(Originally published to Glitchwave on 12/26/2025)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Developer: FromSoft
Publisher: Activision, CubeGame, FromSoft
Genre(s): Soulslike, Action-Adventure
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Release Date: March 22, 2019
For the past seven years, I have been scared shitless of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Its developer, FromSoft, already has the trademark of being the purveyors of grievous pain and frustration since the seventh gaming generation. I realize that I’ve made them sound like a sinister legion of doom, cackling evilly as they hatch their insidious plans to bring forth suffering and woe onto impressionable, innocent gamers. However, for those who are seasoned enthusiasts of the Japanese game developer, they can attest that their brand of sadism is actually quite invigorating in a gaming landscape where any sort of player adversity is expunged and overcorrected like an obsessively protective mother padding their children before they enter the playground. It turns out that gamers would rather feel the searing sting of failure than nothing at all, and the feeling of gratification once the initial pain is transmuted into pride upon one’s eventual success is a speciality that FromSoft honed to perfection. Still, by the late 2010s, the “prepare to die” branding that marked the Souls’ series at its most freshly foreboding earlier that decade had been diminished by the ever-present familiarity of its idiosyncrasies thanks to its sequels and influx of “soulslike” imitators. FromSoft evidently perceived the newfound ubiquitous joy that their meaty mechanics were now eliciting as an affront to their credibility as the arbiters of interactive agony. They told someone to “hold their beer” and went to work crafting Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a title whose unique reinterpretation of the “soulslike” formula is intended to alienate series veterans and refuel FromSoft’s supply of juicy gamer tears as a result. Given that Sekiro would go on to garner a reputation as “the hardest video game of all time” by the masses, I think FromSoft probably needed to relocate their supply of gamer saline they were storing by the rain barrel full with Dark Souls to a spacious warehouse on a remote island fitting for Alcatrazz. After finally finding the courage to face FromSoft’s brand new beast, I find that there’s plenty of hyperbole behind its formidable status. But did Sekiro still subject me to a torrent of torment that superseded Dark Souls in its own special way nevertheless? Does a bear still defecate in the forest?
Besides the aspects that differentiate Sekiro from Dark Souls in the mechanical department, there also exists a myriad of narrative elements that go against the typical FromSoft grain. Namely, the fact that Sekiro eschews the extensive undead soldier/hunter character creator that introduces the game in favor of forcing the player to pilot a character with a solidified lore background, a defined moniker, and a voice that can enunciate more than just Neanderthal-like cries and groans in reaction to physical pain. Wolf, Sekiro’s protagonist who is only referred to eponymously by legendary sword saint Lord Isshin, is a shinobi warrior whose life purpose is to serve and protect a child heir to the “Dragon’s Heritage” named Kuro. That is, until the prestigious boy is abducted by a figure named Genichiro, the adopted grandson of the aforementioned Ashina leader, Lord Isshin, who wishes to harvest the boy’s immortal blood as a means to defeat the Interior Ministry invaders and continue the reign of the Ashina Clan as its supreme chancellor once his sickly, geriatric grandfather passes. Wolf attempts to rescue his perennial client from the desperate clutches of the king-to-be, but Genichiro fatally slashes Wolf down and severs his left arm clean off his shoulder for good measure. Somehow, maintaining a relationship with Kuro has granted Wolf the same indestructible platelets, which he learns he possesses after a mysterious “sculptor” gives him refuge after the disastrous duel with Genichiro. With the guiding aid of a doctor named Emma and even old Isshin himself, who fervently believes that his grandson’s lust for clan control has unscrambled a few bolts in his brain, Wolf must ensure the safety of his defenseless protectee amidst this contentious power struggle. No, I am not just splurging paraphrased texts procured from an inordinate amount of research (okay, minimally so) as I was forced to do to even provide any iota of context behind the narratives for any of FromSoft’s previous output. Sekiro’s basic conflict premise is exposited coherently throughout the tutorial section in lieu of leaving the player in an obtuse haze of relying on dialogue from dreadfully daffy NPCs. A cogently told story in a FromSoft title? Ah, a heartily jestful exhibition, sir–you split my sides.
