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[PC] [ONE] [PS4] Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

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[PC] [ONE] [PS4] Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Unread postby ExiledOne » 22 Jun 2018 02:12

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Unread postby earthboundtrev » 21 Aug 2018 14:18

https://gematsu.com/2018/08/sekiro-shad ... ch-22-2019

Sal Romano wrote:Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will launch worldwide for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam on March 22, 2019, publisher Activision and developer From Software announced. Digital pre-orders will open today in select markets.


Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/8143 ... Die_Twice/
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Oct 2018 21:41

This is how the official Japanese site refers to the game:

SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE オフィシャルウェブサイトです。

This might be unprecedented for From, and for most Japanese companies, but especially for them. Key illustration with the name only in English, in Japan:

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https://www.sekiro.jp/

I guess it must be the Activision influence, plus the fact that the bulk of their sales are overseas. Nioh for example is promoted exclusively with the title in kanji. This isn't Metal Gear Solid where the words are English. It's unheard of for a game with a Japanese title to be promoted with the fucking English transliteration. It looks fucking disgusting.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Oct 2018 23:37

lol Ni no Kuni II is the same, on the box even. I can't believe it.

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The kids must have stopped learning kanji over there or something. Eventually only a bunch of gaijin otaku will be able to read the language lol. It's tragic.
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★★★★★ Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019, PC)

Unread postby Insomnia » 12 May 2019 15:05

Review (5/5): https://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=7034

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Insomnia wrote:Best rhythm game 2019.
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Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jul 2019 05:44

Shakesman has a negative take on this: https://steamcommunity.com/id/BertieWoo ... ed/814380/

William Shakesman wrote:So you made a ninja game without working stealth? Big levels, but enemies can see you on nearly any perch, any rooftop. Lots of rooftops but no alternate routes; all funneling into big enemy throwdown areas. Distraction items? But stealth kills perma-alert everyone in range of them... And what the hell ninja game makes a leaping air assassinate so unreliable?!

So you didn't even try to make Tenchu again. Fine, so it's a ninja combat game. I mean we're not expecting Ninja Gaiden but... naw, it's another flavor of Dark Souls. Bloodborne was dodge flavored, so Sekiro is parry flavored. Combat is far too straightforward and boring for a souls game. Just parry enemy attacks and then stab them, you're punished for dodging like BB punished you for Souls style cautious turtle play. All the fun of waiting nearly a second for a cartoonishly delayed attack windup to hit without any of the skill of a better game (And as always in Souls games, ♥♥♥♥ you if you are getting mobbed). But you die in two hits so you can pretend it's hardcore. Because the appearance of being hardcore is more important than game fundamentals, am I right?

But I'm being rude. There are midbosses and a few different enemy types. And you have a skill tree and a robot arm filled with ninja tools... .... .. most of said skills and tools are just one-note counters to these enemy type gimmicks. A particularly brutal and cheap midboss becomes stand still and hit the skill button three times. This happens across multiple types of enemies.

So what are you trying to do Sekiro? Your combat isn't good. Your stealth isn't good. What kind of ninja game are you trying to be?
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Unread postby ChevRage » 30 Jul 2019 08:44

First paragraph is bullshit, lol. It's not like rooftops make you invisible so of course if enemies have line of sight they'll be able to see you. There are plenty of alternate routes, and sometimes little hidden escape holes where you can emerge on another side of a "big enemy throwdown area" to surprise enemies who are still cautiously watching where you were before.

I've never felt the need to use a distraction item. While enemies aren't alert stealth kills are silent and don't give away your position unless somebody sees you, and if they do it's usually easy to get away and come back in from where they aren't expecting you. Distracting enemies makes them cautious if they aren't already, and then they hear the stealth kills so you can't sneak up on as many of them. I guess he's expecting enemies to keep looking at whatever location you threw one of those pots so that he can just backstab them all in a big series of stealth kills, but that would simplify the game way too much.

Leaping assassinations are fucking great too, no idea what he's complaining about. You can just jump in the direction of the enemy, and if you're going to land even somewhat near their position you are given the option to assassinate as you land on them. I've only ever missed a couple and that's only because I didn't jump far enough.

He's also pretty disingenuous about other things in the rest of his review. If anybody is really interested I can try to break it down later.
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Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jul 2019 13:14

Yeah, everything he says is contradicted either directly or indirectly by the Insomnia review. I still felt like posting his opinion because he's written many good reviews in the past, and I figured there might be some worthwhile comments in there even if the conclusion was wrong, but I guess not.

