Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Catch-All

brokenclavicle wrote:

I beat the True dude a couple of days ago. I can see how it can get frustrating. Generally, with games of this ilk, when I get frustrated and can see that I'm somehow reading the moves but reacting erroneously, I take a break for a few days. That usually improves my approach. It's proven successful more often than not.

Wish I could give more practical, actionable advice, but it reads like you know what you're doing, just misfiring for one reason or another. When that happens to me, the above tends to set me straight.

Yep, I had to do that for the previous boss-block. This one felt like I was just miscuing too many times in a row. Tonight, 3rd attempt and we're off to the races.

So now I explore the FANCY PLACE. Oh good, new annoying enemies.

Oh man, I'm on a bit of a high right now, I just beat...

Spoiler:

Shinobi Owl on top of the tower! I had a few goes at him previously and my best attempt was getting him to half of his health for the first phase. I looked up a few strategies and videos so I could study his move set a bit more. I had one or two more goes with the same results - dying without too much trouble caused.

My goal for today was to just get to a point where I was more comfortable with his moves and could at least get into the second phase. I think the thing that threw me most on this fight was the fact he has no perilous attacks to counter, which is something I've been good at in other fights. He's also fairly unpredictable.

So, anyway, I get him into the second phase for the first time and I'm fairly happy with myself, I think I'll see where it takes me, as I still had around 4/9 gourd refills left. I didn't really try go for much posture damage, more trying to read the attacks, dodge, and get a quick hit in. I found what really helped was:

First phase: Double Ichimonji
Second phase: Mortal Blade

I noticed that with my Mortal Blade attacks, I'd whittled him down to around half his health, which is when I started to believe I could really do it. I got poisoned once with a stupid mistake, so popped a divine grass to be ultra-cautious. I was one shot away from death (but had a revive in hand), but just saw an opportunity to end it and took it! I was hammering the R1 button at the end to make sure I wouldn't miss any of those extra deathblows.

So that was unexpected for me. Onto the final stretch!

Trying to figure out

Spoiler:

Lady Butterfly

Good (well, better) runs start at 36:40 of this video:

The second phase is sure a thing. I'm really digging figuring this one out and I feel like I go from having ZERO clue what to do at the start of the video to getting close by the last couple of runs. If anyone spots mistakes or has pointers, I'm all ears.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

The second phase is sure a thing. I'm really digging figuring this one out and I feel like I go from having ZERO clue what to do at the start of the video to getting close by the last couple of runs. If anyone spots mistakes or has pointers, I'm all ears.

It looks like you're relying primarily on blocking instead of dodging which already puts you ahead of most players at this phase in the game, so good job there. After watching a couple of your later attempts, I can offer a few tips.

1) Start weaving in deflections to your defense. You don't need to deflect every attack, but if even 20% of those blocks were deflections in that first run where you made it to phase 2, you would have had her in deathblow range much sooner. If you're nervous about getting hit while learning the deflect timings, just try spamming the block button instead of perpetually holding it. You'll deflect some of her attacks without even trying. On the other hand, you seem to have a pretty good rhythm down for this fight, so this is a lesson you could start tackling after you win this fight.

2) You're making it through the first phase with relative ease, but since you're out of spirit emblems by the end, your main strategy is out the window for phase 2. I'd suggest saving some by allowing her to finish the perilous jump grab attack. You can reliably dodge this by dodging straight back when she launches at you and combo this into a charged R1. You can do the same thing when she does her stair climb into drop kick attack. This should help you save spirit emblems for the more dangerous phase 2.

3) Phase 2 is phase 1 + illusion summon and magic projectiles. When she summons the illusions, I typically either fight her away from them or run and hide until she dismisses them. When they're dismissed, you can easily avoid the magic volley by running around or hiding behind a pillar. As for the projectiles, dodge what you can, but don't be afraid to eat a few through a block or deflect if dodging will get you hit. Otherwise, the strategy for phase 2 is mostly the same as phase 1.

Thanks - that's all super helpful! I didn't know the illusions would be dismissed eventually and that makes me eager to jump back in. I was reticent to use the one snap seed I have (I also tend to be not the smoothest at inventory scrolling while fighting) so if I can get grind out that first phase and then outlast the illusions, I bet I can take her.

So mad I'm at work right now and not at home!

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I was reticent to use the one snap seed I have (I also tend to be not the smoothest at inventory scrolling while fighting)

Thankfully, snap seeds are not at all essential for this fight.

On inventory scrolling, remember that you can pause now! There is zero penalty to pausing and using an item from your inventory if you think item scrolling mid-battle will get you in trouble. I did this all the time.

