Sekiro’s Greatest Innovation and Promising Legacy
From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a masterpiece. This opinion is not unique to me — upon its release, the game received numerous awards and perfect 10s from scores of reviewers. But despite this widespread initial acclaim, it feels like Sekiro has fallen out of favor in the wake of the developer’s subsequent smash hit, Elden Ring. Paralleling Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series, to which From’s “soulslike” releases owe a great deal, a linear entry (Skyward Sword, in Zelda’s case) launches to initial widespread acclaim and admiration from critics, with a not-insignificant number of fans expressing disappointment in that linearity. The follow-up, then, corrects hard in the opposite direction and produces a revolutionary open world experience that permanently alters the trajectory of the entire industry, and elevates the series to new critical and commercial heights. Elden Ring owes a lot to Breath of the Wild, as Breath of the Wild owes to Dark Souls, and Dark Souls owes to the original Legend of Zelda and Ocarina of Time. Innovation and revolution in this industry can come just as often from brand-new ideas as it does from adapting pieces of other titles into a new context, style, or framework.
Many players were disappointed in Sekiro at the time of its release due to massive departures it made from previous From Software titles, departures that were undone in Elden Ring. While the Souls games and Bloodborne lean into their RPG mechanics, containing leveling systems, character builds, myriad weapons, and diverse playstyles, Sekiro strips out many of these features in service of pure action. There are no build choices or level ups in Sekiro. The protagonist, Wolf, has exactly one primary weapon, and the whole game comprises his journey to master usage of that single sword.
This restriction felt stifling to some players yearning for the build variety and replayability of previous titles. Initially, it may seem like a major step back from Dark Souls 3’s 190 (!!!) weapons to restrict the scope so, but this limitation allowed the designers to craft some of the tightest and most enjoyable combat encounters I’ve ever had the pleasure of learning. When a designer knows exactly what a player will enter a boss fight with, they are able to tailor every aspect of the fight to suit the player’s tools and moveset, and Sekiro does this over and over again throughout its runtime.
This philosophy can be traced back to Dark Souls, the 2011 breakout hit that catapulted From to prominence. Arguably its greatest innovation, replicated in countless future titles, was the Estus Flask. The Flask provides players a consistent healing resource refreshed at each checkpoint. Players are able to upgrade the healing amount via thorough world exploration and the quantity offered at any particular checkpoint by using a limited resource. The consistent healing it offers provides an allotment for a certain number of mistakes between checkpoints. Designers are then able to tailor the challenge of each area around that limitation, silently promising to the player that each area is designed to be completed with the Flask’s limited healing in mind.
Sekiro obviously takes this concept much further than that title’s use of limited healing resources, but the groundwork was laid there. Its prescriptiveness also allows for the smoothest difficulty progression in any of the games in the Souls lineage — character strength is improved exclusively by defeating major bosses, which allows each encounter to be perfectly tuned to the level of skill and power that the player and Wolf respectively possess at that moment in the story.
To lay all my cards on the table, Sekiro is my favorite title by From Software, and my favorite game in the nebulous and poorly named “soulslike” genre that they’ve inspired. I love a linear, well-balanced, tightly designed challenge and Sekiro delivers this in spades. But if you disagree with me, I don’t intend to try to convince you here. My preference for linearity is just that, a preference. However, I would like to discuss an oft-ignored but critical piece of Sekiro’s combat puzzle, in the hopes that you come to appreciate its elegance in the same way I have. Even as a certified Sekiro obsessive, I found myself ignoring this mechanic’s genius until very recently. I was only made aware of its importance by noticing its absence as I played through a different title inspired by From Software’s game.
That other title is Nine Sols, a, frankly, phenomenal game that came out earlier this summer by Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games, previously known for their work on atmospheric horror experiences Detention and Devotion. It is a 2D action platformer with beautiful hand drawn visuals and combat heavily inspired by Hollow Knight and, of course, Sekiro. I highly recommend you check this game out, as it is criminally overlooked at present and was a fantastic experience. These developers have demonstrated the extremely impressive ability to deliver amazing experiences in vastly disparate genres and absolutely deserve your support. I will be trying to avoid spoilers going forward to preserve the first-time experience for any readers that haven’t played it yet, but I will discuss aspects of its final boss in vague detail, so if that’s a problem for you, go play it before reading that section!
