One Arm, No Mercy
I’d spent hundreds of hours in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, learning the grammar of FromSoftware games—the patience, the reads, the carefully timed counterattacks. Sekiro uses that language but speaks a completely different dialect.
You play as an unnamed swordsman, though the game calls you Sekiro, which means one-armed wolf.
You’ve already lost an arm and nearly died when the story picks you up. You’re bound by oath to a young nobleman—some aristocrat with a cursed bloodline or secret power—and when he gets kidnapped, you chase everyone responsible through Sengoku-era Japan. That’s the premise. There’s no mystery about your goal, no blank-slate character building, no second-guessing the story’s direction. You know who you are and what you need to do.
The Sengoku period is the late 1500s, Japan tearing itself apart. Miyazaki, the director, specifically chose this era over the Edo period because it was rougher, bloodier, more brutal. It matters. The world you move through is collapsing, and you move through it as a one-armed man with a prosthetic that can ignite or transform into a saw blade or chain whip. The historical setting grounds the fantasy in something real—you’re not fighting shadow demons, you’re fighting warriors who were actual soldiers in an actual war.
The combat philosophy is where Sekiro completely breaks from its predecessors. Dark Souls rewards patience. You wait, you observe, you punish mistakes. That gets you killed in Sekiro. Miyazaki explained his thinking plainly: a ninja doesn’t fight like a knight. A knight has armor, reach, options. A ninja is constantly on the edge of death, exposed, taking enormous risks because that’s the only way to survive. So Sekiro is built on aggression and vulnerability at once. You’re forced to attack relentlessly, which sounds like it should be reckless, but the game’s designed so that recklessness, when executed precisely, is your only winning strategy.
Then there’s the resurrection system. You die, but you can resurrect in place, mid-fight, and keep going. This isn’t a kindness. It’s the opposite. It lets the game be harder because you’re not losing progress every death. It lets Miyazaki create encounters where you genuinely might die at any moment, where one mistake cascades into a second and third. And it matters to the story too—the resurrections are tied to who your character is, part of the mystery surrounding him and the boy he’s sworn to protect.
Compared to Dark Souls, Sekiro strips away the RPG stuff. No character building, no leveling, no new weapons to find and experiment with. You learn one character’s entire moveset and you fight enemies designed to destroy anyone who doesn’t understand them completely. It’s more direct, more focused, meaner. And because your character has a name and a story and a specific goal, the opening is clearer—you’re not confused about where you are or why. You know.
Dark Souls players will probably be drawn to this. But not for the same reasons. It’s faster and crueler and it asks for something different—not caution but ferocity, not patience but controlled aggression. And that historical setting changes something too. The violence feels more grounded. The stakes feel heavier.
You’ll die constantly. Everyone does. Most people will quit at some point. But if you can sit with it, if you can accept that the game is designed for you to fail repeatedly and that failure is the path to success, there’s something here that no other game offers. Sekiro doesn’t want your friendship. It wants your absolute concentration.