Tag: sekiro

#REVIEW: Nine Sols (PS5, 2024)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

The tl;dr verdict: 7/10, but I think it’s my fault.

On paper, I should have absolutely loved this game. Nine Sols is a combination of a Metroidvania and a Soulslike– two of my favorite genres– with a combat system that is basically a 2D version of Sekiro bolted onto it. The level design is great (although the ability to leave markers on the map would have been greatly appreciated,) the enemy design and overall graphics are wonderful, and the bosses are basically perfect, the kind of boss design where you get utterly annihilated in the first five or six fights and then it slowly starts to click and by the time you win it’s because you can see into the future.

So how come I turned the difficulty down to “infant” 2/3 of the way through the game and rushed through the back part as quickly as I could?

The storytelling is interesting in this game, and I can easily imagine it being someone’s favorite part of the game. The story is deep and twisty-turns and has a fascinating fusion of future-inflected Taoism with high technology and weapons like spears and swords and bows, and the relationships between the main characters are awesome– I haven’t seen an exploration of fatherhood, albeit unintentional fatherhood, done this well in a game since The Last of Us, and the story motifs of revenge and regret and colonialism are all done really well.

But, man, the main character is a dick, and after a while I really got tired of Yi. He’s a scientist in a religious culture, which is cool, and he’s kind of an irascible ass, which is cool– Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite characters, remember, and her main personality type is “impatient asshole”– but he’s got this weird dismissive, arrogant atheism about him that somehow managed to make him a turn-off to me, an arrogant atheist. Combine that with no voice acting at all, meaning that I was fast-forwarding through massive amounts of dialogue all the time, a very rare opportunity to choose a dialogue option that I almost always missed because I was hammering a button to get past the word bubbles (and which, 95% of the time, made no difference at all, and 5% of the time chose the ending for you) and a general predilection for pontificating and meandering philosophizing, and … ugh. I lost patience with it after a while, and again, I can absolutely see someone else really digging the story in this game, but I just wanted to be done with it after a while.

I spent 34 hours with this, picking up 30 of the 36 trophies along the way (a second play through is required to 100% if you’re not savescumming, and turning down the difficulty lost me one of the trophies as well) and I think if it had been a 25 hour game I’d have been singing its praises from the firmament. It just wore out its welcome after a while, and once it did even some of its strengths turned against it– if I’m getting tired of a game and just want to finish it and move on, the boss design that is one of the greatest things about it becomes a problem, because I don’t want to spend an hour or two (or more like four, looking at you, Lady Ethereal) learning a boss’s patterns. I want to turn my attack power through the ceiling and three-shot the final boss in the game. Which I did.

So, yeah, ultimately this was a game that I should have really enjoyed that I didn’t, but if you feel like this sounds like your type of thing, I’d follow that instinct anyway, and if you’re a story person, it’s definitely worth a look, especially at $30.

Improvement!

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Today was better, and I’m blaming yesterday on Monday. Tomorrow is an inservice day so I have none of the childrens, then Thursday and Friday and then another weekend. Teaching: where the first quarter of the year features no five-day weeks. The great thing about tomorrow is whatever meetings or training or thing they have planned for us, it’s not going to be a waste of my time and at no point will I be blatantly and openly disrespected. It’s gonna be awesome!

My Big Important Task tonight is to get Isshin Ashina beaten so that my schedule on LutherPlaysGames doesn’t get messed with; I need Content tomorrow, so Content I must generate. Are you following me over there yet? You should be, if only because I’m getting tantalizingly close to 250 followers and that’s an important number psychologically. It’s 1/4 of the way to being eligible to get paid! It only took two years of daily videos to get here! I’m sure it’ll get faster soon.

(In case you’ve been around here for several years, Isshin Ashina is this guy, who took literal weeks to beat last time I fought him. I have, oh, a couple of hours, max. It’ll be fine.)

EDIT: Got ‘im. It’s too late to get the episode edited together for tomorrow, so there will just be Wo Long, but I’ll have it ready Thursday.

Got you, asshole

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I know, you’re tired of me talking about Sekiro. Too bad, my blog. 🙂

I am proud to announce that after 1) playing through the entire game, (which came out in March) getting to this sonofabitch, and restarting because I couldn’t beat him, 2) doing an entire second playthrough that targeted the other ending where I didn’t actually have to fight him, and 3) spending at least a couple of weeks intermittently playing and getting my ass killed over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, Sword Saint Isshin Ashina finally went down last night …

… and when I finally beat him, I had half my health bar and a couple of heals left. Which is ridiculous.

