and janky how aggro works a lot of the time. It has multiple alert levels, but then in a lot of cases they fill up instantly despite you not being in their view so fully as to warrant that (similar to Dark Souls' anti-backstab aggro rules where enemies turn around once you get close). After the Chained Ogre there's an open area you can circle right or left, but on the right an archer spots you whether you walk, climb along the edge with a tree trunk between you, or grapple hook onto that tree trunk so that's not actually an option. Other times you kill people in full view of others, corpses don't matter but this is way beyond that. It's not very intuitive when an enemy will spot you or what their reaction will be. This is only made worse by the skills and items that decrease your presence, it's intentionally inconsistent across a playthrough how much noise you make or how good the eyesight of enemies are, without any real indication. Minibosses are especially bad for this, and should just not be possible to stealth deathblow with how ridiculously janky it ends up being.
Another option for minibosses would be to remove the multiple health bars. It's a nice indicator to tell they're more important, but it's never interesting to bypass half the fight by stealth, and having a longer single-segment fight would mean more room for chipping their health and mistakes costing you as they recover posture. If you want to let players skip a boss just give that option and signpost it not being intended, integrating it into the core systems means a player who would have a better experience avoiding the stealth kills needs to awkwardly balance the game themselves on-the-fly. It would be fine if there was clarity about it, like a difficulty option to make mini- / bosses immune to stealth deathblows. Maybe the demon bell should have just made enemies spot you instantly when in range.
Feedback and Memorising Patterns
As you're learning the game, it pretty openly tells you what to do against each type of attack and focuses mostly on testing your timing ability, memorizing when each different attack will hit you so you can parry it. There's a few key attack properties that demand different responses, and they're mostly well communicated by the visuals. Unblockable attacks have a big red kanji appear, even if it doesn't tell you which type it is so you need to differentiate animations to tell sweeps, grabs and thrusts apart (except for a couple grabs that have sweeping animations, this is quite intuitive). Then there's attacks that leave a white trail behind them in the air, indicating they deal a smaller portion of their damage through your block. This isn't entirely consistent, but it's also not that big a deal, just something to clear up any confusion if you take damage through blocking them. Raging Bull and Demon of Hatred have attacks with no indication which do chip damage even when you parry them, and it's not like elemental attacks universally do that since you can parry the ghost lazer from the Shichimens, but these are outliers and not that big a deal.
The main issue I have with the feedback is hyperarmor attacks. Most common with bosses, these are usually multiple attacks strung together that won't be interrupted even if you land an attack in between them. Normally after you parry an enemy you've got the upper hand and can punish, but if they're in a hyperarmor attack you can get absolutely murdered for attempting that (and if you don't try that and fail then you won't learn about the hyperarmor property at all). Yet there's zero visual indication of this, and it's not intuitive which attacks will be protected by hyperarmor either (some are, like the long wind-up for Genichiro and Emma to do their wild combos). Owl 2 is this big, broad dad but gets interrupted by regular attacks in the middle of some pretty slow and deliberate 2-attack combos. On the other hand Sword Saint Isshin is a lightweight yet gets hyperarmor for like 10 seconds at a time while comboing a lot of very regular-looking attacks together. The red-eye effect on the player makes you not stagger from attacks so you could use brief red eyes to indicate this very discrete state, or anything else really, as long as there's something. This is as important as perilous attacks for informing your play, and similarly can't be clearly communicated with just regular attack animations. Particularly against certain bosses this makes for a lot of straight up trial and error while you're learning their moveset.
A Hitbox Suggestion
So I've been considering this idea of solving various issues while keeping with the game's concept (outside its concept I would e.g. not have parries be the main defensive option, but I understand why it is): have a grey area for hitboxes where you can parry the attack, but it can't hit you. This way, the enemy somehow missing you with an attack you would have parried is much less likely to happen, which breaks the flow of combat and robs you of the reward good parries are supposed to have. It means that positioning matters, you'll want to pay attention to enemy patterns beyond timing and get into that grey zone so that you can dodge attacks that you fail to parry. It'd be similar to Bloodborne where your parry is a ranged attack, so you can bait an attack and position so it'll miss you, then try to parry and either you get it or they miss you. While I don't think BB's parry is perfect, it's a neat way to create some more nuance to a generally very binary and swingy mechanic.
