Final Fantasy VII arrived in Europe in November 1997, and I remember the specific texture of that moment better than I remember most of the game: the Amiga had gone quiet under me, the PlayStation had turned up carrying the future on three discs, and a Japanese role-playing game about a mercenary with a comically large sword was suddenly the thing everyone had an opinion about. Midgar — the opening city, the bombing run, the plate, the slums — took maybe six hours. It was the best six hours on the console and then the game left it behind and went off to be a world map.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, released for PS4 in April 2020, takes those six hours and makes them the whole game. Forty of them, give or take. This is the fact that decided most people’s reaction before they had played a minute of it, and it is the least interesting fact about the thing.

The combat is the achievement

Start here, because the combat system is the part that deserves study, and it is a genuinely clever piece of hybrid engineering rather than a compromise.

You control one party member directly in real time. Attacking builds ATB — the gauge from 1997, now a resource rather than a clock — and spending ATB is how you cast, use an item, or fire an ability. Opening the command menu drops the game into Tactical Mode, where time slows to a crawl while you choose. You can switch to any party member instantly, and the ones you are not controlling fight competently and build ATB slowly on their own.

The read: this is an action game whose action generates the currency of a turn-based game, and whose turn-based game happens inside a bubble of slowed time carved out of the action. It sounds like a fudge. In play it produces something quite precise — you are always simultaneously executing and planning, and the slow-motion menu functions as a held breath.

Then Stagger. Every enemy has a stagger gauge, filled by pressure — pressure being generated by doing the specific thing that enemy dislikes, which the scan spell will tell you. Staggered, they take a burst of extra damage for a window. This mechanic did not come fromFinal Fantasy VII. It came fromFinal Fantasy XIII, and the people who built it are the people who made this: Motomu Toriyama on scenario, Naoki Hamaguchi on game design, both veterans of the XIII trilogy, under Tetsuya Nomura’s direction.XIII was pilloried for a combat system that most players never got far enough in to understand.Remake takes that system’s actual idea — combat as the management of a vulnerability window rather than an exchange of numbers — and wraps it in something you can touch.

That is the real ancestral trace, and it is more honest than the one the marketing wanted.Remake’s fighting isKingdom Hearts hands welded toFinal Fantasy XIII’s brain, made by the people who had both. The 1997 game contributes the Materia system, which returns almost unchanged and remains one of the best build systems anyone has designed: spells are objects, objects go in slots, slots are in gear, and therefore your entire capability is portable between characters at any moment.

Where the design fights itself

Forty hours of Midgar is not, in itself, a crime. Midgar can hold forty hours; the concept is strong enough and the art direction is comprehensively magnificent. The problem is thetexture of the added thirty-four, and specifically that Square Enix appears to have solved a large fraction of them with corridors.

There is a category of moment in this game that everyone who played it can describe: the gap you squeeze sideways through while the level streams, the ladder you climb at a fixed speed, the arm you hold out to a robot claw, the pair of levers that must be pulled in sequence in a room built exclusively to contain two levers. The Train Graveyard chapter and the long descent through the Shinra building are the usual examples cited, and they are cited because they are correct. These are pure duration, purchased at the cost of your goodwill.

I take this seriously because forty hours is a real thing to ask. A game asking for a working week of somebody’s life owes them a reason for every one of those hours, andRemake has stretches where the reason is plainly that the chapter needed to be longer than the content in it. The side quests are the same instinct wearing a friendlier face — go and find some cats, go and kill some rats — and they exist to buy you affection scenes and a slightly better relationship with characters the game could have simply written more scenes for.

What rescues it, and it does mostly rescue it, is that the expansion isspecific where it counts. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are three names and a death in the original. Here they are people with a flat, a family, opinions about Cloud, and a plan; when the plate falls the arithmetic has changed, because you have had dinner with them. Wall Market is no longer a joke and a dress — it is an economy, with Don Corneo sitting on top of it and a genuinely superb set piece built around a piece of 1997 comedy that could have gone very badly and instead goes big, sincere, and slightly magnificent.

The thing it is actually doing

Here is the read that matters. Every remake has to decide what it is faithfulto, and the available options are the text or the memory of the text.Dead Space’s 2023 rebuild chose the text and treated the job as restoration — clean the varnish, fix the joints, do not repaint.Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 chose to argue with its original about tone, and won some of that argument.