(There are still two more endings to go, and I will not rest until I have every single trophy for this game. So I’m not done talking about Sekiro, although I may take a break and play something else for a while.)

A couple of reviewlets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I took a shower after getting up this morning, as I do every day before work, and I had a coughing fit after my shower, as also happens damn near every day. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s been a feature of my life since college: finish shower, coughing fit.

The coughing fit going on for so long that I puke was new, though. As I have A Rule about these things, I quickly amended my half day off because of Ongoing Medical Disaster to a full day, took the boy to school, hoping that no further esophageal eruptions would occur, and took a nap. Then I got back up, finished reading a book, and beat a video game. Then I puked again, right after beating the video game.

It was some kind of day, I’ll tell you what.

I have read one Sam Sykes book in the past. Well, started. His The City Stained Red bounced off of me hard, in the sort of way that leaves you suspecting you’re being unfair to the book somehow, but I like him enough on Twitter to be willing to give him a second chance, and man, am I glad I did, because Seven Blades in Black is a monstrously good book despite the terrible, Monty-Python-esque cover. It’s nearly 700 pages long and I blew through it in about three days because I didn’t want to put it down– and right up to the last 100 pages I was pretty convinced I was reading what would eventually become my favorite book of the year.

Unfortunately, the book could probably stand to be about a hundred pages shorter, and this may be a consequence of having read it so fast, but a number of its tropes started feeling really damn repetitive toward the end and it started to wear on me a tiny bit. This still leaves it good enough that it’s a solid candidate for the end-of-year list, but I liked the first 5/6 more than I did the end. This is gritty, violent, profane fantasy literature that somehow manages to be high-magic and low fantasy at the same time, not a combination that I see all that often (or would have thought possible before reading this) and the most amazing thing about it is that Sykes makes it feel so easy. I don’t know his process at all, but this feels like it was written in seven or eight ten-hour bursts over the course of seven or eight days, and in case it’s not clear I mean that as a compliment. For all I know, he agonized over it for a really long time, but on the page it just feels … I dunno, I don’t want to repeat “easy” again but the whole thing just comes off as really organic somehow, like it wrote itself.

And I love Sal the Cacophony, even if she looks ridiculous on the cover. Check the book out.

I finally finally finally finally finally finally finally fucking beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice today, a game I started playing approximately six years ago, and no shadows die at any point in the game and in fact the word “shadow” is never uttered once anywhere by anyone and it’s the worst subtitle in the history of video games but that’s okay because Sekiro might be my favorite game ever right now. That said there are four endings and I just got one of them, and the one I got involved beating a different final boss than the other three do, so … I’ve got some more fucking work to do, because I’m getting every damn trophy this game has to offer and no one and nothing is going to stop me.

You should buy this game and you should dedicate your life to getting good at it because it is insanely Goddamned difficult and it will break you down and make you cry and force you to play on its terms no matter what you want to do. And you will do it anyway because the game is just that fuckin’ good. 15/10 would cry again. Probably will tonight, as a matter of fact, because I have two active save files on two different last bosses and I only beat one of them today. Time to go back to the other one.

I figure it’ll take another week, minimum.

On temporary and uncharacteristic bursts of optimism

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Writing1 Comment

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I was entertained– this is genuine, I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here– at how little attention my post about Sekiro got the other day.  Clearly there isn’t a huge audience around here for wild technical musings about video games unless I’m complaining (complaining always gets attention).  That said, we’re invoking the My Blog My Rules Goddammit covenant here, because my ass beat Genichiro Ashina earlier today, a feat that somehow only twenty-five percent of the players of this game have managed in the nine days since it came out, and I am damned proud of myself.  So: booyah, motherfuckers.

ALSO!  I have put new stuff on my Patreon twice in the last few days after ignoring it (and pausing charges to my Patrons; I don’t take your money if I don’t give you anything in return) for a couple of months.  There have been two first chapters of old, abandoned projects put up– neither of those ever got finished, but if people like what they see in those first chapters, maybe I’ll revisit them.  Remember, $2 a month gets you a whole book.  We like books, right?

Today’s the first day of Spring Break, and while we don’t have any real plans for the week I have high hopes that I’ll get something done for the two conventions I’ll be going to this April– a new banner, at least, since the old ones are getting a little raggedy(*).  I have been completely dry as far as writing fiction goes for all of 2019, basically, and dammit I’m gonna fix that this week.  We’re gonna get something creative accomplished up in here if it kills me.  And it’s not gonna kill me.

This is gonna be a big week, dammit.  Big.