Boss Phases
I think boss phases are great, but Sekiro's aren't very dynamic due to completely separate health bars, often with transitioning animations, attacks or straight cutscenes (similar to Dark Souls 3) that makes it impossible to play around the phase change in any meaningful way. Spawn-ganking Butterfly is cool, dodging through Owl 1's smoke is really cool, and keeping Sword Saint Isshin constantly busy to prevent him from pulling out his spear is awesome - but playing around Pontiff's risk/reward phase change into the clone summoning, or priming Aldritch by doing just under 1600 damage to 1- or 2-cycle him, are on a different level.
Then there is the hidden extra health bars. The game establishes powerful
enemies having multiple health bars with a deathblow indicator for each, and then they break that rule as a neat surprise -
except it happens to half of the proper bosses. The final boss of each route
makes sense since they are different bosses (Emma/Genichiro leading to Isshin), and I can get having one boss whose gimmick is they're not dead even though you thought they were - similar to Friede's
surprise third phase. Guardian Ape into Headless Ape is a cool visual change, Butterfly makes sense (though first phase should take
damage from snap seed if you're actually committing to the "it was just an
illusion" thing), and Genichiro makes sense with the undying thing, but
you gotta pick one. It stops being surprising real quick, and making a mechanic meant to inform players completely unreliable kind of defeats the purpose.
Prosthetics and Spirit Emblems
Prosthetics let you change up combat and take advantage of different openings with slower attacks, or just switch up your attacks with longer range, poison and other small variations. Sadly, they all cost spirit emblems so you can't use them much per rest, nor very freely overall. Where they're most effective is in setting bosses on fire or using firecrackers to get free hits in, which isn't particularly interesting. They also serve as special counters like the spear pulling out Headless Ape's centipede for extra posture damage, which is a neat secret interaction but there's very few of these. Combat arts don't all take emblems, and serve as a heavier attack option with longer wind-up and more reward. There's a bunch of different ones but they overlap a ton with both basic attacks and each other, with an emblem cost for anything remotely interesting (like Mortal Blade which goes through blocks).
There's some superficially cool combo videos but just using the basic mechanics will be more effective and efficient for a lot of this (particularly the stealth, as established), then there's some that may be more effective but at a spirit emblem cost that I can't see being worth it. There are times where an enemy requires spirit emblems to kill, like shield guys needing the axe, so spending your emblems to be cool and have fun is disincentivized. For absolute optimization there's definitely some cool stuff, the Punch-Out comparison isn't for nothing as the boss rush speedrun is wild with optimizing all the endgame prosthetics and combat arts (do note that he uses a total of 3 combat arts though, out of the ~20).
While some tools are straight power boosts so having a cost is necessary (firecrackers for free hits, the defensive tools for very powerful defense), the rest are situational and weak enough that making them free would work outside some weird cheesy interactions. Even better, use the most underutilized core resource: posture. Slight risk reward to prevent you from just spamming it, lets good players use them quite freely, and suddenly you've made this entire side of the combat relevant throughout, instead of a crutch to rely on when you're struggling and want to just bypass content or make a boss easier.
Skills and Progression
There's so many pointless skills, and those that aren't should mostly just be given without the grind at a faster pace. The repetitive combat arts and tiny passive buffs (+1 maximum spirit emblems is baffling) are on one side, while Mikiri Counter and mid-air moves are on the other. I can get not giving these to the player right away, smoothing the learning curve a bit and all that, but they should be available much faster and more conveniently (Mikiri is kind of a trap option, as new players may not realize how essential and overpowered it is). With so few meaningfully different skills there's not really any customization or decision-making to differentiate playthroughs, and they even hide what each skill is until you get close to it on the tree so there's also a level of obfuscation preventing informed decisions.
Death and Unfairness
The first problem this death system faces is you have sen: a long-term resource that you aren't spending regularly and that don't have floors like experience points (once you get a skill point, you can't lose the XP that got you there). Having two different currencies doesn't seem to have any benefit to me, it just takes away some of the decision making for progression compared to their previous more streamlined economies. I'm not a big fan of the long-lasting punishment of short-term mistakes at the best of times. Death resetting the fight and requiring you to run back from the checkpoint is the short term reliable consequence, it's not really balanced around you having thousands of sen on you. You quickly learn not to carry that much into boss fights and such, reducing the punishment down to being a temporary setback. While overly swingy, punishing the player for bad play isn't some controversial feature.