In fact, I usually just left 2-3 items on my quick scroll item so it wouldn't be so fiddly and relied on pausing for all other items.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

Trying to figure out

Spoiler:

Lady Butterfly

Good (well, better) runs start at 36:40 of this video:

The second phase is sure a thing. I'm really digging figuring this one out and I feel like I go from having ZERO clue what to do at the start of the video to getting close by the last couple of runs. If anyone spots mistakes or has pointers, I'm all ears.

Dyni makes some good points. For me, this fight is one of the first lessons in why it pays to be aggressive in this game. You want to take down her posture bar rather than health, try trade a few blows over and over and get those deflections in; it's a fight you want to stay up close in. As mentioned, save most of your emblems for the second phase. I got through the fight without using any snap seeds, on the 2nd phase I just ran around the perimeter until the illusions went away.

You G.damn dirty (guardian) ape.

The Sekiro NPC I currently feel the most sorry for is the archer that is waiting outside of Lady Butterfly's chamber.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

The Sekiro NPC I currently feel the most sorry for is the archer that is waiting outside of Lady Butterfly's chamber.

Better than taking an arrow to the knee.

Was I the only one who didn't realize you could pause the game and use items until I was literally on the last boss? I was so used to the souls games I assumed the game could not be paused...

Endgame / final boss spoilers.

Spoiler:

I have been on Isshin Sword Saint for four or five hours now. Genichiro is like fighting an early-game miniboss with an overleveld endgame character - I put him down without getting touched almost every time.

Phase 1 of Sword Saint is never perfect - I feel like there are some punishes that I absolutely can't deflect in time, and sometimes it happens when I don't feel like I shouldn't be able to deflect. I'm getting much better at reading him though.

Phase 2 has been a bit of a bugger, but I finally feel like I'm learning it. I've gotten there on at least 3/4ths of attempts, but it took me a long time to figure out which dangerous attack to counter, which one to avoid, and that the big, sweeping spear attacks that swipe in a huge circle can actually be countered, and I don't have to desperately try to get away from him during those. My most recent attempt on him with all of these things in mind went quite well, until it didn't.

I hit Phase 3 only once, apparently out of luck with Phase 2, because this was well before I had figured out all of those details of that phase. It ended rather quickly - with the skies becoming stormy, I had a good idea of what was coming, but I anticipated the lightning attacks WAY too early and got shocked twice in a row, with no resurrections left. I don't really know exactly how Phase 3 is going to go otherwise, but if it's just Phase 2 with lightning, I feel like that actually might be easier, getting backup from lightning counters.

But man am I ready to be done with this game. I can only get maybe 6 or 7 attempts in before my left hand starts to cramp up from the unconsciously strong grip I have on the controller. I just want to beat this motherf*cker so I can save scum the three main endings, get into NG+ so I can get the Shura ending, and enough Lapis and XP to fill out the rest of those trees, and then take a break.

Ugh. That sounds like a lot of work, too, though. Maybe someday.

You're correct about phase three, so yeah, it's a lot easier if you nail the counters.

NSMike wrote:

Endgame / final boss spoilers.

Spoiler:

I have been on Isshin Sword Saint for four or five hours now. Genichiro is like fighting an early-game miniboss with an overleveld endgame character - I put him down without getting touched almost every time.

Phase 1 of Sword Saint is never perfect - I feel like there are some punishes that I absolutely can't deflect in time, and sometimes it happens when I don't feel like I shouldn't be able to deflect. I'm getting much better at reading him though.

Phase 2 has been a bit of a bugger, but I finally feel like I'm learning it. I've gotten there on at least 3/4ths of attempts, but it took me a long time to figure out which dangerous attack to counter, which one to avoid, and that the big, sweeping spear attacks that swipe in a huge circle can actually be countered, and I don't have to desperately try to get away from him during those. My most recent attempt on him with all of these things in mind went quite well, until it didn't.

I hit Phase 3 only once, apparently out of luck with Phase 2, because this was well before I had figured out all of those details of that phase. It ended rather quickly - with the skies becoming stormy, I had a good idea of what was coming, but I anticipated the lightning attacks WAY too early and got shocked twice in a row, with no resurrections left. I don't really know exactly how Phase 3 is going to go otherwise, but if it's just Phase 2 with lightning, I feel like that actually might be easier, getting backup from lightning counters.

But man am I ready to be done with this game. I can only get maybe 6 or 7 attempts in before my left hand starts to cramp up from the unconsciously strong grip I have on the controller. I just want to beat this motherf*cker so I can save scum the three main endings, get into NG+ so I can get the Shura ending, and enough Lapis and XP to fill out the rest of those trees, and then take a break.

Ugh. That sounds like a lot of work, too, though. Maybe someday.

