NonSequtur
a body
Yes I'm posting in a thread that's nearly two years dead. I only got the game a few weeks ago. 
After a couple hundred hours into Elden Ring I decided to go on a tour of some of Fromsoft's other games... by which I mean DS3 and Sekiro, because Bloodborne isn't on PC, DS1 is pretty old, Demon's Souls is old and not on PC, and DS2 was received so badly than DS3 decided to be 90% DS1 callbacks by volume. Sekiro's definitely the most divergent from the base formula of all of them, and also seems to be the most beloved on a mechanical level.
I can definitely see why it's so beloved, but I also think Fromsoft's experimentation explored almost as many ways to fuck up as it did genuinely fantastic ideas, at least mechanically. Some of the things which bother me about Sekiro are baffling - solved problems from Dark Souls whose solutions were abandoned, or ideas which simply seem on their face dumb - while others seem more like a consequence of trying something new, or an inherent aspect of the concept which can't really be gotten rid of, and becomes more a marker of whether you'd like the genre of combat at all.
Now that I've spent 1500 words on mechanics, I'll just briefly say the aesthetic and atmosphere is good - the ambient music is more interesting than DS3 and Elden Ring in my opinion, though I haven't clicked with the boss music quite as much. Visually it's not Elden Ring's tour de force, but it's cohesive and thematic. Story-wise they somehow made Wolf even more of a baffling cryptid than the average Souls PC despite being an actual voiced character with a defined history. Having a story where things are actually explained and the PC has a specific motive is a nice change of pace; one of the big issues I have with DS3 and ER is that what you do is pretty specific and why you do it is basically unexplained. This can lead to you inventing a neat story, but can also lead to questions along the lines of 'wait, why don't I do <this obvious thing which would be in-character for my imagined PC but which the game doesn't allow, like talking>', which isn't an issue in Sekiro because we know who and what Wolf is.
Someone who was never taught to cook rice.
After a couple hundred hours into Elden Ring I decided to go on a tour of some of Fromsoft's other games... by which I mean DS3 and Sekiro, because Bloodborne isn't on PC, DS1 is pretty old, Demon's Souls is old and not on PC, and DS2 was received so badly than DS3 decided to be 90% DS1 callbacks by volume. Sekiro's definitely the most divergent from the base formula of all of them, and also seems to be the most beloved on a mechanical level.I can definitely see why it's so beloved, but I also think Fromsoft's experimentation explored almost as many ways to fuck up as it did genuinely fantastic ideas, at least mechanically. Some of the things which bother me about Sekiro are baffling - solved problems from Dark Souls whose solutions were abandoned, or ideas which simply seem on their face dumb - while others seem more like a consequence of trying something new, or an inherent aspect of the concept which can't really be gotten rid of, and becomes more a marker of whether you'd like the genre of combat at all.
The most baffling things in Sekiro are problems that they'd already solved in Dark Souls. In particular, Sekiro seems to not care that people can and will die, repeatedly, to bosses, because multiple mechanics make doing so much more punishing than in DS3, Fromsoft's previous title. Dragonrot as a mechanic is thematic to the story, absolutely, and also a kick in the ribs in a game where bosses are going to feed you your teeth and make you feel bad about it already. Hollowing was also thematic, but that didn't mean making it optional and of little consequence wasn't a good thing, and Dragonrot is arguably worse because of how it shuts down NPC interactions.
Another thing which makes dying repeatedly to a boss more painful than Fromsoft should already know to make it is the consumables. Making prosthetics or the cooler skills a frequent part of your strategy risks Spirit Emblems running out on you. Some bosses have entire mechanics obviated by, or are nearly impossible without, items, and these items only become unlimited in the shop in the late game - the worst of these have an instant kill status effect, which isn't new, but is so much more aggressive and common than Deacons of the Deep or Lichdragon Fortissax were. To fight these enemies effectively you'd have to beat them with the limited number the game just lets you find, or realize and remember which enemies have the moderately rare chance to drop them. Or look at the wiki. And the additional resurrections, which can be very useful against multi-phase bosses, require you to go out and kill a lot of enemies if you want to give the boss your best shot again. I suppose you can farm resurrection power, spirit emblems and critical items all at once, but that doesn't solve the core issue of tools which are a core mechanic of either the game as a whole or that boss being something you can just Run Out Of and have to go kill some unrelated enemies for a while.