Many moons ago, I discussed how soulslike title Nioh fulfilled a niche slice of fan service by translating FromSoft’s typically Anglo medieval-inspired Souls formula to the eastern island nation of Japan. As much as I appreciate an unaffiliated IP tweaking the idiosyncrasies of the Souls series as a “soulslike” should ideally do, leave it to the true visionaries at FromSoft to show these imitators how to properly execute other developers’ ideas for their gameplay formula. Sure, Nioh depicted the country of Japan in its tumultuous Sengoku period adequately, with its ancient shiden-zukuri architecture and blooming cherry blossom trees sprinkling the atmosphere with a beguiling native majesty. Sekiro also features all of these specific chorographic tropes in spades, but FromSoft’s depiction of their country over five centuries ago isn’t content to just rely on the typical iconography to set the scene. I would say that Sekiro renounced Nioh’s design decision to launch the player into an area via a streamlined level select option in a menu, but FromSoft hasn’t divided the areas that rigidly since the Souls progenitor of Demon’s Souls. It was a mark of Nioh’s distinguishability, and all it accomplished was making all of the various Japanese settings shallow and ephemeral. By not changing a damn thing, Sekiro unfucks Nioh’s fatal flaw in the level design department and significantly broadens the land of the sun’s daily origin point with their patented interconnectivity. Anything to dig Nioh deeper down into the depths of irrelevance where it belongs.
While there aren’t any arbitrary loading borders between any of Sekiro’s areas, don’t expect the interconnectivity at play to dazzle you like taking the Undead Parish elevator down and discovering the back corridors of Firelink Shrine at the ride’s end. Sekiro’s level progression is mostly segmented between a series of checkpoint idols that halt at a dead end that is occupied by the area’s major boss. I’d equate the area organization and branching paths in Sekiro to how Bloodborne conducted the traversal of its map’s entirety, with perhaps fewer portals to regions unknown later in the game that throw a monkey wrench into the cohesion. What does unite each of Sekiro’s districts, in their own distinct ways as a slight contradiction to this rule, is that they are all mesmerizingly breathtaking. Gone are the muted tones and visceral scuzz intended to evoke an air of doom and gloom in Dark Souls, and/or the garish gothicness of Bloodborne, while we’re at it, as Sekiro flaunts the foliage and awe-striking organic glory of a pre-industrialized Japan to its fullest. Still, despite their picturesque radiance, Sekiro suggests an air of agitation that conveys the ever-present conflict engulfing each area like a pernicious smog.
The Ashina capital and the subsections that encompass its immediate perimeter are being salted in a perpetual flurry of snow, whose stark whiteness chalks the earth as a consistent visual motif of the foreground. Winter is arguably the harshest season to bear, so perhaps the frigidness of the three-month period complements the tone of tension, stemming from either the overarching story conflict or the severity of the game itself. The Sunken Valley that exists between the perilous pits of a winding gulch shakes up the subtlety of Ashina’s gentle snowfall with wintry winds so blustering that they’re liable to tear one’s face clean off. One would think the plateaus that house the Senpou Temple would feature the frozen precipitation due to its higher elevation, but the Tibetan-esque chain of mountainous peaks where monks piously practice their creed trades the fall of frost with an autumnal glow of golden and red that is absolute eye candy. Still, that disquieting aura felt around Ashina is retained when the beauty of Senpou’s outside is juxtaposed with the disgusting contents of the temple’s interiors. Infected channelers excrete abnormally large insects that crawl around the walls, plus monstrosities who have fused their DNA with that of an insect to ghastly results. The body horror aspect existing around the Senpou grounds is incredibly reminiscent of the cosmic failures conducted by the clinic in Bloodborne. Fountainhead Palace forgoes any trace of tension to accentuate its immaculate divinity, exhibiting the pinnacle of Japanese elegance without verging into expressionism like Okami. The area is definitely comparable to Anor Londo in both its heavenly aesthetic and position in the game, as its arrival is a reward in and of itself, and this also extends to some fairly steep challenges that exist within it as well. I’ll excuse the Abandoned Dungeon being rather drab because I see it as a brief vestibule that lies between Ashina Castle and the dank Ashina Depths below it. Still, I disagree with the popular sentiment that the latter section mentioned is an ugly smudge on Sekiro’s stunning map. Mibu Village is actually one of my favorites among all of Ashina’s various locales, for I was entranced by the eerie, moonlit glow of this would-be quaint zombified hamlet. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. Even the obligatory place where poison floods the floor up to the player’s knees in Ashina Depths is rather striking, with large monk statues erected out of the filth that suggest this circular setting was once a sacred place of worship. Now, it's a fetid pit liable to give the player hepatitis A through Zed through only a few minutes of direct exposure, but I wouldn’t classify it on the same level of calamity as its comparable Souls counterparts of Blighttown or the Valley of Defilement. Overall, all of Sekiro’s areas lack the dirge and despair of the districts of Lordran, Lothric, or Boletaria because the fictionalized depiction of 16th-century Japan isn’t a terminally ill ghoul waiting to be put out of its misery. Instead of playing hospice nurse checking off the responsibilities of soothing a decrepit world before it passes on, the player in Sekiro is more comparable to a doctor diagnosing the issue and then surgically expunging the cancer before it spreads. As you can plainly see, a healthier specimen that can strive for remission proves to be far more attractive.
