It’s been one year since I wrote my first little segment and set up this website. It’s been a year of challenges; Covid-19, war in Europe, the upcoming economic recession shaped like an abandoned Chinese skyscraper looming over us all, you name it. At the end of the day, or year, it’s been a net gain for me. Most years are, if I’m honest. Even bad things can be taken as experiences that you learn from. Every cloud has a silver lining. Or, going by today’s theme, a platinum lining.

When the cold and darkness arrived this winter I thought that the perfect swan song for this challenging year would be to complete one of the most challenging video games I have ever player, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice by From Software, known for my previous post about Elden Ring. Sekiro follows the From Software template of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay mixed with intricate background storytelling, same as its big brothers Dark Souls and the aforementioned Elden Ring.

The events in Sekiro take place in Ashina, a fictional daimyo of Meiji era Japan. The game revolves around Wolf, a shinobi tasked with protecting Lord Kuro, an immortal dragon boy. At the beginning of the game Lord Kuro gets imprisoned by the daimyo Lord Genichiro Ashina, and Wolf then has to rescue Kuro and find a way to severe his immortality.

The gameplay is simple yet challenging. Wolf is a shinobi and equipped with a katana and a few shinobi tools that can aid him in battle. The primary way to deal with enemies in the game is the katana, taking enemies head-on or picking the off one-by-one from the shadows. The versatile approaches the player can take compensate for the absence of weapon variety. The other tools like the shuriken or the firecrackers can help the player land a few hits here and there but they are rarely game changers.

Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, and coming from there, I had to unlearn some key muscle memories. First off, in Dark Souls the player can choose their weapon, whether it be a sword, a halberd, a giant club made of a dragon’s tooth or a spell. As previously mentioned, in Sekiro you either use your katana or turn off the game and go to sleep. Second, in Dark Souls you’d be well in your right to run up to incoming enemies and smash them with your big club until you’ve turned them into paste, or dodge roll their attacks and stab them in the back. The main difference between Sekiro and its predecessors is that the combat is 100% more reactive. You could take the approach of charging into a patrolling samurai and wildly swinging your sword, but the results would be poor for your shinobi health. Instead, the intended experience is taking it slow; reading your opponent’s movements and deflecting their strikes, slowly breaking their stance and only striking back at opportune moments. This was the first stumbling block for me, being used to zweihandering my way through Blighttown.

When I picked up the controller I set myself a goal of defeating every boss and every subsequent miniboss as I progressed through the game. There are no stats to increase in this game, save for your vitality, posture and attack power. You need special items to upgrade each of them and your healing flask, and the only way to get them is defeating bosses. This had previously been my downfall; skipping difficult enemies and therefore not being upgraded enough to take on the final boss. That said, I had never beaten the final boss of the game, or the other optional end-game boss. This time, however I vowed to change that.

At this point I have to admit that I no matter how much I like Dark Souls, I like Sekiro despite its differences, maybe even because of. The thing is, I really like Sekiro on paper. The lack of weapon variety means that the challenge is more streamlined and honed for a specific experience. In Dark Souls you can easily break the game by finding a weapon or a spell that goes around the intended challenge curve. In Sekiro, meanwhile, the developers can adjust the difficulty curve better since they know what the players have up their sleeves. In Sekiro the player controls a main character who is an actual character with voice lines and a personality, and not the mute husk of a character like in Dark Souls. This makes the story and its characters more compelling, in my opinion, when you can have an actual conversation about the burden of immortality.

That said, there are some wrinkles on the paper that I like Sekiro on. The events take place in fantasy Japan, and the game being Japanese, granted, it can be really heavy on Japanese folklore and mythology. For example, there are these enemies that look like peacocks with tentacles and that play flutes that steal your youth until you become a withered old man. These enemies, like so many others, are based on actual creatures in Japanese mythology. This is all nice and well in small doses, but I feel that the Japanese oddness can overwhelm me pretty quickly, and that I need a doctorate in Japanese folklore to fully enjoy the game.

Also, while I appreciate the streamlined combat system, I must admit that I really suck at it. As I said, the intended way to defeat enemies is deflecting and parrying their strikes. All well designed, but this essentially turns the game into glorified Guitar Hero, where you have to read the incoming stikes and press the deflect button in rhythm to the enemy’s attack. Then some enemies have taken advanced lessons in combat and use lunges and sweeps that can’t be deflected but have to be countered in specific ways, and switching from deflect to dodge at a moment’s notice make my fingers tangle up and an enraged samurai, in turn, turns Wolf into a shish kebab.

After going through a few mental training sessions and getting my ass handed to me enough times, I finally made it and was able to beat the final boss and all the possible preceding bosses for the first time in my life. I don’t have an OCD or anything related to that, but I find that if I am playing a game that I enjoy on every level, gameplay, story and challenge included, I can’t let it go until I have achieved everything there is to achieve. I was playing this game on PlayStation 5, and Sony has this achievement tracking system where they give you virtual trophies for every pre-established achievement. I went through the list of trophies and set myself a goal to get each and every one of them.

There are easy trophies that are story-related and practically impossible to miss; those are the bronze trophies. There are trophies that require some amounts of skill to get; those are the silver ones. There are trophies that require an extensive amount of skill or time to get; those are the gold trophies. Then there is a trophy for getting every available trophy on the list; this is the platinum one, which every game has. That’s how you know if a player is a connoisseur of a particular game by checking whether or not they have the platinum trophy.

Getting the platinum trophy in Sekiro requires a lot of time and effort. Basically you have to beat the game at least once, with some post-game shenanigans. You have to beat every boss in the game, which is pretty standard. You also have to maximize your vitality, upgrade your shinobi tools and healing flask to their maximum levels and, last but definitely not the least, acquire every available shinobi technique in the game. Now, the last point doesn’t sound the hardest, but to get every technique you need to spend skill points to acquire them, and you get skill points by gathering enough experience by defeating enemies. Every skill point gained raises the amount of needed experience for the next one, and by the last one I was spending several dozens of minutes giving impromptu katana spinal surgeries to the one Central Ministry shinobi by the Castle Antechamber idol.

But at the end of the day, again, I grinded my way to the top and was awarded with the platinum trophy for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It may not mean anything to anyone else, or even to myself for that matter, but as I said, life is made of small net gains. I really like Sekiro for what it’s worth and I feel good about completing it as it was intended. That’s the final word, really. I’ll now bestow a shiny award upon you for reaching the end of this ultimately pointless post. A net gain, right?