Sekiro Focuses on Challenge, Slices Through Bullshit
There’s a moment late in the first act of Sekiro where you reach a checkpoint labeled “Dojo,” just outside a room with a closed door. When you open the door, you find a blue-robed samurai, “Ashina Elite – Jinsuke Saze,” calmly waiting for you just on the other side in the seiza position. As you approach, he rises and greets you with a fierce iaijutsu style, unsheathing and resheathing his sword in two-slash bursts. One slash is enough to nearly kill you, but the second slash is sure to finish the job without giving you a chance to recover.
When you inevitably die, you revive back at that Dojo checkpoint, the door still open from before, and Jinsuke is back in his seiza position, staring you down. This was the first time I could recall a FromSoftware game placing a checkpoint within view of the boss. It was also the moment I affirmed that, for once, misery wasn’t the point. I’d already fought many bosses and minibosses in Sekiro, and though they were often challenging enough to kill me multiple times, at no point had the consequences for death felt punitive. In almost all cases, reinitiating the fight was as simple as traversing a short distance, made easy by Sekiro’s ability to jump and grapple and his relatively fast run speed. Granted, this particular miniboss was an extreme case, perched mere feet away from the checkpoint, but was not an exceptional case. Rather, he epitomized the shift in dynamic that sets Sekiro apart from FromSoft’s “Soulsborne” games, which, despite their many merits, I have long regarded with seething resentment. Sekiro, like other FromSoft games, demands you “git gud,” but unlike those other games, Sekiro actually wants you to.
I spent at least an hour fighting Jinsuke Saze. The average duration of each attempt was less than a minute. I’m pretty sure he killed me at least eighty times, which stands to reason, given that he’s almost sure to kill you if he hits you at all. But the only penalty for each death was having to retry the fight. Wait, let me amend that: the only penalty for every two deaths—because in Sekiro, you can resurrect yourself mid-fight. (So when I say he killed me at least eighty times, what I actually mean is a hundred sixty times.)
Compare this to the part of Bloodborne that made me shelve it for two years: Micolash, Host of the Nightmare. By most accounts, he’s one of the “easiest” bosses in the game. Since he’s one of the few that isn’t just an enormous pile of erratically flailing limbs with inscrutable hitboxes, I can’t disagree. But he’s not easy, per se, since, like Sekiro’s blue-robed butcher, his attacks can hit hard enough to kill you if he catches you just once or twice. The problem is that each time you die, you have to repeat a maddeningly long and convoluted process to reinitiate the fight: call the elevator, wait for the elevator, ride the elevator back up, cross a metal footbridge, kill or evade two of the fastest, most dangerous skeleton enemies in gaming history, chase Micolash through a fog-laden labyrinth of corridors lined with more erratically flailing skeletons, and finally corner him in a chamber, where the fight actually begins. Furthermore, Micolash can bolt in a few different directions when you pursue him, meaning it’s never quite the same from one attempt to the next, and sometimes the chase can go on for a full minute or more.* If you manage to get through all that and knock out half his health, he flees and leads you on another even longer, more dangerous chase. More skeletons, some with hard-hitting ranged attacks, more ways to get lost, deadly drops, and a more elusive Micolash. When you finally find him, the only way to reinitiate the fight is to drop down on him from above, which guarantees some fall damage. Depending on how you performed in the first half, that might be all it takes to do you in. Nightmare, indeed.
(*There is an exploit to ensure he runs directly to the chamber every time, but it’s such a nonsensical process of AI finagling, you could only be expected to figure it out through lots of trial-and-error or consulting the web.)
Micolash, too, is an extreme but not exceptional case. The problem with this encounter and many other moments in Bloodborne and the Dark Souls games is that the challenge is overshadowed by the hassle surrounding it. All told, actually fighting Micolash is a simple, rote process of dodging and counterattacking the same one move over and over. The defining aspect of the fight isn’t the challenge, it’s all the shit that gets in the way of fighting him to begin with. In moments like this, the game isn’t saying “git gud,” it’s saying “endure hardship.” Not the same thing. There are a variety of ways to stumble through Soulsborne games without getting that good, thanks to things like co-op and the ability to upgrade your stats and weapons. In fact, the punishment is often so severe that there’s high incentive to lean on these crutches rather than dedicating the inordinate amount of time required to get good. I myself only beat Bloodborne thanks to a very powerful co-op partner who got me through the final boss fight on my second try. I got through much of the game this way, and came away feeling like I’d poured so much of my time—in other words, my actual, real-life life—into the game without having much to show for it. The challenge, the player growth, was never the point—the nightmare was.
Ultimately the hardest thing about Bloodborne was tolerating its bullshit.
The problem I have with this approach to difficulty is that there’s no logical end to it. If difficulty is defined by impeding the player’s ability to improve, you may as well break one of my real-life fingers or pass me an infant each time I die and call it “difficulty.” It doesn’t feel like game design to me.
By contrast, Sekiro frequently forces you to learn and improve by pushing you through a funnel. Adapt or die immediately. It’s as clear-cut as the edge of a sword. But the game lets you work at it, because—of course—that’s the only way to “git gud” at anything. You will fail, but the focus is almost always on the challenge itself, so the game is happy to let you bang your head against it without interruption.
This hard-earned panty shot was more gratifying than beating the entirety of Bloodborne.
For me, that made all the difference. Not only is Sekiro the first FromSoft game of its sort to win me over, it’s now one of my all-time favorite games, and the first one I’ve ever Platinumed. Admittedly, this has emboldened me in my criticism of Soulsborne. As someone inclined to second-guess himself first and everyone else a distant second, I’m confident now that the problem wasn’t me—it was all that misery.
