Sifu Catch-All

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Ok this was a Horizon: Forbidden West Catch-all until it was pointed out that I already made one of those so now it’s a Sifu thread. The other imminent game that I’m incredibly excited for.

It’s a day one purchase if reviews and impressions are favourable and no game is ever a day one purchase for me.

https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...

You’re so excited you forgot you already made a thread.

Wow. As you say, it was even me who made it. Incredible. I think I might repurpose this thread. Thanks.

Hopefully I haven’t already made a Sifu thread.

Nice save.

I only noticed so quickly because I’m excited about HFW too and was looking at the other thread for the first time yesterday.

Sifu, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Delete Absolver from My Steam Wishlist

If reviews are very good I'm getting this straight away. My inner Jackie Chan is ready to be unleashed.

Have you seen The Raid (full title: The Raid: Redemption) Spikeout? Some of the combat reminds me of the brutal corridor fights in that film.

Higgledy wrote:

Have you seen The Raid (full title: The Raid: Redemption) Spikeout? Some of the combat reminds me of the brutal corridor fights in that film.

Yep remember way back in the day going to the cinema to see The Raid & was blown away by the choreography of the fight scenes. It was truly something else.

I think it's the combination of how detailed the kung fu looks as well as the amount of interactivity in the environments that has me most excited.

That last video with Alannah is so good because she’s really into the pace of the combat. I can see it having a superb flow when you get going and the interactive environmental stuff is just the icing on the cake. Can’t wait.

Absolver was a lot of fun so I may fire that back up until Sifu.

I picked Absolver back up last year after falling off it during the tutorial a long time ago. It was very good. Fun challenging fights but not too tough.

I do like the aesthetic, I just worry that, even though dying is apparently a mechanic, I might get frustrated dying so often. Also among my claims to fame is that I went to The Raid 2 at Sundance, how is that relevant, it's not, but it made people here and in the meat space jealous, so I'm mentioning it. The Raids rule.

Just over a week to go. It feels simultaneously like January has flown by but that we’re approaching the release date for Sifu at a snails pace.

There’s going to be a physical edition in May with an art book and lithographs.

Also:

The reviews are coming in. These are both extremely positive.

And another. Just started watching.

A very thoughtful, and likely helpful, review by Skillup.

SU's review sure gives me a lot to think about. I'm replaying Sekiro right now and sometimes I'll say, "yeah I beat the boss but I also made a bunch of mistakes where I could have no-hit them." So Sifu's philosophy is intriguing. But I might want to finish that replay before I add this to my plate.

Thanks for including that review. I've also read the one in The Guardian.

I'd been keeping an eye out for this game since reading an article about it in Edge magazine some time last year. But this isn't what I was expecting or wanted.

As I understand it, there is no meaningful story draped around the basic game. So, this is a stripped back brawler which tests memory and mastery, and rewards players only with a succession of Pyrrhic victories unless and until they can complete each level in the most efficient and effective way possible.

("If we win another such battle with the Romans, then we will be completely lost.", as Plutarch wrote.)

So, Sekiro x Returnal x spite-with-a-dash-of-unfairness...

*Adopts Duncan Bannatyne voice from 'Dragons Den'*

"Aaahm oot!"

EDIT:

Out until the game arrives in the bargain bin, priced at £10.

Heh exact opposite reaction for me. The Skillup review switched me from meh, to "now I really want to try it".

Yeah I was pretty set on getting this as my first official PS5 game but I'll definitely take in some reviews and impressions before buying. Not sure I want another Sekiro/Nioh/Souls-style game right now.

That Skillup review was very helpful. It sounds like I'm the target audience for this game, but I'm not picking up anything new until I'm done with Horizon and Elden Ring, so not the best timing. I'll grab it later this year.

I'm all over this so I ended up preordering the Deluxe to be able to fart around with it a day early.

Initial reaction: I am absolutely the target audience for this. I'm loving the aesthetic (visuals + soundtrack) and the combat feels incredibly satisfying. That said, I have not historically been a fan of mercilessly difficult games (e.g., never played a Dark Souls intentionally) so part of this experience is intended to make me a more patient gamer. Wish me luck.

