Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (new From Software game)

[Steezus]

Jesus, put your shit in spoilers, you fuckos.

 

[Somberlain]

Wow, fighting Guardian Ape only to find that the next boss is the same Guardian Ape but with a friend is a new standard of bullshit, From.

 

[Jaedar]

This guardian ape is killing me so bad.

Time to grind mibu village for spirit emblems...

 

[Ezekiel]

Slightly mad. Just saw Vaati best the final final boss in less than 35 or so minutes. First try on last phase.

Meanwhile, pleb me needed hours on Lady Butterfly.

Did you fight Lady Butterfly early? I beat her on my first try, despite evading almost none of her unavoidable red attacks. Most of the other bosses have not been that easy for me, not by a long shot.

Spoiler

One of the more annoying ones was the guy with all the armor and the big sword on the covered bridge. I only beat him by performing a deathblow when he was right at the edge of the bridge, which caused him to back up slightly and fall to his death.

 

[Wolfe]

I fucking hate the concept of Divine Confetti in this game. Spent way too much time on O'Rin because I refuse to farm consumables with a low drop rate, I don't understand who thought that's a good idea. She sometimes goes berserk and destroys your posture even if you deflect almost all of her attacks.. fuck, I'm so pissed off.

It seems to me like the HP bloat which started becoming an issue in DS 3 is rearing its ugly head again here. Genichiro has a nasty surprise just when you think you're done, the apparition mini-bosses take ages to kill without Divine Confetti.. what are they thinking? From what I've been reading on this thread I'm starting to clench my butt cheeks because it seems this design pattern will only get worse from now on.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

From Software should stick to oneiric abstract stories and silent player character. This weeb shit is somewhat off-putting.

... Hmm.

 

[Silva]

The Souls games barely had characters. They had ciphers who you would randomly see progress (really more like shift from point to point in their wandering because you don’t really see enough of their stories to give a clear idea of them moving forward) and some of them were more interesting than others.

Bullshit. The industry is already saturated of cookie-cutter exposition dumps that treat the player like a retardo. I'd rather devs respect my intelligence AND adult life by acknowledging I don't need to read a fucking novella every time I meet an NPC.

GTFO, you Biowarian faggot.

 

[Jasede]

Wow, fighting Guardian Ape only to find that the next boss is the same Guardian Ape but with a friend is a new standard of bullshit, From.

Well, if you had fought the Guardian Ape last you could have skipped the double team fight.

Ezekiel
Yes, I fought her as my first boss and it didn't go well for me. She took me much longer than any other bosses in the game, by a long shot.

Haven't fought the Demon yet.

 

[Jasede]

I fucking hate the concept of Divine Confetti in this game. Spent way too much time on O'Rin because I refuse to farm consumables with a low drop rate, I don't understand who thought that's a good idea. She sometimes goes berserk and destroys your posture even if you deflect almost all of her attacks.. fuck, I'm so pissed off.

It seems to me like the HP bloat which started becoming an issue in DS 3 is rearing its ugly head again here. Genichiro has a nasty surprise just when you think you're done, the apparition mini-bosses take ages to kill without Divine Confetti.. what are they thinking? From what I've been reading on this thread I'm starting to clench my butt cheeks because it seems this design pattern will only get worse from now on.

The HP has to be bloated to encourage players to break the enemy's posture. You aren't supposed to kill them by HP damage. Once you chip Orin to 75% of her health bar (so it's mostly still full) you can just parry your way to victory and fill up her posture bar. Maybe you aren't timing the deflection right? It's also important to stop her from regenerating posture so just wail on her when she backs off, or throw something at her.

You absolutely don't need/want to use confetti on this fight.

Honestly, I think the key thing to learn about this game is that if you are experiencing HP bloat, you are still fighting wrong. Watching the 'good' streamers you can see them kill bosses with 80%, 70% of their HP left, just because they fill up that posture bar.

