Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Incredibly tight combat, beautiful world, cool monsters. Classic FromSoft.

But at its core I kind of hate the combat. It's so, so good when you master it and spend the time to learn the enemies and can counter everything they throw at you. But it's like they made it so, so hard so that you have to do that. And then they throw all this bullshit in your way to make it so you can't get good.

Fights are too hard by default. Without spending a bunch of time to get all the collectibles to max out your character, enemies hit you for almost your whole health bar. So that means I basically have 3 hits I can take in any given fight. THREE. I spent 3 hours I think mastering Lady Butterfly because without memorizing all her possible moves and the exact flow of combat I would die in a couple of hits. And that was the first real boss I fought.

And they put all these obstacles between you and just getting on with practicing on bosses. A lot of bosses have a long walk back, a lot of the mini bosses have adds you have to clear beforehand. It's ridiculous. Some fights semi-require you to use items to defeat them or at least make them manageable. And what does FromSoft do with those items? They make them limited. So once you use your small supply that's it. Snap Seeds are the easiest example. They give you fucking ONE for Lady Butterfly. Once you use it its gone. If you try to reload it won't work because the game saves when you fucking use an item. Oh wait you can buy infinite from a merchant. A merchant you unlock by defeating the ultimate form of a boss (Corrupted Monk, the boss I finally just said "fuck this on" after I ran out of snap seeds) that already requires snap seeds to make it a fair fight that doesn't hours of memorizing their moves.

I know I can challenge myself and beat the bosses and beat the game. But while I'm playing I'm just not having fun and I'm asking myself "Why am I doing this?" To say I did it? Because the reward at the end, the "Wow I learned how to do that" is an incredibly small reward. Sure it felt really cool to start at being absolutely fucked by Lady Butterfly to being able to parry everything she threw at me. That's cool. But it's not cool enough to warrant spending 3 hours to learn the combat system. I think this game is the first FromSoft game that I think is too hard to the detriment of actually enjoying it as a game. It just feels like work. It's not for me. And as a result it's the first game I'm just going to put down with no plan of finishing in a long, long time.