Final Fantasy VII Remake chose something stranger and considerably riskier. It is faithful to thememory — to the way Midgar is bigger in your head than it ever was on the disc, to the way Aerith is more important in retrospect than she is in her introduction — and it treats that gap between the game and the recollection as the actual subject. The forty hours are the game rendering your inflated memory at the size your memory has it. That is why the added material is nearly alltexture rather than plot: the plot was never what got exaggerated.

And then it goes further, in a way I will keep below the line.

The verdict

This is a magnificent, sincere, overlong thing, and the overlength follows directly from the ambition. Play it. Play it on PC or PS5 where Intergrade’s performance mode makes the combat legible at the speed it wants to run — the PS5 version arrived in June 2021 with the Yuffie episode attached, and the PC release followed later that year, reaching Steam in 2022. Turn the difficulty to Normal and use Assess on everything; the combat only opens up once you accept that scanning is a verb.

And then decide, honestly, whether you have another eighty hours forRebirth, because the 2024 sequel doubles everything here including the problems.

If you want the argument about endings and structure taken somewhere weirder,Nier: Automata is Square’s other great swing at making the shape of a playthrough into a statement.

Spoilers below

The Whispers. Let us have this out.

From very early on,Remake has ghosts in it — spectral figures who appear whenever the story deviates from the events of 1997 and physically shove it back on course. They stop Aerith from saying a thing. They block a road. They intervene at the moment Barret dies in a way he did not die before, and undo it.

The obvious reading is that they are the game’s own canon, personified and armed. The obvious complaint is that this is Nomura being Nomura: a metafictional device bolted onto a story that did not need one, resolved in a final act where the party fights the concept of fate in a sky arena while a dead character from a spin-off walks past.

I have gone back and forth and I have landed here: the Whispers are the honest expression of what this project is. Square Enix could not remakeFinal Fantasy VII straight — the original exists, is playable on everything, and is better than a straight remake would be at the only thing a straight remake could offer. What they could do is make a game about the pressure of the original’s existence, in which the characters are pushed around by a force that wants events to go the way you remember. The Whispers are the audience. They are the wiki. They are the decades of accumulated players who know Aerith dies and will riot if she does not.

And the ending — the party choosing to fight that force, and the game closing on a Midgar that has explicitly diverged from the one on the discs — is a studio saying out loud that it refuses to be a museum. I think the execution is muddled. The sky arena is bad. The Sephiroth escalation arrives about six hours before it has been earned. But theidea is the boldest thing a major publisher has done with its own back catalogue, and the alternative — a respectful, tasteful, identicalFinal Fantasy VII with better shaders — would have been a much safer game and a much emptier one.

The thing you remember is not the thing that happened.Remake knows that, and builds the knowledge into the plot. Whether it can land the consequences across three games is a question for the third one.

I playedDoom in 1993 on a beige tower that a friend’s older brother had talked his parents into, and what I remember is the width of it — you strafed, you circled, you emptied a shotgun into a room and the room emptied back. The game asked for nerve and spatial sense. It did not ask for a plan.

Doom Eternal asks for a plan. id Software released it on 20 March 2020 for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Stadia, with a Switch port arriving that December, and it remains the most divisive big-budget action design of its generation for one reason: game director Hugo Martin and his team took a shooter and built a puzzle game inside it. Five years on, the people who bounced off it have not come back, and the people who clicked with it have never really stopped playing. Both camps are responding to the same mechanic. They just disagree about whether a first-person shooter is allowed to have a correct answer.

The triangle

Here is the design, stated as plainly as it deserves.

Ammunition is scarce, and the reserves are small enough that you will empty a weapon during any serious fight. Your refill is the chainsaw, which regenerates one fuel pip on a timer, and one pip is enough to open a small demon and spray ammo across the floor.

Health is scarce, and the pickups are thin. Your refill is the Glory Kill — stagger a demon, punch it apart, take the health it drops.

Armour is scarce. Your refill is the Flame Belch, which sets a demon burning so that everything you subsequently land on it sheds armour shards.

Three needs, three verbs, each verb requiring you to be inside the fight rather than backing out of it. That is the whole engine, and it is whyEternal moves the way it does. The 2016 reboot introduced the Glory Kill and called the philosophy push-forward combat.Eternal takes the same idea and closes every exit. You cannot turtle, because turtling starves you. You cannot hoard, because the reserves are too small to hoard into. The only route to resources runs through the demon standing in front of you, and the game has arranged for a demon to always be standing in front of you.

Why the arena is a lock

The second layer is where the argument really lives: weapon-specific weaknesses.

