one was brave fencer musashi, the other sekiro: shadows die twice. I didn't start musashi, and it was itself a swapped out game meant to replace tales of vesperia: definitive edition on a list that felt overpopulated by tales games. no fault of its own, just a replacement that didn't work out with my year.
sekiro, however, was something I was trepidatious about, despite looking forward to working on it. I knew I often grated against from software games when they leaned into favoring the specific paradigm that this was based around, from experience with their other games.
bloodborne was firmly on the parry/dodge side of the viability spectrum for build strategy, given the lack of proper shield, but there was still some degree of flexibility; on top of that, with the standardized weight class, you were never at risk of simply equipping anything that put you into a disadvantageous position movement-wise like higher-defense loadouts in the souls games. I had trouble with adapting to bloodborne's parry-based paradigm, though I eventually found a sweet spot I could manage with a little bit of extra focus and practice.
sekiro, however, offers no such lenience. you are bound to the narrow strip of steel in wolf's hands, and your only tools are restricted to a similarly narrow playstyle, meant to function in two distinct modes of play that hardly interact: stealth and duels. when you fail stealth, you are forced to flee and retry the stealth again or enter combat, which gets to be a strenuous ordeal the instant a second foe enters the fray. every deflection is a beat in a rhythm that you have to manage, and when you have to start juggling multiple patterns, it gets insufferable real quick. I didn't sign up for the ninja game to have to learn how to deal with math rock parry timing.
the stealth sections are what constitute the general level design, and they're arranged in ways that never have fully clean paths to dart through. this isn't a game you're meant to be able to ghost, but worse, to me, is the fact that it seem to not be a game you're meant to be able to fluidly stealth through at all, even with killing involved. stealth kills produce noise, enough to alert nearby enemies in the same pack, even if they're distracted by something else, so every encounter ends up being a coin toss on which one of a pair of enemies gets to die for free and which ends up being the one you have a full fight with. enemies always come in pairs, at least, and there are always entire arrays of dudes to very slowly process through the meat grinder of wolf's deathblows so you can clear areas to fight the big enemies (that Should actually challenge you a little) one on one.
these miniboss fights often, as far as I got, boiled down to skill checks and reminders about how you're supposed to react to each form of Perilous Attack; sweeps get jumped, grabs get dodged away from, and thrusts get dodged into. there are twists each target offers, to teach you something about a future boss, but it's really just a matter of learning the pattern, remembering how to react to each of the dangerous attacks, and clashing your swords together until their posture breaks and you can finish them off.
and I couldn't keep up with it.
the bit where you have to identify what the perilous attack noise meant tripped me up every time. literally, mostly, because I was simply unable to train myself to recognize when a sweep was coming out. it always made me fuck up! I would hear the sound effect warning me of peril, and I reflexively did a dodge into them for the mikiri counter, which is for thrust attacks. I got hit every time. when I instead tried to at least dodge out so I didn't get hit with the attack, a not insignificant number of the attacks turned out to be thrusts, which are all attacks that end up chasing you a bit. got nailed with those a few times too.
and these are on the minibosses. I know the real bosses get way worse.
in a different fromsoft game, I would vary my build because I could tell this style wasn't working out for me in the slightest. I'm told that consumables can be pretty useful for enabling various strategies, but they're hardly worth using, given that you have to farm basically every single one of them off of enemies. even your secondary tools have ammo, melee options included. you can't even buy the pitiful regen items en masse.
so much of this game would be better if this were two different games instead. make the ninja game about murder-stealthing through feudal japan (you literally own the rights to tenchu, fromsoft), and make a boss-heavy parry game (looks at bloodborne/souls), but... these two tastes don't work well together for me. they trip each other up every time they interact.
example: did we really need the fromsoft death loop? I know they can make games where you don't have a plot reason to resurrect and you just have to load from a checkpoint (and armored core 6 was good for it). the scarcity of consumables wouldn't be so bad if you were loading a save every time and could thus make the most of them, but here, if you use it at all, it's used, and you get to go farm more.
also, the fact that you can hold up to two resurrections but you can only use one at a time without getting a deathblow to unlock the next one kinda sucks. what annoys me even more is that you only restore one of them via resting; the secondary one recharges by getting kills, so if you want to be really ready for a boss, you have to grind enemies. insufferable.
and speaking of death, the fact that dying "for real" eats half of your money and progress to the next skill point-- DID I FORGET TO MENTION THE SKILL POINTS? AUGH. I hate the fact that this game has a skill tree instead of just putting all the things that are on the skill tree around the world to be found, which would reward exploration and not be so goddamn annoying. there's a distinct and separate tech tree, too, for your secondary tools, alongside skills that are added to your collection after killing special enemies, so they knew they had other options, but they still put the potential to need to grind into this game. and on top of all this, the game has the gall to try and guilt trip you for being bad at the game and dying! every "real" death risks spreading the dragonrot, which halts all questlines for affected NPCs and makes them cough at you when you talk to them. you can, however, cure Everyone Everywhere All At Once with certain limited items so if you get walled on too many quests you can just pop one of those, get those done, and carry on, which actually irritates me more. if you're going to make a threat, follow through on it instead of neutering it. fucking cowards.
as you can see, basically every turn brought me irritation with myriad design issues I found grating. I faced every named enemy with anxiety and anger, and when I finally killed them, I received not catharsis or joy, but a too-mild sigh of relief. this game does nothing but make me miserable.
I'm trying to be better and not be stubborn when things are just making my life worse. so I'm dropping it. but I still have to grapple with the feeling that this means I've been defeated. a problem I've identified in myself over the last few years is that my sense of identity is (perhaps unduly) tied to my own perception of my capabilities; games provide a pretty firm metric on whether I'm capable of doing things, and mostly, when I set myself toward working on a game, it's simply a process of adapting, but I eventually make it through. I could count the number of games I've given up on entirely on my fingers.
objectively, I could probably, eventually, make it through sekiro. it would not be pretty, or gratifying, or worth the stress it would inflict on me and anyone who had to listen to me griping in the process. thus, in practical terms, I recognize that this basically is a loss on my part. this sucks. I grieve the loss of the media I can't actually engage with, and I lament the loss in my "career", for lack of a better term. it blows a hole in my hopes for being able to enjoy a game that I thought may have been in my wheelhouse, and it injures my stupid pride as a mostly capable gamer to have another game I can't finish.
it's a game that's probably great for speedrunners, and they can keep it. games that reward consistency with low tolerances are speedrunner games, and I very much do not have the patience for them. it's also the sort of game which makes me feel very strongly about discussions of difficulty options, because being told "nah, you don't get to enter this discussion" by the game adds insult to infuriating injury.
but it's long since made its decision, and now I've made mine. I've got better things to do than fret over this game. here's to a happier tomorrow.