Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Analysis

Overview

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an action RPG developed by FROMSOFTWARE and Activision. It was released on March 22, 2019.

Formal Elements

Players

Sekiro is a strictly single player game, and unlike other recent games developed by FROMSOFTWARE, there is no multiplayer competitive or cooperative element, and players cannot leave messages for each other. As you play the game, you control an initially nameless shinobi. The prologue functions as an introduction to the basic gameplay and mechanics, as well as providing a background and motivation for the player.

Rules

Combat and Movement

Combat in Sekiro shares many similarities to other games produced by FROMSOFTWARE, but has several important distinctions. You control a shinobi armed with a sword, which you use to attack enemies. The animations are fast and fluid, and you can interrupt most by pressing a different action button. Although Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne also featured quicker animations than were typical for FROMSOFTWARE, you were still locked into an animation once it was triggered. Unlike Dark Souls or Bloodborne, attacking, dodging, and jumping do not drain stamina. In Sekiro, there is no stamina bar. You can attack, dodge, or jump repeatedly as much as you want. Instead you deal with two bars: a health bar, and a posture bar. When you attack enemies, you reduce their health bar. If you can reduce it to zero, you can kill the enemy. The same holds true for the player: if your health bar is reduced to zero, you die. In practice, you will only sometimes reduce the enemy's health bar to zero. More commonly, you will attack, doing some damage and also increasing their posture bar. If they block, or if the player continues to attack, the posture bar will continue to increase. If you max out their posture bar, this puts the enemy in a stunned state, during which you can one-hit kill them, regardless of the status of their health bar. The same is also true for the player: when you take damage, you increase your posture bar, and if your blocks are poorly timed, you further increase your posture bar. If it maxes out, the enemy can one-hit kill you.

If you avoid taking damage or being attacked for several seconds, the posture bar will slowly drop. Holding block will increase the rate of drop, but your health level effects this rate: having high health makes posture reduce more quickly, while low health causes posture damage to linger. Running around slows the rate of posture recovery. This all flies in the face of what most players and fans of FROMSOFTWARE games have come to expect. I started playing Sekiro immediately after finishing my third playthrough of Bloodborne, and I felt like was being punished for having played Bloodborne. All my habits and instincts were wrong.

Besides the posture system, there is the blocking and deflecting system. Most enemy attacks can be blocked. This is achieved by simply holding the block button before an enemy attack. Deflecting is achieved by tapping the block button just before an enemy attack connects. Some enemy attacks cannot be blocked, for example, thrusts. These must be deflected or dodged. The precise timing of deflection is critical. You can hear a slight difference in the sound effect of the deflection based on your timing: perfect deflections have a sharp, ringing sound, while imperfect ones are duller and more wooden. In contrast to thrusts, sweeps cannot be deflected or blocked, but most be dodged or jumped over. Finally, grabs must be avoided entirely.

Lost? That's how most players will feel coming into the game. Instead of a relatively simple choice of block/parry/dodge/attack, where parrying is simply a high risk/high reward form of blocking, you must read the enemy's state and animations, and correctly figure out: Should I press the attack? Are they readying an attack that I can block? Will they thrust (forcing me to dodge or use a perfect deflection), or sweep (forcing me to dodge back or to jump over it)? Much of the tension of previous FROMSOFTWARE games is still here, and the density of the choices you must make in real-time is much the same, but they have increased the number of different response options you must choose from based on the enemy's tells. Compare this to walking into an unfamiliar grocery store and being forced to best match a BBQ sauce to a particular cut of meat or wine while someone is punishing you for any hesitation or dilly dallying.

Like all FROMSOFTWARE games, you eventually begin to read the opponents automatically. On my first playthrough, it took me about 5 hours spread over several days to beat Isshin Ashina the Sword-Saint, the final boss of the game for several endings. On my fourth playthough, I beat him on my first try and felt somewhat detached throughout the fight. I knew what to expect from him, and I had seen his attack patterns many times previously. I felt something like Neo must have at the end of the first Matrix movie, calmly countering Agent Smith's increasingly desperate attacks before finishing him off. Counter to the popular wisdom concerning game design, Sekiro is difficult to learn but easy to master.

