Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - Review

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - Review: The Evolution of a Genre

No Spoilers

In a recent interview with Polygon, Hidetaka Miyazaki, the president of From Software and the creative director of Sekiro, expressed a desire to substantially evolve the tried and true Dark Souls formula saying, "Keeping it fresh - providing something new - that is what's going to lead to a better game." From that aspiration, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was born and, while there are certainly elements that are reminiscent of their previous work, this game is a different beast entirely. And what a beautiful beast it is. Each risk that the game takes pays off in dividends. From the tensely satisfying combat loop that relies on player confidence to the robust stealth systems that reward clever thinking, Sekiro succeeds on delivering the promise of being a super badass ninja in an unforgiving, merciless world.

Sekiro's Story and the Best of Both Worlds

The story of Sekiro follows Wolf, a shinobi who has pledged his allegiance to a young lord in feudal Japan at the end of the Sengoku period. When that lord is kidnapped, you set out on a quest to rescue him from the nefarious forces who have taken him. While this sounds quite cliche, the main plot is told with such subtlety and sincerity that it becomes genuinely engaging. Furthermore, the wider that you explore and the further you dig into the world, whether it be through NPC interactions, in-game landmarks, or item descriptions, the more you can see how interconnected the story is with the environment. It's fascinating to happen upon an old grave early in the game only to discover later whose grave it was and how integral they were to the story. Similarly, NPC's feel more connected to this world than ever before with rich backstories that shed light on more than just their motivations but that also reveal hidden truths about boss encounters or prosthetic weapon origins. While the main thread of the story is told with a clarity that the previous From Software games lacked, it hasn't abandoned the cryptic and mysterious nature of the world that many find so alluring. Rather, Sekiro tells an old tale well while also adding a level of depth to the environments and items that allows the player to add their own nuances and discoveries to the telling of this story. Everything in the game has a narrative purpose, from each line of dialogue to the placement of NPC's, they all serve to grant a wider view of the world. Starting out on this adventure, your vision is narrowed about the events unfolding around you but, like any good book, with each passing page, you slowly get to see more and more of the mystery until the mastery of its construction becomes apparent.

Interestingly, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has four different endings, each of which has considerable impact not only on the story but on the content that you experience in the game. I won't go into further detail about these differences but, suffice it to say, they are significant. What I will say is that each ending leaves the player satisfied at the conclusion and they add a new level of replayability to the experience.

More Than Just Eye Candy

To put it simply, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a stunningly realized and beautifully fashioned game. The scenery is downright gorgeous with a vibrant, pastel color palette in the natural environments and a muted almost militaristic color palette in the urban environments both of which fit the wartime themes of the game. Furthermore, the character animations are truly masterful throughout. Both your character and the vast array of enemy types move with fluidity and precision, something that is absolutely necessary in a game that demands so much from the player. Never will you be wondering what the difference between a sweep and a thrust attack are as they are so clearly animated. The effects in this game deserve a special shout out as well with clear signals every time swords clash together. Being able to visually read whether or not you have successfully deflected an opponents blade or vise versa is essential to the ebb and flow of combat. This exquisite detail carries over into everything, from the effects that linger on you if you have a status ailment to the way that an aura emanates from you whenever you pop a buff. These sort of details matter in a game as deadly as this where you need to be able to see what sort of interaction is happening without consulting a clumsy menu. Finally, in terms of performance, I played on PS4 and, aside from an odd hiccup here and there which was thankfully never in combat, I did not experience any sort of drag on the frame rate.

However, the stealth indicators, while clear when the enemy is searching for you, vanish once you have been spotted which can lead to some confusion on the battlefield. Hearing the musical battle cue start after watching a red icon briefly blink behind you can be disconcerting, especially when you turn around and no one's there. More than once, I was spotted by an enemy off-screen only to desperately flip around, search for the opponent, panic grapple to the nearest branch, and then find out that it was some random fish in the river behind me.

