DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this blog is not to always be against the general critics and opinions on popular games that are/were praised, but rather to provide a different perspective sustained on game design principles.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice won the well deserved game of the year recognition on The Game Awards past edition and while it is indeed a truly outstanding game, there are some questionable game design practices that I really wanted to talk about since I played it.
One of the most crucial aspects of any video game is the game language, which is the system of signs and symbols that the designers uses to communicate with their players.
This language can be anything from visual to auditory or spatial patterns that inform the player what's going on at any point of the game. And the most important thing to remember when developing such language is that is has to be consistent.
Sekiro's HUD in Boss Fights
Whenever you fight a boss or a "mini boss", there are 2 red circles shown above the boss's health bar, which inform the number of deathblows needed to defeat a boss. These deathblows are enabled whenever the player depletes the boss's health bar, or by breaking the enemy's posture which is shown by the top center bar on the screen.
Clearly these UI elements are informing the player how much is going to take to defeat a certain boss, so the player is prepared for what's is about to come, or maybe not?.
Broken language
The information that Sekiro's HUD has been conveying all this time to the player in boss fights, suddenly became obsolete with Genichiro Ashina's second boss fight.This boss is surprisingly divided in 2 phases: Genichiro Ashina and Genichiro Way of Tomoe.
The language is broken on the first phase of the fight, where the UI clearly stated that only 2 deathblows were required to defeat him, this creates a big problem for players like me that had a hard time reaching this point of the fight, since you were just mentally set from the very beginning to celebrate your victory after performing the second deathblow and it does take a considerable amount of time to get there,(yes even with the most optimal strategy).
The game denying what it had previously established just makes the player's effort feel unrewarded because of the misleading mental model it created in the player.
Learning in the Unsafe
On the second phase of this fight, the game literally throws in a new mechanic in the middle of a boss fight: Lightning Reversal. This mechanic is indeed only signaled to the player if you cleared the mini boss fight at the Ashina Dojo and if read the scroll before this fight, (you can still perform it if you happen to accidentally press R1 while midair) and while it is meant to reward players that took the time to do this, the fact that you need to learn to perform a new mechanic on the unsafest scenario possible , takes away great part of the rewarding intention.
The "Souls" Schema
From Software's past titles have unavoidably set on the mind of their players certain assumptions when it comes about its gameplay.This is commonly referred as the schema, which is a mental framework of expectations that sets how you perceive and react to a certain experience.
When it comes to boss/mini boss fights in From Software's games, we all expect to solve these encounters by mere combat, this could also be considered as part of the language that the"souls" series have developed over time. However the Armored Warrior mini boss fight located at Senpou Temple, breaks with this convention in a very awkward way.
This is a heavy armored enemy as the name and the visual appearance obviously states it, and as you start to fight him, you quickly realize that using just the sword won't do any damage at all. This is when the player's schema comes into play, as you will smartly think that surely a heavy weapon on your prosthetic tools available could be able pierce through the enemy's armor, since it totally makes sense!
The big problem with this fight is that the schema pushes you think of any other way to solve the encounter than by triggering a scripted action to defeat him.
Turns out that the only way to defeat this mini-boss is by fighting him close the bridge's border until you break his posture, to execute a deathblow that will push him off the bridge...I mean I seriously had to search up on how to defeat him out of frustration.
I guess that if this wasn't a required boss fight to progress further into the game, it would have felt way differently.
Tripping over the same stone twice
Did you miss the part when Genichiro didn't die after the second deathblow? Well, for that we also have Guardian Ape boss fight.
There is not much to say about it, you execute the only one deathblow needed to chop his bloody head off and you even get displayed the usual "Shinobi Execution" message that you get after defeating every boss , just so that 1 minute later the ape raises back from the dead and begins his last phase...
I get that they really wanted the player to feel that oh shi... moment ,but I think they went too far by tricking you to think he was already dead. They could have just not shown any "Shinobi Execution" message at all, so that the player slowly realizes that there's definitely something wrong going on.
And the reason why this is a really bad game design practice It's because it takes away all sense of accomplishment from the player, specially for players like me that hadn't easy.
But I guess I should have seen this coming after Genichiro's boss fight, right?
So these are my thoughts, please feel free to share yours on the comments section below.
Happy gaming everyone!
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