Feel free to expand more on your comments, if you feel like it. I'll certainly read it with interest.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 31 Jul 2019 23:35

I haven't played Tenchu so I can't say how it compares, but the stealth is pretty nice in this game. You can hang from a ledge and shimmy across, you can put your back up against a wall and peek out from a corner, the game even has waist-high grass that you can duck down into so that enemies can't spot you. And all of these options provide you with opportunities to assassinate enemies if they haven't been alerted and get close enough. Standard fare really. But you can't really hide bodies or anything and it doesn't seem like enemies even notice them even if they are out in full view. The game definitely focuses on the action, and the stealth feels more like what you'd use to kill as many enemies as possible before the real combat starts.

There are some really cool assassinations you can do though, especially when you're about to initiate combat with a group. Like the ability to spray the victim's blood out into a cloud that hides your location. Or the one that briefly turns them into your ally before they die. All accompanied with their own brutal execution animations. It sounds kind of OP, but they use up a LOT of this shared resource that is also used by your shinobi tools which can be more useful depending on the situation, so you aren't going to be using it much. Still, it looks so fucking badass that I feel like using them each time even if it puts me into a disadvantageous position.

As for the combat not being good, well... I think the combat is legit some of the best I've played in an action game, if not the very best period. Sure it's quite simple (like the Insomnia review says, "rhythm game" lol), and there's really not that much in the way of combos at all; there are some situational attacks that you can equip in your skill slot and they sometimes have extra moves if you keep tapping the attack button. For the most part, you're going to be pressing the left bumper to parry, and the right bumper to attack, both to do a skill, and occasionally you're going to dodge or jump. There's a little more to it than that, like using the prosthetic tool to make things slightly easier, but basically it's that simple. It's weird going from DMC5, where playing as Dante you'd be using every single button on that controller, from every direction on the D-pad, all of the face buttons, to the sticks, and even the select button all of which you could be pressing at any point in time—depending on what crazy combo you feel like doing—to this game's few buttons and still be having more fun with it for the most part. And it's not just because you aren't getting a cramp in your hands or the enemies in Sekiro being a lot more aggressive and dangerous.

See there's this really awesome mechanic they've added in that wasn't in previous Souls games or Bloodborne and that's this posture gauge that you have. Every time an attack is blocked without being parried (blocking with perfect timing) it fills up a little. If you don't get hit at all for a while it slowly goes down, and you can speed this up by doing certain skills. Once it fills up completely though your posture finally breaks, your guard gets shattered, and enemies can hit you until you roll out of the stumble animation. The thing is that it happens to enemies too. They also have a posture gauge and it functions like a second more vital health bar, because once it completely fills up you are able to execute them on the spot. And that's the way a battle between you and an enemy would normally go; you both attack each other and try to parry each other's hits, until somebodie's guard fails and they take damage. Except in the enemies' case, taking damage this way means they get killed completely in an execution. And all this can happen without either of you getting cut at all, without your sword clipping through their body as they barely react to what should realistically have cut them in half. And that's what's so awesome about it. Picture this; two swordsmen clashing blades with beautiful attack animations, deflecting each other, spraying sparks everywhere, circling around and trying to find openings until suddenly BAM: one of them has a sword stabbed through their chest. That's what it looks like to fight enemies 1v1 in this game. Well ok, not quite, because enemies still have a health bar, and you do swipe through their body with your sword sometimes if they are dumb like the lower-tier swordsmen or the bigger beasts. There's even a really hard boss in this game that's just a big monkey and you just slash at him until he dies, it feels super archaic but you get to see a cool execution out of it though I guess. But what I described earlier IS what the game's combat looks like at its absolute peak, when all the conditions are right. And when it happens it feels absolutely fucking amazing.

"Combat is far too straightforward and boring for a souls game" lol. I have no idea who would actually think this.

I should also mention that realistic-looking melee animations have been done before, in the later Uncharteds and The Last of Us for example, but this is the first game I know of where melee combat has been the focus and it really shows.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Aug 2019 00:56

ChevRage wrote:I should also mention that realistic-looking melee animations have been done before, in the later Uncharteds and The Last of Us for example, but this is the first game I know of where melee combat has been the focus and it really shows.


There's also For Honor. That's definitely the peak of melee animation, unless Sekiro beats it.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 01 Aug 2019 07:19

Dammit, no idea how I completely forgot about For Honor. Must have had tunnel vision with regards to single-player games or something. Anyway no, Sekiro doesn't beat it in that department, maybe if it got rid of enemy health completely and any opening was grounds for an execution. But they'd need to make the enemy AI even more powerful to do that and keep the difficulty, because as it is now even the most skilled enemies slip up from time to time and let you hit them directly regardless of the posture gauge. They've tied in the enemy health to the posture by making posture easier to break when an enemy is at lower health, so it's not like attacking health directly doesn't help at all, but I'd still prefer them to get rid of the health mechanic in future games.
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