I'm there with you, the first fight I can do fairly easy, but I haven't even got the main even'ts first phase finished once!

UPDATE: So, I looked up a few videos to get his pattern down

Spoiler:

I can get through Genichiro without even taking a hit, he's very easy to build up posture on, and since I struggled with that fight originally, I pretty much know all his moves already.

Most tutorials seem to suggest you should keep your distance and pick your shots, but I'm having more luck with getting in there duking it out with Isshin. Mainly as I think my stong point is Miriki counters. I've got him into the 2nd phase a few times now, although I'm struggling with that one a bit more.

The last two endgame fights feel like they will be a slog. So I ran around doing some side stuff that I missed before that's still available. That was cool. I missed one major late game side quest though ...

Spoiler:

Owl 2

Which will probably be a real problem if I try to do it in NG+.

Don't forget the umbrella. You can use it to absorb the gunshots and hit him back with that damage.

And I'm done!

So I was determined today to finish the game in the morning, as today is a bank holiday in the UK. I had quite an odd last session with the game

Spoiler:

I could go most fights barely taking a hit off Genichiro, blasting through. But today, I had a few stupid deaths to him. I can't remember on the actual winning run if I did die to him or not!

With Isshin the sword saint, I was focusing on learning his move set, and I was getting very good with it. At phase one, I'd definitely recommend standing toe-to-toe with him rather than running and picking shots. Is Miriki counters are fairly easy to build up posture. I was getting fairly consistent with getting to his phase 2, but using up a fair amount of health.

Phase 2 was a bit of a struggle, it is really hard at this point to trade blows with him. I was struggling to make much of a dent in him and found the pace really hard to keep up with. My biggest nuisance was those rocks that seemed to always get in the way. I'd not even got him onto stage 3.

Onto the actual run with Isshin, I had a great first phase, and was building up posture really fast. I managed to keep most of my health items intact for the next phase, which were very much needed.

In the second phase, I resorted at first to looking for his overhead jump attack to get some damage on him. This allowed me to build up his posture, which seemed like it came out of nowhere really. I'd managed to get him onto the third phase, and in the back of my mind I was saying "oh god, I'm getting a nose bleed up here, what the hell do i do?!"

Watching videos before hand, I was very prepared for the lightning attack. He was gracious enough to treat me with three quick attempts at it, all of which I countered. It was at this point I saw his posture and started to get a bit excited/nervous, and I made a mistake and died. Luckily, I had a restore, got up, and went into him. I just swung and swung until eventually, he went down!

I shouted with delight, and I am currently having a bit of a rest, trying to stop myself from shaking so much. You always do this to me, From Software.

Huh, I haven't actually checked a video for him. I also didn't even think of the Mikiri - I basically never used it in my normal playthrough anyway, so it's not something I think about as an option most of the time. I may have to check out some videos.

I feel like the developers of the game squeal with joy whenever a relative newcomer to the game suddenly discovers how to beat things with deflects and Mikiri counters over anything other tactic in the game.

It's too bad I'm so bad at both.

It is done.

NG+ will be... in the near future. Not sure I'm quite ready for that right off the bat. But there are some achievements I still need, and I would like to 100% this game, especially since it seems pretty simple to do.

Spoiler:

Still didn't get around to looking up a video, but I paid attention with Mikiri in mind and spotted enough of the thrust attacks that it would likely work on to make good use of it. Reaching phase 3 became a fairly regular thing after that.

I had one attempt right before the kill where I was literally a hair's breadth away from getting that last deathblow, but the tree and rock at the far end of the arena got in the way of me trying to move somewhere and an attack that shouldn't have hit me killed me. That was frustrating, but I was so close that I immediately gave it another try.

The kill attempt was actually easier than the one before, because he did, almost immediately, three lightning attacks, and I countered them all. His health was almost gone, and it was super easy to break his posture after that.

I made heavy use of the firecrackers to block his punishes for healing... and used almost 500 spirit emblems in the process. Luckily before these attempts I had been farming up skill XP in an attempt to max out the skill trees for the achievement related to that (I stopped when I read how much XP could be had in NG+), and a side-effect of the farming was TONS of Sen, so I had actually purchased the max number of spirit emblems possible before the last boss. Hence using almost 500.

That actually allows me to do some math. I know I didn't use all 20 spirit emblems available to me on each attempt, but the math on using 500 means I had, at least, 25 attempts. I'd put it closer to 40. I had a number of attempts where I just jumped off the cliff because it wasn't going as well as I needed it to almost immediately, so that pumped up that count quite a bit. I'm actually somewhat surprised that From still hasn't put some stat tracking into these games. I would love to see my actual number of deaths, resurrections, and boss attempts.