This, in retrospect, also makes me hate the 'HP bloat' less. Right about at Orin/Ape/Monk Phantom I thought this HP bloat was insane, too, but it's about at that point I learned to just fill up their posture bar and kill them that way, letting them have more than 50% of their HP left.

 

[bataille]

I wonder if it would have been better for Froms to have made dragonrot a secret mechanic, giving NPCs the affliction silently, leaving it to the player to connect the dots between the resurrection and its toll. It seems to me that in doing so they would have alleviated that metagamey message that you shouldn't be dying (arguably, you should be dying-a lot), introduced another mystery to solve, and removed a major anxiety from the already stressful equation. Introducing such an important narrative aspect via a tutorial popup is in extremely poor taste. Kinda strange that is was a decision of the man with so much experience in creating elegant, non-direct NPC storylines.

 

[Sentinel]

I fucking hate the concept of Divine Confetti in this game. Spent way too much time on O'Rin because I refuse to farm consumables with a low drop rate, I don't understand who thought that's a good idea. She sometimes goes berserk and destroys your posture even if you deflect almost all of her attacks.. fuck, I'm so pissed off.

It seems to me like the HP bloat which started becoming an issue in DS 3 is rearing its ugly head again here. Genichiro has a nasty surprise just when you think you're done, the apparition mini-bosses take ages to kill without Divine Confetti.. what are they thinking? From what I've been reading on this thread I'm starting to clench my butt cheeks because it seems this design pattern will only get worse from now on.

You don't need confetti for this fight or for the upcoming one.
Poison her.
Learn to jump.
You can cheese her by throwing a ceramic shard at her from behind and instantly deathblowing her to start off the fight.

Wow, fighting Guardian Ape only to find that the next boss is the same Guardian Ape but with a friend is a new standard of bullshit, From.

That fight can actually be avoided. I didn't fight them on my first playhtrough.

 

[Hassar]

The Souls games barely had characters. They had ciphers who you would randomly see progress (really more like shift from point to point in their wandering because you don’t really see enough of their stories to give a clear idea of them moving forward) and some of them were more interesting than others.

Bullshit. The industry is already saturated of cookie-cutter exposition dumps that treat the player like a retardo. I'd rather devs respect my intelligence AND adult life by acknowledging I don't need to read a fucking novella every time I meet an NPC.

GTFO, you Biowarian faggot.

You’re confusing the ability to make a good character from making a character a stand in for infodumps.

Heck. Part of the problem with Souls is that most of the “lore” is stealth infodumped in the form of item descriptions and some characters really have no personality besides providing information and/or a service to the player character.

I have Souls characters that I like more than others but I don’t pretend that 6 lines of dialogue makes them particularly well developed enough to have an identity.

 

[cvv]

You aren't supposed to kill them by HP damage.

Yes to all that but except the Demon. And Guardian Ape. And Owl 2nd phase when he's regenerating. There are a few regenerating mini-bosses but it's easy to prevent them from that, unlike Owl.

You don't need confetti for this fight.

Have you beaten her on NG+? She takes ages to beat like that, you have to put some serious damage into her.

That fight can actually be avoided. I didn't fight them on my first playhtrough.

If you beat Guardian Ape first and then go for the Monk you have to go through the cavern behind Snake Eyes where she's waiting for you. I just did that. Pretty brutal for people who don't know.

 

[cvv]

Owl Father on NG+:

Spoiler

 

[Jasede]

I am totally going to cheese Orin with the pottery next time if I ever replay the game, that's awesome.

 

[Lutte]

You should stop pretending the Souls games had good (or any) stories.