Before we get to the aforementioned mechanic that undergirds its systems, I’ll describe Sekiro’s basic combat loop. Defeating an enemy in Sekiro is achieved by performing a deathblow, which becomes available to the player upon depletion of the enemy’s health or the maximization of its posture meter. Posture damage is accumulated much faster than health damage, as even blocked attacks increment posture to some degree. This meter recovers rapidly over time but the recovery rate decreases dramatically as health depletes. This creates a wonderful feeling of push and pull between the player and their adversary — do they keep up the aggression and try to max out their posture meter quickly for an instant victory early in the fight, or do they take potshots and try to reduce their foe’s recovery rate before going in for the kill? Unlike prior Souls titles that rewarded careful defensive play and restrained offense, the best answer is often to overwhelm Wolf’s opponents with nonstop aggression. Failing to truly internalize this, I struggled mightily with Sekiro’s final boss until I actually took the taunting advice he provided upon my losses: “Hesitation is defeat”. The posture system encourages taking risks, remaining in the fray, and never letting up the pressure, and I was able to achieve victory against that final challenge only after I understood and applied this lesson.
I might be getting a bit too in-the-weeds here, but this is further encouraged thanks to a massive change Sekiro made from prior Souls titles: attacks are extremely non-committal. More akin to something like Bayonetta than Souls, swings are able to be interrupted with a block or dodge basically right up until the attack can deal damage, and very quickly afterwards. In Souls, every attack is heavy, slow, and measured. Even with light weapons, once the attack button is pressed, the player character is stuck in its animation for what feels like ages before defensive play is available again. Players have to be certain when, how, and where they want to attack, or they will be pulverized by even basic enemies. This affords Souls combat a certain feel that works really well in creating the feeling of a world hostile to the player, but Sekiro’s modifications to the formula completely change the feel of the gameplay and encourage wild, animalistic flurries from Wolf and the player rather than careful observation and measured response.
Despite Wolf’s aggression, enemies will still take any openings available to try to ruin his day. But to a master shinobi, even their attacks become opportunities. Sekiro’s combat strongly rewards deflection, performing a block at the precise moment of an attack’s impact, with further posture damage. This encourages the player learn to perform parries to increase the enemy’s posture meter and end fights quicker, even while on the defensive. A skilled player is able to turn every swing from an adversary into additional progress towards victory. Every interaction in Sekiro’s combat system is a chance to take the upper hand.
Missing these deflections, however, will let his opponents shred Wolf’s health bar in seconds. Across the board, damage is very high, with both the player and their foes having extremely quick times-to-kill. This makes the combat feel pervasively of deadliness — every exchange can potentially be the player’s or the enemy’s last, turning encounters into a delicate and precise dance between equals. This point about equal deadliness is very important; at no point does the player really feel underpowered compared to their adversaries, thanks to ever-present parry opportunities, a consistent difficulty curve, and well-balanced scaling. Across gaming, many players’ favorite encounters tend to be ones against equals or perceived equals to the player character. For examples in previous From titles, think of Lady Maria, Gehrman, Artorias, Fume Knight, or the Soul of Cinder. These kinds of fights feel fair and extremely rewarding to learn. Every 1:1 boss encounter in Sekiro feels like this, and they are uniformly exhilarating. Deadliness and brutality is highlighted as a major theme in the narrative as well, with the game’s “bad ending” portraying the result of Wolf succumbing to his violent tendencies like previous shinobi before him.
But if the combat is emphasized by its deadliness to an even further extent than prior (already very difficult) titles, how does the game prevent the player from getting frustrated? It’s because Sekiro implements a mechanic that, upon reflection, is so core to the experience that many of the game’s challenges would fail to function without it. This mechanic allows the designers to create suitably deadly foes for Wolf to duel, without that deadliness becoming overwhelming or unfair. It is so important to the core of the game that its absence in Nine Sols is what spawned this entire essay. It’s so fundamental to Sekiro’s essence that discussion of it takes up most of the narrative, and, indeed, the title of the game.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an extremely challenging game, but this challenge is both mitigated and enhanced by affording the player the ability to resurrect Wolf once upon defeat. This mechanic is the glue that holds Sekiro together, and permeates every aspect of the experience. It is the only game I’ve seen implement a mechanic like this, including other titles by From Software and those they’ve inspired. All of From’s other games are very challenging, and none afford the player this luxury. I am forced to ask — why Sekiro? Why provide the player such an extremely powerful ability? What decisions led to its inclusion? And, in understanding the answers to these questions, I hope to convince you of the genius of this seemingly simple and ancillary mechanic that just so happens to hold the entire game together.