The player will be able to see the full extent of Sekiro’s single-tear-shedding magnificence from all sorts of cinematographic angles due to the inclusion of the grappling hook. We’ll discuss the multifaceted uses of Wolf’s prosthesis later on, but for now, let’s delve into the one utility of his new artificial arm that will quickly become second nature to the player. When prompted by the visual cue of a green orb, pressing the assigned controller button will latch Wolf onto a plethora of protruding objects and surfaces, including, but not limited to, tree branches, building corners, mammoth-sized bosses, etc. The extension rope is lengthy enough to grapple onto these desired targets from what feels like at least a kilometer away, just as long as the game doesn’t deem the angle between Wolf and the object to be incompatible and deny the connection as a result. Any Souls veteran should be seeing the rich irony in this mechanic that makes Wolf as spry and environmentally adaptable as a 3D platformer mascot (Sly Cooper comes to mind) because any instance of jumping or hurdling in a Souls title was an ordeal that required as much preparation and practice as skydiving. If zipping through the trees and the rooftops of towering Japanese architectures like a squirrel feels rather uncharacteristic for a FromSoft title, get a load of Sekiro’s other wacky gameplay mechanics. Bodies of water would prove to be hazardous environmental obstacles in Dark Souls unless the cumulative liquid was at a height that didn’t reach above the crotch, so imagine my shock when I accidentally fell in the lake surrounding Hirata Estate, and Wolf didn’t immediately drown on impact. Eventually, Wolf can even submerge himself into the drink, where the contents of the water body become another realm of extensive traversability as the taller, perchable areas above the surface. The requirement for Wolf to reemerge to the water’s surface to refill his lungs with oxygen isn’t even a relevant condition when swimming. When Wolf dies due to the deadly conditions that exist on dry land, Wolf won’t immediately revert back to the bonfire-equivalent of an idol if his health bar totally depletes. Because Sekiro sometimes grants the more significant characters of the game multiple lives that function like the popular cat myth, Wolf gets the opportunity to automatically reorient himself once upon one initial death with a halved health bar upon his resurrection. For this last feature I want to mention, I implore all Souls fans to sit down while reading because I don’t want to be responsible for any concussions that might occur upon any fainting reactions. Making its long-awaited debut in Sekiro after we believed it to be something that FromSoft dogmatically omitted is a legitimate pause menu, which fully freezes the action of the game in addition to detailing all of the player’s inventory and attributes. Insert a gif of the infamous head explosion opener from Scanners to express the extent of my stunned awe.
