Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (From Software)

I agree being able to teleport everywhere makes the later games much more enjoyable. Even Demons Souls had a teleport system in from the beginning of the game.

Even so, you get the lordvessel before you have to do most of the backtracking and I don't see how that could drop a game from "masterpiece" to something you don't like

In case anyone else is autistic as me, I tried attacking the Great Serpents body for about 20 minutes to see if anything special would happen, and nothing did.

Unless maybe it requires 25 minutes!

So i beat the second owl fight last night leaving me only with demon of hatred and final boss dude. The second owl fight as fantastic and i just wish more of the bosses were along the lines of him. One thing i loved is how if you do the proper counter to some of his moves before waiting to the absolute last second he will switch into a different move out of his stance to counter you instead of simply tracking like every other boss and every other game. For example, when he goes for his big overhand you will dodge left or right by instinct with the idea of getting hit or two in. BUT, instead he counters this by changing his vertical attack into horizontal slash right where you dodged to. There are some other good examples of this too, like with his main multi slash combo he will fake the 3rd or 4th blow and do a hesitation move with it before coming back at you with it.

OTOH, the gameplay feels less good in other areas. i still don't think the stealth is a great design choice, at worse it inevitably takes away from the games strength of combat. Fighting multiple enemies at once often does not really fit with the games combat either.

i also don't care for the huge beast mobs, the guardian ape and headless is acceptable as a change of pace but i was dismayed to see demon of hatred is another one like this given the game does not have so may real bosses compared to BB and souls games.

Overall i think it's an 8/10 for me. It's far more bad or even mediocre. i look at it an experimental game that has some rough areas that don't work as well as you might hope and serve to hide the games amazing core fighting gameplay instead of give a slight break from it at times and enhance it. For me Bloodborne is easily the best from developed game and very possibly among the best of this decade.


ps; How is Ng+? Dunno if i should invest an ng+ playthrough or not..

Yeah the owl having "mixups" is pretty cool, i think if you do the head stomp on him he'll side step and 1 shot you as well lol

I genuinely can't muster interest in playing this game though, i was super excited for it too

Owl was definitely my most favorite fight in the game, close to that water lady but that's just because it was literally like a dance. Had a good pace.

The demon though man.. fuck that thing. Some of the RNG in that fight was driving me absolutely fucking mad. Sometimes he would just decide to charge twice as far and it would be impossible to run to him in time without getting beamed by fireballs, it was fucking stupid.

Well consider me retarded

Fedor said:

You can completely block his fire attacks with suzaku's lotus umbrella.

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I really can't believe I didn't try that after being so proud finding out the umbrella works so well against headless dudes..

Just killed it on my first try using the umbrella. Whistle also helps.

I just spent.. hours on this fucking guy and just killed him like 10 minutes ago. Felt like a god, and then I watch that video LMAO

That is insane

Fedor said:

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A huge amount of people who may appear to have some disability affecting motor skills have no disability when it comes to the ones involved with gaming.


i nearly died as a kid when i had meningitis and it did some slight permanent nerve damage. The only real notable affect is that my writing is godawful and looks like a 10 year olds. However it seems even the fine motor skills that control things like writing do not affect have any effect on things like using a controller, typing, using a clutch in a car ect.. as i do all these at least as well as your average person.

So i suspect even if you see some guy spazzing out like they have downsyndrome there is still a decent chance they can use a gamepad as well as you or me.

Completed it and avoided all threads etc as didn't want spoilers, and for once wanted to take my time with a fromsoft game and try to find everything i could

Went pretty good, missed the final two prayer beads of course, bit salty about that. Also the fish corpse location, dunno why the fuck he's eventually at ape, I guess it links somehow and thats how people got sick? Maybe i missed the item that elaborated on that, but I didn't get it.

Overall I thought the quests were easier to progress than others in the series, maybe thats because the grapple makes it easier to return to areas you struggled with before. In the end I was a bit disappointed with the conclusions, i spawned a small fish from the pot guy who kept asking for more scales to become bigger, and I thought this would eventually lead to me fighting the big carp and bringing him the final scales (I also bought everything from him), but nope, just a small fish now. Nothing special from that entire thing. Pretty shitty. Blackhat just gives a balloon that combines all the effects. Rat catcher guy/Issin at least gave me some art. Killing all five headless doesnt seem to do anything. I really thought that room near the start of senpau temple past the monks where you grapple up into the hole in the roof, which has all 5 there and one of the guys is holding like a bell thing, would do something once I killed them all. I also thought killing all the infected guys with the mortal blade without resting would do something too, but apparently not (or I missed some but didn't see in wiki). Disappointed black scroll was just a lore item.

I also found the game a lot smaller in scope than the others. Like it suddenly dawned on me that this was probably all the areas I was going to visit, and whilst fountainhead was a lot bigger/better than expected, I never felt like I actually got away from Ashina, though this was probably by design. I was just so sick of the place in the end, three times we're back there now. Ending (dragons homecoming) was just a cutscene, absolutely nothing of importance.

Having said all that , I did still love the game. The way it turns a more or less linear path into making you feel like you have discovered something special is still great, and plenty of nice surprises. The combat grew on me a lot (Swapping eavesdrop and flask buttons helped), i just wish there was another couple of areas to explore.

In terms of difficulty, found it like all souls games: rolled at start, fine the majority of the way through, last two bosses I found challenging though Ebretias is still #1 for fucking me over.
Don't agree that its not a souls-like game, I actually thought it was very souls like and my eyes rolled so hard when i saw the 'treasure carps', but at least they were elaborated on later with the swimming. Anyway 9/10 or so, loved it despite my criticism, no game makes me pay attention like fromsoft games.


Also, one thing I don't think I saw mentioned in this thread despite someone talking about the Mortal Blade is that you can go back and kill the guardian ape's corpse properly, for an extra attack power.

Beat Oniwa after ~15 attempts. Was really hoping to not die so much with the fucking Dragonrot. Getting better with the deflection/parry's. I saw there was a NPC near Jouzou, but, I did not manage to talk to him in time before he died. Is he important? -.-