When I first started playing through Sekiro, I did not particularly enjoy how the game eased you into combat, the story, and the world in general. After encountering a kind of expository dump about a fictional land you don’t really have any bearing on, and that dump failing to give a new player any sort of concrete understanding of what is happening in the world besides “welcome to a warring Japan parallel,” the game puts you in the shoes of a depressed samurai at the bottom of a well. While not quite a huge problem, the character’s motivation for getting up and out of the well coming from Emma, a random woman dropping a random thing into the well, seems to not really make sense. Further, this lack of motivation runs counter to how the player probably feels picking up and starting a new game.

Looking back now, I could see design-wise how these things make sense in the overall plot of the game, but relative to a game like Dark Souls 3, the intro seemed a little off-putting to me. Dark Souls 3’s introduction has the main character, a nameless cursed undead, rise out of the grave at the sound of a bell tolling throughout the land and the motivation picks up from there through dialogue/souls acquisition/challenging fights. Nothing is kept in reserve in DS3 either. Sekiro differentiates itself in its beginning by restricting a lot of the tools that you will receive throughout the game and breadcrumbs you into how these systems will eventually interact with each other.

In itself, I don’t think this is a flawed design. However, the way these systems are breadcrumbed can be frustrating as you move further into the game. After stealthing through the first part (place to emphasize that stealth is an option unlike other FromSoftware games), you receive your sword as the first big reward of the game. You use this to chop through some enemies and a little miniboss, stumble your way down a valley, and into your first boss fight.

When I first reached this fight, I was absolutely entranced by the imagery. Beautiful artwork, paired with a tense story situation, gives you a great sense of stakes, of something to be gained and lost from this fight. Genichiro is an incredible warrior, something you discover quickly as the game thrusts you into a fight you could never conceive of winning on your first playthrough.

This failure leaves you with one less arm and one less Kuro. You are rescued, given more somewhat contextless dialogue with the sculptor, and you are off again. This to me seemed like the real beginning of the game and in this regard, I have to compliment the previous section of the game. The game puts you at the bottom of a mountain, in this case, Genichiro’s incredible skill, and tells you that you must climb it to fulfill your duty to the boy you have resworn allegiance to.

The designers now begin the breadcrumbing, or the various steps you will need to climb up the metaphorical mountain that is Genichiro. To defeat him, you will need a variety of acquired skills that you will be fed one by one as you make your way towards him. Unfortunately, this breadcrumbing fundamentally fails to lead the player in the manner that it should, and instead of giving players small, achievable stairs to begin the ascent up the mountain, the designers opt to make multiple tough challenges that do not build off one another.

For example, the first miniboss you encounter after reaching the Dilapidated Temple is one of Ashina’s generals. Assailing you with a barrage of sweeping attacks, the player quickly learns that unlike other FromSoftware games, verticality during combat will play a key role in surviving some of the more severe attacks of the game. With the other, smaller encounters the player faces on your way, and after this boss, the player learns that sword attacks can come in a variety of different forms, and the methods you will use to defend yourself from these attacks will have to be different. I thought this design was actually pretty good and made me learn quickly to expect different things from new enemies, especially bosses.

This brings us to the second miniboss, Chained Ogre. This guy sucked ass. I don’t think I’m alone in this, I think you will have a challenging time trying to find a Sekiro player who believes that this boss enters even into the top half of good bosses in Sekiro. Not only do I think the boss doesn’t deliver an enjoyable experience like some of the game’s later bosses, but I also think that the boss fails to build off the concepts that Sekiro has introduced at this point. Instead of incorporating things you learned from the previous boss, like jumping sweeping attacks, this boss instead punishes you for jumping during a perilous attack. The idea behind Chained Ogre is to force you to learn a different Perilous Attack made by bosses and certain normal enemies: the grab. Pairing one of the more annoying moves in the game with an enemy who does not have a sword.

This boss, like several of the next upcoming bosses, does not have a sword. I think this was done to a) give variety to the enemy types since as you move through the capital of Ashina you fight some really similar miniboss types in the form of generals of the state and b) force you to learn a variety of dissimilar mechanics to prepare you for some of the later enemies. This boss, as well as Gyobuu and the raging bull, give the game a sense of regularly increasing difficulty. Each one features larger-than-life bosses that introduce incredibly hard gameplay mechanics that are poorly explored throughout the rest of the game. Larger non-human bosses have never been FromSoftware’s forte, but how these bosses are positioned accentuates their frustration to the player and gives the game the patented “this game is too hard for me” vibe that FromSoftware’s other titles deliver.

