I'm getting better at Sekiro (spoilers likely)

[air_show]

Sure but there's also interesting theming about how the pursuit of immortality as a means of power over your enemies creates an ugly cycle of war, to the point where the line between man and monster becomes blurred. And of COURSE there's an isolated sect that in its own pursuit of immortality perpetuates medical atrocities. There's always one of those.

 

[air_show]

I fought the Demon of Hatred enough times to decide I hate him and haven't played since. Though I am hankering to fire the game up and try some of the mini-bosses I suppose.

 

[karzac]

The key to the Demon is that you need to roll to dodge its attacks, not party. And if I recall correctly, several of the attacks you need to roll toward the sweep, not away from it.

 

[Regulus]

You can parry a lot of the attacks but it's probably not worth trying because the risk is so high. You definitely want to treat it more like a Dark Souls-style boss.

 

[air_show]

Holy crap!

Did not expect to destroy him that quickly. Umbrella is fuckin underrated.

So I took him out and the other Seven Spears guy and the last drunkard type before that so I think that's all the minibosses except the two I missed from the alternate Hirata memory. I also think I might have missed one prayer bead in the Castle Fortress but I can't get to that location on account of it being a boss arena for the Demon of Hatred now.

I've also killed every headless and upgraded one of my weapons to lazulite (I decided to go after the shuriken first). Could do a second one before NG+ and I kind of want it to be the blue axe for its dispelling property, but I'll have to defeat the Demon of Hatred to get that.

 

[karzac]

Wow awesome! I didn't use the umbrella much, that's very impressive.

Man, Elden Ring is great and all, but this thread has me jonesing for Sekiro

 

[air_show]

HOT DAMN

I got him. I got him on an attempt where multiple times I felt like I had blown it.

For real I think what made the fight start feeling easier to me was when I fully committed to deflecting him as much as I could. Though it seemed rare that I ever got his posture down before his health, it nevertheless ended up being the most reliable way to avoid damage. In my many, many failed attempts where I would focus soley on dodging and attacking the health, I could never reliably avoid certain attacks often enough. It's interesting that so many guides out there advise going soley for vitality kills on several bosses, but I always and up using a good mix of deflecting and health damage.

 

[air_show]

And now we're on to how ever many hours it's going to take me to beat the Sword Saint. I can grind for the handful of remaining abilities to unlock but I'd much rather do that in NG+ so throwing myself at him is basically the only thing I have left. I don't think there is a single mini-boss or pick-up availabe to me anymore (the one other prayer bead I missed was in the Gun Fort, not the Fortress as I thought so I got them all besides the two mini-bosses I can't fight).

He's as much of a motherfucker as the internet has hyped him up to be. Lots of deadly fast attacks, super hard to read. I can successfully mikiri counter one of his thrusts and only because he's got a fairly recognizable pattern for when it's about to happen. Several of his other perilous attacks I can't even tell what they are. Is the thing that destroyed me a sweep or a thrust? I have no idea, it happens too fast. I eventually learned to run the fuck away when he sheathes his sword and just counterattack when he whiffs. But sometime he does that big huge charge up attack that does a big shock-wave and even if I'm fleeing for safety as fast as I possibly can it still hits me.

That said I have managed to, maybe 2 or 3 times now, get up to his second phase and discover how utterly helpless I am against it. That spear is so hard to read, and now he's fucking shooting me.

To be fair I knew damn well how bad this was going to be because the legend of That One FromSoft Final Boss That's Actually the Hardest Boss In the Game and Possibly Any Game Ever Made carries far. So I'm annoyed at how bad I am but I knew this was always going to be the experience. I've heard like, less that 25% of the people who've played the game have beaten him? That's something.

Anyway. Also sometimes Genichiro gets me. Most of the time I do sufficiently stomp him helplessly into the dirt so I can get killed by the real boss but every now and then I lose my groove and he costs me me a resurrect or just beats me outright.

 

[air_show]

Woof. Another hour or so fighting Sword Saint and never getting past his second phase. At best I could sometimes survive the second phase for a while while taking a beating. But most attempts ended with him destroying me in seconds or punking me with the gun.