The Mancubus has arm cannons that come off to a precise shot. The Revenant has shoulder launchers. The Arachnotron has a turret on its back that can be sheared away, which stops it suffering you at range. The Cacodemon will swallow a grenade fed into its open mouth and go straight into a stagger. The Carcass throws up a barrier that the Super Shotgun tears down. The Pain Elemental floats where only certain tools reach.

Every demon, then, is a lock with a named key, and an arena is a queue of locks opening at you simultaneously. The mental loop that results is genuinely strange for a shooter: the dominant activity issorting. Which threat resolves fastest, which weapon is loaded, do I have the fuel to open a fodder demon for ammo before the Mancubus commits, can I dash twice to reposition before the Revenant’s second volley lands. The pace is frantic and the thinking is turn-based. Hugo Martin has described the fantasy as being an apex predator running a chess board at 200 miles an hour, and that is an accurate description of what the pad is doing.

The result is a combat system where two competent players can look completely different. One is playingDoom Eternal. The other is playingDoom (2016) inDoom Eternal’s costume, running out of ammo every fifteen seconds, and hating every minute.

Why people hate it

The complaint is coherent, and dismissing it is lazy.Eternal removes freedom from a series whose entire cultural memory is freedom. If you want to solve a room with the rocket launcher because the rocket launcher is fun, the game will punish you for it, and the punishment arrives as an empty magazine with a Mancubus attached. The design has an opinion about how you should play and it enforces that opinion through the economy rather than through a difficulty slider. Some players experience that as being taught. Others experience it as being managed.

The Marauder is where the argument gets loudest, and it is the fairest test case. He blocks everything outside a specific range band, and he opens for exactly the window in which his eyes flash green — a window you cannot rush, cannot bait early, and cannot skip. He is a rhythm-game boss dropped into a shooter. Fight him correctly and he is the best encounter id has ever built; fight him the way you have fought everything else since 1993 and he is a wall that laughs at you. He is a purer version of whatSekiro does to people, and he provokes the same split: some players hear the game telling them the tempo, and some hear it telling them off.

The platforming is a weaker defence. The monkey bars and the jump pads exist to give the arenas breathing room, and they largely do, but they also drag a game whose best quality is momentum into stretches where the momentum is a chore. Nothing in the traversal is as interesting as the worst fight.

What it is actually descended from

The easy read is thatEternal descends fromDoom II (1994), and it does in the sense that combined-arms encounter design — an archvile behind a crowd, a revenant on a ledge — is where id first learned to make a room think. The deeper ancestor is elsewhere.

Eternal’s real lineage runs through the resource-economy roguelike. The question the game asks you every four seconds — what do I spend, what do I have left, what do I need to be holding twenty seconds from now — is the questionRisk of Rain 2 asks with its clock, which I wrote about inRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock. It is also the question every good arena-shooter map asked in 1999, when the armour and the quad respawned on timers and the entire skill of Quake was knowing where the resources would be before they existed. id’s insight in 2020 was to move that timer off the map and onto the demons. Once the ammo is inside the enemy, spatial control and resource control become the same act, and the shooter collapses into a single verb.

For the boss-rush reading of a similar idea — encounters as locks, each with a tool — the mech that best rhymes with it is inArmored Core VI: The Boss Rush Hiding in a Mech Game.

The verdict

Doom Eternal is the most rigorously designed action game of its era, and the rigour is the reason it will never be universally liked. It is a game with a thesis, and it spends eighteen hours proving the thesis at you. When the loop locks in — chainsaw, Glory Kill, Belch, Super Shotgun into a Cacodemon’s mouth, meat hook to the next problem — nothing else in the genre produces that specific feeling of a hard system dissolving into instinct. When it does not lock in, you are standing in a car park with no bullets, and the game feels like homework someone set you.

The post-launch record backs the thesis.The Ancient Gods, Part One (October 2020) andPart Two (March 2021) tightened the screws rather than loosening them, adding encounters aimed at players who had already internalised the economy. Update 6 added Horde Mode in 2021 — pure arenas, no story, no monkey bars — which is id quietly agreeing about what the game is for. The Denuvo Anti-Cheat component added in May 2020 was pulled within days after players objected, a small episode that says more about the PC community than the game.

Play it on anything that will run it at a high frame rate; the design assumes your inputs are instant and it becomes a different, worse game when they are not. If the economy irritates you in the first two hours, it will irritate you in the last two. That is a real answer, and it is not a failure of the game.

What to play next:Risk of Rain 2 for the same resource pressure expressed as time, andSekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword for the other 2019–20 combat system that insists there is a correct answer and refuses to accept anything else.

