2019’s Game of the Year is a game with an identity crisis. It is a great many different games, and it is also none of them. Maybe this means it can be all things to all people, but I believe that at its core there is conflict which is holding it back.
The Way of the Samurai
Sekiro is at once familiar and yet original. Soulsbourne veterans will recognise many inherited mechanics, and there are similarities in the combat system, although Sekiro represents the fastest combat that From Software have produced.
It’s major innovation is the Posture and Vitality system. Vitality is your health, but in addition every character in the game has a Posture bar. This fills as they are attacked, or have their own attacks deflected. Should it ever reach its maximum then it is as if they had had their health reduced to zero, and may be struck down with a Deathblow. The two are also linked, as all characters (including Sekiro himself) recover Posture more slowly when their Vitality is lowered.
This system immediately gives the player options. You can defeat opponents by attacking their vitality, or by destroying their posture. Doing damage to their posture can be either by aggressively attacking them, or by reactively deflecting everything they throw at you. At your best, you are moving fluidly between the two, attacking when the enemy isn’t, and deflecting their blows as they attack you. This trade of blows is an interactive dance between Sekiro and foe, and has an entrancing rhythm to it.
More than giving options to the player though, it gives the designer options. Enemies can have fast or slow posture recovery. Small or large posture bars. Deep or shallow health pools. They can be very aggressive, forcing the player to spend most of their time deflecting, or more passive, reacting to Sekiro’s assault. This makes each dance partner feel different to fight in a way that goes beyond simply what their attack animations are.
The Big Bosses
At its heart, the thing Sekiro does and does well is bosses. Bosses take multiple Deathblows to defeat, on top of huge Posture and Vitality bars that take time to erode. They test the limits of the posture system and reward you with some of the most interactive Boss fights From have produced to date. Soulsbourne titles are no strangers to bosses after all, but they often fall into a pattern of Evading/Blocking until the enemy is finished with a sequence, and then dealing damage in a small window before they start again. Sekiro invites you to take the fight to the enemies face, and to not just evade their attacks but actively deflect each them. You can use their own attacks against them, bringing them closer to defeat with each one you turn aside.
Boss fights have two major problems though as the focus for a game. The first is that they are challenging. You aren’t expected to beat them the first attempt, but to work up to overcoming them with time. Second, they are traditionally roadblocks to progress, guarding the door to the next area. Together, these combine to form a game where you cannot progress until you defeat the next boss, and defeating that boss requires throwing yourself into failure repeatedly. This can be exhausting for a player. Worse, as Sekiro racks up over 40 bosses, your reward for beating one Boss is often… another Boss.
It’s the palette cleansing moments in-between where you are rewarded with new areas to explore that stop the game being entirely unrelenting, and give players a chance to breathe in the atmosphere of Ashina.
The Spaces Inbetween
In the spaces between Bosses Sekiro translates it’s mechanics to rank and file enemies. Vitality and Posture work identically, but regular enemies often take just a single well timed deflect to open themselves up for a Deathblow.
It also affords whole other avenues that are absent from the core boss fights; traversal and takedowns.
Sekiro is agile. Incredibly so compared to predecessor Soulsbourne titles. With his grappling hook, he is able to quickly zip to rooftops in a manner reminiscent of the Tenchu series. You can observe enemies from above, and even eavesdrop on conversations. You can also sprint and double jump, and clamber over obstacles, making short work of navigating around any space.
Along with this ability to be the apex predator in an area, Sekiro can also Deathblow enemies from behind if he can sneak up on them. By dropping from rooftops onto their heads, and luring them into alleys with bits of ceramic, Sekiro can clear through many areas of the game without having to trade blows with the enemy.
This actually blends back nicely into the boss fights at times, as almost every mini-boss in the game has at least one method by which you can start a fight by backstabbing them, immediately robbing them of one of their (usually two) lives, and making the subsequent fight less of a hurdle.
There are two other notable differences versus previous Soulsbourne titles. For one, the density of Idols (the bonfire like checkpoints) is incredibly high, to the point that every combat area has at least one, and often two. Secondly, the game affords very few shortcuts, and opening them up does not represent a significant moment.