Normally, I’d be thankful for FromSoft inserting all of these would-be quality-of-life enhancements that would typically make Sekiro a more agreeable experience compared to Dark Souls. However, keeping its nerve-racking reputation into consideration, all of the sharp skeptics should assume that the developers wouldn’t have implemented all of these perks into their product unless they deemed it absolutely necessary to maintain player morale. To give you an indication of how brutally demanding and strenuous Sekiro’s combat is, the game is often categorized as a quasi-rhythm game by the people who’ve played it. Knowing exactly what element of Sekiro’s gameplay this comparison was derived from when someone I was casually discussing the game with in college sent a surge of dread throughout my system, like a five-year-old coming to grips with the concept of mortality when one of their relatives kicks the bucket. Parrying with a melee weapon in Dark Souls was an aspect of combat that I used about as sparingly as the holy hand grenade, so the prospect of being forced to incorporate it into every single combat scenario put me in a state of hysterical panic. Fortunately, Sekiro bestows a sense of self-awareness of how parry-intensive its gameplay is and displays a wider window of leniency with the player’s deflection timing. Askew, yet relatively responsive parries are all fine and dandy during defense, but simple alertness won’t do the player any favors when offense is factored in. Replacing the standard stamina meter found in Dark Souls is the “posture meter,” which indicates the threshold of damage blocking Wolf can withstand before he has to take a breather and leave himself vulnerable to a potentially critical strike from the enemy. Except for the dogs that die with one sword swipe, the vitality of every conceivable enemy in Sekiro is also bound by this mechanic, and the only way of penetrating most foes, especially bosses, is to clog their posture meter and deliver a “deathblow” execution upon reaching its breaking point. Besides needing to deflect their attacks flawlessly for their posture meter to even emerge on screen, enemies will often incorporate unblockable offensive maneuvers into their tactics, and the red Japanese character that fleetingly flashes on screen to signify its appearance probably means something along the lines of “oh fuck, death approaches!” It certainly doesn’t translate to either “duck” or “dodge,” for that would imply an extent of passivity on the player’s part. No, what the player is intended to do when the enemy is revving up this intimidating gambit is to splash it back in their faces with either a “mikiri counter” or whatever the cheeky little bounce move is called. Accurately executing either counter depending on the position of the “perilous move” will insert a heaping slab into their posture meter, but whether or not they’ll thrust their sword or sweep the player’s leg is rather unpredictable. In fact, nothing involved with Sekiro’s combat displays a consistent pattern recognizability to commit to muscle memory as its musical comparisons would connote. We’re not banging the bass drum along to Seven Nation Army here; we’re playing as the percussionist for Ornette Coleman. Because of the polyrhythmic unpredictability between swapping for slivers of enemy vulnerability and meeting their swift aggressions with picture-perfect timing, Sekiro’s combat is a tango that takes tons of acute, feline-like reactions and practice to even stand a chance of survival. The extent of attentiveness required is also pervasive across most, if not all enemies, with even the big black cocks annihilating Wolf if he isn’t cautious. I’m only referring to these enemies in this fashion to impress a sense of severity on everyone reading this.
Much to the chagrin of a sizable selection of Souls veterans, the player cannot simply swap Wolf’s relatively flaccid sword with a heftier one that requires both arms to carry around. A katana is my weapon of choice across any Souls game when it becomes available, but even I feel inclined to seek out Andre so he can enhance it with as much titanite as humanly possible so I can shred chunks of health off of enemies and bosses with only a handful of sword swipes. Unfortunately, the player is constricted to Sekiro’s arduous, novel gameplay conditions, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t allowed to add some pinches of variability to said conditions. Besides buffing Wolf’s sword with the various sugars and briefly making his katana like a stainless steel beignet, or the divine confetti to exploit a weakness in apparition enemies, an auxiliary mode of offense in Sekiro that might prove more reliable is the prosthetic tools. When Wolf finds or buys a particular tool on the field, he returns to his sculptor savior in the Dilapidated Temple hub so he can reconfigure the object of interest into a secondary offensive unit using his craftsmanship expertise. The “loaded axe” proved to be helpful during the earlier sections of the game for more potent damage that my sword struggled to inflict when I wasn’t confident in my deflection abilities, and the “shinobi firecracker” is obnoxiously bright and loud enough to distract any enemy and throw them off their mojo. Note that this particular prosthetic tool is extremely effective against any animal enemy, like frightening one’s pets on the Fourth of July. The “loaded spear” and “finger whistle” tended to be quite useful when kiting enemies away from their packs, and the “loaded umbrella” is a serviceable shield for when enemies in said packs are packing heat (no pun intended). You’ll notice how I’ve described an applicable situation for all of these prosthetic tools, which connotes that all of them tend to only be useful in specific scenarios. The player can’t just stick to one of these tools like glue to supplement the lackluster damage dealt with Wolf’s katana, which negates the prospect of a “build” that Souls players tend to develop. Sekiro has a strict dress code to abide by, but at least one can change the color of the tie that accompanies the uniform.