Though "most attempts" may be misleading here because I swear to god Genichiro reads this thread and upped the difficulty of his AI like 10 notches after seeing me talk shit. Significantly more attempts at the final boss than I'm comfortable with have been ended before even getting to Isshin. And while sometimes I could beat Saint Level 1 with style, just as much I fuck it up and get chased around screaming for a while until he beats me into the ground. So a percentage of the time I'm not even beating the opening act boss who's supposed to just warm you up. Then a percentage of the time that's not happening I'm getting terrorized by the old man. And an even smaller percentage of the time the old man's second form utterly demolishes me. Zero percent has even seen the final phase of the fight.

Still there were times were I was vibin and feeling like i was learning the fight better. I just got no consistency.

 

[Adrenaline]

The umbrella helped me on that one.

 

[air_show]

Ok, I had to rage quit for the first time in a while just now. Because holy shit. I am getting real frustrated at putting so much goddamn effort into beating Gen and Phase 1 over and over and over again only to get completely helplessly FUCKED by phase 2. I can't damage him, I can't deflect him, I can't avoid him. I just get FUCKING WRECKED in 1-2 hits, and it's over. It's fucking over. The worst his his jump attack which has a tendency to fuck my camera and nullify my block, and then he combos it into a second jump which invariably kills me. It's absolute certain death.

A lot of the rest of the game helps build up to this claim but I'm gonna go ahead and say on this basis of the final boss ALONE this is the hardest fucking game I've ever played in my entire life. It dethrones Thumper which was an absolute motherfucker of a game and easily surpasses every other soulsborne I've so much as touched by several hundred miles. This guy is absolutely fucking insane and I can't do it.

 

[air_show]

I'm honestly getting genuinely pissed because I'm sick of it now. I'm sick of losing to this guy and this guy alone for hours and hours instead of being able to move on to NG+. I was really looking forward to going through the game again with all the things I've learned but I can't do that now because of this absolute brick wall.

 

[air_show]

Ok, so add another 2-3 hours to the Isshin counter. I have completely and utterly failed to even come a teeny tiny bit fucking close to beating this piece of shit after well over 5+ hours total now. Like... actual solid hours of time. Where I can't even make a dent in this piece of FUCKING SHIT's health or posture as soon as he pulls out the spear. He's impossible. He's completely literally impossible, I don't believe any videos of beating him exist, they're obviously the result of hacking the game and cheating because you can't fucking beat this asshole.

Ooof. I'm definitely salty. See here's the thing, I can get Genichiro and the first phase down to a science. I fuck up a little now and then but I can defeat them reliably now but as soon as he pulls out that GODDAMN FUCKING SPEAR there's nothing I can do.

I can't damage him. Every single weapon swing I take is punished. He's never vulnerable. Even when he does the jump attack and I dodge it I can't hit him without him doing some swift counter hit that trades too much damage for me to survive.

I can't deflect him. I can't read shit with his weird floaty attacks. Trying to deflect gets half to 70% of my health sliced off.

I definitely can't block him because blocking his crazy combos just gets your posture broken and he WILL punish you for it every single goddamn time. I honestly can only survive the duration of a Gokan's Sugar, at which point the non-stop relentless beating I take staggers me and gets me killed by a now unavoidable combo. Every single time. Every. Single. Time.

It's become a pattern. Destroy Genichiro. Destroy First Form Isshin. Spear comes out and I either get stomped into the fucking dirt so fast I can't heal at all, or I run out of healing, all ten charges, and don't even get 10% of his health off. And I certainly can't knock his posture down any better.

I've fought this piece of shit literally hundreds of times now and I can count on ONE HAND the number of times I've even seen the last phase of the fight. By that point I'm always so stressed out and exhausted I can't even avoid the lightning.

I'm worried I may stall out completely and never finish this game because this is too much. This is not ok.

 

[air_show]

Ok here's what I'm talking about.

Like, the TLDW is that I have a very very very good first attempt. I handle Genichiro and Phase 1 well enough to go into phase 2 with a bit of resources to spare. And I do everything in my power to keep going hard and not letting up on him any more than he's letting up on me. Then phase three happens and I biff it. I biff it hardcore and get STOMPED INTO THE FUCKING DIRT LIKE THE PIECE OF SHIT I AM.