Souls games have great gameplay but trying to make sense of a story is futile because of its heavily, heavily japanese spirituality influences.
The problem with souls stories is that even if they had extremely straightforward storytelling direction, they would still be utterly alien and ridiculous to the western mind because they're ALL based (even the lovecraftian inspired bloodborne) on Japanese ""spirituality"" aka the dumbest superstitions known to man (those same superstitions that build the souls lore are the reason why an entire class of workers are treated like subhumans in Japan, although it has gotten a lot less bad compared to centuries ago).
People who don't know about Shinto and the bits of Buddhism practiced in Japan will try very hard to look for deeper meaning in souls lore where there is none and in fact the thing is self explanatory but just doesn't make any logical sense, exactly like actual Shinto practice.
Here's an example of Japanese ""spirituality"" core concept - Kegare (often translated as defilement, but having a more infectious, corrupting meaning, yet amoral, it is like a force of nature), and the way their mythos focused on purity vs impurity

It records that in 642, a Prince Gyōgi 翹岐 of Paekche 百濟, accompanied by his family, made a state visit to the Nara court. While in Japan, his child died, and the prince and his wife were so fearful of defilement that they would not attend the funeral. The chronicle notes, “In general, the custom of [persons of] Paekche and Silla is that, when someone has died, even one’s father or mother, brother, spouse, or sister, one never looks upon that person again. In such utter lack of affection, how do they differ from birds or beasts?” By the mid-Heian period, however, very similar avoidances had been adopted among Japanese nobles and internalized to such an extent that they must indeed have appeared to be distinctively “Japanese.” Concerns about pollution avoidance played a vital role in state formation. Herman Ooms has traced how the sovereign Tenmu 天武天皇 (r. 673-86), who was instrumental in establishing the ritsuryō system, mobilized “purity” as a core value in legitimizing his rule.

A few rare holdouts of those superstitions still do things like forbidding women from climbing mountains because they're a source of blood pollution (menstruation, child birth).

Don't let the westerny visuals mislead ya, even Demon's Souls was a Japanese story told with a western look and vocabulary. You could see the impact of the jap spiritual thoughts in elements like the karmic world's tendencies, the valley of defilement and so on.
The kind of thinking that drives the souls world building is a-l-i-e-n to any sort of rational thinking. There is no point in trying to make sense of the puzzle. To me, it is not the fact that Souls tell much of its setting from things like item description that makes them what they are but rather, that the writers are heavily influenced by a type of thinking that eludes rationality. I'm not surprised people will have trouble grasping wtf Shura is in Sekiro.

 

[Cromwell]

A few rare holdouts of those superstitions still do things like forbidding women from climbing mountains because they're a source of blood pollution

no. no! NO! SAY IT AINT SO!, but then your whole post reeks of fedora.

 

[Hassar]

You should stop pretending the Souls games had good (or any) stories.

Souls games have great gameplay but trying to make sense of a story is futile because of its heavily, heavily japanese spirituality influences.
The problem with souls stories is that even if they had extremely straightforward storytelling direction, they would still be utterly alien and ridiculous to the western mind because they're ALL based (even the lovecraftian inspired bloodborne) on Japanese ""spirituality"" aka the dumbest superstitions known to man (those same superstitions that build the souls lore are the reason why an entire class of workers are treated like subhumans in Japan, although it has gotten a lot less bad compared to centuries ago).
People who don't know about Shinto and the bits of Buddhism practiced in Japan will try very hard to look for deeper meaning in souls lore where there is none and in fact the thing is self explanatory but just doesn't make any logical sense, exactly like actual Shinto practice.
Here's an example of Japanese ""spirituality"" core concept - Kegare (often translated as defilement, but having a more infectious, corrupting meaning, yet amoral, it is like a force of nature), and the way their mythos focused on purity vs impurity

It records that in 642, a Prince Gyōgi 翹岐 of Paekche 百濟, accompanied by his family, made a state visit to the Nara court. While in Japan, his child died, and the prince and his wife were so fearful of defilement that they would not attend the funeral. The chronicle notes, “In general, the custom of [persons of] Paekche and Silla is that, when someone has died, even one’s father or mother, brother, spouse, or sister, one never looks upon that person again. In such utter lack of affection, how do they differ from birds or beasts?” By the mid-Heian period, however, very similar avoidances had been adopted among Japanese nobles and internalized to such an extent that they must indeed have appeared to be distinctively “Japanese.” Concerns about pollution avoidance played a vital role in state formation. Herman Ooms has traced how the sovereign Tenmu 天武天皇 (r. 673-86), who was instrumental in establishing the ritsuryō system, mobilized “purity” as a core value in legitimizing his rule.

