Sekiro-Choa 02

Really excited to see where this series go, Janobi.

Super happy that you're playing this Jan. While Elden Ring is magical, Sekiro has a tightness to its gameplay that can't be matched. Besides one boss, every boss in this game is so great (at least off the top of my head I may be forgetting a few). No spoilers but you may need a special video series for that final boss. It's so good though.

Keep going, Jan. Sekiro is a great and you'll have some really cool boss fights soon.

One thing to remember in Sekiro. Anytime you ask yourself "Am I being too aggressive?" the answer is always "No. I am not being aggressive enough."

So glad to see Jan back at it!

Yes! If you can get good at managing aggressive play while simultaneously blocking/deflecting/dodging attacks, you will have 90% of the combat completely locked down (the other 10% may require some flexibility). A big mistake I see a lot of people do is attempt to play this like a DS game where you might hover around an enemy waiting for opportunities. Go at them hard! It not only helps build their posture meter, but it allows you to influence the enemy's responses. Jan's instincts are pretty good here, so I don't think he's going to have too much trouble once he really gets a feel for the game.

Something about the quality of the video is being destroyed by the bitrate. At the initial closeup of Jan, super handsome and high quality. In game it looks really rough and I don't know why.

@ronald: True. But also, you kinda can be too aggressive if you are so busy slashing away that you are getting surprised by attacks that "poise" their way right through your swings, or are timed to hit you before you have a chance to recover from your attack and get your block up.

I think the better type of aggression for this game is to get right up in their face and poke at them. Be all "c'mon, what are you gonna do, huh?" and then punish them hard as soon as they try to attack you.

I am so so glad that Jan is playing Sekiro and that Bloodborne Identity led to this

This is going to be very interesting to watch evolve because Jan is reacting to this segment of the game exactly as I did. Within an hour or so I was pretty certain this was going to be one of the best games I'd ever played. Stealthing around this little villages and taking down the mini-bosses is so goddamn fun and visceral.

...And then you realize that this is all just fodder, none of it really matters at all compared to defeating bosses, and suddenly all these fun little encampments become little more than obstacle courses you're supposed to speed run over, around and through on your way to the boss of your choice.

I really wish Sekiro had been way more of this game rather than the sort of game it quickly becomes where there's a boss around damn near every corner and the fodder enemies are essentially a total waste of time. Yes, this is a basic element of every From Soft game, but the combat is also so essentially rudimentary in a Bloodborne or Elden Ring that you can enjoy doing it for the grind without missing it when you need to focus on a boss for actual progression. But even then, if you just want to go clear a fortress or building because you enjoy the enemies or the layout or whatever, when you walk away from it you can also have more health, more strength, more MP, more something other than coins and a vague sense of accomplishment.

By removing the grind element from the game, Sekiro kneecaps the most fun aspect of itself (for me!) and it's such a bummer. I couldn't help but watch this entire video and think to myself, "it's such a shame Jan's completely wasting his time with all this." I enjoyed this village segment so much I would just grind it over and over clearing the enemies trying to build up a speedrun...I wouldn't be surprised if some celestial clock logged four or five hours of playtime for me just looping through this bit over and over. And sure, it was fun as fuck...but it had no impact on the rest of the game at all, and Sekiro doesn't really make that clear until you're actually in the city with bosses waiting in every cardinal direction.

Hey Jan, maybe a good idea would be to just read out the tutorial prompts to the audience so you don't keep skipping half of them.

Cant say I really agree.

You still unlock skill points from regular combat, and the fodder and minibosses of an area are often subtly training you for the boss, as their attacks are often more basic versions of that of the bosses. You only start speeding past everything once you've 'completed' an area by beating all the enemies/ picking up all the items/ and have explored everything. I don't think the game loses anything by emphasing player skill over grinding stats.

the compression on those videos is really bad is there any way to change that somehow @janman as soon as something moves it get's real blurry and I can't even see your SKILLZ you know :)

I'll always concede that in conversation. I'm not the sort of dude that thinks my reaction to a game is the definitive, absolute summary of its pros and cons. The game was clearly designed to be about internalizing its ruleset, and the fairness of that ruleset has been made quite clear by players of all sorts of skill level as well as physical and/or mental hinderance. It's been three plus years - I get this thing I have with Sekiro is quite a me problem. Part of why I've bought less and less games as I've explored my 30s is I realize I really want to Always Be Progressing - and I'm not always so interested in actually, fully learning a game in order to make the boss die or the door open.

I just had a really visceral reaction to hearing Jan react to this portion of the game because of how similarly I felt while bopping off the fodder enemies in this flashback sequence. But I equally remember just how hard I wound up crashing with this game, and perhaps I should have found a way to say: I hope I see Jan not have that same experience so I might be inspired to give the game a fourth try. Unfortunately, because this session was one of the most intuitively relatable streams I've seen in over a decade of Giant Bomb, I'm gonna have to see it to believe it.

Prayer hands are emphatically up in the chat for Ochoakiro.

As a super fan of the blood borne identity…………..thats it that’s the comment.

Hugs

I’m down for any Jan stream.

This. Compared to other From games this one is very good at telling you where to go, why you're going there, and when to do it. He chalked up the whole Buddha sequence to From being weird, but the bell item description that took up his entire screen told him to do it, the old lady who gave him the bell told him to do it, and her son told him to do it, but he skipped through all of it. I'd much prefer he engage with the game rather than ask chat what to do every 15 minutes.

@giantrobot24: I also think Jan should read tutorial tips - or have a Tamoor / Pack beside him in a couple of videos. The game funnels you into mastering the Mikiri counter, but it can get you in a frustrating spot if you don't know what you need to do.

Not to say Jan is a bad gamer. My dude, you rock and can't wait to see more of this series. Also, I'm not ashamed to say it took me far more deaths to reach the spot you're in during my first run!

Hesitation is defeat.

Dodging is almost never the answer: GET UP IN THAT ASS.

Jan you are a natural at this game! It was hard for me to adjust from souls games where you have to worry about stamina and dodge instead of block!

"Is that bubble wrap?" might be the most Californian response I've heard after seeing that particular foreshadowing LMAO

Love the series! Huge fan of Janborne; hoping for maybe some guests in the future!! <3

Keep going Jan you got this!

Why is the video quality so bad?