Man, structurally this is some of my favorite type of game design. Your first playthrough is so challenging and takes so long that it feels like a standard 30-50 hour game. But then you start a new save file and get through the game incredibly fast thanks to the way progress works. No overly long tutorials. Relatively open levels, so there's lots of areas you can skip. Progress based entirely around just going through levels and beating bosses with very few stops for cutscenes and such. Lots of optional stuff, sure, but there's no weird, dumb mandatory fetch quest-like stuff. You just start playing and the game moves along as fast as you're able to. If you know where you need to go and how to beat everything there's no extra stuff in your way. Just got from the beginning of the game to Gyoubu in like an hour. Speedruns of this game are really cool too. Sub 40 minutes even for glitchless runs. Souls games were fun, but a lot of the RPG stuff wasn't to my liking, so it's really nice to see these things applied to a game like Sekiro.