A few rare holdouts of those superstitions still do things like forbidding women from climbing mountains because they're a source of blood pollution (menstruation, child birth).

Don't let the westerny visuals mislead ya, even Demon's Souls was a Japanese story told with a western look and vocabulary. You could see the impact of the jap spiritual thoughts in elements like the karmic world's tendencies, the valley of defilement and so on.
The kind of thinking that drives the souls world building is a-l-i-e-n to any sort of rational thinking. There is no point in trying to make sense of the puzzle. To me, it is not the fact that Souls tell much of its setting from things like item description that makes them what they are but rather, that the writers are heavily influenced by a type of thinking that eludes rationality. I'm not surprised people will have trouble grasping wtf Shura is in Sekiro.

Yes, this is what I was thinking. I studied Japanese for years and have a writing background so definitely understand this. Could agree to disagree here but from my POV, it is besides the point to talk about Souls character storylines as “stories” in them western sense. I think the closest story telling conceptualization we have for this “floating world” type style would be an “interlude” wherein you see or experience a fragmented vision of the start, middle, or the end of another character’s story.

 

[Wolfe]

I said HP bloat and that was misleading, I was referring to both HP and posture. Some fights feel like attrition battles, even if you eventually learn the combos you have to play almost perfectly for 5 minutes as you slowly whittle down the boss, with even one mistake almost forcing you to start again.

 

[Matador]

I have started NG+ and so far very dull aside from very high enemy damage. It seems more interesting to try to make another run from the beginning and take my time to do everything and get the complete ending.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

hey gamers check out my epic pro mlg sekiro stream

doing no hit no jump prosthetic only ng+++ speedruns I have 10000 hours in souls games donate to me

 

[Jasede]

Because I was so impressed with Vaati killing the final boss in like 35 minutes I am watching his entire blind playthrough- he kills every boss in 1-3 tries...
Except for Snake Eyes, he gets stuck with her for 45 minutes.

I didn't know making Lore Videos was good for your reflexes. Though I guess the $6000 each month from Patreon helps...

Edit: Jesus Christ, first try first 2 phases of roof Genichiro, blind...

 

[cvv]

I said HP bloat and that was misleading, I was referring to both HP and posture. Some fights feel like attrition battles, even if you eventually learn the combos you have to play almost perfectly for 5 minutes as you slowly whittle down the boss, with even one mistake almost forcing you to start again.

Nothing represents this better than the Owl (Father) fight in one of the alternative endings, on NG+. I've just spent two hours on this. One stage can take up to 15 minutes of slowly chipping his gigantic VIT down and then trying to catch all the curve balls he's throwing you to work on his posture. Of which he has plenty of too.

And he has a lot of tricks. Like one-shotting you if you relax your 110% focus for a split second. At max health.

I thought Sword Saint is the most exhausting, idiotic fight in the game but this one easily takes the cake. This is purely for the freaks and autists. Cheat Engining that bullshit rn.

 

[Silva]

You should stop pretending the Souls games had good (or any) stories.