Items and your shinobi prosthetic can play critical roles in combat. At the end of the prologue, you will lose your left arm in a duel. This is replaced with a prosthetic arm which can be equipped with enough different gadgets to make James Bond blush. Enemies with large wooden shields can be taken down by upgrading your prosthetic with an axe to destroy the shield, while other enemies who spew out fire or terror can be safely blocked by equipping different kinds of armored umbrellas, and still other armored enemies can be stripped of their armor using a spear upgrade. Many animal or beast enemies can be stunned by firecrackers, and others are weak against fire damage, which can be inflicted using a flame-cannon/thrower. Only three upgrades can be equipped at a time, but thanks to the ability to pause the game completely, you can easily swap these out even in the midst of combat. Similar to focus in Dark Souls 3 or bullet ammo in Bloodborne, the use of these powerful abilities is limited by an item called a "Spirit Emblem." These can be purchased at a save point, found in the environment, or received from enemies upon their death.

The typical health items which regenerate after spawning at a save point make their appearance in Sekiro. There are also rocks to stun enemies with, jars of oil to use with the flame-cannon, different sugars which increase your damage, buff your posture, or make you extra stealthy, and many others. You will need to experiment or check a wiki to see which you should carry for which enemies.

One last twist to combat is dying. In Sekiro, if you die you have a single chance to respawn immediately where you died. This can give you one more go at the enemy or boss without losing money or XP. If you die a second time, or if you decide to respawn at the last save point, you will lose half of your XP and money permanently, unless you receive "Unseen Aid," which occurs randomly but at a percentage determined by how often you have died previously. This "Unseen Aid" chance can be reset using in game items and following an optional side quest.

The basic movement system is roughly similar to previous games by FROMSOFTWARE. You can walk, run, and jump around the levels, but the biggest changes are in the freedom to explore the levels in different ways. There are many ledges that you can hang from or shimmy along, increasing the number of places that you can reach. Your shinobi prosthetic also has a grappling hook, which you can use to grapple from tree branches, building decorations, and even particular enemies. This opens up the levels immensely, making you feel like a real ninja rapidly traversing both horizontally and vertically. The target may be changed in midair, allowing you to chain from one point to another with grace and aplomb. While walking near steep ledges or along tree branches, the game developers have made it impossible to simply walk off the edge, which is one of the many instances of truly considerate design in the game. After all, how likely is it that a competent ninja would clumsily plummet off a ledge to their death?

Besides these forms of movement, Sekiro is the first FROMSOFTWARE game to feature swimming. Exploring several underwater segments is pretty fun. It does not match the feeling of Subnautica, but the swimming areas are well-laid out, and the camera and movement controls are competent and feel nice.

Stealth

Another change is to the stealth or aggro system. In previous games, you could sneak up on enemies, but after they knew about your existence, they never forgot until you got far enough away to cause them to reset their state. In Sekiro, you can sneak behind, above, or below enemies and execute them with a single deadly blow. As long as they are out of sight of other enemies and far enough away, you can chain these stealth kills together. Further, the placement of ledges, walls, and tall grass allows you hide from the enemy and execute further stealth kills, or to return to an undetected state if you managed to get seen by an enemy.

Inventory

Sekiro features a few changes from the standard inventory system in previous FROMSOFTWARE games. In previous games, you could carry 99 items of each type, including weapons, armor, health items, and throwable items. Sekiro removes all armor and weapon customization, and limits the number of items you can carry severely. For example, you can only carry three of any type of Buddhist sugar at a given time. If you pick up a fourth one, it will be sent to your remote storage. If you respawn or rest at a save point, any carried items that are at less than capacity will be stocked up from your storage. You can have up to five different quick items equipped at any time, but again, because of the ability to safely pause the game, you can use any item you want at any time, or switch your quick slot items easily.

The above limitations on numbers are partly to refocus the game away from the item management and stat matching in previous games, and partly to maintain the difficulty. Since the player can pause the game completely and thus switch out items and abilities without worrying about dying while doing so, the number of items you can carry must be correspondingly reduced in order to maintain challenge.

Skills

Skills and stats is another area where FROMSOFTWARE has departed from the past. Instead of having different stats such as strength, agility, endurance, intelligence, etc, there are five different skill trees. As you kill enemies, you receive experience points which you can see in the upper right corner of the screen. After a set amount is reached, those points are converted into a skill point. The amount of XP needed to reach the next level increases with each point earned in a way familiar to fans other RPGs. The skills themselves require different amounts of skill points, generally increasing as you progress farther from the root.

Only one combat skill and one ninjutsu skill may be equipped at a time, but most skills are in fact passive. For example, you will unlock the ability to run and slide. While running, if you press the crouch button it will trigger a short slide that let's you evade an enemy's detection, or to get back into cover quickly. Once unlocked, you do not need to equip or unequip this ability. An example of a combat skill would be the Ashina Cross. This is a quick attack skill which causes Sekiro to make two rapid cuts in the shape of a cross. This costs spirit emblems to perform. All combat skills are triggered by pressing the R1 and L1 buttons at the same time. An example of a ninjutsu skill is the Puppeteer Technique. This allows you make an allay of an enemy after committing a death blow on them. Like the Ashina Cross, it costs spirit emblems to perform.

