Sekiro is my first From game. I felt that it was an amazing game as a whole, but it has real flaws. Indeed, it's a testament to just how high Sekiro's highs are that the game is still like, a 5/5 despite so many shortcomings. To name a few...
- Fighting multiple enemies is, at best, tolerable when the enemies you're fighting are complete trash due to the bad camera controls and mechanics that are heavily designed around one-on-one fighting.
- Having to clear adds before fighting minibosses doesn't make the game harder, it just makes it more tedious since clearing adds is very easy once you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, From seemed to think this was a really good idea because nearly every miniboss after the early game has 'em. Towards the end of the game, I stopped fighting optional bosses that had too many adds because I simply couldn't be assed to clear them all before every attempt.
- The boss fights that do not play directly into the game's strengths are of noticeably lower quality than the ones that do. All of the game's worst boss fights involve an unarmed combatant of some kind (be it a bull, an ape, or... another bull), and all of the best involve a weapon.
- Without getting too spoilery, dragonrot ends up simply being an inconsequential way to kick the player while they're down. It's ultimately completely toothless while still being annoying enough to add pressure to the process of learning a boss fight.
- The game expects a lot from the player but the controls are weirdly inconsistent. Despite having beaten the game I'm still not 100% confident about when an input has been successfully buffered or not. One of the most confusing manifestations of this is that sometimes opening the menu doesn't work - why do this? This is obviously a design choice, not a technical limitation.
- I strongly dislike when games give enemies super armor without visually communicating this to the player, and Sekiro utilizes this a lot. I understand that this game is a lot about trial and error, but I don't think that essentially forcing players to memorize when a boss has super armor amounts to anything more than padding.
- All of the active abilities and prosthetic tools are nearly completely useless. Some of them have uses on specific bosses, but you can very easily play the whole game without using any of them.
- Maybe this is a personal thing, but I completely lost the plot by about the middle of the game and I never got it back. This had some gameplay consequences as I was at times very confused about what I was supposed to be doing next.
- Items take really long to use. Yes, git gud and all that, but I really would have just preferred the game be harder in exchange for allowing items to be used in a reasonable amount of time. I just gave up on items entirely for the back nine. (Related: Divine confetti is stupid. While it's scarce it serves to lock you out of doing a bunch of optional bosses, and when it becomes readily available doing those bosses is essentially irrelevant.)
...Having said all that, Sekiro is an incredible game. When everything is working the way it's supposed to - you're fighting a good boss, slowly learning the mechanics and gradually chipping away at what seemed impossible only moments ago - there are really few games out there that can match the Sekiro experience. I can't think of any game that demands so much attention and focus to play. Even Bayonetta, a game that I think is better-designed overall and that I couldn't help but compare Sekiro to while I was playing it, doesn't have a single boss fight even in the same ballpark as Sekiro's final boss.
Much has been said about Sekiro's difficulty, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Sekiro is really not that hard of a game. The early game is quite challenging, but then the difficulty goes down a lot once you figure out what you're doing and it doesn't really come back up again until the very end.