As a thought experiment, let’s imagine a prototype of Sekiro where the resurrection system hasn’t been implemented. In this hypothetical, a driving principle of the design for the game has already been decided as “deadliness”, in a desire to push further in the direction established by Bloodborne’s brutality. Here we encounter an issue. Every enemy should be able to dispatch the protagonist in a few swings, but if we want the combat system to highly reward perfect deflections and mastery, how is the player meant to learn new attack patterns? Missed parries should be punished harshly to encourage precision. These punishments, though well-intentioned, could become frustrating very quickly if every new enemy encounter or attack string resulted in a trip back to the previous checkpoint. I hypothesize that this issue was discovered during development after creating the parry system, yet before implementing Wolf’s resurrection ability. After all, parries were in Souls from day one, and the series had continually sped up over time, so going further in this direction follows naturally. Adding the opportunity for the player to revive during combat doesn’t just solve this issue, but also opens new avenues for heightening the drama of enemy encounters, and even further emphasizes that immense sense of triumph and relief elicited from defeating overwhelming odds in one of these games.
Earlier I mentioned Sekiro’s one-on-one combat encounters as duels between equals, and Wolf’s resurrection ability further contributes to this feeling. Almost every boss and miniboss in the game takes multiple deathblows to defeat. This makes sense, as if these fights were over as quickly as regular enemies they would feel anticlimactic. Often, the first deathblow on minibosses can be achieved through stealth rather than direct engagement, dramatically simplifying the encounter and rewarding clever play. Requiring the player to still engage with the foe’s mechanics while rewarding stealth (as, after all, Wolf is a shinobi) strikes a nice balance. In addition, each major foe requiring multiple deathblows to defeat parallels the player’s ability to do the same. Just as Wolf can get a quick first deathblow on the enemy, so too can minibosses like the Chained Ogre take Wolf out in seconds. Sharing this ability between the player and their adversaries fosters a feeling of dynamic back-and-forth throughout most combat encounters in the game, and empowers both combatants to make dramatic comebacks from the brink of defeat.
This is even further emphasized by a subtle wrinkle in the mechanic that feels explicitly designed to encourage this kind of combat drama. This final, seemingly minor aspect is what puts the resurrection mechanic over the top, and confirms for me that From Software’s designers were absolutely at the top of their game when putting this game together. Crucially, Wolf gains the ability to revive additional times in the same combat by performing deathblows on enemies. Think about the implications of this. For each deathblow a boss requires to be defeated, Wolf, too, can revive an additional time, making the bout feel even more like a duel between equals. This contributes to a beautiful push and pull between the player and the enemy. It incentivizes ferocity on the player’s part, strongly encouraging the player to attack with reckless abandon to trigger the boss’s next deathblow so their revive is refreshed. The best defense in this game is nonstop, relentless offense to refresh the player’s greatest safety net. Even further still, it provides this additional leniency in the extremely intense boss fights without trivializing standard combat against less durable foes who do not provide as many opportunities for additional resurrections. This is a truly inspired piece of design that contributes immensely to the feel and flow of Sekiro, especially on a first playthrough when this mechanic is not fully understood. I remember on several occasions getting an additional resurrection opportunity during a difficult boss fight without understanding why (as this is never directly explained in game) and using that little bit of extra runway to clutch out a hard-fought victory. This kind of story is not unique to me, and designing a game that organically creates these kinds of player-generated stories of triumph so consistently is nothing short of amazing.
To put into more practical terms, I’d like to make a case study of the boss fight against Genichiro Ashina, the game’s primary rival character. Genichiro is the man who kidnapped Wolf’s ward and cut off his arm at the beginning of the game; he is the inciting incident, and by easily defeating the player in an early scripted encounter, he engenders a strong motivation to improve and defeat him. Wolf fights him again after a few hours of getting to grips with the game, with the player only having the chance to develop a basic understanding of the game’s systems by this point. Genichiro is a gatekeeper, requiring all players overcome his focused challenge before being granted access to Sekiro’s midgame. He expects the player to have internalized the lessons conveyed up to this point, and represents a significant difficulty spike from what came before. While not a final exam, he is a midterm; requiring proper deflections, Mikiri Counters, and persistent aggression for the player to overcome their rival.