And just to drive home how much this psychologically broke me then I begin struggling to even beat Genichiro and Phase 1 at all again and feel like I'm starting over from fucking nothing.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

On the previous iteration of this forum, you could track my steady mental decline into despair dealing with this fight in the Sekiro thread. The only thing that helped me to eventually beat him was to memorize every one of his moves across all three phases. It’s not very good advice, I know.

 

[air_show]

Update. It didn't get better. I gave up after another solid hour of occasionally in a while getting to the final phase and getting destroyed so throughly each time that it's like I've learned or accomplished nothing at all. Then Genichiro killed me. Again. I couldn't take it anymore.

 

[air_show]

YOOOOOOO

Not even gonna pretend it didn't feel all worthwhile to finally pull that off.

 

[air_show]

On the previous iteration of this forum, you could track my steady mental decline into despair dealing with this fight in the Sekiro thread. The only thing that helped me to eventually beat him was to memorize every one of his moves across all three phases. It’s not very good advice, I know.

At the end of the day the only advice that works though. Hardest thing was damaging his health in phase 2 so his posture wouldn't regenerate so fast. The full fight took around 8 minutes, which actually seems to have been a pattern for several bosses as the first Genichiro fight and Demon clocked in around the same length.

 

[karzac]

The rewarding thinkg about Sekiro boss fights is you always look like an absolute badass when you beat them.

Congratulations!

 

[madhair60]

I really want to like Sekiro, and I do, but I can't get anywhere in it and it makes me really, really mad because I don't see progress.

This thread makes me feel better about it to know it is possible, but also I will never do it. Just not gonna happen. I can't get past this one guy, like, he's not even a boss. He's just some random guy in a fort and I can't kill him.

 

[Adrenaline]

Nice job

 

[air_show]

Here's the full fight if anyone wants to see.

It is a good game at the end of the day. A big turning point for me early on was learning to say the hell with it and run away any time I felt overwhelmed. You can do this with just about all regular enemies and minibosses with a few exceptions. It mitigates the losses from dying so you at least always feel like you're making progress. Spending all your money on spirit emblems or useful spendables keeps you from risking losing too much, and I would only take on a hard challenge if I had skill points banked and little to lose.

Because eventually you run out of things to do and there's nothing left but a brick wall to smash yourself against over and over again for what could be literal hours. That's where the game starts feeling like just a brutal, unforgiving, demoralizing piece of shit. But if you can push through the despair and find a bit of calm and just keep practicing, you eventually get that satisfaction and it does indeed satisfy.

There's also valid cheese tactics. I was too stubborn to use them and the trade-off is usually that it makes a difficult fight a little easier in exchange for taking a really long time and requiring very precise AI manipulation.

I tell ya though, when I watched a cheese video for Isshin he was like a different person. A well-behaved AI boi following clear patterns where as my version of the boss was a ruthless terminator that doesn't feel fear pity or remorse and absolutely will not stop, ever.

 

[Falselogic]

Congratulations!

 

[Lokii]

Congrats! That's def a big achievement.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

Great work! SS Isshin sits right up there with the final boss of Shinobi (PS2) for me as hardest non-optional last boss.

 

[air_show]

Man NG+ is WIIILD. I've cleared every starting area in a single run and defeated every mini-boss and GYOBU on the first try, some of them stylishly. I've had to ressurect a few times but my first Capital D Death was against Lady Butterfly who I took on shortly after LOUD HORSE MAN. I was disappointed but also had to remind myself what an accomplishment that was compared to my last playthrough and especially the partial playthrough before that.

I still like that little "Forgive me..." that Wolf says before killing him, which he also says to Lady Butterfly, implying that neither of these bosses are people he would want to kill under normal circumstances. I thought that would end up being true for all of the bosses in the game but Genichiro broke the streak.

Also, ok, the story. I'm most compelled by Isshin, who I had spoiled well before I ever touched the game and assumed from the hype that he was one of those optional super bosses, not THE final boss for 75% of the game's endings, and can be locked in as such no less. So I knew some guy named Isshin was a mega super boss. And then I play the game and a "Lord Isshin" gets mentioned by the kid a few times implying that the two are on friendly terms and I'm like "Ok, some old badass dude is secretly the evil manipulator behind the scenes."