I should note that the usage of the prosthetic tools is a finite contingency relative to how many “spirit emblems” Wolf has in his inventory. This form of ammunition that resembles paper-thin crosses can be found all across Sekiro’s map, but it's recommended for the player to buy them in bulk when visiting an idol using the Sen currency that Wolf literally vacuums out of slain enemies. To increase the amount of ammo used per life, the player must allocate their experience gained in battle towards the unlockable perks available in five different skill trees, which also include several special maneuvers the player can incorporate into the combat. Yes, the experience required to purchase these skills is lost upon dying as a punitive measure just like in Dark Souls, but Sekiro reinterprets the damning penalty for failure into something uniquely merciless. Whenever the player oversteps the allowance the game gives for sheathing Wolf’s mortal coil and is forced to return to the idol they last interacted with, their total amount of both experience and sen is subtracted exactly in half. That is, until a safety net referred to as “unseen aid” saves both units from plummeting, but this is only automatically applied on a maximum occurrence rate of 30%. I’ve never touted myself as a supreme master of Soulslike games, but I have a much better chance at recovering 100% of my experience by manually trekking back to my failure point than the low likelihood that Sekiro confines me to. To further the sternness of this method of punishment, Sekiro incorporates the narratively relevant condition of “dragonrot” into this system if the player continually gives up the ghost. Given the consistent symptoms of this illness that pandemically plagues Ashina, “dragonrot” seems to be a folksy, medically primordial term for tuberculosis. How this is factored into Wolf cyclically biting the dust to no end is that the rate of unseen aid decreases to potentially single digits if he keeps collecting strands of the disease upon dying. Somehow, the friendly NPCs such as the Sculptor and the various merchants will also contract dragonrot by proxy if left untreated. Keep a “dragon’s blood droplet” in your inventory like a diabetic stores insulin shots. I’d be more appalled by Sekiro’s methods of penalizing the player if the skills were absolutely mandatory for progression and character building like in the typical RPG. Still, just on principle alone, the demerit dealt while trying to learn Sekiro’s combat is downright diabolical–evil even. Yeah, go fuck yourself too, FromSoft.
Because the stipulations at play here are anything but fair and forgiving, it’s essential to approach every frame of Sekiro with absolute tact and patience. Expounding more on the latter requirement, Sekiro practically emphasizes stealth as a gameplay mechanic on almost equal pertinence as parrying. For all intents and purposes, pretend that the game is titled “Solid Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice” because approaching every scenario where several enemies could ambush the player with subtlety and quiet repose can mitigate the struggle of acclimating to Sekiro’s more confrontational gameplay entirely. By methodically scanning a visual layout of any scene where enemies are scattered about, the player can dispatch enemies with a single deathblow from above or below due to their guard remaining relatively lowered. Wolf must have expertise in human anatomy, for he knows where on the neck to critically insert his blade, which somehow immediately mutes the desperate gasps and gurgles an enemy would logically utter in a state of extreme, dying pain. It somehow works in the interest of keeping the other enemies in the vicinity in a nescient state, which can somehow be retained as long as Wolf crouch-walks his way through enemy lines. Scoping out the safest entrypoint will require a proficient use of the grappling hook, and finding inconspicuous vantage points to gain leverage shows a more profound utilization of agility in a FromSoft title than ordinary traversal. Sneaking up on enemies to take them down one-by-one admittedly did instill a sensation of imposter syndrome because I was taking the easy way out instead of impeccably taming the toils of combat. Then again, what are shinobi more associated with: covertness or warrior-like aggression? I rest my case.
Perhaps one of the most beneficial aspects of stealth in Sekiro is the opportunity to extinguish an entire orb of a miniboss's health with a furtive deathblow. That would typically be all that I’d comment in regard to a game’s foes of a silver-ranking but considering that Sekiro’s minbosses are harder than the majority of other games’ primetime bosses and they caused dragonrot to fill my lungs with subsequent defeats, they’re certainly notable enough for further detail. For the first third of the game, the more imposing enemies with names and stacked health bars will take the shape of Ashina army generals decorated with esteemed shogun samurai armor. Wolf will also encounter an ogre or two in the cold Ashina Outskirts, whose perilous grab maneuver will highlight some physically incongruous hitboxes. In both Sunken Valley and in the poison pool of Ashina Depths, Wolf will encounter what I can only describe as a Tusken Raider from the deserts of Tatooine, complete with blasting Wolf in the face with the firing of their muskets. The sumo-sized drunkards will infuse their fights with elemental damage, while the impish yet volatile O’rin of the Water will phase out of corporeality on a whim to nullify Wolf’s sword slashes. One standout enemy designated as a “miniboss” is the strapping “Armored Warrior” who unexplainably screams out “Rooobberrtt!!” once Wolf figures out how to defeat him despite his impenetrable iron suit. Undoubtedly, he was going to follow that up by shouting “Smith” if he didn’t break his neck beforehand. It seems unfitting to relegate these stark progression impediments to a status of lowered significance, but I’d say that rewarding the player with a prayer bead that increases attributes like vitality with a full set of four does not diminish their importance or relevance. That, and subtracting their statuses as bosses allows them to be reused without players accusing the developers of lazily padding the experience. Trust me, if the Stray Demon and Demon Firesage were classified as minibosses, no one would have batted an eye.
