In the last couple of years I gave myself a challenge
I wanted to beat all of the modern From software games, DLC, side bosses and all. As someone who’d never played a from software game, very publicly I might add since I praised Hollow Knight for the losing currency on death mechanic since at the time I thought it came up with that idea, and I generally wasn’t the most skilled when it came to video games. This was a pretty tall order, but as I do with most self-imposed challenges, I was dedicated to completing it.
It’s important to note that this was a few months before Elden Ring came out, in anticipation of its release I wanted to play the whole soulsbornekiro “series” first, I decided to start with Bloodborne but all the hype I saw online for Elden Ring got to me and frankly I didn’t want to play these 6 amazing games thinking of them as a means to an end, that end being Elden Ring, so after wandering around central Yarnham for 5 hours with no idea where to go next and a determination not to use a guide for some reason, I decided to make Elden Ring my first “souls” game.
Lead Up
I don’t need to tell you how magical your first playthrough of Elden Ring is, if you’ve played the game you know the feeling of finding something super cool or useful around literally every corner, the Lands Between is one of the best designed open world maps to come out of the gaming industry, Fromsoft’s mastery over map design put them in a perfect position to make one of the most well realized open worlds ever created.
But man was it tough, not being familiar with the souls combat loop and starting with a game they expects exactly that from you, I set myself up for failure. Full honesty I had watched Bleach pretty recently and Loretta’s great bow looking like Uryu Ishida’s bow attack was unironically the deciding factor for me buying this game when I did, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Though it took a long time and a LOT of struggle, I eventually managed to claw my way through tooth and nail, defeating everything there was to throw myself at through sheer force of will, learning how to hold my own in Souls combat along the way. I had completed my first souls game.
So after I’d conquered the Lands Between, next came Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 1, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and finally Dark Souls 2, I actually managed to get the platinum trophy on Bloodborne, one of only two games where I’ve ever done that, even after making a couple mistakes including having to play the Old Hunter DLC for the first time on New Game +, a fact that I’m very proud of.
I pretty quickly started to stay away from the Int build I had used in Elden Ring, and for all the following games I did full strength build to maximize the challenge and experience the game like I thought most people would. And it was difficult, it was really REALLY hard, taking about two years to carry out. But I had done it. I had defeated every boss, including DLC and side bosses, in a series known for being the hardest to complete.
Of course if you’re familiar with From software’s catalogue, or read the title of this post, you’ve noticed that I left out a game. Generally known to be the hardest game in the series, I decided that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice would be my final game in this multiple year spanning path of struggle I’d lay out for myself. Little did I know, that would be the biggest undertaking of this whole challenge. As in order to beat Sekiro, you have to play by its rules, rules which were meticulously designed to make you better at it.
First Try
January 23rd, 2023, the day I downloaded Sekiro for the first time. I had played through the tutorial and got a basic handle on the moment-to-moment combat, while I had been told this game would be supremely difficult, so far I hadn’t seen anything I couldn’t take on.
I got a decent way through the first area, struggling on the mini bosses as I tried to adapt to the new style of combat, I knew it would be different from the other Fromsoft games I had played but hearing about it and actually having to adapt are two totally different things.
I continued down the main path until I reached the first real boss in the game Gyoubu Oniwa.
Gyoubu would serve as the first roadblock in my path to completing this game, I was able to use the combat system in a very basic sense to get through regular enemies just fine, but the first real boss of the game who was designed to hard stop anyone who still wasn’t playing by the game’s rules, did exactly that, he stopped me. I threw myself at him time and time again but at this point I wasn’t ready to defeat him. So at this point, truthfully, I gave up, for now.
Sekiro is an uncompromising experience. If you try to play by your rules or in any way avoid improving your skills with the combat system, you will be punished for it, and Gyoubu is the first indicator of that. Unlike many early souls bosses, Gyoubu Oniwa has very little room for error, and that leeway only decreases as the game goes on. There is no way to defeat Gyoubu that doesn’t involve your personal development with the game.
And this is what I mean when I say that Sekiro is designed to make you better at it, unlike the other souls games there’s no build variety, and even the leveling system, as bare bones as it is compared to other Fromsoft rpg’s, requires you to defeat a powerful enemy for each piece of the level up, in every aspect of the game, it will only let you progress as far as your skill level allows, and so for me, this is where I capped out.
At this point I had beaten Dark Souls 3 and decided I simply wasn’t ready to take on a game like Sekiro, and resigned myself to trying again after playing a few more games in Fromsoft’s catalogue to get a better feel for difficult games.
April 26th, 2023
After making my way through all the bosses in Dark Souls 1 and Demon’s Souls, as well as plenty of other single player games I’d played in between, I decided to pick Sekiro back up, and to my surprise, during this attempt I found Gyoubu Oniwa to be incredibly easy, defeating him in less than an hour of attempts, so what happened?
When we as humans learn a skill, it takes a break from performing that skill to let the lessons work their way into your performance, take fighting a souls boss for example, generally the best strategy is to take a 10 or so minute break after a couple of attempts to let the information you’ve learned about the bosses move set settle in your mind and give your instincts time to adapt to this new information. On my first attempt I did not give my instincts time to adapt to this new information. And through a combination of improving my game skills in general from playing the other games in the series and understanding the boss better, Gyoubu Oniwa fell, and the way forward was open.
Now in this fight I actually managed to teach myself a lesson that would harm my progress later, on my winning attempt against Gyoubu I was incredibly aggressive, and while usually that’s a good thing in Sekiro, I took it too far. I rushed down the boss and threw out so much offense that my defense wasn’t as good as it should have been, in order to succeed in Sekiro you have to be patient and use the bosses moveset against them to build up poise, but in this fight I was so overly aggressive that I mistakenly taught myself that defense wasn’t as important as it is to the core combat of Sekiro, as it really is.