But I'm not so sure? Like when you get to meet him in-game (officially) he's just a weary old man who has accepted his mortality but will share some spicy stories with you if you get him liquored up. He seems to condone letting Kuro be the chooser of his own fate. But then like boom, he shows up and is your biggest roadblock to whichever of the three non-Shura endings you're going for. But is that Isshin as we know him? Or is it more of a spiritual idealization of him as Genichiro saw him, an unstoppable war god who would never let his nation fail. Or is it a younger version of Isshin at his most fiery and arrogant, who only knows he was ressurected to KICK YOUR ASS and can?

Aww whatever, soulsborne game.

Oh yeah, speaking of things I had spoilers about, I knew the Guardian Ape was a boss fight which as a kaiju fan made me quite enthusiastic, and I had unfortunately had it spoiled that he just gets right back up after a full blown UI confirming kill. What I did not have spoiled is the creepy, floaty serpentine way in which his headless self moves so it was still quite a fight. Watching compilations of people who don't know it's coming and reacting to it is a favorite passtime of mine.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Man NG+ is WIIILD. I've cleared every starting area in a single run and defeated every mini-boss and GYOBU on the first try, some of them stylishly.

 

[air_show]

NG+ is also weird. The gaining of skill points has slowed to an absolute crawl and I need SO MANY points still if I'm going to unlock all the skills and platinum the game. It feels like it might have to chain all four playthroughs together for each ending to actually accomplish that? I was gonna start a second save file for the other two endings and try building my skill trees differently but if it's going to take this long to get the remaining skills I guess I'll just have to stick to the one.

That's a little unfortunate as it means no player will ever really get to experience having all the options available without investing in either a grind so tedious as to rob the game of all joy, or to play so far into NG cycles that an absurd level of mastery will have to be reached before you can even see what some skills look like.

It also means if you want to get ahold of certain high end skills you have to be pretty discerning and prioritize your point allocations carefully. I chose to always buy point as soon as possible which meant buying all 1 point skills before 2, 2 point skills before 3, etc. It made my skillset diverse but also locked me out of some of the quality of life buffs until recently, but I ain't mad about that. I'm just disappointed that I'm already at the end of playthrough 2 almost and only unlocked a handful of the remaining skills.

 

[air_show]

Yesterday I had an interesting session. For the first time I decided it was kosher to put Spotify on in the background as I play the game because I've seen all its content on its own tonal level. I don't know if it was the music or what but I cleared my way through the late game Ashina Outskirts area like it was NOTHING. I was deflecting like some kind of savant. I cleared the map from the bridge to the demon of hatred like an incredible super assassin. Feels good man.

Then I went and fought the Demon of Hatred a few times and though the music certainly added a new flavor to the fighting it didn't help me beat him that session. I did pretty good though and got damn close to taking him down a few times.

I also tried fighting the memory version of Owl for a while and realized if I beat this guy I have to pick the Purification ending because I don't think I want to fight him again. Had to leave him unbeaten for now as well.

Now I'm feeling like maybe it might be time to put the game down for a while. Demon and Isshin are still incredibly fresh in my mind and after having defeated Owl twice already having to beat an even harder version of him isn't the MOST appealing idea at the moment. There's only a handful of trophies left but maybe I can age gracefully and not have to clear every From Soft game that gets its claws in me.

 

[air_show]

Oooh, I beat Father Owl! It was pretty stressful like the regular fight. But I guess by the end I have to admit I was forced to look pretty good at the fight.

What I think aggravates me about the Owl fights is that they don't seem to have momentum to them. What I mean is that usually if you start gitting gud at a boss fight with multiple phases, what usually happens is after a while you get really good at taking down the first phase or two and it starts going a lot faster getting to the harder ones. Not so with Owl. He is always just as much of a chore every single time you fight him.

So that's pretty cool, and apparently I'm not quite done with the game. If I do go ahead and beat Isshin this run through I definitely want to do the Purification ending so that I don't ever have to fight Father Owl ever again.