Game post-mortem:

This is probably one of the best From titles I've ever played. Honestly. Soulsborne combat is something quite different, and used to be at the top of my list for satisfying combat, but I think Sekiro has it beat. And they made me like using stealth, which is a miracle, to be honest. I hate stealth games so much, but I think it's because failing at stealth was SO much less punishing than usual, and could be so easily reset while keeping your progress on thinning out a particular area of enemies that it was actually fun to sneak up behind unsuspecting mobs and backstab a ton of them, even if it meant getting caught.

Having just played 5 or 6 hours of only a boss fight, the stark differences between the two styles of play in this game were made much more apparent. After I finished off the last boss, I went back to that farming route to finish filling in the skill XP bar that I had gotten from defeating the final boss, and it took me a second to realign my thinking and play style to killing more mundane enemies. I think that probably highlights the difficulty of this game. In Soulsborne games, the combat does not change significantly from mobs to bosses, but you are thinking quite differently between the two in Sekiro, and if you don't spend a lot of time in the more rare style of gameplay that is a boss fight, and go back to the main game, you may not precisely notice the differences, nor easily learn the lessons between the two. And then, of course, they throw you some curve balls with certain bosses that don't fit either model entirely well.

I will finish by saying that I normally don't bother with DLC for a game I've finished, no matter who has made it, and I only played the Dark Souls DLC because it was baked into the Prepare to Die edition when I first played it. I have not finished, nor even given a real attempt at, the DLC for Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, or Dark Souls 3. But I really am looking forward to Sekiro DLC. I want more, and I hope they give it soon.

I beat the Ape but I cheesed him. I dont feel too happy about it.

I got lucky and made it through

Spoiler:

Demon of Hatred

This is the best because you can use

Spoiler:

the umbrella that completely protects you from huge firestorms exploding all over the screen.

Anyway. On to the finals.

BTW

Spoiler:

Does this boss really call you loooossserrrr when you die sometimes?

I've been taking a break from Sekiro for a few weeks, but I do plan on coming back to finish it. Meanwhile, today Amazon sent the official strategy guide from Futurepress, and like their other guides, it is gorgeous.

I have now gotten back to where I'd left off before my long rock n' roll weekend. Found some thundery dudes in a watery place, then found a miniboss I'd run into in an underground area earlier in the game.

Spoiler:

The Fountain Palace is gorgeous, and the bowmen were a bit of a pain, but I managed to get to another Shichimen miniboss and wreck him in three tries. I must be getting rusty.

I called it a night at that point. Gonna give it a bit more time tonight, if I can stay awake.

Apparently the way to handle a certain Mr. Spearpants is to be drunk while fighting him.

Not drunk - Died about ten times.
drunk - Flawlessly took him out with a strategy that was a full 180 from what I had been slowly figuring out.

I particularly love

Spoiler:

The way the game hints at you that being drunk IRL will be helpful, by having the sculptor open up whenever you give him his "tea."

Soooo I seem to have reached the end - minus a small area with an NPC that I didn't want to talk to yet - of the Fountainhead Palace.

Spoiler:

Managed to kill an Underwater Headless that appeared as two iterations thereof, but once one died, the other disappeared. Also saw the pot noble quests to their end, which ended with me poisoning the giant carp that had been a pain before when I was trying to get through the underwater cavern in the palace. After that, I was all pooped out from exploring and going back and forth.

I feel like there's a boss coming. I honestly thought it would be that big fish, but that wasn't the case. Maybe something else underwater?

brokenclavicle wrote:

I feel like there's a boss coming. I honestly thought it would be that big fish, but that wasn't the case. Maybe something else underwater?

Perhaps....

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Godzilla-King-of-Monsters-42319-625x352.jpg)

JC wrote:
brokenclavicle wrote:

I feel like there's a boss coming. I honestly thought it would be that big fish, but that wasn't the case. Maybe something else underwater?

Perhaps....

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Godzilla-King-of-Monsters-42319-625x352.jpg)

Yup hahaha

Definitely had a fun time with that...

Spoiler:

Managed to beat him on my first try, the Divine Dragon. Not that hard... just had to figure out which tree to grapple to, which I did by accident, but once the connection was made, it was easy, peacy thereafter.
Exploring Ashina Castle after that, with Isshin dying, I went to where he used to be and found a suped-up version of a samurai mini-boss I'd beaten without much issue many hours before. The amount of damage he does is staggering. I got a little tilted, so I thought I should put it down after three angering attempts. I'll hit that cantankerous bastard tomorrow or the day after.

Good stuff, though.

Spoiler:

he's got red eyes, just sayin'

The strategy guide came in the mail yesterday. Guess I'd better actually consider purchasing the game now.