A Clash of Swords
With these things established, the main contention I feel in the game is between the bosses and the spaces inbetween. The game is, undoubtedly, made for the boss fights. The core innovative mechanics bend towards them. A game is not built on bosses alone though, and the arenas between them need to provide some respite before springing another on you.
Not only is this space non-existant in some cases, the affordances the game gives you for dealing with these spaces render them almost frictionless to encounter. If I were inclined, I could easily use the movement tech to all but skip each area, dancing across the rooftops to the next Idol. That does mean I would miss out on all the loot temptingly sprinkled around the area though. Therefore, the most optimal way that Sekiro can collect that is to stealth kill every single minion. This never gets harder than it is at the start of the game. No new mechanics to have to deal with when being stealthy. No patrol routes to have to observe and digest. No new enemy designs that make it awkward, or require new tools. Just a swathe of immobile opponents to dispatch.
Both these mechanics actively work to shrink the areas between bosses. These areas actually often contain new, tougher enemies. Movesets you’ve never encountered before, offering new challenge. Except the movement and stealth allows you to ignore or sideline any of that in favour of efficient progress. From Software have produced content that simply isn’t helping players pace their progress through the game, and a lot of the effort is completely wasted as players never even stop long enough to find out what makes them special and unique.
Part of this is due to an absence of a core loop of Soulsbourne games. In it’s brethren, you would find exploring a new area to be fraught with peril. New foes that you don’t know how to fight competently. An area that has a layout you haven’t discovered yet. Shortcuts unopened that will make passage through easier. Sekiro neatly slices through all of this; you don’t need to know how to fight enemies if they never get a chance to draw their sword, you have an easy ability to get up high and get the lay of the land, and traversing through is already trivial.
This also fouls one of the other core mechanics of Soulsbourne games; the Flask. Dark Souls is a battle of attrition, as you work your way forward against the world and the enemies in it. Every so often you stop to take a swig as the environment saps your lifeforce. Each time, you get better at fighting the enemies along the way and get a bit further, until eventually you find another Bonfire at which to rest. The more times you die along the way, the bigger the cache of Souls builds on your corpse as you pick it up over and over. When you finally do break through, this cache will surge you forward in power, trying to balance out how easy you should’ve found it. The flask represents how far you can push forward. But with Sekiro’s freedom of movement it’s no longer a linear battle of attrition through a level. Scooting through is easy, whether stealth killing enemies or not. In boss fights, it feels even less relevant, as the balance of vitality and posture is almost completely lost on the player character. If your flask upgrades were all just in your health bar, you could feel the posture recovery become tougher as the fight went on, and have other consumables that factored into buffing that.
There are other vestigal mechanics from Soulsbourne titles. Money and Exp (both used to “level up”) have half lost on death. Loss of progress on death is almost the critics definition of a “Souls-like” game, but it almost always comes with some way to recover it. Sekiro doesn’t, it’s just lost. So unlike a Soulsbourne where every run to the Boss increases the payout for victory, Sekiro just flattens out any progress you have and won’t let you get any more until you beat the Boss. I don’t see any reason to punish the player in this way other than simply because it’s a trope of these titles.
Hero of a Thousand Faces
In the end, Sekiro is a mix of different titles. It’s part Dark Souls, part Tenchu, part Super Punch-Out.
For me the Boss battles, it’s Super Punch-Out DNA, is where it’s at its strongest. To support that, it needs the space between to help efficiently pad those out. The movement options and stealth trivialise and shrink those sections, and the vestigal mechanics from Soulsbourne titles almost feel there by default rather than designed to work with the systems of the game.
It could lean more heavily into just being straight up Samurai souls, with less movement and stealth and a more attrition based focus in those spaces between Bosses, but i’m actually glad to see From Software spread their wings a little, and hope they will go even further in future.
Sekiro could also be a great stealth game, but then it’s arena and enemy design needs to vary and build into that in the way a series like Arkham does, with many tools for stealth takedowns.
With Elden Ring on the horizon, and the possibility of more titles in a Sekiro franchise, i’m eager to see what changes and focus those titles receive. I just hope that they make some sharper cuts to define the edges of what those games are, so they can truly revel in the parts that make them excellent