After you defeat Seven Spears of Ashina, who again teaches an important lesson to the player about Mikiri countering thrust attacks. By itself, a good lesson that’ll be useful to the player further in the game, but in juxtaposition with the other enemies introduced comes off very jarring. If I had any hand in the design, I would probably remove Chained Ogre, keep Gyobuu and then put the bull much further into the game. One non-swordsman type enemy would be enough to keep things fresh in the game’s beginning while also keeping things focused both gameplay-wise and even story-wise, as I don’t believe these enemies enhance or build upon the idea of Ashina as a state that’ll do anything to win a war in an effective manner.

For all the reasons above, this made me drag my feet as I played through the beginning of Sekiro. That being said, after you fight with Genichiro, the game only drags during certain bosses (notably the Snake Eyes fights and the two monkey fights), but overall, the gameplay takes a huge turn for the better.

There are so many positives about the later bosses of the game I would find it hard to list all of them point by point. Suffice it to say, I think the gameplay of most of the sword bosses and especially the three inner bosses are some of the most focused, fair, and fun bosses you can make in a game. The way things flow in these fights always makes you feel as if you could’ve done something to have not died. The resurrection system also gives you a buffer against things that you would consider “bullshit,” and leaves the player less of an excuse after dying twice or even potentially three times.

Speaking of multiple resurrections, it was an interesting decision to make your two additional resurrections rechargeable, as I think the system would have benefited greatly from letting you upgrade them to permanent per resurrection instead of having to recharge if you use them up, but I can see it encouraging farming some of the other resources in the game such as the experience and gold.

I personally think there should’ve been more customization as that was usually a mainstay for most of FromSoftware’s previous games, but I appreciated that it allowed the game to have much more focused gameplay. Aesthetic customization would’ve been nice, and although some of the DLC itched some of the scratch, nothing really came close to what I found through mods.

The story was much more present than some of FromSoftware’s previous entries, something I’ve seen as “intelligible” and “comprehensible,” but I think unlike the gameplay, the story builds well and then fails at the ending. All three of the non-Shura endings felt indistinguishable to some degree in how much the player is meant to care about them. When I defeated the Sword Saint himself, the task of defeating the final boss meant much more to me than anything that could happen in the end. For me, this only really changed when I played through the Shura ending, which forces you to make some uncomfortable decisions to kill some characters that you loved for seemingly no reason. But the result feels like something that you chose instead of a path you are forced to walk by virtue of “rescuing Kuro,” a character that only has depth through incredibly close inspection of your interactions with him, something that I only noticed multiple playthroughs after my first and something that I believe is not apparent to most people playing the game. This is rendered ultimately immaterial because of how good the gameplay is, but I just personally wish that the game figured out how to tell a more meaningful story through stronger character development. You can get more storytelling through consumable items in the form of sharing a drink with certain characters, but players’ natural drive towards resource conservation and decision paralysis makes it unlikely players will ever even see more than two or three of these conversations.

The world that Ashina inhabits is an interesting departure from the other worlds that Miyazaki has developed. I’m more of a fan of more fantasy-based worlds, but Ashina felt like it inhabited part-fantasy with things like The Demon of Hatred and Lady Tomoe teaching Genichiro how to harness lightning, but also felt really grounded in the history of Japan by incorporating real samurai moves, Japanese architecture and the lands mythos in general using giant snakes, giant monkeys, and other enemy types. It wasn’t quite personally for me, but I can appreciate that Miyazaki incorporated so many real-world elements into a fantasy world to tell one of the series’ first “intelligible” stories.

Other than that, there is not that much to complain about. I really want to emphasize how much I enjoyed the combat as it was such an incredible experience. Sekiro makes me rethink what good combat in video games can be, and even makes me rethink what I used to think polished combat looked like, such as in Dark Souls 3 and Kingdom Hearts 2. These games are incredible, but they tunnel you into making certain decisions, while Sekiro gives you a lot of freedom even outside of Shinobi tools to make different split-second decisions throughout a fight.