SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE
A call to nifty prosthetic arms
Format PS4 ETA 22 Mar Pub Activision Dev FromSoftware
FromSoftware’s latest gives you the right to bear arms as the One-Armed Wolf. Using your prosthetic, you can batter assailants with an arm-mounted axe, lob shuriken at them, or burn them away using the flamethrower. You can’t use these add-ons willy-nilly as they are resourcebased (and besides, you’ll be preoccupied with staying alive). The crossing of swords is a complex dance. You can’t just swing wildly until your opponent keels over. It’s all about the posture bar, which both you and opponents have. Posture can be whittled away by perfectly timing your blocks to meet incoming attacks, attacking, and pulling off a special kind of dodge known as a ‘mekiri’. Some attacks will cause the kanji character for danger to appear, signalling that you cannot block them and you’ll need to try something else. One way to deal with this sort of attack is to perform a mekiri, and dodge into it. Few opponents will expect that, hence this move destabilising even the most stoic enemy’s poise.
If you sneak up on the unwitting or sufficiently whittle away at another foe’s posture, a red orb will appear, showing you can go in for a Shinobi execution with u. Weaker enemies will go down after one of these killing blows, and many bosses can only be finished off this way. For both, the end comes in a red plume.