Platinum #258 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
It's fun, but I have a huge complaint with this game, and I now need to start reading other threads to see if anyone else is having it: sometimes, the game will not recognise inputs from the controller.
I'm completely serious, this is not some OH COME ON I DEFLECTED THAT salt, it's not thrown-off-balance/stun/whatever so I can't immediately respond input, it's not that. Something simply feels
wrong with the game. It mostly occurs during battle, but not necessarily during any kind of button mashing moment. I can push a direction on the stick, start moving, push and hold L1 (not touching any other buttons), and nothing will happen. No block. Continue holding L1, push R1, and the combat art comes out. Same for jumps and dodges sometimes.
I strongly suspect it's tied to framerate as it doesn't run great on a base PS4, and I don't have a pro / good PC to check ... but yeah. This wasn't the direct cause of any deaths, I can blame many other things for that, but every time it happened, it annoyed the crap out of me.
Souls feels so good because the controls are always responsive. This ... doesn't feel as good. If the next gen Playstation does have true BC and it makes this run closer to 60, I'd be very interested to try this again.
Apart from all that ... trophies were annoying, I had to go into NG++ to get the last one. If you're going for the platinum, look up how to get all the ending items before you defeat a certain boss. There is a pointlessly long grind for all the skill points at the end. Bring listening material.
Eh, you kinda can though! A lot of the skills are super useful, as well as many of the prosthetics which can trivialize some boss battles, or at the very least, make them easier. Plus the game is pretty open ended so outside some exceptions you can always leave a boss if it's giving you trouble and go grind some XP or try your hand at some minibosses for beads.
Been thinking about this - I'll mostly agree. Some fights are just mean though. I got stuck for quite a while trying to defeat either one of the
Snake Eyes enemies blocking progression to those two areas of the game ... I realise one of them's optional, but I wasn't sure how else to progress, given that I *completely missed* a certain mandatory boss battle earlier in the game resulting in a blocked path. I had a really good set of items, skills and prosthetics, and was still managing to die in record time.
My main complaint is that everyone saying "just use fireworks / ichimonji to stunlock" or similar doesn't really do much for the player's skill. It'll work on some bosses, but then you'll hit a wall again ... and yet ... earlyish mid-game, there were two bosses where that strategy seemed absolutely mandatory to get any kind of progression, until I got gud. And that didn't happen until many hours later.
I'd say that after the initial learning curve and getting over Dark Souls muscle memory of trying to dodge through everything, the game is roughly in the same ballpark of difficulty as, say, DS3.
100% agree. I'd say it's a little bit easier; there was a boss in DS2 and a boss in DS3 that I couldn't do without help. The optional bosses need a bit of study and practice, but they're not excessively difficult.
