One key, defining aspect to the game that sets it apart from other company fare is that it has a colour palette and isn't afraid to use it. So much of From's catalogue is preoccupied with a sense of "dark" something-or-other thematically and tonally, but also aesthetically. When that absence of light is used with care and intent, it can lead to great atmospherics and spatial storytelling--but just as well the tendency to remain grim, dreary and desolate figuratively and literally at all times can result in monotonous, monochrome drudgery more in search of an atmosphere than coming to it earnestly. Even when the games play about with arresting colour schemes, they are largely dedicated to dominant tones defining entire areas at once, as if to branch out would risk the gloomy potentiality of the habitats. Sekiro's play is to present a mythical-historical view of Sengoku-era northern Japan in all its naturally-occuring and fantastically-embellished splendour, where the earthern tones of autumn make way to blankets of spring snow, where flames of war and conflict rage amidst bamboo thickets and pitch-black holes in the earth only illuminated by ghastly purples and ghostly greens. The Fountainhead Palace alone is a chapter of metatextual significance in how much it rewrites the aesthetic, tone and structure usually reached for in comparable games: instead of foreboding menace, there's a false tranquility; instead of the meanest gauntlet of twists and turns, there's a wide and accommodating span to experiment pathing through; instead of an absence of colour there is an explosion of it. All throughout the game there is a sense of tonal confidence in that whatever mood is attempted, the sheer theatricality and expressive shading of the environments can only support that end goal instead of harming it through those exaggerations.
Tone in general is something that's nailed here in a way I haven't felt about From games very often. Despite the reputation--reinforced by their mechanics and the associations that come with the territory--as Serious Games for Serious Gamers, there's always been an undercurrent of levity to the studio's output which more than the endless personal and cosmic tragedies that comprise the larger narratives are the piece of the whole that From-latelies in efforts to imitate often overlook despite it being a crucial component to how these stories are able to land and connect with people. They're very funny games when they have a mind to and the tone of that release is often fatalistic and a little sideways in practice. Sekiro is apace with that baseline, with several enemy concepts, bits of narration and chance interactions oscillating between the ghoulish and comedic, but never in ways that intrude upon the superficially and fundamentally solemn story being told--the world and what it contains simply exhibits all the extremes of expression within it, often delivered in tandem: maybe you'll fight an oni that punctuates its wanton destruction with carefully choreographed kabuki poses for dramatic emphasis; maybe a horrific, headless corpse reaches deep in your rectum to pull out your soul from its resting place within. All these things are rooted in culture, folklore, and myth, and the game is thrilled to be as much of a spooky folktale as it is a dour historical period piece or a violent action thriller, holistically grafting the appeals of each into its myriad forms.
The big differentiator is that unlike some past games from this creative outfit, the game doesn't descend into performative misery at every turn. Are the people of Ashina having a good time? Certainly not, as interfactional political violence is the backdrop of the game's central conflict, and all the supernatural facets of the setting are not only commonly believed in but demonstrably present as an added darkness in the wilderness. It's just not a happy game, and yet there's an uncommonly intimate sense of humanity in its storytelling that's usually absent in From works. Part of it has to do with a defined protagonist who is a person as the rest of the cast, and bounces off of them in turn: while Wolf or Sekiro's taciturn demeanor at first impression suggests a sort of stoic blank slate to imprint on, the performance in its withdrawn generalities still manages to leave one with an impression of unspoken kindness in the man, beyond generalized aspirational projections of an inhabited avatar. The formula of conversation and interplay allows for much more here in characterization than the sinister chucklings of assorted people met on the road and their respective ignominious, ironic ends as is the conventional mode of shading the extended cast--here, people know each other, converse, interact beyond the limitations of lore checklists, and form an arc that by the end of it has a chance of leaving one invested in those dynamics and the people as individuals instead of the artifical stripping down of characters to their functions as so often happens in these games over time and player disengagement. The simple sharing of a drink with another feels as vulnerable and humanizing as anything these games have ever asked the player to do.
Of course, the well-deserved stigma of dad media and dad games was always part of something Sekiro had to reconcile with its very premise being so entrenched in those themes. Why it ultimately doesn't conform to those fears and stereotypes is both in the aforementioned characterization of Sekiro as a gentle protector figure whose masculinity isn't a synonym for violent entitlement, and also in how the usually central gendered thesis of the stereotype--authoritative man, sheltered girl--is not explored here with the Divine Heir Kuro instead standing as Sekiro's charge and lord, boy to man. Although possessed of its own sets of narrative conventions, it's a dynamic that western media-reading isn't equipped to scrutinize in the pejorative lens in the same way, so it's privy to eluding at least some of those criticisms from that perspective. What also helps in forming those thematic throughlines is that the one centerpiece relationship isn't the only one the game is interested in concocting, as issues of parenthood, filial piety and family dynamics run deep through the central and incidental cast in ways that are consistent and emphasized. Particularly the generational rift between parents and their children is a running theme, as the exploits of the older generation--Isshin, Lady Butterfly, Owl, Gyoubu, Orangutan--form the political past of Ashina and its brink of ruination in the present the younger generation--the wards, disciples, students, daughters and sons--are forced to deal with, while the Divine Dragon itself, the zenith of divinity in the region is itself isolated and alone, a corruptive source of an immortal "gift" sought by many, engineered by some, and suffered by a few. The most hidden, obscure ending achievable in the game demands confronting the most native of gods of the land to facilitate the means to repatriate the sovereign deity to its home in distant lands, and outside of the mythical textuality the process of how the steps to that plan are taken involve some of the most innocent, uplifting actions possible in the game, as the two divine children learn of one another and establish in solidarity a correspondence of sorts, with Sekiro as their go-between means of communication. None of the endings are absent of sacrifice, compromise and burden, but it's a rare thing to find a moment of hope in a lineage so invested in repeated cycles of entropy, and the way it's arrived at is not insignificant to what truly propels the game as a story told and conveyed.