Procedures

Defeating a boss

There are two main kinds of bosses: mini-bosses and main bosses. Main bosses are few and far between. There are very few bosses which you must kill in order to progress in the game. There are two primary benefits to killing any kind of boss in Sekiro. First, you can often receive a prayer bead, which after four are collected can be used to increase your health and posture. Second, you can unlock a new area which was not available before killing the boss. Main bosses have the additional benefit of granting you a battle memory, which can be used to increase your attack power.

The prayer beads and battle memories highlight one of the key differences between Sekiro and previous FROMSOFTWARE games. In previous FROMSOFTWARE games, you could grind certain areas in order to beat a boss. However, in Sekiro, while you can grind for XP, money, and items, XP is only used to grant skill points. Skill points can be used to purchase skills from any skill tree you've unlocked. These might give you a new attack, or increase the power of healing items, etc. BUT, they will not increase your health or posture bar, and they will not increase your attack power. Money and items can be used to upgrade your shinobi prosthetics, or to buy items and materials from merchants (some of which might allow the player to increase health and posture), but are not generally key to beat bosses. Furthermore, in previous FROMSOFTWARE games, there were companions that the player could summon if a certain boss was proving too much of a challenge. So, two major crutches that veteran players might have used to get through a boss have been removed. If you were hoping to increase your attack damage stat or your health for just a slight edge in the boss battle, you're SOL. In the parlance of many fans of the Souls-borne games, you have to "git gud." You will not be able to get a friend to help you, and you will not be able to grind XP and increase your health or damage. You'll need to learn the patterns of the boss and the best ways to counter them, and what kinds of damage they are weak to. THEN, you will be granted your battle memory or your prayer bead.

Leveling up

Leveling in Sekiro is quite different in feeling from most RPGs. You can increase your health only by collecting four prayer beads and offering these at a save point, and although you can find a few of these lying around, and you can purchase one, the vast majority of the 40 total prayer beads can only be earned by defeating bosses. By the same token, you can only increase your attack power by defeating main bosses, who will grant you a battle memory. Like the prayer beads, these must be offered at a save point in order to take effect. XP, as mentioned before, is earned by killing enemies, and is automatically converted to a skill point after the next plateau is reached. Like prayer beads and battle memories, skill points can only be spent at save points to unlock new skills.

Exploring an area

Exploration has been touched on lightly before, but like many FROMSOFTWARE games, there are many areas, events, quest lines, and even endings that are easy to miss. Although exploration feels better than ever before, the designers have drastically increased the number of different paths through an area. To fully explore an area will usually require a great deal of dedication, patience, and even multiple revisits, as it is likely that the player will not have all the required abilities to reach every part.

Resources

• Health: Health works the same as in many games. You have a set amount, and it can be reduced by receiving damage from falls, poison, fire, terror, and regular attacks. Low health slows the regeneration of your posture bar. If it reaches zero, you enter a death state. The twist is that you have one chance to come back to life right where you died.
• Posture: Posture determines your ability to block further attacks and avoid damage. If you block using poor timing, or if you forget to block, your posture bar will begin to build. If it maxes out, you will be put in a temporary vulnerable state.
• Sen: Sen is the money in Sekiro. It is needed to purchase items and to upgrade shinobi prosthetics. Like XP, you will lose half of all sen that you carry when you die. If you store it in money bags, you can keep it.
• XP: Keeping with Souls-Borne tradition, the player gathers XP by killing enemies. The main difference is that once a certain amount of XP is gathered, it is converted into a skill point. Until this happens, that XP is similar to the souls or blood echoes from previous games: upon death, the player will lose half of all XP, unless they receive "Unseen Aid." Any XP that has been converted into a skill point will be kept, no matter how many times you die. The amount of XP needed for each successive skill point increases according to similar curves to souls or blood echoes in previous games.
• Skill Points: Skill points are used to purchase abilities from the different skill trees that Sekiro has. As you play the game, you will unlock more skill trees with different abilities.
• Skills: Unlike other FROMSOFTWARE titles, skills in Sekiro are divided into several skill trees, which can be unlocked by progressing in the game, completing optional activities and dialog checks. Each skill has prerequisites and a skill point cost. Most skills are passive buffs, but some are combat or shinobi skills. The player may unlock as many of these as they like, but only one combat and one shinobi skill may be equipped at a time.
• Shinobi Prosthetics: There are 10 shinobi prosthetics in Sekiro. Once you receive your prosthetic arm, you get one basic skill: you can grapple onto specific objects in the environment. For example, tree branches protruding from cliffs, and specifically shaped trees; and lastly certain decorative elements on the roofs of buildings. All the other prosthetics must be discovered by the player through exploring the environment or by purchasing them from vendors. Only three prosthetics may be equipped at a time, but they can be switched dynamically during gameplay. Every prosthetic has several different upgrades which either increase its effectiveness, or alter its effects in some key way.
• Dragonrot: This increases as you die more and more. This makes NPCs in the world sick, and prevents the player from advancing their questline. It also lower's your chance of receiving "Unseen Aid."
• Throwable Items: These include items like pottery shards and oil jars. They can be used in several different contexts, but are most useful to get the attention of enemies, or to set them up for a fire attack.
• Consumable Items: These are items like different sugars which provide different attack buffs, or Divine Confetti, which allows the player increased damage to particular enemy types.
• Sake: You will be given or will find several different varieties of sake throughout the game. These can be given to different NPCs as gifts to unlock different dialogue options. Usually, these will be nostalgic monologues about some past friend or event, which bears indirectly on the story of Sekiro.
• Materials: The final set are materials which are used to craft shinobi prosthetics. These are things like Fulminated Mercury, Lapis Lazuli, or Scrap Iron. They can sometimes be randomly dropped from enemies, but others can only be found once in the environment or purchased from vendors in limited amounts.

