Sekiro is arguably the hardest game of all time, and I haven’t even played any of the FromSoftware games before. I did play Jedi: Fallen Order, which is soulslike, and I really love the combat, so after beating it, I finally bought Sekiro to experience the ultimate sword fight.

Overall

It’s a 9/10 game for me. Some of the fights are really satisfying. It’s also … kind of not as hard as I expected? I mean it’s hard, the hardest game I’ve ever played, but you can always git gud and defeat the miniboss or boss you’re struggling on as long as you keep trying and dying. I thought there will a point where I just cannot progress further as I can’t beat the boss, but not really. My biggest obstacles in the game are probably Guardian Ape & Isshin, the Sword Saint. Guardian Ape 1st phase & Isshin spear phase just felt genuinely unfair at times, but you ultimately get through.

I think the early (Ashina & Senpou) and late game (Fountainhead Palace & after) are awesome, but the mid-game (Sunken Valley & Ashina Depth) bosses suck. The exploration in mid-game is pretty cool, but the bosses are not enjoyable at all. I hate Guardian Ape. I hate Shichimen Warriors. I hate Headless Ape. I hate Snake Eyes. I dread going through mid-game in new playthroughs because of them. I do like O’Rin, Corrupted Monk, and Owl, but they’re at the very end of mid-game.

Combat

The combat is the best of all the games I’ve played. There is more variety in Ghost of Tsushima with the various stances, but it’s also so much easier. In GoT, I can just hold up my block all the time and attack when the enemies are open. In Sekiro however, you’re forced to try to deflect / perfect parry the attacks, as your posture bar can easily overflow if you only block them. Deflecting an attack also feels amazing, especially when fighting human bosses, with the crisp sound of metal and the sparks.

Bosses

There are roughly 3 types of minibosses and bosses in this game.

1st one is a tricky LeetCode medium. You’ll find them overwhelming and perhaps die instantly at first, but after a few tries, you’ll find the pattern, and ease through them. Example: Long-arm Centipede, Ashina Elite.

2nd one is a good LeetCode medium. It’s not as crazy as the 1st type and may seem manageable, but you’ll still need to die a few times, or many many times, to git gud and optimize your movements, deflection and attacks enough to beat them. Example: Gyoubu Oniwa, General Ashina.

3rd one is a LeetCode Hard. They killed you instantly at first, and you just have to keep dying and trying and optimize your controls to be able to finally beat them, barely. Example: Guardian Ape.

Also see every miniboss/boss in Sekiro I’ve met and how I beat them.

Difficulty

There are no easy mode, but 3 hard modes.

There are 4 difficulties in the game, the base game, base + bell demon, base + charmless, and base + bell demon + charmless.

The original difficulty is already very hard. However, it becomes BRUTAL when on charmless, it’s literally another game. What is charmless? It is an option that you’ll unlock once you complete the first playthrough. At the start of the subsequent playthroughs, you’ll an option to give Kuro’s charm back to him. The charm protects you from getting hit while blocking as long as your posture bar doesn’t break. So by giving the charm back, you enter a charmless mode, indicated by a “難” in the bottom left corner of your screen. In this mode, you’ll still get chip damage even if you block the enemies attack. So you’ll have to deflect every attack, otherwise you’ll have to keep healing, which disrupt the flow and also basically reset the posture bar of swift enemies.

On charmless, some bosses become much harder than when you met them during the original playthrough, even though you’ve already memorize their moves.

As for bell demon, I haven’t tried it before, but from what I’ve read, the difficulty increase isn’t that significant.

Gameplay

The gameplay outside of combats is kind of minimalistic. The grappling is cool, and flying around in the Ashina castle rooftop area fighting the chasing and escaping from the assassins is one of the most memorial gaming moments ever. However, there are lots of mechanisms that don’t make sense.

Take falling down to the ground for example. When you take a long vertical jump, you just … land on the ground as if nothing happens, no health damage, no rolling, and your knees don’t even bend a bit. When you jump from a very high ground however, you do take some health damage, however, the animation of the shock is still minimal. It really bothers me in early game, as it just feels so cheap.

Also, there is pretty much no footstep sound at all, which really breaks the immersion. Not a single sound even when I’m sprinting or falling down from 30 meters above?? Really??

Another thing is the NPC movements. When the mobs detect you and chase you, but then you run away and de-aggro them, oftentimes they just … stand there, doing absolutely nothing, and don’t even move a bit, as if time has frozen.

World

The world design is pretty cool. It doesn’t look real, but it looks beautiful, especially the temple area and sunken valley. It may not look as gorgeous as Ghost of Tsushima, but it has a lot more variety in terms of the terrains. I haven’t finished Ghost of Tsushima (nor Sekiro) but the Ghost of Tsushima is generally just a big flat island while there are a pagoda city (Ashina Castle), a forest, a very Japanese-style temple with lots of trees and flowers, a huge valley, and some deep dark caves.

One thing that is great but also very inconvenient is that, there is no map, not even a mini-map. This helps a lot with the immersion, and also makes the game even more difficult as you have no idea where the enemies are until you either see them or be discovered by them, or you died and come back to life for the 5th time. And since it’s not an open world but an IKEA-like game, I often found myself not knowing where to go since I have to find my path with bare eyes. The remnants, which are the shadows left by other players, helped a bit, but not much. Some messages like “should try jumping” or “hidden path ahead” are super helpful tho.

Story

There’s more story than I expected, and I was actually kind of invested in it after beating Genechiro Ashina. There are also some side quests, but they are very easy to miss as there are no quest markers or quest menu. You either wander around the world, meet the side quest NPCs by chance and accidentally finish their quests, or look up a guide and do them like some chores.

Still, it’s a combat-focused game.