The fight with Genichiro atop Ashina Castle is extremely well-designed for many reasons. His status as a gatekeeper is justified because his challenge forces the player to master the tools necessary to progress through the rest of the game. Similar to Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls, if you can beat Genichiro, you can complete Sekiro.
Initially, he appears to only require two deathblows to defeat. But after performing that supposed final deathblow, he mimics the player in an unexpected way — he gets back up. Genichiro, Way of Tomoe, his final phase, opens with him shedding his heavy armor. This not only makes him a much nimbler combatant but also significantly reduces his defenses, ensuring that the fight will come to a brisk climax. In addition, he gains the ability to assail the player with lightning. This would normally be a fine escalation for a final phase, but crucial to the drama of this encounter is the fact that a new player has never seen lightning before, and it requires a very specific response to effectively counter. Right before initiating the fight, a new player will almost certainly find a scroll that provides written instructions on how to counter lightning attacks, but there are no opportunities afforded for live practice. The player is then jumpscared with such an attack in the third phase of an extremely tense boss fight that already likely caught them off-guard. This flies in the face of almost all conventional game design wisdom. But it works, because Wolf can get back up, too.
Upon performing the second deathblow against Genichiro Ashina, the resurrection charge a first-time player probably spent getting to this point is refreshed. The fight is designed with the assumption that the player will not be prepared for the third phase or its lightning attack, but because the player will likely have a revive available, they will almost certainly have the opportunity to learn something about this new phase. Any first-time player will probably die or be heavily wounded by the lightning attack, but once it’s been seen and the player knows what to expect, they can do better next time. They can review the instructional scroll (conveniently located next to the nearest checkpoint), practice the inputs outside the boss arena, or even better yet, get back up right then and there and nail it the second time.
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In the likely scenario that, despite these minor affordances, a player is sent back to the checkpoint by Genichiro’s third phase, they have certainly gained crucial knowledge that will help them overcome the challenge. And by demonstrating to themselves that they’ve gotten through the first two phases once, it becomes much easier to do it again. Triumph becomes an inevitability rather than an impossibility.
After reaching the third phase once more, a new player might notice something: “did he just open with the same attack again?” Genichiro, Way of Tomoe always performs a thrust attack at the start of this phase, a move that has very specific and very effective counterplay in the Mikiri Counter. Prior to this point in the game, thrust attacks have been somewhat rare and often unpredictable, so a new player is unlikely to have gotten their reps in with executing the counter in the heat of battle. Genichiro’s earlier phases also have thrust attacks, so the player is sure to have Mikiri Counters on the mind. If they are then able to execute the input with the proper timing at the start of the third phase, they are guaranteed significant posture and health damage with minimal difficulty. The consistency of this attack also gives a new player plenty of opportunity to practice a move that will be essential to defeating harder enemies later in the game. And, as always, if the player messes up the counter, they will almost always be able to get back up immediately thanks to their recently refreshed revive.
Our hypothetical new player has now learned to deal with the opening thrust attack, and finally stares down Genichiro’s lightning attack for another time. This attack has a very long windup, and the input for deflecting it has very forgiving timing. They land the deflection and take a massive chunk out of Genichiro’s posture meter and health bar, putting him on death’s door within seconds. The free thrust counter, the lightning deflection’s heavy damage, and his lower defenses turn this third phase into more of a victory lap than a final overwhelming obstacle.
Genichiro’s final phase is significantly easier than it appears at first blush, but is designed to obfuscate that fact and make the player feel so extremely cool for finally defeating him. As a first-time player, it is exhilarating to turn the tables on this foe previously thought to be insurmountable by deflecting his lightning back at him. The pageantry of this moment is just right, as a storm moves in as the player deals damage and heightens the already significant drama of this rematch with the man who so thoroughly trounced Wolf at the game’s opening. Wolf’s resurrection ability, notably lacking during that initial encounter, is the glue that holds this fight together and allows it to be as difficult and dynamic as it is. The third phase can introduce new mechanics and surprises because the player is always afforded some ability to learn even when they might be otherwise blindsided. The average player is likely to defeat Genichiro’s third phase after only reaching it only a couple times, creating a truly empowering moment and giving the player the confidence and energy to move forward into Sekiro’s midgame.