But then there's unfair deaths. The bloodstain system in Dark Souls is very forgiving, letting you retreive everything you lost in full as long as you make it back to where you died. So unless you're unlucky enough to suffer two unfair deaths in a row, you will have some blame in whatever occurs. Hollow Knight has a long-term resource without frequent spending opportunities like Sekiro, but the bloodstain (or ghost) reins in the swingy impact this can have. Sekiro on the other hand takes half your sen right then and there, no questions asked, no second chances. Whether it's from out of game things, like your controller dying or having an emergency, or in-game glitches and unintended elements, or really bad hitboxes and telegraphs.
The
more punishing dying is, the more sure you have to be that every death
is a good death, a fault of the player that they can learn from. I had
more than one instance in my first playthrough where I lost a lot of
resources for something I still take no blame in - i.e. the unfair element caused death from 100% hp through resurrection. Burning to death in
fires that didn't exist while stuck inside invisible walls, for
instance, or falling through the map. A small issue with the game can compound with the death system
to have a lot more impact than it has any right to. I'd never mention
some janky fire hitboxes here if not for losing thousands of sen to
them.
Camera and Controls
You can't unbind camera reset, after five damn games. Also it gets stuck in/on and moves automatically in disorienting ways when close to walls, roofs etc. This happens in past games (I remember it always spazzing out when rounding a tight corner up stairs in Demon's Souls), but the higher variety of ways you can interact with the environment seems to have increased the prominence of the jank.
Contextual actions rely on the camera which feels horrible personally, and can be really janky with invisible environmental hitboxes blocking them and such. Item pickups require you to look at the item, grappling hooking requires you to have the grapple point in view (ish), and deathblows are janky. I put a few clips of this in a video to showcase:
For deathblows, you can be in a position to stealth kill someone, move closer, and lose the indicator. The drop attacks are worst for this, as you can't take it slow and make sure it's still there when you press the button. Contextual actions are tricky, so partially this is just an inherent drawback of them being in focus again after Bloodborne made backstabs a lot less relevant, and grappling hooking was never going to be that clean, but the pickups are just an attempt at polish resulting in a downgrade.
You can't walk off ledges, for the most part. You need to run or dodge, and even then it tries to keep you on for a while which is very janky. There's a lot of ledges strewn about without much consideration for the risk it could pose, so it makes sense to protect the player a bit. With the lack of instant death upon going into a pit, I think they could have removed this invisible baby fence if they just removed a few of the superficial chasms and grapple hooks or put ground under them. Seems like a case of visuals and spectacle taking priority over smooth gameplay, it's not like falling and fading to black to teleport back up is very cinematic or whatever.
Invulnerable NPCs and Hubs
You cannot run or attack at all while in hubs where you interact with NPCs and such. You can't kill any NPCs outside of ones possible to fight in their questlines, you can attack shopkeepers and old ladies but they're all invulnerable. Too cowardly to actually be true to its in-universe rules and logic, yet too pretentious to value gameplay over superficial immersion. At least remove the animation to put away and take out your weapon, it's so tedious. "It's what Sekiro would do" yeah and so is committing suicide to more quickly restart the boss fight? So is standing still for 4 hours as I go eat dinner and take a walk?
Being unable to kill NPCs is the same as cliffs no longer killing you. There's a lot of jank with ledges and such, so I overall like that change, but both are about obeying conventional "good design" rules and smoothing out any rough, interesting, quirky edges. Softlocking yourself by attacking the blacksmith (or a Firelink NPC that you can't defeat yet) makes for some of the best Dark Souls player stories. It's about small details, but I think they're important to the gameplay experience of these games, and it's gotten weaker each progressive game since Demon's Souls.
Healing
I have no idea why you start with one heal, scrounge for seeds paying top dollar in the early game just to get 3-4, and then mid-late can get like 5 more seeds without even killing a boss, up to 10 charges in the end. Emma's Medicine is also not available early on, nor the passive healing boost gotten by beating some minibosses. It's like Dark Souls 2 without gems again, early minibosses are really hard even with stealth kills because you can only make 4-5 mistakes on top of not knowing the combat system yet. On further playthroughs they're much easier since I know the combat but they're still some of the hardest minibosses in the game because of such little healing.
