Board 8 > Help me appreciate Sekiro more.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I really want to like this game, but there's a bunch of minor annoyances that are starting to add up.

-Losing EXP and money on death with no way to get it back is not fun.
-There's not enough feedback for when you successfully land a parry (the sound effect is weak).
-Nakiri Counter is extremely finicky and you eat a huge punish if it decides to just not work.
-The combat system kinda falls apart when facing a big group of enemies.
-You can get hit at the immediate end of a deathblow animation.

Maybe I just need to get good but eh. When the game is fun, it's fun, but I feel like I'm fighting the game for my enjoyment a lot of the time.

lol here's a new one. Am fighting a boss that's in a big arena with a house on one side. Deathblow'd him once, got him down to 25% on his last one. I was near dead and with no flasks left. Figured I'd lead him into the house to confuse his pathfinding, back out, then take the time to heal up with my pellets. It worked! I felt great for a successful strategy.

Then I walk up to see that he's regained all his health, including the deathblow I did. Okay...

Hi! I've 100%'d this game and beat it something like 6 times. It has one of my favorite combat systems in all of gaming so hopefully you can turn around on it, it's well worth experiencing in full IMO.

On exp and money - even if you die a bunch and lose nearly an entire skill bar you're never really set back that much. If you're close to hitting the next full point and feel danger coming up, just make sure to eke out that extra point so you don't need to worry about it. Money is worth even less but similarly you should try to spend it or "save" it in pouches you can get from some merchants at a slight loss so you're never carrying around an absolute ton.

Mikiri Counter takes some getting used to but you basically want to go DIRECTLY at the attack and "hit" it with the absolute middle of your dodge animation. It's actually a lot easier than, say, parrying in a Souls game, but you do need to get used to it.

The combat system is 100% not meant to encourage you to fight big groups. If you're in a 3v1, you're in an undesirable situation and should do whatever you can to avoid it or get out of it ASAP. The thing you experienced with the miniboss is intentional anti-cheese design - it does suck you had to discover it that way but just know you're not going to be allowed to disengage minibosses like that. (But you CAN stealth "kill" them to get a free deathblow, and that guy's quite susceptible to it!)

For all the dozens of hours I've poured into the game I've not had an issue with getting hit out of a deathblow - you're fully invincible in the animation up until the frame where you can successfully dodge and enemies *generally* stop attacking if you're doing one. Parry sounds and feeling you'll get more used to as you go but they end up being very distinctive once you have the ear for it. There's a boss you'll fight very soon that is basically the "teacher" for this game's combat system and has extremely distinct parry sounds. It'll probably be rough but if you can beat it you'll be in a way better position to tackle the rest of what the game has to throw at you. Basically think of it as a rhythm game almost - outside of using tools, you want to spend 90% of your time fighting in this game standing toe to toe, deflecting and counterattacking with the "beat" of the enemy's moveset.

Sorry if any of this is redundant or you were already trying this, I'm reaching back a bit in my memory here.

-I don't know if you are, but I think I found that while I tended to play Dark Souls/Bloodborne pretty defensively with a lot of waiting it pays more to be aggressive here.
--Basically what Shake said there about basically fighting your enemy toe-to-toe

-Mashing parry is actually really effective? Like I think it says it has diminishing returns or something but I feel like panic mashing tends to work out most of the time? Better to mash it then trying to go for a single precise timing and whiff in my experience. Like work on figuring the right timing but mash around that.

-Sounds like you picked up Makiri Counter which is good because that really shouldn't be optional.

-You just kind of have to get used to the three main Perilous Attacks and the proper responses. I'm pretty sure the visual tell is where the flash is on the attack but I'll be honest my visual processing and reaction time was never good enough to reliably use that and I'd just try to figure out what the various attack windups look like and try to react to that instead. There are definitely times where the difference is subtle though and that sucked. Like if I focused on the tell I could read it, just not in time so I'd often just guess lol.
--Goes without saying but basically Makiri Counter by rolling right into a thrust attack, jump for sweeps, and grabs I think you just get out of there.

-Stealth is pretty generous here IIRC. I think I initially played like it was Metal Gear Solid but really you have quite a bit of leeway and can do a lot as long as you stay out of direct line of sight and that helps you pick off scores of enemies so you don't end up facing a crowd.

-I generally treated your self-revival as a "time to go" thing rather than fight on and risk dying for real unless I was really confident.

Also the trick is that jumping is way easier to avoid attacks with than dodging, which requires more precision but lets you follow up attack easier

Always focus on deflecting over dodging. I don't think you actually get any invincibility frames from sidestepping an attack. If a weapon looks like it connects with your character model then it will deal damage even if you think you "dodged" through it.

You need to stare your opponents in the eyes and never back down.

As mentioned it's good to think of it as somewhat of a rhythm game, or rhythm combat. A good pattern to rely on is slash twice (NEVER mash) then deflect their counterattack, repeat until you win. It's usually a good way to keep control over a duel.

Oh and about Mikiri counter, you usually have quite a wide window to perform. Make sure you dodge directly into the thrust, and you don't have to be super close for it to activate. In fact it's a little easier to use Mikiri if you have a bit of distance from the enemy.

CassandraCain posted...

Always focus on deflecting over dodging. I don't think you actually get any invincibility frames from sidestepping an attack. If a weapon looks like it connects with your character model then it will deal damage even if you think you "dodged" through it.

You do get invul frames on dodging but they're very minimal and enemy attacks are so fast that you should basically never be trying to Dark Souls dodge "through" any attacks. There are extremely specific moves that dodging is great against, but they'll always have massive windups + cooldowns that identify them as such - and even then you may be better served parrying against a lot of those.