I am replaying it right now and I think I agree. I do greatly value the diversity of options from Soulsborne games, too... maybe if I replay Bloodborne I'd be saying "ok Bloodborne is the best", lol. But right now, Sekiro is just so. damn. good.
Ironically, I think Sekiro's combat suffers principally because of two elements that were put in to make the game easier. Namely:
1. It is far too easy to get through the game by spamming the parry button when you have a vague idea of getting hit. The problem here is that there's no "untech" window: the game doesn't prevent you from parrying for any time after a failed attempt at parrying so, as many have mentioned, the ideal thing to do instead of holding the button down is to mash it. This is bad principally because it takes most of the challenge out of parrying once you figure this out. Granted, if the game prevented you from doing this it'd be much harder, but I think also much better.
*laughs in charmless*
2. There are similarly weirdly wide windows for things like the mikiri counter, meaning that you can input things very early and the game won't punish you for it. This isn't as bad as the other problem I identified, but it really undermines the logic of the whole thing when you can mikiri while the guy still has his weapon sheathed.
I also think the decision to make the dash attack extremely sluggish was a poor one, but I suppose I understand why they had to do that.
The generosity of the mikiri window varies greatly from enemy to enemy, I found. For Seven Spears and those lancer type enemies, it's actually really narrow, if you press O too early you're fucked. But for others, it works somehow. I think those enemies charge/delay their attack a lot, which would explain it.
I also didn't care for having to kill a bunch of enemies again after dying in under a minute to any random boss either. It's not like you could simply run past them either.
...What? There is literally zero boss where you need to kill a bunch of enemies to retry. All the bosses have a sculptor's idol right before them or close enough that it takes only a few seconds to run from it.
Maybe you meant mini-bosses, like the Bull, the Drunkard etc.? But those aren't bosses, and for most of those, running past enemies does work too.
Sekiro is too easy to cheese too.
This is confusing, because outside of a very few particularly obscure tricks, there's no cheesing in Sekiro... but there definitely is in Nioh (e.g. Living Weapons builds).
Im doing my regular NG playthrough of it without the charm now and yeah its amazing. I played through all my NG+ runs without it but not having any upgrades AT ALL without the charm really just makes it an entirely different game. It also prevents the L1 spam so many people used to cheese encounters.
I'm doing the same thing right now!
*high-five*
So far so good. It's been a struggle early on, especially against mini-bosses, but I'm right before the
Dragon so I'm progressing OK. The best/worst is yet to come though... xD
It really does force you to play without spamming or brute-forcing. O'rin sure schooled me, lol. And hell I actually figured out how to fight the Headless properly this time instead of just brute-forcing... đź‘€ (they're still annoying though!)
I gotta say, these Nioh comments really confuse me. I remember thinking it was pretty basic and forgettable. DMCV and MGR I get though.
Basic? Nah. Ki pulse, stance switching, the different weapon movesets and their customizable skills, the magic and ninjutsu abilities, it's all pretty great.
Having so many of your abilities tied to consumables completely ruins it IMO.
That's a weird complaint IMO. Was never a big problem for me, and you can spend your leftover gold on emblems too. In my current charmless run I have 500+ emblems and I use my tools liberally.