Chained Ogre is hard mostly because you're allowed to make much fewer mistakes than against e.g. Guardian Ape, despite them being pretty similar in what kind of boss they are (first phase at least). He oneshots you a lot with grabs, sure, but even if you survive you're spending all your healing to regain that HP. Then by the time you get to lategame, especially picking up the beads to elongate that health bar (when healing is %-based), you can tank like 20 attacks from the final boss and be just fine. If they want every mistake to matter, like how Mortal Shell has almost no healing at all, that's cool (though I'm not a fan of it while learning early on). If they want to give you tons of healing but drawing out fights, like they do with Demon of Hatred, sure. Having one at the start of the game and another at the end is weird to me (flip it and it makes a bit more sense at least), and few of the lategame bosses and areas function as well as DoH with 10 flasks.
Exploration
There
are cool areas to explore on their own, and FromSoft are masters at
constructing compelling environments to map out in your head. The
context is lacking, as enemy combat and placement, as well as item
pickups and customization options, is part of why Dark Souls is great
to explore. Never being at actual risk of death makes for careless,
lighthearted wandering about rather than really engaging with and trying
to understand layouts to route your way safely from A to B, which works at times when traversing large open
landscapes (Mount Kongo, Fountainhead Palace). The limited world
structure is also a shame, seemingly open at first but despite the low
number of areas there's little interconnectivity and almost no
non-linearity. The prosthetics are cool to find, but there's little
beyond that, their upgrades are very diffuse with tons of generic
materials required so even a rare item isn't immediately exciting.
Consumables are so weak (barely worth using for 10% damage the next 30
seconds), on top of being forever gone once used on a failed attempt.
The areas purely in their own right also don't have the atmospheric high
points like Tower of Latria or Darkroot Basin, or even Shaded Woods or
Irithyll.
Tedious replaying
The
newest patch added boss rushes and practice scenarios but before that
the only way to fight the bosses was to go through the whole game again,
several of which are exclusive to specific endings, and even the boss rushes are locked to getting those endings. There's also new game + stages like in their previous games, and some difficulty modifications like Kuro's Charm, and even at its base hindering replayability is a real shame for speedruns and casual replays alike. Here's a list of the things that become tedious and annoying on subsequent playthroughs.
- Forced tutorial messages and "you got yet another pile of ash!" pop-ups. The mod that disables these is absolutely essential, even on a first playthrough you do not need the game to pause to tell you how an item works (you can pause and read it in your inventory as you please), let alone 10 times over.
- Tutorial area with no attacking, dodging or running, so you have to either slowly crouch walk or continuously jump past the enemies who can oneshot you with ranged attacks.
- Non-optional minibosses with adds that you need to slowly get rid of with stealth or deal with multiples (Drunkard, Snake Eyes Shirahagi, Enshin). If it's just a straight replay you can deal with the challenge of taking it all on at once, but challenges like no Kuro's Charm are encouraged by the game.
- A few boring fights along the main path: Raging Bull and Corrupt Monk are too tanky, and Divine Dragon is very cool once but very boring since. This isn't unique to Sekiro (Halflight and Oceiros in DS3, the giants in SOTFS, Izalith in DS1) but with such a short length I wish it was more concise and consistent.
- Tons of talking and NPC bullshit. While writing this speedrunners found one of the biggest developments since close to release - a way to cut almost a minute of talking. Even the tutorial has forced dialogue to get your sword, and to access the best boss in the game (Owl 2) there's a ton of obscure dialogue and fetch quests to go through. There's some other random dependencies too, like how the bell that lets you access the Monkey boss doesn't spawn until you talk to Isshin in his room, where he won't be until you've killed some fodder earlier in the area. If you want to kill the Shichimen in the double ape cave, he doesn't spawn until you've gained the finger whistle and attached it to your arm back at base. A far cry from the action- and item-driven progression of their past games.
- Snakes that require slow set piece gameplay or leave you to deal with their really poorly telegraphed attacks and behavior.
- No multitasking. Menus pause everything so you can't move while sorting stuff out there, speaking to an npc forces you to stand still the whole time. You also can't run in the hubs, and need to wait for sheathing / unsheathing animations when going in and out.
