I’m mad. I lit all the torches in The Gutter so that I could spawn the Gutter Denizen to get my favorite set, the Black Witch Set–and veil. But, I killed them on a platform and their drop fell below the platform–which meant I could not get it. I wikied it, and you can sometimes quit out and it’ll be somewhere reachable, but that didn’t happen.
There is one other suggestion that I might do–it’s resetting the area with a Bonfire Ascetic. Supposedly, it’ll bring the Gutter Denizen back to life. Yes, they’ll be at NG+ strength, but that’s OK. I tried to do it, but I hadn’t killed The Rotten yet, and he’s considered the boss of the area. You can’t Bonfire Ascetic it up before you kill the boss.
I’m finally in Drangleic Castle. There are just so many ways that the game intentionally tries to fuck you over, it’s annoying. It’s with the use of camera angles, mostly. There are times when you just cannot see the enemies in the area because of how the camera is angled.
There has been a lot of debate about Miyazaki’s feeling for his fans after the first game was released. Not about the fans as people, but about the players of Dark Souls. Some people think he hates the players and wants them to be miserable. Some other people think that he wants players to succeed, but is taking a ‘tough love’ approach to it.
Oh. Here is part five of my endless posts about DS II. I’m beyond explaining why I’m still writing about the game and the comparison to Elden Ring. Let’s face it. I will be writing about these games endlessly because I can and because I want to. My main point in writing is to express what is inside, and this is what I’m focused on at the moment. Why? Mostly because the negatives of this game are really standing out after having played Elden Ring. Again, I am one of the minority who actually likes this game. I played it more often than the first game in part because you can fast-travel from the start.
I will say that after Elden Ring, it feels limiting not to be able to fast-travel from anywhere I want. In DS II/SotFS, you can only fast-travel from a bonfire. Which felt revolutionary at the time, but now, it’s so annoying. I’m used to opening my map–
Hey. Let’s talk about that as well. The map, I mean. This is, without a doubt, the best invention of the game. Is that hyperbole? Yes. Is it really how I feel? Also yes. I was one of the people who doubted the inclusion of a map. I knew it had to happen because there was no way to have an open world without a map. That would have been b-r-u-t-a-l. But, I also couldn’t imagine a From game with a map.
Yes, there was a map in Sekiro, but it was a joke map. It was buried in…options, I think, and it was just a sparse map of the overworld. I liked to joke that *sigh* Activision (obligatory fuck Activision here) insisted there be a map and this was Miyazaki’s begrudging response. “You want a map? FINE. I’ll give you a damn map, but you’ll never be able to find it.”
It’s the same with the name of the game. The official name is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It was just going to be Sekiro. Shadows Die Twice was Miyazaki’s placeholder name for the game. Execs at Activision loved it and insisted that it be included in the actual name. Which is funny because no one calls it by the full name–only Sekiro.
I really appreciate that about him. Yes, he has to work within the constrains of whatever publisher is telling him what to do, but he’s still going to do it his way. This started with Demon’s Souls, by the way. He was given free rein with that game, which is probably why it’s the quirkiest of them all. The bosses are puzzles, most of them, and it’s more about puzzling it out than brute strength. This was also the first time in recent memory that a game had hidden consequences.
I’ll tell you what I mean. This is a huge spoiler for Demon’s Souls. Yes, the game is old, but it recently got remade so I wanted to point this out. There is an NPC you run across in a cage. Yurt, the Silent Chief. Who looks fucking badass, by the way. You can choose to let him go or not. If you do let him go, you can kill him (of course) or not. If you don’t, he disappears from the area because that’s what NPCs sometimes do in this game. Then, you go about your business and forget about Yurt. Maybe you think to look for him in the Nexus, and he’s there. You have a little chat with him, but you don’t think anything of it.
Then, the next time you kill a boss, you notice that there’s a bloodstain in the Nexus (not that it’s unusual as people regularly kill themselves in the Nexus for World Tendency reasons) with loot attached to it. And there’s another. Weird. What is going on? If you don’t figure it out, you just go through the rest of the game. When you return to the Nexus again after killing a boss, you notice that one of the NPCS is dead. This goes on for the rest of the game. What’s going on? It’s Yurt. He believes he’s on a mission from god to eradicate the apostates, which are the ones who use sorceries.
I’m sure that there are people that never pieced it together. I’m not sure I would have if I played the game without knowing that bit. But how fucking cool is it that it exists? I mean, it’s such an interesting idea, although I have never seen someone play the game who didn’t know it was going to happen. Well, that’s not exactly true. Rory from RKG didn’t know, nor did Gav, the G. Krupa knew because he had played it already, but he kept it to himself. That’s one of my favorite things about Retry, but the way. Krupa’s knowing glances at the camera when Rory was about to run across something amazing.
OK. I’m done now. I’m sure I’ll have another post about it tomorrow.