At the end of one route littered with minibosses obstructing the sweet respite of a new idol discovery lies Sekiro’s bona fide bosses, and the roster presented here is formidable enough to encompass the entirety of someone’s Mt. Rushmore of hardest boss battles across all of gaming. Still, like Dark Souls, the difficulty curve inconsistently ebbs and flows like the evening tide. The booming, horseback riding Ashina castle gatekeeper Gyoubu Oniwa and female shinobi Lady Butterfly are deemed fairly challenging for inexperienced players early on. Then, the player is faced with the Folding Screen Monkey quartet and the electric (literally) Divine Dragon, whose bouts incorporate gimmicks that verge on puzzles unseen since the underdeveloped days of Demon's Souls. Corrupted Monk seems to only inspire relative ire instead of outright rancor despite her physical bulkiness and three health bars to contend with, but perhaps that is due to practicing on her phantom phase at the end of Mibu Village. Truly, I can think of two (or technically three) Sekiro bosses that are certain to trigger some PTSD-induced sweating and fatigue in a vast majority of players. The first one lies at the watering hole dead end of Sunken Valley, which would be serene if not for the colossal, albino King Kong called “Guardian Ape” waiting to trounce anyone or anything that trespasses in his shallow pond. And trounce the player he will with his erratic, animalistic flailing that is more difficult to anticipate and account for than the flight trajectory of a drunken house fly! His grab tends to almost magnetize to the player, and his flatulence and stereotypical shit-flinging will poison the player to add insult to indignifying injury. Once I managed to decapitate this feral monstrosity upon what I believed to be the final blow with great skepticism, seeing the beast readjust himself and start playing Hamlet with his organic head in one hand and a disturbingly large centipede in place of his head’s old resting place made me scream “of fucking course!” with great frustration. Granted, this phase is easier to combat because he inexplicably whips a sword out of his ass, but the constant AOE blasts that deal the Sekiro-equivalent of Bloodborne's deadly frenzy affliction in “terror” are not to be taken lightly. Fun. The other especially enraging boss in Sekiro is definitely the Demon of Hatred, an atrocious beast that the Sculptor becomes after downing some swill sake at the game’s climactic point, or something. His attack patterns are easier to commit to memory than elementary-grade multiplication tables, but I will concede that the position of vanquishing a boss that evidently escaped from the Bloodborne zoo exhibit with three whopping health bars where deflecting is practically an irrelevant condition in a game practically entrapped by the mechanic is quite the Brobdingnagian task. I’d still rather fight him than the fiery Bloodborne boss that he reminds me of. Still, whether or not Sekiro’s stacked boss selection is stirring an indescribable anger within the player or just making them question their abilities for a few seconds, I think I can speak for everyone when I say that each boss is herculean in their own right to act as a substantial milestone in overcoming Sekiro’s outstanding gameplay constraints. The bonus of enhancing Wolf’s base level damage output is a fine reward for besting these baddies, but I felt like I had grown and evolved accordingly anyway without anything tangible attached.
