Hi folks, I made a video about why Sekiro is awesome.
Here it is: https://youtu.be/eSnNWNCq7j8
I guess that most of the people on here are fans of the game anyway but it may be good to show to friends. Regardless, it's fun to break down the great things about the games we love.
For those who aren't into watching the video here's a written version:
Sekiro maintains the core of what a soulsborne game is. It’ll put you in a twisted and interconnected world brimming with mystery. It’ll have you creeping between bonfire-like checkpoints, fearing for your hoarded XP. It’ll reward you for improving your skill at the game. It’ll even let you learn and dissect a seemingly impossible boss, until they’re nothing but dirt on your tiniest of boot, that still manages to kill you.
But it also introduces a bunch of new stuff that’ll keep the whole ordeal fresh. Like a brand new Sengoku period inspired setting or a new skill focussed XP system and a combat style that’ll make even the most jaded souls veteran, feel like it’s their very first time.
COMBAT: Dance Dance Ninjitsu
The fun of Sekiro’s combat is in the way it makes defense your best offense. Enemies have a health bar and a posture bar. Fill that bad boy up and you can do a death blow, instantly killing regular enemies and taking a notch off of bosses. But attacking isn’t great for doing posture damage, you gotta block right for that.
Take the Wolverine Necromorph hybrid for instance. He attacks fast, does a lot of damage and is scary in a buttface ugly kinda way. But when you get his rhythm down and block at just the right moments, he’s easy. This essentially turns Sekiro into an incredibly satisfying yet dangerous rhythm game.
Even when dealing with unblockable attacks, your defense is a weapon. After jumping over a sweep attack you can give ‘em a boot to the noggin. Or when a ninja comes sliding in with a Booker T style bicycle kick, you can stomp on it and end that man’s life.
Soulsborne games have always been about picking apart an enemy, downloading their DNA into your mind and beating them over the head with it. But it's better here because when you react to something you’ve learnt you’re instantly rewarded for it.
The one-on-one combat is a satisfying clash of swords where you’re so close to your enemy, you can smell their grubby breath and that makes it dangerous and exhilarating.
SKILLS & TOOLS: Ninja Your Way
Upsettingly, you aren’t going to be able to play dress up in Sekiro. It doesn’t have a ton of weapons or armor. It doesn’t even have a character creator. But you still have a huge collection of tools and a way to build your own playstyle.
To start, there are so many skill trees. You can unlock abilities, like recovering health on a death blow or reflecting attacks in midair or awesome combat arts that let you kick arse with an acrobatic flurry of blows.
Then there’s the Shinobi prosthetic tools, like the axe that breaks shields or the umbrella that protects from ranged attacks. These tools have a niche purpose but you can improvise with them too. The axe does a ton of posture damage to non-shielded enemies and the umbrella is perfect for an overly aggressive foe.
This freedom extends to how you approach encounters. Take the chunky sausage of a samurai for example. You could fight him and all his goons together but you’re better off sneaking in taking a few out, dipping back into stealth and repeating until it’s just you and him.
There are so many touches that help with this playstyle, like a grappling hook with vertically designed environments and high grass to stealth in. This is a game that makes you feel smart for systematically dispatching enemies and gives you the tools to do it.
STORY & WORLD: Intelligible Mystery
The story of Sekiro is more straightforward and personal than its predecessors. You aren’t learning about the major players 1000 years later, you get to watch it happen and you’ll care. You’ll end up force feeding Sake to every character just so they’ll tell you about that time they got a little too close with their cousin.
That being said, From Software haven’t lost their love of mystery and cryptic story telling. You feel the history of every environment. While the item descriptions still give you insights into the world. This is a captivating setting that masterfully explores the cyclical nature of violence and the corrupting effect of power. There are far too few creepy laughs for a Soulsborne game though.
SUMMARY
You should play Sekiro because it does everything that the soulsborne games do with a gleaming new lick of paint, some banging changes to the combat system and a cracking story you’ll actually follow and if you fancy some more, here’s some similar games to have a loot at.
SIMILAR GAMES
Nioh takes place in a similar period and adopts a lot of the same aesthetic as Sekiro. It’s also the best soulsborne game not made by From Software, it nails that formula and introduces elements, like loot and an active dodge system that make it feel unique.
Furi is an indie boss rush game that looks fantastic and rewards you for paying attention. It fills the screen with dangers, gives you a fun set of tools to plays with and demands you start learning those patterns.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is a super innovative rogue-like rhythm game hybrid that can be played just with a dance mat. Basically, you do all the rogue like stuff of killing and looting but you have to do it on the beat. It’s a merging of genre that works surprisingly well and you should be able to carry over all that rhythm you’ve learnt in Sekiro.
I'd love some feedback on the video. But more importantly:
Is there anything great about Sekiro that I missed?
Submitted May 24, 2019 at 05:04PM by GGRex http://bit.ly/2Wm9vyB
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