So I beat it this morning, and I didn't like the game. TL;DR: Sorry if I shit on your new favorite game but Sekiro is kind of trash. And no, it has pretty much nothing to do with "difficulty."
My thoughts as follows:
Well the setting could be cool but it’s really boring. Feudal Japan has been done so many times, and even in 4K HDR it doesn’t look amazing. It’s either the same Japanese rooftops or rocky paths through a mountain. There’s tons of just foggy pits for really no reason. Enemy design is also pretty lazy. There’s humans, then big humans, and a few dogs, a bird enemy, and a couple demonic humanoids... it’s really nothing special. Nioh had way cooler enemies.
Story wise it’s nowhere near as deep as a Souls game. Basically there’s this line of immortals that are called the Divine Heirs of the Dragon Lineage (cliche much for Japan?) and this kid is the last and he doesn’t wanna do it anymore so you’re looking for a way to sever his immortality. There's really no "world" to build in this game because the "world" is just mythical Japan. Nothing cool about the different clans or anything. It’s mostly just this one area they call Ashina and that’s it.
Music is the standard fare for a Japan game but it could be way better. Okami had killer music from beginning to end. This is just a flute and drums over and over again, with some lone violins just for fun.
Now that the aesthetics are out of the way, let's talk gameplay.
Gameplay wise you have barely any customization of your play style. If you watch videos of Dark Souls bosses, people will have strategies based on what kind of build you have. Videos for this are just “you can cheese this boss by always dodging left.” You get your Katana, which you can get combat moves for... but you can only have one move on at a time. So like an overhead strike, or a spin slash, or whatever. You can use one of those. Otherwise your “combo” is just a bunch of nonstop swipes. Really boring to watch. I understand that this can be a callback to NES games like Ninja Gaiden where really you just memorized a boss's patterns and it became an FMV game, but I feel like we're beyond that point as a video game community.
The parrying and blocking system could have been locked down a lot more too. In Bloodborne you had a good idea of windows for things and could punish dudes pretty well. But you also didn’t have to play the game that way. This one is basically just to keep on top of guys, stay slightly to their side, and mash the block button. The issue I find is that you don’t even have to time it; if you just rapid fire mash, you’ll end up getting a parry. For the unblockable moves, where you can either dodge into thrusts for a counter that does posture damage, or the sweeps where you jump over them, it definitely babies you with a big warning sign before they happen. Not to say I didn't appreciate the telegraphing, but it kind of ruins the immersion of the gameplay.
Hit detection is bad. I saved a couple videos, recorded on my phone in slow-mo, and watched the replay to see how far away I was from an attack, and how long it took for my character to register that he was hit. It's really abysmal. I know that I-Frames have always been a thing in action-based games, but this one must just have some numbers off. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a patch later on that fixed a bunch of this.
The stealth aspect of the game is a total joke. In many portions, you are pit against a number of guys in some sort of courtyard. You can jump in a stealth kill one of them, and use your grappling hook to get away; when you do, everyone forgets that anything happened. I know this isn't MGS where enemies will have radios but holy shit, your friend just died and you're just gonna go back to standing in your little corner until I come back and stealth-kill another friend? What I'm saying is that the game doesn't really reward true stealth (killing off one guy at a time silently while nobody notices) any better than just hopping down from a ledge and then running away again. They've made backstabs and takedowns significantly easier in this than in Dark Souls, but they've taken away the rewarding feeling of doing it well.
A bunch of minor gripes in a row:
-Your health bottle is mapped to the up on the d-pad. Who came up with that idea?
-Everything costs way too much money. Even if you never died, you’d have to grind a lot to get just some regular items.
-Related to that, most of the texts that you find in the game to uncover some background you have to pay for.
-All of the male voices sound the exact same.
-People are currently able to beat this in 40 minutes. How broken does a 2019 game have to be if it can be finished in 40 minutes in the first couple days that the game is out?
-Oh and there’s a separate button you have to press to suck in loot (money) from enemies. Like Onimusha style.
-Terror is a stupid "status ailment." It's worse than Frenzy was in Bloodborne. Why do I have two meters where if they reach a certain point, I die? How about just one, and we'll call it HP.
-Many of the prosthetics, the only thing really customizing your battling, were totally worthless. Basically if you have the firecracker, you just use that to stun everything.
Pretty much a dud of a FromSoft game.