The fight atop Ashina Castle is very elegantly designed. It makes the most of Sekiro’s systems, teaches the player everything they need for the rest of the game, and is an exhilarating challenge to boot. Without the resurrection mechanic, however, multi-phase bosses with this level of dynamism would not shine as brilliantly. Elden Ring attempts to have similar bosses with dramatic final phases, but they often fell flat for me because I found it extremely frustrating to get to the second phase and die immediately to brand new attacks and barely explained mechanics. Maliketh, the Black Blade was the worst example of this for me. Upon phase transition, this boss gains extreme acrobatic prowess, begins flipping around the room, and launches numerous projectiles interspersed with lightning-fast melee swings. The game’s camera is not built to handle this level of mobility. I found myself dying repeatedly as soon as I got to this phase, and never felt like I was really able to learn his new moveset. I ended up feeling like my victory was a result of luck rather than skillfully overcoming a well-designed challenge. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, for all her Waterfowl Dance-related faults, at least felt like a logical progression from phase 1 to 2, keeping most moves across phases and allowing me to feel like I was making some progress with each attempt that made it that far.
Nine Sols shares many more mechanics with Sekiro than Elden Ring does, with the notable exception of the resurrection system. The game’s combat has the same deadly core as Sekiro, with very fast times-to-kill for both the protagonist, Yi, and his foes. The exception here, of course, is bosses, who have inflated health bars but lack an equivalent to the posture meter that would enable quicker takedowns. Instead, the reward for performing a deflection in Nine Sols is a talisman charge, used to perform very strong attacks that often interact with the game’s equipment system. Performing deflections into talisman attacks into more deflections turns fights into flowing acrobatic dances just like Sekiro, and feels amazing. Yi glides and dashes through the air, matching his foe blow for blow, pausing only to ensure safety against their next attack before resuming the onslaught. This is one of the most fun and dynamic combat systems in a 2D game I have ever seen, and only improves as layers of complexity are introduced over the game’s runtime.
I would like to preface this next point with some caveats. I am not particularly good at games, but I have played a lot of Sekiro, and would call myself pretty good at it. I struggled mightily through my one Elden Ring playthrough as previously mentioned, and often fail to click bosses properly in OSRS. I have played a lot of 2D games, though, and my experience with Sekiro certainly helped me develop an intuition for Nine Sols relatively quickly. I am about to complain about the game’s difficulty from the perspective of someone who had a relatively easy time of it. I know this is not a universal experience, and I’ll circle back to that perspective shortly.
My issue with Nine Sols’ combat is not in the mechanics themselves, which are excellent, but in the design of the foes Yi must face. To be somewhat blunt, I found the majority of bosses (the titular Sols) unsatisfying to defeat. Early in the game, the encounters felt too simple, bosses had only a couple of moves that were easy enough to learn and didn’t push me to engage with the most fun aspects of the combat system. I found myself often asking “that was it?” after a boss masterfully built up over the course of an entire area was abruptly defeated in a scant few attempts.
This highlighted for me a limitation of this sort of deadly, deflection-based combat — the difficulty is extremely hard to balance. Though this is a universal truth in gaming, systems that seek to require high degrees of execution (like ones that might require many properly timed inputs) seem even more susceptible to missing the mark for some players. For each of these encounters that I found unsatisfying and too simple, I found myriad reddit posts and Steam discussions arguing that they were too hard or frustrating. In an attempt to understand my own feelings and those of others online, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the Sol fights tend to distill down into one of two possibilities. Either the player learns the boss’s moveset, rarely gets hit if at all, and wins far too easily, or the player misses a deflect or two and dies instantly. Likely due to my experience with Sekiro, I fell into the first camp for the vast majority of the game. The long health bars of bosses often felt like formalities; after internalizing their movesets I was stuck repeating the same strings of deflections and whittling down their health bars until achieving an unceremonious victory. Rarely, if ever, did I feel like I had barely scraped by in that oh-so-satisfying way fostered by Sekiro’s encounters. The fights were missing the sense of drama I craved from that game.
In my opinion, the most satisfying triumphs in gaming come down to the wire. My ideal first victory against a difficult boss is one where, after struggling to make progress for a decent while, I’m able to clutch out the win using all of my available resources. This kind of win results from a truly intense encounter and ends with a tremendous sense of relief and satisfaction. My problem with Nine Sols’s bosses was that very few of them actually gave me this feeling of barely scraping by because the fights almost always fell into that binary of “stomp or be stomped”.