But all of these bosses I’ve mentioned were not the biggest thorns in my subjective sides throughout my Sekiro experience. No, that honorable superlative, or dishonorable depending on how you swing it, goes to Genichiro Ashina. The overarching antagonist of Sekiro isn’t the boss that brought the most emphatic anger out of me because of his elevated relevance to the plot or his amoral capacity to harm children, but because he’s a real sumbitch in battle. His encounter at the tippy top of Ashina’s capital building is considered to be the first major “road block” where it dawns on the player that they’ll need to adapt to Sekiro’s mechanics or suffer immensely. I am of the common demographic of players who struggled with Genichiro’s vicious stabbings and long-ranged archery, and I definitely wasn’t prepared to deal with his third phase that incorporated a lightning deflection mechanic that hadn’t even been hinted at before this boss encounter. Still, I came to admire the underlying educational aspect of Genichiro despite finishing him and feeling as if luck played a significant role in my eventual success. That is, until he kidnaps Kuro again once the Ministry invaders penetrate Ashina’s walls at the game’s climactic finale and Wolf must confront him again in the flowing field where Wolf’s arm was unceremoniously severed by him in what will feel like a lifetime ago. Sure, an emaciated Genichiro will be no trouble for any player who has ideally accumulated so much sword and deflection prowess at this point where they’ll wipe the floor with this formally daunting boss in seconds. However, what the player learns upon dying to Genichiro’s last ditch effort at killing Wolf by unraveling a prime-era Lord Isshin with another mortal blade is that Genichiro is the first of FOUR phases with both him and this sudden facsimile of his grandfather’s younger self. When I’m forced to regress to fighting Genichiro again and again after grandpa spanks me over his knee, my thinning patience with this appetizer starts to affect the efficiency at which I defeat Genichiro. Dealing with Ashina’s successor during the finale evoked the embarrassment of being forced to repeat algebra after failing to grasp trigonometry, or fighting with Luigi after Mario was deemed too difficult to handle. No matter if Genichiro is known as a notorious destroyer of players’ spirits, framing him in the particular way they do here brings me great shame when he manages to still smite me.
Compounding this sense of shame is that Genichiro arguably isn’t Sekiro’s main antagonist anyway, or at least he’s not the driving antagonistic force on all narrative fronts if the outcome of the multiple endings is any indication. If the player has reached Genichiro magically channeling the body of Lord Isshin as Sekiro’s final challenge, then it means that the player has chosen the path of righteousness by refusing to submit to the “iron code” of the shinobi at the game’s most pivotal moment. The regulation in question was espoused by Wolf through the teachings of Owl, an older shinobi who took Wolf in his guardianship and assigned him the task of protecting Kuro. He’s been rumored to have perished in the Hirata Estate attack where Kuro initially went missing, but he’s revealed that to be a ruse when he hears through the grapevine that Wolf has been fighting tooth and nail to rid Kuro of his immortality at the behest of the precociously humane little heir. You see, Owl’s invested interest in Kuro is harnessing his immortal blood for himself, and for reasons that prove to be even more inarguably selfish than Genichiro’s. He’s been manipulating Wolf into keeping the kid in proximity and fabricating this hogwash shinobi code where he stands chiefly above all else to cloud Wolf’s judgment. Given that Owl’s duplicity is written clearly on the walls and that submitting to him will lock the player out of large swathes of endgame content, it’s hard to imagine why the player would prefer siding with this grey-haired jerkoff and scorn both Emma and a sickly Isshin (who both become boss battles as a result) in Sekiro’s “Shura” ending. Still, while this ending may be unsatisfying in the grand scheme of Sekiro’s bigger conflict, perhaps it remains a cathartic conclusion specifically for Wolf, unshackling all servitude towards those close to him and becoming the recalcitrant rogue that might be fitting for his ninja persona. It’s something to consider when weighing the player’s options.
Uncle, Sekiro, uncle, I say! Actually, I was going to conclude this review with something of that tone, pretending that the game was still browbeating and buttfucking me well after I had eventually bested it. However, I realized that ending my comments on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice on a glib note felt rather disingenuous to how the game profoundly impacted me. I stood tall while the Sekiro drill sergeant screamed obscenities in my face at every waking moment, calling me a worthless maggot and several slurs you can’t say in a public setting. While it was an enervating endeavor, I still salute the onslaught of offenses from this game for offering a character-building exercise that improved my capabilities as a gamer. Triumphing over Dark Souls is thrilling enough, but my experience with Sekiro reminded me more of when I finished Zelda II, an excursion I thought to be practically impossible, instilling an indelible confidence within me once I conquered the insurmountable odds. In fact, I look forward to “Sekirolikes” catching on and ushering in an influx of games that ape its aerodynamic platforming, pulsating parry-oriented gameplay, and foster stealth as an advantageous element to combat. For now, incidentally, I’m going to take a power nap…for a week.
