The system is forgiving because parry is the same button of block, but the skill ceiling is high because you can be much more efficient by timing parries. By spamming you will miss a lot of windows to fill enemies posture, thus killing them slower. If you are good you can fill enemy posture lighting fast with consecutive timed parries.
yeah, but in the end it's just rhythmic clicking.
I've seen the gif/video where someone edited those rhythmic video game UI onto Long-Arm Centipede bossfight, and while it's true that the fight with Long-Arm are mostly L1/parry-button mashing, I don't see how 'rhythmic clicking' can be applied to the rest of the game. Yeah, 'consecutive deflection' is a thing that you could even train with Hanbei to master, but reducing Sekiro's gameplay of using certain moves to counter certain moves as 'rhythmic clicking' is just as retarded as calling it glorified QTE.
While in Dark Souls you have multiple weapons with different movesets and different types of damage (strike, thrust, magic, fire, etc),
Yet all that doesn't matter because most individual weapons of a certain type is just a smaller or bigger version of other types of weapons. Different weapons have different movesets, but individually within the same type of weapon they all have exact same moveset, with few weapons here and there where they had a special moveset when two-handed/dual-wielded. The one exception to this is Dark Souls 2 with its power-stancing. Meanwhile, Sekiro with a singular character archetype lets you play around with different shinobi tools and combat arts in addition to your default weapon movesets.
Still, judging Sekiro, an
action-game, based on a quality obviously a game like Dark Souls, an
action RPG, has is just baffling.
have rings with special effects, armor sets with different types of protection, magic,
Again, judging Sekiro based on a quality that a game like Dark Souls would obviously has is just baffling. Why would it matter that an RPG lets you equip rings with special effects, armor sets with different types of protection, and use magic? Compared to an action game where you only play as a shinobi? Does it also matters to you that you shoot stuff in an FPS but you can only jump in a platformer?
buffs (and not just +dmg sugars),
Let's see: Dark Souls has stamina buff, health buff, defense buff, attack buff, stealth buff, spell buff, and status resistance buffs.
Sekiro has posture buff, vitality buff, stealth buff, damage buff, and (non-sugar items) status resistance buffs.
Pretty standard, not sure why you're implying that Sekiro only has +dmg sugars.
you have to manage stamina and keep an eye on surroundings.
Sekiro has stamina, it just has different name and instead of managing it so it doesn't deplete, you manage it so it doesn't fill up.
And 'keep an eye on surroundings'? Did we even play the same game?
The only new thing Sekiro brought was vertical movement via grappling hook.
Dude, this game has a jumping mechanic. An *actual* one, assigned to a button, not this 'hold a button for a while then press the button again' shenanigan. It also adds a proper stealth mechanic, a climbing, shimmying, and wall-hugging mechanic, and ALL that also contributes to adding MORE ways to instakill an enemy, other than BACKSTABBU.