Souls games have great gameplay but trying to make sense of a story is futile because of its heavily, heavily japanese spirituality influences.
The problem with souls stories is that even if they had extremely straightforward storytelling direction, they would still be utterly alien and ridiculous to the western mind because they're ALL based (even the lovecraftian inspired bloodborne) on Japanese ""spirituality"" aka the dumbest superstitions known to man (those same superstitions that build the souls lore are the reason why an entire class of workers are treated like subhumans in Japan, although it has gotten a lot less bad compared to centuries ago).
People who don't know about Shinto and the bits of Buddhism practiced in Japan will try very hard to look for deeper meaning in souls lore where there is none and in fact the thing is self explanatory but just doesn't make any logical sense, exactly like actual Shinto practice.
Here's an example of Japanese ""spirituality"" core concept - Kegare (often translated as defilement, but having a more infectious, corrupting meaning, yet amoral, it is like a force of nature), and the way their mythos focused on purity vs impurity

It records that in 642, a Prince Gyōgi 翹岐 of Paekche 百濟, accompanied by his family, made a state visit to the Nara court. While in Japan, his child died, and the prince and his wife were so fearful of defilement that they would not attend the funeral. The chronicle notes, “In general, the custom of [persons of] Paekche and Silla is that, when someone has died, even one’s father or mother, brother, spouse, or sister, one never looks upon that person again. In such utter lack of affection, how do they differ from birds or beasts?” By the mid-Heian period, however, very similar avoidances had been adopted among Japanese nobles and internalized to such an extent that they must indeed have appeared to be distinctively “Japanese.” Concerns about pollution avoidance played a vital role in state formation. Herman Ooms has traced how the sovereign Tenmu 天武天皇 (r. 673-86), who was instrumental in establishing the ritsuryō system, mobilized “purity” as a core value in legitimizing his rule.

A few rare holdouts of those superstitions still do things like forbidding women from climbing mountains because they're a source of blood pollution (menstruation, child birth).

Don't let the westerny visuals mislead ya, even Demon's Souls was a Japanese story told with a western look and vocabulary. You could see the impact of the jap spiritual thoughts in elements like the karmic world's tendencies, the valley of defilement and so on.
The kind of thinking that drives the souls world building is a-l-i-e-n to any sort of rational thinking. There is no point in trying to make sense of the puzzle. To me, it is not the fact that Souls tell much of its setting from things like item description that makes them what they are but rather, that the writers are heavily influenced by a type of thinking that eludes rationality. I'm not surprised people will have trouble grasping wtf Shura is in Sekiro.

Yes, this is what I was thinking. I studied Japanese for years and have a writing background so definitely understand this. Could agree to disagree here but from my POV, it is besides the point to talk about Souls character storylines as “stories” in them western sense. I think the closest story telling conceptualization we have for this “floating world” type style would be an “interlude” wherein you see or experience a fragmented vision of the start, middle, or the end of another character’s story.

Exaggeration. While I agree there's this alien ethos that give the games a distinct vibe (also see SMT: Nocurne), the overall plots are pretty simple to grok: the cyclical nature of the world (and the assholes who don't want their cycles to end) in Dark Souls, and the hubris of a bunch of researchers going too far in Bloodborne. Never played Demons so I ca t speak for it.

Further, the main source of cryptic stuff in the series IMO is Miyazaki storytelling style, informed by his infancy reading books which language he couldn't fully comprehend and had to fill in the voids with his own interpretation, and now makes it on purpose in his games (just Google it and you'll get the full story). Oh and Beserker, hes a hugr fan of Berserker and it shows. Dark Souls 1 is pretty basic in this, but Bloodborne is the real gem where his technique shines - he purposefully erased points in the plot as to make it ambiguous and prone to personal interpretation, which happen to fit the Lovecraftian theme of unfathomable beings nicely. The proof of this is the pieces of story that were left unknowingly in the release version of the game (in special the one describing the contract between Laurence and the Moon presence) which were erased early in the first patches.

For an obvious jap/shinto reference see Valtr questline in Bloodborne, with all the "vermin and tainted" people he asks you to bring down to purify the city (for a less obvious one, see the relation between the Church and the Cainhurst bloodline).

 

[Sentinel]

I have started NG+ and so far very dull aside from very high enemy damage. It seems more interesting to try to make another run from the beginning and take my time to do everything and get the complete ending.

Get rid of Kuro's charm for increased difficulty (give it back to him at the start of the game). Enemies will deal chip damage through your block, meaning you have to perfect deflect.