With visuals maintaining such a high bar of quality, it's really no surprise that the sound design, voice acting, and the music of Sekiro are nothing short of excellent. First of all, the various sound effects that populate the world are top notch, from the twisted screams from the Chained Ogre to the caws of the crows that surround the vendors. The sounds of combat in particular shine with the clang of crossing swords, the swoosh of an enemy dodging away, and the splash of blood from a recently punctured artery all ringing clearly for the player. Having clear auditory indicators for the stealth alerts and successful back stabs is another godsend. The voice acting (I played through with the English dub) is excellent and subdued throughout the experience. Not many people, aside from the odd NPC, emote extensively but that fits the experience as it allows you to project your own emotions on the characters. Finally, the music is absolutely terrific with traditional Japanese instruments complementing haunting choral melodies. Each track, from the individual boss tracks to the ambient music, fits perfectly for each situation with bombastic strings and horns for bestial encounters and more ethereal flutes and pipes for mystical locations. It's a great mix and blends right into the game's mythos.

Lethal Precision

With such an esteemed pedigree, the action in the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is unsurprisingly magnificent. The combat is based around two facets that you and your enemies share: Vitality and Posture. Vitality is the typical health pool that degrades when taking direct hits. Posture on the other hand is new to Sekiro and the crux of the combat. Essentially, it measures how long you or an opponent can maintain attacking before being knocked down. The posture bar builds based on a number of contributing factors such as attacking, blocking, deflecting attacks, performing counter attacks, dodging, and running. If the posture bar reaches max on you, you will stagger, usually resulting in the enemy getting in a free hit whereas if an enemy posture maxes out, you will be able to perform a deathblow on them, which is a savage and satisfying riposte. This will kill basic enemies immediately but mini-bosses and bosses will require multiple deathblows to take down. Posture replenishes automatically but will do so more slowly if Vitality is lower and more quickly if you're blocking. However, taking the time to heal your Vitality or block will allow your opponent's posture to recover as well and since many fights come down to breaking your opponent's posture you're more incentivized to stay in the fight longer, even at low health which ratchets up the tension considerably as you know that any mistake may be your last. It's an engaging, ingenious system that rewards aggression and demands that you master your opponent's move set. Nothing feels quite as spectacular as when you are literally one strike away from dying and pull off a last second deflection to break an enemy's posture for that final deathblow.

Furthermore, Sekiro's enemies have multiple ways at striking at you aside from their standard attacks. These maneuvers are called perilous attacks and they come in three distinct flavors: sweep attacks, thrust attacks and grabs. In order to evade these attacks you must either jump, deflect, or dodge. Whenever an enemy is going to perform such an attack, an unspecified red symbol flashes above your head and you have a split second to react accordingly to the enemies movement. Failing to do so will often result in a massive loss of health but successfully pulling it off severely damages the enemy's posture or vitality. It's a high-risk, high reward system that is challenging to wrap you mind and fingers around but it plays extremely well, allowing you to tangibly watch yourself become better at a particular enemy or boss. 

Death Comes for You

Death comes quickly in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as you try to get a handle on the mechanics and, thankfully, that's where the game's namesake comes into play. During each encounter, you have the limited ability to resurrect after death at half health, an ability that refills after killing more enemies or knocking off a boss's deathblow. This allows for a number of valuable interactions. If your opponent's posture bar was almost filled you probably will want to immediately leap up and get back into the fight. If you want to heal and restart the engagement, you can back off and heal. If you don't want to be anywhere near this miniboss because you have a lot experience and currency, then you can resurrect and immediately get the hell out of the situation. It's a valuable and balanced tool that needs to be utilized accordingly depending on the situation, especially considering that most difficult enemies are able to kill you in three or four hits and that permanent death comes with stiff penalties. When you die without resurrecting, you lose half of your accumulated experience and half of your currency with no chance to get it back. However, you will retain any full experience points that you've earned and only lose progress to the next full point. Furthermore, when you die permanently, you will spread a disease among the world's NPC's that will prevent questlines and lock out various services. This can be cured by a relatively rare item and adds a further level pressure to the combat, though that pressure is relatively short-lived the more you understand the mechanic.  