This one-sidedness is even despite the fact that a lot of Nine Sols’s bosses are genuinely really hard. The problem I found was that in order to make any progress on any given fight I tended to make all the progress at the same time. I imagine that the many, many people who struggled with the fights in this game were unable to make consistent progress for long periods, which can certainly add to frustration and burnout. I was able to break through the walls relatively quickly thanks to my experience with this kind of game, but new players getting stuck is an inevitability when encounters are so swingy like this.
Simply making the bosses harder would be insufficient to make the game feel more challenging and dynamic for someone of my experience level but still approachable for someone brand new to the genre. The latter Sols already all have very solid, interesting movesets, and require the player to learn timings and fully interface with the combat dance to succeed, so I don’t think changes are necessarily warranted there; the fights just tend to be a bit too all-or-nothing right now. If we want to encourage close calls, tense exchanges, and the feeling of scraping through by the skin of your teeth, we need to add some other sort of mechanic to spice up the encounters. Maybe something that could increase the amount of time the player is exposed to the bosses’ movesets per attempt, something that enables players to make a comeback after inevitable errors, something that could add leniency to difficult encounters for those struggling but could also open the door for heightening the challenge without it becoming overwhelming.
That’s just Sekiro’s resurrection mechanic again, isn’t it? Theoretically, endowing Yi with an extra chance upon death would almost certainly fix this problem and even unshackle the designers to increase the complexity of some of the earlier fights. I came to this realization during my umpteenth attempt against the final boss of the game, a subject of much contention online. Forums and reviews are awash with complaints about the significant difficulty spike the final boss presents. Sekiro, too, has a severe difficulty spike at the final boss, but it feels much more palatable there. The principal difference I see between these two encounters is that Sekiro encourages and enables learning its final fight, just as it does with Genichiro, by granting the player the option to resurrect upon every defeat. Nine Sols’ final challenge is tremendously fun once the player understands their adversary’s patterns, but getting to that point of mastery is much more of an uphill battle than in Sekiro. To provide more detail, I’m going to discuss my experience with this final boss in vague terms, but I will try to avoid spoiling anything too critical. If the game sounds interesting to you and you would like to avoid spoilers, I highly recommend playing it before reading further.
In a vacuum, the Final Sol is incredibly fun to fight. They have fast, deadly combos with consistent and fair timings, mixups that reward the player for paying attention to minor cues, and leave ample opportunities for the player to retaliate with hefty damage. Punishments for failed deflections are harsh here, with this Sol being able to dispatch a maxed-out Yi in only a couple hits. After enduring through numerous deaths and learning enough to finally make it to the second phase, I was met by a new attack I had never seen before. Similar to Genichiro’s guaranteed opening, the last Sol always uses this same transitional attack, a move that requires a grounded Yi to perform a precise series of specific counters to four screen-wide slashes or be met with almost certain death. As this was the first time I had seen the attack, I failed to counter it and lost the attempt. This experience is certainly not unique to me. While the attack is well-telegraphed, this death felt cheap, as I had no way of predicting the subsequent slashes in the pattern and had no opportunity to practice aside from struggling through the first phase again. It felt like artificial difficulty, prolonging the amount of time it took to learn the fight and especially to see phase two’s other changes. New attacks as fights progress are welcome, certainly, but sight reading this sort of combo feels all-but impossible for a new player, and it feels really bad to be sent back to the checkpoint like that immediately after finally getting past phase one.
Phase two in general is an escalation from the first. Several new moves require very specific dodge and parry patterns based on minor visual cues, building on phase one in a great way. Mastering these attacks is very satisfying and rewarding, as they provide the largest opportunities to get some solid hits in. Most of them also afford new players opportunities to perform relatively more lenient dodges to avoid damage while still getting exposed to their patterns for future attempts. All of this is excellent! I ran into issues, though, when trying to take my game to the next level and deflect rather than dodge the Sol’s onslaught. Upon parrying some of the moves in their combos, the player can end up in surprising situations that they had no way of predicting. Throughout the game, aerial deflections prior to this fight always bounced Yi up and back slightly from the attacker. The final Sol has an attack string that must be deflected aerially, and is followed by another slash a fraction of a second later that spikes Yi to the ground, contrary to established expectations. In order to avoid damage after deflecting the second slash (easier said than done due to its speed), Yi must then immediately begin charging an “unbound counter”, an advanced deflection that requires Yi to stand still and charge for a moment before executing the parry. It is impossible for a new player to predict that they will be spiked to the ground, and even moreso that they then need to immediately begin an unbound counter, even if they had previously dodged the full combo. Deaths to this kind of unexpected behavior feel cheap. A lot of the fun of difficulty is lost, in my opinion, when the fights become trial and error like this.