Difficulty
I think Sekiro is the only souls/-like game where changing things related to difficulty wouldn't really affect the depth or core experience negatively, so scaling it to the player (i.e. a worse player plays on easy, not a lazier player who simply wants to first try everything) makes sense. In Dark Souls, regardless of player skill, an easy mode would comparatively make for fewer, less interesting and less impactful decisions; a much worse game overall. Degrading art to appeal to more people is the opposite of noble in my mind, but I really don't think this is a danger with Sekiro.
That goes in the other direction too, and I think having up-front customizeable difficulty would be nice. The game has New Game Plus (NG+) where you keep your power level but enemies keep getting more damage and defense (as well as some different loot), and two other options available in-game. First is the Demon Bell, which you can access very early if you know about it, and if not you get there around the middle of the game. It gives you higher drop rates for materials, and enemies drop more powerful items as well. The downside is similar to being on NG+, everything deals more damage and takes less, particularly early game content because in NG+ that's the main thing affected (since you start at endgame power level).
The second option is Kuro's Charm, which you can give back to Kuro to take on a "path of hardship" at the start of your second playthrough onward. This means you have to complete the game, but it doesn't require it to be the same save file so you can do it on a fresh character. It causes blocking an attack to do a lot more posture damage, as well as taking 30% of the attack's health damage. Enemies also have higher defense and health, and give a bit more XP / Sen. I only have experience combining these two modifications without NG+ so I can't speak to individual effects exactly, but I found the early game to be extremely tedious and imbalanced (particularly the bull), then by the end of the game enemies overwhelm you stats-wise so deflecting attacks is essential. The chip damage is interesting, but ends up less impactful than the high posture damage since you get so much healing and the guard breaks that happen almost any time you block can swing the fight very suddenly. I'd really like a more conveniently found option that lets you just take the chip damage, because it's certainly the most interesting way to replay the game except for the ...
Randomizer!
While each fight is quite shallow, the optimal strategy varies based on which skills you have, what your damage is at etc. Similar to learning how to optimize a fight on straight sword vs greathammer in Dark Souls, but here it has to be modded in because there's so little customization and variety otherwise. You'll more often find yourself without mikiri and needing to counter thrusts in other ways, needing HP damage and valuing dodges, and getting odd combinations of enemies and environments to navigate (which is more interesting to run past, though can be awful to fight so Bull and others with adds can be bad). This is the best way to replay Sekiro by a long shot and is in some ways superior to a first playthrough of the base game. Try it out yourself!
Critical Background
Various sites, people, videos and articles that influenced my perspective on the game.
Krrish for editing the first few parts.
The Critpoints Discord, discussing the game since launch.
Celia Alexis Wagar's writing on souls games and more.
https://critpoints.net/2020/02/12/the-silver-bullet-game-design-problem/
https://curiouscat.qa/Evilagram/post/1147155042
https://critpoints.net/2020/05/23/why-the-hell-does-depth-matter/
https://critpoints.net/2019/05/03/cultivating-possibility-space/
OniMask / Caption's video on Sekiro's flaws, now deleted. I wasn't in full agreement but it got some things right and started some discussions.
https://youtu.be/AF15iMcoqiM (dead)
Lover's video critique going through the whole game. Mostly quite descriptive and some uninformed points, but at 24 minutes he goes into the systemic and structural side which is strong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gr-C7K1usQ
Waifu-eater's gameplay critique. I don't agree on his goals and its potential (he seems to care more about game feel than depth), and he only really tackles the sub-systems. Good points on skills and prosthetics, but some fall flat by not going into the core mechanics (like more equippable weapon arts).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF7dyy3i1TY
Lee Yin / Ninja Critics, various comments mostly but they also did a review that I skimmed through machine translation.
https://ninja-critics.blogspot.com/2019/05/sekiro-shadows-die-twice-dissonance.html
Jason de Heras' tweet threads about how melee combat systems differentiate themselves.
https://twitter.com/jasondeheras/status/1358654321303277568
TheFifthMatt's randomizer, the best way to replay the game.
https://www.nexusmods.com/sekiro/mods/543
Joseph Anderson's scattered discussions on the game (stream, tweets etc.).
Speedrunners for showing some cool strats and sick plays: LilAggy, Nemz38, Qttsix, bilibili, Distortion2, Mazirika, Spacey1, SekiroShadow, Mr.4.
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