I've beaten and loved all previous From games, but at 7 hours in I've stopped enjoying Sekiro. There's stretches of time where things open up, there's a bit of world to explore and you get a steady trickle of progress, but this all goes to shit when the game throws a big roadblock ahead of you in the form of the bosses.
I just fucking hate fighting bosses in this game, and I think it's partly because the level of difficulty is simply tuned too high, and partly just because I dislike the design due to it being almost exclusively focused on parrying.
In previous From games when I die to a boss I'm thinking about what I learned and what I can do differently to improve upon my previous attempt. There is a wide swathe of mechanics and tactics that I can consider. The sort of questions I ask myself are: Which attacks can I dodge and which should I block? How should i adjust my positioning? When and how many hits I can get in on when i have an attack window? Can i adjust my gear or apply some buffs to give me an edge?
In Sekiro when I die to a boss and head back into the arena, the only thing I feel like I have to do differently is get better at learning the parry timing. I'm not engaging any higher-level brain functions, but rather simply hoping that I've bashed my head against the wall long enough so that my fingers learn the appropriate muscle memory.
There's also nothing mechanically interesting or unique about any of the bosses so far. At this stage in Dark Souls 1 I had versed the Taurus Demon, the Moonlight Butterfly, the Gaping Dragon and the Capra Demon. Each of these bosses were completely different and required different approaches. In Sekiro every boss so far just feels like a parry test against a humanoid enemy. You run up to them, wail away fruitlessly for a bit and then wait for them to attack so you can play the parry rhythm game. The parry rhythm game is where you hit L1 in time to the rhythm of the enemies attacks, and if you nail the split second timing you get to hit the boss.
It's just not that engaging or interesting, and paired with the frustration of half of the first set of bosses being literally harder than the final boss of any previous From game, and it just adds up to a not-great experience.