Unless, of course, there is some leeway afforded to make such trial and error less frustrating. Requiring the player to fight back through phase one over and over to even have the opportunity to begin learning these new attacks can quickly become tedious, but providing some leniency to encourage learning and experimentation could turn a slog into something more dynamic and fulfilling. Leniency like the ability to revive once per fight. Leniency that, while not enabled by default à la Sekiro, does exist in Nine Sols.
I buried the lede a little bit here. Nine Sols also takes significant inspiration from Hollow Knight, notably in its gorgeous hand-drawn visuals, but also in its Jade system very reminiscent of that game’s Charms. Players can equip Jades that each provide various bonuses at the cost of a limited number of equipment slots. The Revival Jade, very easily obtained along the main story path, grants Yi the ability to revive once mid-combat with 25% of his maximum HP. After dying to the aforementioned spike combo, I equipped this Jade out of frustration and a desire to make more consistent progress. It made a world of difference.
Suddenly, it was so much more fun experimenting with their combos and discovering the optimal response, knowing that I wasn’t one mistake away from having to redo minutes of progress. Being granted the leeway to make mistakes while still improving and learning was absolutely critical to my enjoyment of the game’s hardest challenge, and this experience of mine is the sole reason I wrote this entire essay. After finally defeating them and rolling credits, I found myself wishing I had the Jade equipped the entire time, and it made me realize how essential that room for mistakes was to the experience of combat in Sekiro. This is why I’m so certain that the resurrection mechanic is key to what makes Sekiro work — being able to directly enable it and disable it in Nine Sols opened my eyes to its importance.
Nine Sols is a truly significant accomplishment that Red Candle Games should be extremely proud of. The Final Sol is now up there for me among my favorite boss encounters, and it’s all due to the flexibility offered by Jades. Despite my earlier criticism, the fact that I was able to improve my experience so dramatically using in-game tools felt amazing, and though I and others may have had a better time if it was enabled by default, I think providing options to the player certainly has its own value. Throughout my playthrough, I was able to experiment with various Jade builds that enhanced the risk and reward of the combat, letting me customize the experience in a way that not even Sekiro accommodates. My prior criticism went up in smoke after experimenting with the Revival Jade, and my biggest remaining one is only that there is no way to go back and re-experience the thrilling choreography of the boss encounters — yet. If you’re playing the game for the first time, I highly recommend trying out the Revival Jade; you might find that it adds much more to the experience than you’d think.
In an interview with PlayStation Blog, the director of Sekiro and Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki, said “our approach to these games […] is to design them to encourage the player to overcome adversity.” To me, Sekiro’s resurrection system is the epitome of this encouragement, providing the player a second or third or fourth chance to dive back into battle and learn, practice, and finally triumph over insurmountable odds. It provides exactly the wiggle room a player needs to make appreciable progress consistently against foes that otherwise overwhelm. I find myself wishing that this leniency was applied to other difficult, execution-heavy games, and am so glad that Nine Sols provided me an opportunity to isolate it and discover how much such a small thing can contribute to the whole.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is built entirely around the resurrection mechanic, and that mechanic might be the single greatest innovation the title introduced to the Souls lineage. It is the perfect learning tool for a new player, and fosters an experience that encourages the player to get back into the fray and keep trying. It also unshackled the game’s designers to go wild with fun surprises and escalations throughout boss encounters that wouldn’t be as fun or fair if such a safety net didn’t exist. Nine Sols, as a game in Sekiro’s lineage, also succeeds in creating a satisfying and distinct experience, highlighted by the flexibility of its Jade system. Sekiro’s linearity and prescriptiveness arguably could have used such a system to increase replayability and build variety for players who value that, and many of the offerings in Nine Sols would feel right at home in From Software’s game.
Art is in constant conversation with all that comes before and all that will come after. Later works can inspire reappraisal of earlier genius, just as early rough prototypes can inspire future phenomenal experiences. As two similar yet disparate implementations for deflection-based combat systems, Sekiro and Nine Sols contrast and complement each other, each able to highlight something the other may be missing. They make me tremendously hopeful and excited for the bright future of what is quickly becoming my favorite combat framework. I cannot wait to see the further innovations and experiences future developers, inspired by their successes and failures, will add to the conversation.