Conflicts

Leveling

Although the strength of the conflict has been reduced, there is still a conflict in terms of what skill to choose. Most skills require more than one skill point to unlock, so deciding which one to unlock can feel like making a big investment.

Game Story Path

Fans of FROMSOFTWARE games will notice a requiring theme about immortality. In Dark Souls, the player and most of the NPCs and enemies are cursed to come back to life again and again. At the end of the game, you can choose to continue the age of fire, or end it, beginning the age of dark. The exact implications of each path are not exactly clear. Similarly, in Bloodborne, you are a beast hunter who is possibly trapped in some kind of dream or nightmare. When you die, you don't really die but can come back again and again, as do the enemies. At the end, you can choose to leave the dream, continue the dream, or perhaps to become some kind of in-human god-like being. Again, the implications are not exactly clear, but the in-game justification for why the player and the enemies respawn is clear and well-implemented.

In Sekiro, we also find a preoccupation with immortality and a clear message about it. In all FROMSOFTWARE games, immortality is regarded as a kind of curse or perversion of the natural order. Certain members of the Ashina clan want to make use of the Dragon Heritage or Divine Blood in order to create an immortal, unstoppable army. It makes sense that the two main story paths in Sekiro are the player either choosing to make use of this power, or agreeing with the Divine Heir that it is indeed a perversion and trying to destroy it.

Boundaries

Grappling

Not everything may be grappled to in Sekiro. Some enemies in particular animation states can be grappled to, if you have unlocked the skill which allows this. Particular branches can be grappled to. Roof decorations may also be grappled to.

Inventory

Your inventory is severely limited, as has been detailed before.

Prayer Beads

As mentioned before, there are only 40 total prayer beads, and once a prayer bead has been received, either from an area or from a boss or vendor, it will no longer be available there for any playthrough.

Outcomes

There are four different main endings, but there are several different states that NPCs can be in at the end.

1. Shura: This ending effective short circuits the game. You decide to betray your lord, and "stay loyal" to your father. You end up actually killing your father, and becoming a demon of hatred.
2. Regular: You decide to stay loyal to Lord Kuro, and you give him Divine Dragon Tears to cut his connection to the divine realm. He dies, but the Dragonrot curse is ended
3. Happy?: You decide to stay loyal to Lord Kuro, and you give him Divine Dragon Tears and an Aromatic Flower to cut his connection to the divine realm. In order to free your lord of the curse and and allow him to live, you must take your own life.
4. Happiest: You decide to stay loyal to Lord Kuro, and you give him Divine Dragon Tears and Frozen Tears to cut his connection to the divine realm. He dies in some sense, but his soul is carried by another, and Sekiro and this other person travel to the west in search of the origin of the Dragon's blood. This removes the curse of immortality from the mortal realm.

Dynamic Elements

There are several dynamic elements in Sekiro. First of all, there are the stopping mechanisms of resurrection and inventory. You may only resurrect once, unless you use a special item to refill this ability, or unless you can fill the second resurrection bar by getting death blows. Both these methods are limited by either the number of enemies in an area, or by the number of items you can carry. The inventory limitations prevents players from cheesing the game.

Secondly, there is the near ubiquitous use of dynamic friction for the acquisition of XP, as found in almost every RPG.