Marching onward, I falsely believed that my triumph over Gyoubu meant that I had mastered the game, and further challenges would be banal compared to Gyoubu. I progressed further through the main story and through the map, no longer scared and sneaking around normal enemies.
Now to be clear this wasn’t my final attempt at this game, and this time the hard stopping point I reached was Lady Butterfly.
I had reached a point in the game where the only way to make forward progress was one of two options, defeating Lady Butterfly, or defeating the Long-arm Centipede Giraffe, now I’m not saying that I couldn’t beat the Long-arm centipede, but what I am saying is that I did not know it was a requirement for furthering the story, and didn’t give it more than one or two attempts before going back to the losing battle that was Lady Butterfly.
Something that should be obvious by now is that when it comes to video games I am immensely stubborn and the idea of stopping attempts to go fill up on snap seeds to make her second phase easier literally did not occur to me as an option, once I ran out I just decided to do the fight like normal without help from consumables. By the way I’m not trying to gloat this was a really terrible idea.
Similarly to Gyoubu I just couldn’t wrap my head around the level of skill Lady Butterfly demanded, I had gotten a handle on the combat for sure and could defeat basic enemies and easier bosses like Gyoubu no problem, but Lady Butterfly is another level, the next step in your progression to becoming good at this game requires more than just being good enough to scrape through her first phase. She has enough health that if you want to get past this fight you can’t just rush her down and hope to get lucky, as I said before she has an even smaller margin for error than before, no, Lady Butterfly is a statement, from here on out you will be fighting incredibly skilled foes and difficult battles, and if you can’t get past her? You won’t stand a chance against what comes next.
At this point I hadn’t truly realized the mistaken lesson I learned when I fought Gyoubu, so to defeat Lady Butterfly it would take relearning the combat to fight like the game wants you to, once again, in order to move forward with the story, I had to learn to play by Sekiro’s rules.
And at this point, I didn’t even know where to begin, I hadn’t understood my mistake. So I decided again to put Sekiro on the back burner, about 2-3 times afterwards I downloaded the game, ran a few attempts on Lady Butterfly, ran around the map looking for where to go next, saw that I had nowhere else to go, then deleted the game and moved on. At this point I decided that STILL, I wasn’t ready for the challenges ahead in Sekiro, and I knew that I’d need every ounce of skill I could muster to conquer this game.
June 30th, 2024
Over a year later, at this point I had beaten all the other souls games, so I had no more excuses to not to play Sekiro to the finish line, no reason to put it on the backburner, I had to beat the game here and now or it meant admitting that I just wasn’t capable of it.
I finally decided to start following a guide like I had done with the other games, so I knew where to go next, I quickly dispatched of the Long-arm and set my sights on Lady Butterfly.
I finally realized the mistake I had made in this fight before, that I was trying to rush it like how I had done with Gyoubu, that was an easy enough fight that you can squeeze out a win playing the game incorrectly, but not here, I realized during this fight that in Sekiro you had to supplement aggressive offense with patient defense, rather than attacking constantly and trying to prevent the boss from using any of their moves for fear of taking damage, I shifted my perspective, a boss throwing out an attack against you is an opportunity to deal damage to their stance bar, not something to fear for the chance to get hit like I thought, now that I properly understood what Sekiro was expecting of me, I focused in on the fight, learning Lady Butterfly’s timings and slowly but surely whittling her stance down by deflecting her combos. And at 3:20 pm I finally defeated Lady Butterfly, then at 4:19 pm I defeated Genichiro, when I first fought Genichiro I struggled a little sure, but finally being able to put into action the fighting style that the game demanded of me, and hot off a victory over a year in the making, Genichiro never stood a chance, I even managed to get past his third phase on my first try.
At this point nothing could really stop me, boss after boss fell to my understanding of the combat, sure I hit a few roadblocks that impeded my progress for a few days, but at the end of the day, with everything I had learned, everything that Sekiro hammered into me over a year’s worth of failures, I had become unstoppable.
Soon enough I found myself staring down the final boss. After taking so long to make any meaningful progress, a mere 10 days after picking Sekiro back up for the final time, I was face to face with my final test.
I knew that Sword Saint Isshin would be my hardest test of all, so after arriving at his boss arena somewhere around noon on July 9th, I sat down and made a promise to myself, this was it, I was going to play this game until I defeated Isshin, no breaks, and no excuses, and at 5:48 PM on July 9th, 2024, I had finally managed to beat Sekiro for the first time, side bosses, Owl Father and all, this single playthrough had taken me a year and a half to do, and the next morning, at 10:38 AM on July 10th, 2024, I did it again, I beat Sekiro for the second time on New Game+ in less than a day.
For those who don’t know Sekiro has two endings, one that ends the game around the halfway point, but there are unique bosses locked behind it that you can’t fight any other way, so in order to complete my self-imposed challenge of beating every boss in the game, I had to do both endings.
And what had just taken me a year and a half, now I was able to do again in an evening, and an extra 30 more minutes of final boss attempts in the morning. I wasn’t just good at Sekiro, I didn’t just survive, but because of the genius way that the progression in this game was crafted, I had finally become a master, of Sekrio: Shadows Die Twice.
Why did I do this?
Sekiro is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s one of the most difficult challenges gaming can offer on a first playthrough, and for most people, child’s play on a second. The way that Sekiro makes you better at it as you progress through the story is a result of some of the most carefully crafted boss, area, and enemy designs ever put to a disc. Of all the masterpieces From software has created in the last 15 years, Sekiro is one of their best. And I’m thankful for the journey it led me down, thankful for the fact that Sekiro forced me to be better.
Jman.Blog 
Leave a comment