Finally, if you do hit a boss like an egg hits a brick wall, you have limited options to do anything but farm those items and try again. Alternative builds? Co-op? Simply out-levelling enemies? The upshot of this is a very tightly designed game, where enemies can be precisely tuned to a specific set of capabilities rather than 'sword, spear, axe, bow, magic, two swords, fists, whips, all at different stat distributions, possibly with a friend'. The problem is everyone is tuned differently. I've broadly come around to the idea that Dark Souls doesn't need an easy mode because you have the freedom to find the most busted and personally suited build you can, get help (at least before the servers were shut down) and make the game easier that way, but Sekiro doesn't have that. As a result, I know far more people who simply tapped out of it than I do the other Fromsoft games.
Another thing which makes dying repeatedly to a boss more painful than Fromsoft should already know to make it is the consumables. Making prosthetics or the cooler skills a frequent part of your strategy risks Spirit Emblems running out on you. Some bosses have entire mechanics obviated by, or are nearly impossible without, items, and these items only become unlimited in the shop in the late game - the worst of these have an instant kill status effect, which isn't new, but is so much more aggressive and common than Deacons of the Deep or Lichdragon Fortissax were. To fight these enemies effectively you'd have to beat them with the limited number the game just lets you find, or realize and remember which enemies have the moderately rare chance to drop them. Or look at the wiki. And the additional resurrections, which can be very useful against multi-phase bosses, require you to go out and kill a lot of enemies if you want to give the boss your best shot again. I suppose you can farm resurrection power, spirit emblems and critical items all at once, but that doesn't solve the core issue of tools which are a core mechanic of either the game as a whole or that boss being something you can just Run Out Of and have to go kill some unrelated enemies for a while.
Finally, if you do hit a boss like an egg hits a brick wall, you have limited options to do anything but farm those items and try again. Alternative builds? Co-op? Simply out-levelling enemies? The upshot of this is a very tightly designed game, where enemies can be precisely tuned to a specific set of capabilities rather than 'sword, spear, axe, bow, magic, two swords, fists, whips, all at different stat distributions, possibly with a friend'. The problem is everyone is tuned differently. I've broadly come around to the idea that Dark Souls doesn't need an easy mode because you have the freedom to find the most busted and personally suited build you can, get help (at least before the servers were shut down) and make the game easier that way, but Sekiro doesn't have that. As a result, I know far more people who simply tapped out of it than I do the other Fromsoft games.
Other things Sekiro does that bug me are more related to the new things it tries that haven't had all the kinks worked out by experience. For example, a number of bosses have gank squads either around them or in the general area. My assumption is that these were seen as okay because you have stealth kills and mobility now, so you can hop in, kill one, run away, and so on. The problem is that the way the AI acts once alerted is closer to 'psychic' than 'alert', which makes thinning the crowd tiresome as you wait for their AI to reset. The grappling hook's usefulness as a get-out-of-dodge tool is absolutely there, but personally I found it, and a lot of the movement and stealth more generally, just a bit too finicky. Other little annoyances are like why, if you're already moving away from the idea you need to go up to the body and pick things up, do you have the vacuum mode rather than automatic pick up? You don't even have armor or weapons which might clutter up an inventory the way it could in Dark Souls, there's no reason to not hoover up everything. Item pick-up/interact being the same as ledge cling might be unavoidable - only so many buttons, and you don't want the combat buttons mixed with non-combat contextual buttons - but the wall hug mechanic feels useless and in the way every time I go Solid Snake when I just want to open a paper bag.