(*) ConGlomeration in Louisville, April 19-21, and LaffyCon in Lafayette on April 27 and 28.  Are you near either of them?  Come see me!  I actually have some free tickets for LaffyCon, if anyone’s nearby and wants ’em.

In which I’m playing SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

sekiro-shadows-die-twice-wallpaperFor the last who-knows-how-long– a year?  Close to it?  I have used my PlayStation for nothing other than games made by From Software.  I’ve been basically playing the three Dark Souls games and Bloodborne (together, Soulsborne, a phrase I’ll be using a lot) on a loop, and I’ve beaten all four of them multiple times with several different builds during that time.  I went a really long time where I didn’t ever really replay video games all that much, so to stay with these four games for, again, close to a year (with, granted, some interruptions from other games) was really unprecedented.  I mean, it’s saved me money, but still.

FromSoft released a new game on Friday, the ridiculously-named Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.  I am … I dunno, a dozen hours in?  Fifteen?  And I have yet to see a shadow die, either once or twice, although a random character just decided to name the player character Sekiro.  I don’t get the subtitle.

This isn’t a review, unless “this game is insanely difficult (seriously, the Soulsborne series is renowned for its difficulty and Sekiro puts them to shame) and a lot of fun and I had to stop playing it to type this” counts as a review.  No, instead it’s a post about how I’ve been sort of watching the way I deal with this game from a distance and I’m kind of fascinated by it.

First of all: I can’t play video games without YouTube any longer.  I’ve been simultaneously playing the game (well, okay, in series, not simultaneously) and watching a YouTuber by the name of FightinCowboy play through it for the first time himself.  Cowboy’s helped me through all the Souls games too, so there was no way I wasn’t watching his series on this game.

Now, you may find yourself quietly (or perhaps loudly) mocking me for the idea of spending a lot of time watching someone play a video game on YouTube.  And until I started doing it, I might have felt the same way.  Now, my opinion works this way: have you ever watched anyone play sports on TV?  Could you, instead, have been playing sports yourself?

Oh, the people you’re watching are entertaining and are much better at the sports than you are, and that’s what makes it okay to watch them play instead of playing yourself?

Huh.  Weird how that works.

(Also: you cannot get better at basketball from watching other people play it.  You can get better at video games by watching pros.  You need to develop muscle memory on your own, of course, but strategies and item locations and things like that can absolutely be easily and efficiently discovered online.  There’s also something cathartic about watching someone else get their ass handed to them by a boss that you’re having trouble with, especially in this game.)

So anyway, that’s different.  I’m trying to mostly play before I watch, but the game is wide open enough that he’s going about things in a different order from me, meaning that I’m seeing some stuff in the videos before I get to it myself and I’m also yelling JESUS GO HERE THE ITEM YOU NEED IS OVER IN THIS PART OF THE GAME WHY HAVEN’T YOU GONE BACK HERE YET MY GOD COWBOY or similar things quite a lot.  He can’t hear me; I’m yelling them anyway.

Another interesting thing is that this game is absolutely in dialogue with the Soulsborne games in a way that I find kind of fascinating.  The Dark Souls series is all about playing defensively and looking for openings to attack.  Overt aggression will often get you quickly killed.  Bloodborne shook up the formula a bit, getting rid of shields and blocking and introducing a mechanic where some of the health lost from taking a it could be regained by counterattacking, which led to much more aggressive gameplay overall.

You will die a lot in Sekiro until you stop playing like you’re playing a Soulsborne game.  If you back off an enemy, chances are they’re going to regain everything you just took away from them when you attacked them.  There’s no stamina mechanic– you can block and attack constantly, to your heart’s content, and while the game punishes button mashing harshly they definitely want a scenario where a fight is a couple of dozen quick button pushes in perfect timing and perfect order, which might manifest itself on-screen as several sword strikes, a few blocks, jumping over a sweep, stomping someone’s spear into the ground and then ramming your sword through their neck to end the fight.

Also, stamina played a role in movement in the Soulsborne, because energy to run and energy to fight came from the same pool.  You might find yourself rushing over to an enemy only to discover that once you got there all your stamina was gone and you didn’t have any left to attack or, worse, defend yourself, so measured approaches to everything were prioritized.  This tends to get into that muscle memory I was talking about, quite a bit– and I trashed a boss who had been destroying me repeatedly once I finally realized the game wouldn’t punish me for chasing him.  You can run forever if you want.  Turns out that matters!

So yeah: this isn’t a review, but assuming I don’t chuck my controller through the screen halfway through the game it’s probably a safe assumption that one’s coming eventually.  If nothing else, there’s probably more navel-gazing to be had in the near future, right?