Third, work placement is found in the effects of equipping or swapping out abilities and ninja prosthetics.

Finally, the attrition pattern can be found in the gradual loss of XP and sen upon repeated death, and in the gradual build-up of Dragonrot. Under this paradigm, the first 4 deaths can take you from any random amount of XP to only 6.25% of the original amount. Each subsequent death takes away the same percent (50), but since the amount has become so small after 4, these deaths matter less and less.

Dramatic Elements

Although all FROMSOFTWARE games have featured a story, Sekiro is perhaps the first that takes place in a world that is easy to understand, and the developers have gone out of their way to make the main story beats comprehensible to the players. That is not to say that it will always be clear what to do, what the consequences of different choices are, or even what the conditions are for achieving different branches in the story. There is still some of the attitude of "players are like mushrooms so keep them in the dark and throw shit on them."

Characters

The main character is Sekiro, a boy found on a battle field by a master shinobi and trained in that profession. You are initially called Wolf. You lose your arm protecting your lord in the prologue, and are afterwards named Sekiro, which translates into something like "Lone Wolf" or "One ~~ Wolf," where ~~ could be arm, leg, ball, ear, or eye.

Your "father," a shinobi called Owl, plays a main role in the story. Although he raised Sekiro, he later fakes his own death and tries to kill Sekiro in order to get control of the "Divine Heir." You will have to decide whether to help him or stay loyal to the Divine Heir.

Lord Kuro, the Divine Heir, is the lord who Sekiro must protect and serve. His blood is somehow connected to the divine realm, which when given to a servant, creates a bond between them, and will cause the servant to resurrect whenever killed. Through one of the optional areas and missions, we discover that Kuro has given his blood to Sekiro 3 years before the start of the game. This explains why Sekiro can keep respawning again and again. However, it does not explain why enemies that you've killed have returned. He comes to view this immortality as a kind of curse, and asks Sekiro to help remove it from the world.

The sculptor was featured in the first reveal of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2018. Like Sekiro, he is lacking his left arm. As the game progresses, you will learn that his shinobi name was "Orangutan," and that Lord Isshin was forced to cut his arm off to prevent him from become a Shura, a kind of demon of hatred. The sculptor's shrine functions as an initial safe place, and the player can upgrade their shinobi prosthetics by speaking with the sculptor.

Lady Emma is a doctor who appears at the shrine. She is the daughter of another famous doctor, who appears to have some connection to the Divine Blood or the Dragonrot curse in the past. You will be able to upgrade your Gourd of Life, the main way of replenishing your health in the game, by giving her seeds you've found. Like prayer beads, there is a set number of seeds in the game, and once you've found one, it will be replaced by other items in later playthroughs. You can also eavesdrop on her at different times and places in order to pursue different quest lines or endings.

There are at least a dozen more NPCs in the game, but these are the ones you will probably interact with the most often. There are different merchants, but these have little personality. You can also sometimes interact with enemies, or eavesdrop on them to get more information, but these moments are rare.

Story

The story takes place in a fictionalized version of feudal Japan. The land of Ashina is under attack, and you must protect your charge, Lord Kuro, from his enemies. You lose your arm doing so, and the sculptor helps you and gives you a prosthetic arm. You spend much of the game trying to reach your lord. Once you do, you are faced with the same enemy who dismembered you in the prologue. From here, your lord tasks you with gathering components needed to reach the divine realm in order to cure the immortality curse. Once you have gathered the materials, you will have to fight your way back to the castle. There you must choose between helping your father and helping Kuro. If you choose to help your father, you will become a demon of hatred. If you choose to help Kuro, you must travel to the divine realm in order to get tears from the Divine Dragon. Once returning to the mortal realm again, you will have to fight your way back to the castle before defeating the final boss(es) of the game.

Along the way, you will explore dungeons, haunted forests, deep gorges where you must navigate ledges and branches, the obligatory poisonous ground level, and of course feudal Japanese castles and battlegrounds.

Conclusion

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is another masterpiece from FROMSOFTWARE. It captures that feeling of triumphing over impossible odds that has kept fans playing since 2009's Demon's Souls. At the same time, it successfully innovates in key areas. Gone is multiplayer, gone is messaging, and gone is the sword-and-board combo that got many people through Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls 3. You don't need to worry about character customization or armor/weapon/stat matching. In their place you have skill trees for the first time in a FROMSOFTWARE game, and you also have a dynamic movement system that makes you feel like a ninja. Gone is the grind of trying to get just one more boost to health or strength or what-have-you. Instead you have a system that forces you to observe your own reactions to enemies, and alter them appropriately until you emerge victorious.