Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

About

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a 2019 action video game from FromSoftware, the developers behind the Dark Souls series. The game follows the titular Sekiro, a shinobi (ninja) in feudal Japan. The game was released for Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Windows and received positive reviews.

History

Work on Sekiro began in 2015 after FromSoftware finished the downloadable content for Bloodborne. ^[1] The game is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. It was revealed at the 2017 Game Awards with a teaser (shown below, left). A full trailer appeared at 2018's E3 (shown below, right). The game is a fully-single player experience. It was released on March 22nd, 2019.^[2]

Reception

The game received universal acclaim upon release, scoring an 89 on Metacritic on the day of release.^[2] Playstation Lifestyle praised how the game was able to distinguish itself from the Souls series in combat and storytelling.^[3] Polygon^[4] praised the game's difficulty, echoing other reviewers who found it tough but fair. IGN gave the game a 9.5 in their review (shown below).

Online Presence

The game developed an online following thanks to hype generated by it being a FromSoftware title. As of the release date, Sekiro has 47,000 likes on Facebook^[5] and a subreddit with over 36,000 subscribers.^[6] Game Grumps released an episode of a Let's Play of the game on the day of release (shown below, left) as did user FightinCowboy (shown below, right).

Forbes "Easy Mode" Article

On March 28th, Forbes^[7] writer Dave Thier wrote an article arguing that Sekiro needed an "easy mode." His argument stated that Sekiro and From Software games in general have incredible worlds and character designs but the game's difficulty prevents many, including people with disabilities, from being able to see all the content and enjoy the game on their own terms.

Maybe they have limited gaming time and don't want to spend that time fighting Lady Butterfly 100 times in a row. Maybe they're just not that good at timing their parries, maybe they get frustrated and don't feel like being frustrated, just now. Maybe they have a physical ailment makes this sort of precision just a little too difficult to pull off. An easy mode would allow an order of magnitude more players to see what From has built, and yet these experiences remained walled off for those millions of people for reasons that I just can't parse.

The article generated lots of discussion on social media. Some agreed with Thier's point. User @ElineMuijres^[8] wrote that the easy mode would indeed open up the experience to more players (shown below, left). Thier mentioned on Twitter that he was influenced by an argument posted by @doscsquiddy^[9] on March 27th that stated "it is better to let 3,000,000 people of varying skill levels play a game and maybe a small handful of those people play it on a mode that's easy for them than it is to let 1,000,000 people play the game on just one difficulty" (shown below, right).

Many others were not in favor of adding an easy mode to Sekiro. Thier's colleague at Forbes Erik Kain wrote a counterpoint to Their's article,^[10] saying that the difficulty of the game was core to director Hidetaka Miyazaki's intent.

For one thing, the option to turn down difficulty when stuck at a particularly hard boss (or mini-boss, as the case may be) would always be a temptation. It would be so simple to take the easy route. And then we would never learn what FromSoftware and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki hope we will learn: How to overcome the odds, and in so doing gift ourselves with a sense of pride and achievement.

This sentiment was echoed by people on Twitter. User @DaveMilbo^[11] offered a similar sentiment, gaining over 30 retweets and 330 likes (shown below, left). Others regurgitated Git Gud and "Journalists Can't Play Video Games" arguments. For example, @Slasher^[12] gained 920 retweets and 5,300 likes joking "i'm down for an easy mode in sekiro if they called it 'game journalist mode'" (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References