I haven't gotten much further since my last post, but that's not because I haven't been playing... it's because I'm an analytical detail-oriented fighting game nerd that doesn't want to bounce off this game's difficulty.

After finishing the intro portion, I watched a streamer play through it. He walked through the first door immediately and within seconds was engaged, mashing buttons (you could hear him clicking away) and sort of figuring things out on the fly. He got through the intro in about 20 minutes in the same fashion.

For contrast, I put 30-45 minutes into the game before even walking through that first door. I opened the in-game move list, broke out a notebook, and wrote down every move and combo before attempting them all myself just to get a feel for timing, how each move works/uses space, etc. Only then did I go through that door and play through the intro. As far as I can tell the intro sequence is safe (you can't die), so I really sandboxed it up.

I enjoyed the safe experimentation and cinematic moments so much I started a second savegame and played through the entire intro sequence again, noticing I was already getting a lot more adept with the system and varying moves to keep things interesting. I may actually run through it once more just for the cinematic experience before I really dive in.

I am really digging this.

Edit: i did all this without knowing there is a training mode. Doh.

Destructoid review

The difficulty comes in just how easily you can die. It is so, so easy to get surrounded and suffer an unstoppable onslaught of fists and feet until you perish. Luckily, you have more than just martial arts on your side. Your family’s medallion allows you to recover and get back up, at the cost of time. Every time the student falls, they can get back up by foregoing years of their life.

It starts out easy enough: die at 20, your death counter goes up to one, and you rise at age 21. The next fall will up your death counter, and thus add more years to your penance. Soon, you’re not losing a year on each recovery, but five or six. And you hurtle ever closer towards your 70s, the decade at which you will stop getting back up.

To put it bluntly, Sifu is difficult. It’s one of the harder games I’ve played in recent memory, and it demands a lot of you. Part of that difficulty is in the moment-to-moment fighting. Managing a crowd of enemies can be tough, especially when they start to use deadly weapons and switch up attacks, going for sweeps and hitting with such strength that your strikes won’t stagger them.

I’d forgotten how long it takes me to grasp different combat systems. It’s going to take me a while to learn this one. I can see myself spending a long time on the first level. Fortunately the fights are fun and engaging which I need to keep me coming back for more.

You do die super fast if you get surrounded. I think it’s a question of acclimatising to the speed at which your health bar can go down and fighting accordingly.

Picked it up.. I passed the first level but it took me to 44 years old.. UNACCEPTABLE.. so now I'm going back to the first level and resetting if I die once. Well not really but if I die early I'll just reset.. I haven't gotten very far on my second attempt at a sub 30-year old run

I have a hard time figuring out the parry timing. I know you can't turtle since it has that Sekiro like "structural" stat but successful blocking seems like a guessing game and there isn't a lot of visual or audio queues when you do it correctly. A slight stagger maybe... not like the satisfying sword "clangs" of sekiro. Also don't quite understand the value of the up/down block? if a normal block can parry, why add the up or down? Maybe its not that useful on the first level, and I should just stick to normal blocks and dodges.

If you look on the board when you first start in your dojo, there are some post-its containing various gameplay tidbits. One of those is about using 'avoid' for defense instead of 'deflect' and states that time slows down while avoiding and that hitting the enemy in this state is an instant stun. That MIGHT be the up/down block, need to test in the dojo to confirm.

Agathos wrote:

I'm replaying Sekiro... But I might want to finish that replay before I add this to my plate.

Okay, that's done, let's see what we have here.

Wow, this is hard.

I seem to favor dodges over timed parries. Feels safer, since I'm already holding down the block button and there are so many unblockable roundhouse kicks and such out there.

It took me a while to figure out focus attacks (was there a tutorial for those somewhere?) but they seem pretty devastating. On my latest run of stage 1, it only took a few minutes to earn the 5X cost to unlock one permanently, so I expect to grab a few more while I try to finish it young. Right now I'm 39 going into stage 2.

Ok, any tips for first boss?

I don’t have any tips for the first boss. There are some great general tips in here both from the panel discussion and a developer interview.

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