Aside from fighting and dying, you will be utilizing stealth to your advantage. In Sekiro, you are able to instantly kill basic enemies by sneaking up behind them or jumping on them from above. However, it is simply impossible to talk about the stealth mechanics without briefly mentioning the vast new array of mobility options you now have at your disposal. To list them quickly, you now have access to a grappling hook that can latch onto specific anchor points even from midair, you can now jump and wall climb, you can hang from ledges and perform stealth kills, you can hug walls and assassinate passing enemies, and you can even swim. These options give you an incredible amount of control over how you want to traverse environments and engage with the enemies. Patches of long grass, high branches and rooftops, and hidden cliffs and ledges can be found throughout each brilliant environment design of Sekiro, allowing you to craftily chain kill enemies without them ever being the wiser. It is immensely satisfying to successfully navigate an area, silently murdering every guard without raising the alarm. Later tools that you acquire augment your stealth abilities in substantial ways, continuously giving you new ways to play. 

Progression Systems

Speaking about new augmentations that you find in Sekiro, the prosthetic arm that houses your grappling hook can also utilize a variety of unique tools that can assist in combat. These prosthetic upgrades include the ability to toss shuriken from distance, cleave enemies defenses with an axe, and  set enemies on fire. Each of these tools can be upgraded into new and meaningfully different variants throughout the course of the game. However, many of these upgrades require multiple materials that you have to find or farm in the world and since there's such a premium on these materials, which upgrade you obtain first is often a difficult choice. These prosthetic tools are an invaluable if under explained part of the flow of combat rewarding those who try out multiple tools on different enemies. Sometimes you'll find that the edge you needed in a particularly dangerous fight was already in your arsenal the whole time. 

As you slice and assassinate your way through the waves of unfortunate samurai who dared cross your path, you'll gain experience that gradually builds into points. These points cannot be lost upon death and can be spent to gain new abilities. You gain access to five total skill trees throughout the game (as long as you explore carefully) and each tree offers a variety of combat arts (advanced attacks that you equip one at a time), combat skills which augment an existing attack, or latent skills which are passive buffs such as getting vitality back on every back stab. These can change your playstyle as much as a new prosthetic tool allowing you to string together new combos or go into stealth more efficiently. For example, one combat skill allows you to imbue your blade with fire if you attack immediately after using the flame prosthetic tool, giving you a chance to proc a status effect on an enemy as you're attacking. These add yet another deeper level to the gameplay and are well worth the investment. Be cautious though, you will not be able to get every upgrade on every tree during one or even two playthroughs so investing in the right skills is vital. As there are no other weapons in the game aside from your katana, the true diversity is how you approach each encounter, what abilities and prosthetic tools you champion and the level of knowledge that you bring to each fight.

WHY IS THERE A LAMP THERE?

Since Sekiro's gameplay is often the among the best of the modern action genre, it makes it even more stark when one of the rare problems rear their ugly head. First of all, the camera continues to be a hassle in certain situation just as it has always been in From Software games. When your battling in a wide open arena, there's no problem but as soon as you enter somewhere enclosed, problems begin to rise. Unintentionally backing into a wall will jam the camera into the back of your character's head, discombobulating you, causing you to make mistakes which are often lethal in Sekiro. This forces you to be very aware of your surroundings as you fight. Alone this is not a big problem. However, there are a few, difficult mini-boss encounters that occur in tightly cramped surroundings compounding this problem, making it more than just another element to take into consideration and becoming a severe annoyance. Furthermore, two specific grab animations on two specific mini-bosses (Chained Ogre and Snake Eyes) are downright absurd in width and range. Enemy attack tracking in Sekiro is dialed up to 11 which is necessary to discourage spam dodgers but when you combine this with width, range and insane damage, it goes beyond the point of challenge and enters the realm of nonsense. 

Finally, more than any other From Software game, I found that Sekiro has more unnecessary geography to navigate during combat in a number of arenas. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to dodge from a grab attack only to discover that some random lamp is behind you, impeding you, and then you get destroyed by the enemy. Again, this is compounded by the fact that game dissolves out foreground objects to help you see through them in battle only to have them magically reappear right when you're trying to get out of a sticky situation. Aside from these relatively minor irritations, the gameplay in Sekiro top-tier and everything that From Software has implemented here makes each engagement exciting, perilous and intoxicatingly satisfying. 