Something I'm less equipped to properly discuss but which is nonetheless discernible and appreciated is how steeped in religion the game is. It's easy to map a generalized sense of, say, Buddhist principles to the language of a video game, and especially Sekiro which very much literalizes the cycles of resurrection as you play it, but it goes far beyond convenient nods as nearly every location bears the marks of organized and politicized entrenchment of religion in the land, how the long stretches of inhospitable and untraversable by regular means terrain are looked over by towering bodhisattva, signaling their influence over the region where Shinto practices still linger in the wild and native gods roam amidst a host of amalgamated mythical exports taking root in the local folklore and tradition, mixing and matching together all the while until only conflation remains. The emphasis on a "purity" of being and spirit that humans in their hubris try to induce in themselves through artifice or contrive whole-cloth just taints all who partake as corrupted from the inside out, represented by the burrowing, skittering centipede, a foe of dragons and a harbinger of spiritual death--the dragon itself bereft of its spiritual roots can only rot others from within through its influence. Those who likewise are consumed by their own violence are in turn transformed and chained by it, while those who maintain their personal code in everything they do are allowed to retain their selfhood. It's not a very moralizing game, but the patterns of faith and virtue--not moral virtue necessarily, but personally authentic convictions--are mirrored in the game's cosmology in very flashy and poetic manner befitting of a modern, fanciful framing of so many cultural tenets in play all at once.
Other games, recent ones included, have explored a similar concoction of Japanese military history mixed with Japanese myth and folklore and derived their opponents and challenges from that mix, but Sekiro's strength in this area is the recognition that one cannot interface and confront the supernatural on the same terms as the earthly opposition, so the "solutions" to those encounters vary from case-specific to deliberately preparatory in ways distinct to fighting humans of various martial skill. The Great Serpent and Great Carp comprise the near totality of their environments, and must be avoided until a classically definitive solution presents itself in overcoming them. The Divine Dragon demands treating it as something almost entirely separate of how the rest of the game has taught the player to respond to threats; the Demon of Hatred is less bereft of a grounded context but nonetheless requires one to reorient fighting something other than human in a game that more than any other of its kind is defined by duels of comparable scale. When the haunts of the Headless or Shichimen Warriors are intruded upon, the game once again makes it clear that Sekiro even in all his ridiculous capability is tangling with forces beyond his mortal ken unless he ritualistically prepares himself for the ordeal, and when the Guardian Ape turns from beast to hostile cadaver that shared sense of horror is underlined through the game mechanics themselves. There's mythic scale and mythically exaggerated virtuosity to even the most mundane opponent in the game, but that this distinction exists between the commonplace and the legendary does a great service to defining the hazy and intentionally vague borders between the natural and supernatural worlds the game erects throughout its run--they aren't the same, but not quite apart either.
Even amidst all the standout opponents, I sort of became fixated on one specific one in the Corrupted Monk. There isn't really much of mechanical interest in the battle, even if two differing versions are fought--the same could be said of several other bosses in the game. What caught my interest was that this is a massive woman warrior presented with big pomp and production, a gatekeeper to two integral locations in the game, and she is allowed to be just a giant slab of violence, not presented to any tragic end or diminished by a fetishistic presentation like other From examples routinely have been. People sometimes in my experience overestimate the quality and tone of representation women endure in From games, and while Sekiro isn't altogether exceptional on that end--some staples of genre are hard to shed--it's a nominal accomplishment all the same on the relative scale with figures like the Monk populating its world in smaller and larger roles. I'm not going to forget Emma or Lady Butterfly on the more focal end; neither will I easily forsake memories of the thrilling encounters with Shirahagi, Shirafuji and O'Rin. The Okami clan define the last hours of the game as opposition, while Tomoe, the unseen and posthumous figure with links to them, occupies a dramatically significant space in the setting's past and her connections to the many who still linger and speak of her. Women don't drive this story, but neither are they one-sidedly victimized or ignored, and that counts for a lot even if it seems like bargaining. There's just a curious sense of familiality to how generally all characterization is handled that smooths over many of the potential and customary misgivings.
I have little to end with except to emphasize that this is probably the only From game in their modern run where the mechanics of battle are so compelling that every mini-boss and boss took on the character of a tremendous treat each and every time instead of a source of frustration in the eventuality that "progress" stalled for a time--at no point did it feel like a punishment or an annoyance to be met with a wall (and I'm sure most will have more than one of their own) simply because the process of learning and applying oneself with these sets of rules was so endlessly fluid and expressive. Pushing opponents to react in addition to reacting to them, and in what way, since so many answers at once can be viable, completely avoided the pitfalls of repetitious gruel in hopes of someday getting to the good stuff somewhere beyond; each and every fight for as long as it was relevant became the only concern in my mind as I felt of wanting nothing else in those moments. It's a more flexible rhythm game at heart, less punishing and more merciful of mistakes as the interacting elements can result in something unexpected, but the spirit and technique is present in how it's measured and managed, and I love it for that. To draw a specific comparison to Bloodborne, the sense of focus and distillation in the core mechanics themselves and the number of foes to test them against all speak to a honing of fundamentals until almost nothing superfluous is left. Some games benefit and define themselves by their wide-reaching sprawl--Sekiro reinvents a staid formula through hyperfocusing on a specific branch of it and reaches untold levels of appeal and excellence at that one thing... it just demands commitment to an equally strict degree to make the most of that reorientation.
