Here are my few cents after beating the game for the first time. I'm not great at articulating my thoughts so I will atleast try to keep it short:
- Locations - I think it's a pretty common complaint that we could use more variety. I think the locations that were there, were good but it's certainly not this games strong point. I do understand though that this time they wanted to keep things more 'realistic' and based on history. When it comes to verticality, at first I didn't like the verticality but it really grew on me.
- Soundtrack - I absolutely love it. My kind of thing. My favourite themes are in the monks monastery. Cool stuff, I listen to it outside the game often.
- Story - The story is the easiest to follow from all soulsborne games. I'm not a super fan of japanese mysticism and the general setting but it was enough to keep me interested.
- Prosthetics - This is a mixed bag for me and I think the biggest issue here stems from the fact that your standard toolset (i.e. the sword and movement) are much more powerful than any of the prosthetics. I found the only consistently good prosthetic to be the shuriken. I could use it to interrupt and close distance, which is useful. The other prosthetics are often very situational and even then their use is not necessary nor very rewarding. (cheesing aside).
- Bosses / general mechanics - This is where the game excels I think. The mechanics clicked for me at Lady Butterfly. It was an amazing fight. Extremely fair, each attempt I felt like I made progress and learned a bit. That's how bosses should be done. I never felt underwhelmed. Ultimately I learned to deflect basically her every move and kept pushing her until she ran out of posture health. Fights like Lady Butterfly, Genichiro, Owl and Isshin are my favourites for the same reasons. Very fair fights, never felt underwhelmed and never thought 'this shit is impossible'. Apparition mini-bosses were cool to change the pace and bosses such as demon of hatred (which normally would've belonged in BB) were great too. They refreshed the formula a little bit and forced me to think outside the box for a moment.
- Progression - I enjoyed exploring locations and fighting ordinary enemies to progress, like in any other soulsborne game. I thought it was a pity that at certain points the game turned into 'mini-boss/boss the game'. At certain point in the game I found myself having to beat a number of bosses/mini-bosses in a row, without having to really explore and progress through any location. I think it was somewhere mid game? Even though I barely relied on prosthetics, I still ran out of all my 'ammo' for them. I also did not progress on cash/levels at that time. The only way to make up for that was to grind in locations you've already cleared.
I also want to say a couple of things about the final Isshin fight. I think this is a pinnacle of soulsborne boss fights. The game culminated in a boss that forced you to use everything you learned up to this point. If you played the game 'it's supposed to be played', as in, you learned how to deflect, dogde and counter, then upon meeting this boss you knew that it's going to be perfectly beatable but challenging. Isshin had a little bit more moves up his sleeve, a little bit faster than usual and had great reach - that made him harder than previous bosses but all you had to do was to adjust your style a little. Beating him felt so goooood. Now, I do have a friend who made his way up to Isshin by mashing L1. It is possible to reach that far without really grokking the mechanics BUT then you're in a world of pain. If you didn't learn the proper way to fight sword enemies in the game then it means you already reinforced a lot of bad habits, mainly just mashing L1 to try and defend yourself. And that's where my friend ended up. He got really frustrated by the fight and said it's unfair and badly balanced. Basically what you heard from the journos. Watching my friend try to beat Isshin was painful experience in itself.
All in all, I think Sekiro is a great game and could be greatly expanded and improved upon in many ways in a sequel, which I think is promising.