The movement makes navigating around the map weirdly less enjoyable for me, save in how it can make some things faster. The breadth of options and verticality makes me constantly worried I missed something - and I have, in fact, missed the entrances to multiple areas, repeatedly.
Finally, there's combat. One unambiguously good thing Sekiro does is get rid of the ass-smacking giant boss fight. You can see most of the body of basically every boss, a few awkward jumping attacks aside. The basic notion of having tools to deal with enemy attacks other than i-framing through them is genuinely fun, and when you're really feeling it, the boss melts and you feel invincible in a way that even getting perfectly within Malenia's rhythm doesn't quite match. However, there's still issues I have. Some of that's built into the foundations, and some of that is things that I think could and should be changed.
Of the latter, I think one issue is when Sekiro doesn't give you the tools to aggressively deal with enemy attacks. The most obnoxious of these are grabs - bad enough in Dark Souls, but far more annoying in a game where your dodge has fewer i-frames, you're conditioned to do other defensive options, and you can't get easy passive defense/health enough to eat multiple hits - but unavoidable status and some other things are here too. These are obviously fixable, because plenty of bosses and enemies simply don't have these issues.
A more unexpected problem is how enemies can move you around when you parry. This gives real weight to the combat and getting rid of it would probably look completely boring, but it means the Dark Souls Camera, instead of dealing with the gigantic ass-slapping bosses of other games, is dealing with every boss that isn't in an open field backing you into a corner at least once and probably more. And the Dark Souls Camera (or any 3P camera, really) doesn't deal with being in a corner well. Other than turning walls invisible or making every single fight happen in an open field, I don't know if this can be solved.
The last issue is one I don't know is solvable. This part is even more just my opinion than the rest of this post, but to me, Wolf's sword feels short and laggy, and aggression in general feels too difficult. When you have a boss cornered or they're sticking in your face, this isn't much of an issue, but they often out-range you, hit you so hard through even a perfect parry that you slide back, or back off in a way which means you can't attack them before their next combo is on its way. I'd burn all of Ashina for a quick, gap-closing attack, because Nightjar Slash is not enough. The lagginess of some animations might be unavoidable because they need to be cancelable into block, but I think it can be tightened up and Wolf given a longer sword and maybe a better dash attack or something. Alternatively, bosses could have their range and retreating moves reduced.
Easier aggression would also help with what is probably my core and more intractable issue with Sekiro. When it's great, it feels amazing. When it's not, I feel like I'm making no progress at all. Some bosses can be beaten, with normal levels of skill, while doing hardly any vitality damage - hey O'Rin - and so I can treat the posture meter as a straightforward measure of progress. For most bosses, though, getting the vitality damage to make the posture stick, even when I mess up and have to heal or block a combo instead of parrying, can feel like an exercise in frustration to me. The boss blocks my attacks or dodges out of range, and even if I'm taking very little damage, the yellow in the posture meter isn't progress, because it'll fade as soon as they retreat or I make a mistake. Repeatedly dying to a boss that has just chip vitality damage and a little bit of posture, because the former was blocked and the latter healed, is an experience I've had more often in Sekiro than I did equivalently frustrating moments across all of DS3 or Elden Ring (at least once Margit stopped skill-checking me). Now I want to be clear, this isn't me saying the game is too hard for me. The number of times I died to bosses feels about right for a Fromsoft title, but that the feeling of those deaths and that difficulty isn't as rewarding. Too often, I feel like shit until I beat the boss, and then I'm glad it's over, rather than having a sense of incremental progress culminating in triumph.
The movement makes navigating around the map weirdly less enjoyable for me, save in how it can make some things faster. The breadth of options and verticality makes me constantly worried I missed something - and I have, in fact, missed the entrances to multiple areas, repeatedly.