Environmental Perfection

Ready for a hot take? Hidetaka Miyazaki and his world designs are genius. Bet you didn't see that coming. Seriously though, the environmental design on both a micro and macro level is completely mind-blowing. From the way that each area can be traversed vertically and horizontally, assisted by your new array of mobility tools, to the way that these massive, sprawling areas interconnect with each other in devilishly clever ways, it's all just perfect. After four playthroughs, I'm still find new tricks to try and paths to travel down. And it goes beyond the map designs and bleeds into the story and lore of each area. During a portion of the game, you get directions from a character who literally tells you to go outside and look for a specific landmark in the distance and you can do just that. Characters will reference individual locations and you can go and find them.  Easily on the same scale of excellence that both Dark Souls and Bloodborne have achieved, Sekiro's world building is nothing short of a master class. 

The No Good, Very Bad, Rotten Question of Difficulty

While I feel that this point has been made very clear not only by numerous critics and Youtube personalities but also by Hidetaka Miyazaki himself, I still feel obligated to say that Sekiro does not need an 'easy' mode. Is this game objectively technically challenging? Yes, yes it is. Does it require more thought and quicker reaction time than the average gaming product? Yes, yes it does. Do you feel like a badass gaming god when you encounter a boss that you initially think is insurmountable and then, through trial and error, you learn every aspect of that fight so that you can eventually, painstakingly achieve victory? Yes, yes you do. This is part of the experience and it's understandable if people don't want to put in the necessary time and frustration to adapt to these challenges because it is sincerely draining. That simply means that the best way that they can experience this game is through a Let's Play on Youtube. But adding a easy mode cheapens, weakens and negates much of the allure of these games. I'll let Erik Kain finish this discussion here but just know that the game is technically challenging and immensely rewarding for that challenge. And also, because he's too nice say this, anyone who cries out for an easy mode using the disabled or impaired as a shield for your own frustration, shame on you, you classless swine. The button remapping in Sekiro is immensely robust which can allow anyone who has the possibility of playing any game, play Sekiro to its full potential and have the same breathtaking experience as everyone else.

Boss Time

With any game, I set a high bar for boss encounters. These are meant to be the apex of challenge in a game, testing your accumulated skills and reflexes and forcing you to adapt to new strategies. From Software has continuously delivered some of the most memorable boss fights in video game history and, thankfully, nothing has changed. There are 16 bosses and 16 unique mini-bosses in the game, each with their own rhythm and attack patterns that demand understanding to overcome. They are intricately designed and differ from one another greatly. One moment you'll be in a life and death sword fight with an accomplished nemesis and the next, you'll be staring up in awe at the grandeur of a truly epic spectacle. Only one major boss fight in the game felt mediocre, not outright bad, but simply not on the same par as everything else. The rest are universally excellent through and through, even the gimmick bosses which are leagues ahead of the gimmick fights in the Soulsborne series. So, if fighting bosses is your thing, then buckle up cowboy because you're in for a wild ride.  

Final Thoughts

Going into Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, there was an idea in my head of what it was going to be like and how it was going to play. I had no doubt that it would sit among the pantheon of the Soulsborne titles. Now, after over a hundred hours invested, I can safely say that this does not fit within the Soulsborne genre, a genre that From Software essentially created. It has found its own home, perhaps as the genesis of a new path that they, as a developer, will take, and one that I hope they take. It has transplanted the wondrous environments and deep lore into a demanding, precise and fluid action game with exponentially more moving parts in any given engagement. The cost for these dynamic engagements is the fact that Sekiro has traded in the varied builds and weapons and magic of the past for a more streamlined, focused, and action-oriented affair. But this trade-off was worth it as Sekiro is as beautiful as it is dangerous, fluidly complex in its combat and addictingly triumphant in the euphoria of victory. As Miyazaki says, "Providing something new - that is what's going to lead to a better game" and a what a glorious game they have delivered, going beyond what they have accomplished in the past and evolving a genre in the process.

Final Verdict: 4.75/5.0

Review Score Breakdown

1.0/5.0: Essentially unplayable, not enjoyable, or devoid of any gameplay satisfaction or erstwhile value.
2.0/5.0: Has a few, noteworthy features but is otherwise unremarkable or has a seriously detrimental downside.
3.0/5.0: The game has solid if unremarkable minute-to minute gameplay with a few highlights and considerable downsides.
4.0/5.0: The game is consistently fun and stimulating without any major bugs or issues holding it back.
5.0/5.0: This is an exceptional game that is simultaneously engrossing and thought-provoking in both subject matter and gameplay and is as close to perfect as they can make.