Finally, there's combat. One unambiguously good thing Sekiro does is get rid of the ass-smacking giant boss fight. You can see most of the body of basically every boss, a few awkward jumping attacks aside. The basic notion of having tools to deal with enemy attacks other than i-framing through them is genuinely fun, and when you're really feeling it, the boss melts and you feel invincible in a way that even getting perfectly within Malenia's rhythm doesn't quite match. However, there's still issues I have. Some of that's built into the foundations, and some of that is things that I think could and should be changed.
Of the latter, I think one issue is when Sekiro doesn't give you the tools to aggressively deal with enemy attacks. The most obnoxious of these are grabs - bad enough in Dark Souls, but far more annoying in a game where your dodge has fewer i-frames, you're conditioned to do other defensive options, and you can't get easy passive defense/health enough to eat multiple hits - but unavoidable status and some other things are here too. These are obviously fixable, because plenty of bosses and enemies simply don't have these issues.
A more unexpected problem is how enemies can move you around when you parry. This gives real weight to the combat and getting rid of it would probably look completely boring, but it means the Dark Souls Camera, instead of dealing with the gigantic ass-slapping bosses of other games, is dealing with every boss that isn't in an open field backing you into a corner at least once and probably more. And the Dark Souls Camera (or any 3P camera, really) doesn't deal with being in a corner well. Other than turning walls invisible or making every single fight happen in an open field, I don't know if this can be solved.
The last issue is one I don't know is solvable. This part is even more just my opinion than the rest of this post, but to me, Wolf's sword feels short and laggy, and aggression in general feels too difficult. When you have a boss cornered or they're sticking in your face, this isn't much of an issue, but they often out-range you, hit you so hard through even a perfect parry that you slide back, or back off in a way which means you can't attack them before their next combo is on its way. I'd burn all of Ashina for a quick, gap-closing attack, because Nightjar Slash is not enough. The lagginess of some animations might be unavoidable because they need to be cancelable into block, but I think it can be tightened up and Wolf given a longer sword and maybe a better dash attack or something. Alternatively, bosses could have their range and retreating moves reduced.
Easier aggression would also help with what is probably my core and more intractable issue with Sekiro. When it's great, it feels amazing. When it's not, I feel like I'm making no progress at all. Some bosses can be beaten, with normal levels of skill, while doing hardly any vitality damage - hey O'Rin - and so I can treat the posture meter as a straightforward measure of progress. For most bosses, though, getting the vitality damage to make the posture stick, even when I mess up and have to heal or block a combo instead of parrying, can feel like an exercise in frustration to me. The boss blocks my attacks or dodges out of range, and even if I'm taking very little damage, the yellow in the posture meter isn't progress, because it'll fade as soon as they retreat or I make a mistake. Repeatedly dying to a boss that has just chip vitality damage and a little bit of posture, because the former was blocked and the latter healed, is an experience I've had more often in Sekiro than I did equivalently frustrating moments across all of DS3 or Elden Ring (at least once Margit stopped skill-checking me). Now I want to be clear, this isn't me saying the game is too hard for me. The number of times I died to bosses feels about right for a Fromsoft title, but that the feeling of those deaths and that difficulty isn't as rewarding. Too often, I feel like shit until I beat the boss, and then I'm glad it's over, rather than having a sense of incremental progress culminating in triumph.
Now that I've spent 1500 words on mechanics, I'll just briefly say the aesthetic and atmosphere is good - the ambient music is more interesting than DS3 and Elden Ring in my opinion, though I haven't clicked with the boss music quite as much. Visually it's not Elden Ring's tour de force, but it's cohesive and thematic. Story-wise they somehow made Wolf even more of a baffling cryptid than the average Souls PC despite being an actual voiced character with a defined history. Having a story where things are actually explained and the PC has a specific motive is a nice change of pace; one of the big issues I have with DS3 and ER is that what you do is pretty specific and why you do it is basically unexplained. This can lead to you inventing a neat story, but can also lead to questions along the lines of 'wait, why don't I do <this obvious thing which would be in-character for my imagined PC but which the game doesn't allow, like talking>', which isn't an issue in Sekiro because we know who and what Wolf is.
Someone who was never taught to cook rice.
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