Spoilers below

The campaign’s structure is the weakest thing about it, and the lore is whereEternal most conspicuously loses its nerve. The 2016 reboot understood that the Slayer worked because he was a blank — a man who threw a monitor across a room rather than listen to exposition.Eternal answers questions nobody had: the Maykrs, Urdak, Argent D’Nur, the Slayer’s origin as Doom Guy pulled out of a Night Sentinel order, the whole Father-and-Khan-Maykr theology. The joke of 2016 was that the story was an obstacle the protagonist wanted removed. Making the protagonist the centre of a cosmology retires the joke.

The Ancient Gods, Part Two closes it out with a duel against the Dark Lord, a one-on-one that strips away the arena entirely and asks you to parry — the final statement of the Marauder’s argument, aimed directly at the players who spent two years insisting the Marauder was badly designed. It is a fight only somebody who had accepted the game’s terms could enjoy, and it is the most honest endingEternal could have had.

On 25 January 2023, Xbox ran a Developer_Direct, announcedHi-Fi Rush, and put it on sale the same hour. No marketing run-up, no preview embargo, no two-year drip of trailers. Tango Gameworks — the studio Shinji Mikami founded in 2010, best known at that point forThe Evil Within andGhostwire: Tokyo — had made a cel-shaded rhythm-action comedy under director John Johanas and simply let it go. It is the cleanest shadow-drop of the decade, and it worked precisely because the game does something you cannot really convey in a trailer. You have to hold the pad.

Two and a half years on, the release-day novelty has burned off and the design is still standing up, which is the only test that matters. What is left is the most interesting argument anyone has made about rhythm in an action game sinceRez.

Everything is on the beat, including the furniture

The core fact:Hi-Fi Rush runs at 120 beats per minute, and it runseverything at 120 beats per minute. Chai’s attacks resolve on the beat. Enemy telegraphs land on the beat. Platforms rise and fall on the beat. Fans turn, hoardings flash, girders swing, and a robot cat called 808 wags its tail — all on the beat. The world is the click track, rendered.

This is the bit that people underrate. Most rhythm games put the music in one channel and ask you to match it with your thumbs.Hi-Fi Rush dissolves the channel. Every readable object in the frame is a metronome, so you are never listening for the beat as a separate task — you are reading the room, and the room happens to be in 4/4. Losing the beat here feels like losing the plot of a conversation: you fall out of sync with a place, and the place tells you so from every corner of the frame at once.

The fiction earns it, too. Chai is a wannabe rock star who volunteers for Vandelay Technologies’ Project Armstrong to get a prosthetic arm, and his music player falls into the machinery, fuses to his chest, and makes him a defect: the one person in the building who can hear the rhythm the building is moving to. That is the diegetic justification for a HUD that would otherwise be a bar at the bottom of the screen — the beat becomes a fact about Chai before it becomes an interface element.

The generosity is the mechanic

Here is where the design gets genuinely clever, and where it departs from thirty years of rhythm-game orthodoxy.

You cannot fail for being off-beat.

Press attack at the wrong moment and Chai still swings — the game quantises the input to the next beat and lands it. Nothing punishes you. Nothing shatters, no combo counter resets to zero out of spite, no “MISS” strobes across the middle of the fight. What you lose isupside: on-beat hits do more damage, extend combos further, and pay out better ratings at the end of the encounter. The beat is a multiplier on top of a competent character-action game rather than a gate in front of it.

Compare that toCrypt of the NecroDancer (Brace Yourself Games, 2015), which is the closest structural ancestor and which takes exactly the opposite line: step off the beat and your gold multiplier collapses, and in the harder modes your turn simply does not happen. That is a purist’s design and I like it, but it sorts players into those with rhythm and those without within ninety seconds. Tango’s version sorts nobody. It lets a player with no sense of time at all finish the game while still making the beat feel like the most interesting thing in it, because the feedback for finding it is so lavish — the hit pauses, the partner assist chimes in on the downbeat, the whole encounter suddenly reads as choreography instead of as work.

That generosity extends outward. There is a beat-visualiser you can leave on permanently. There is an accessibility option that auto-aligns your inputs outright. The rhythm parry — which arrives partway through, taught by Korsica after she stops trying to kill you — is a timing window like any parry, and the game gives you a metronome to hit it with.Sekiro asks you to internalise the tempo of a duel with no click track at all; I wrote about why that works inSekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword, and the interesting thing is thatHi-Fi Rush arrives at a comparable feeling of locked-in flow by handing you the very information FromSoftware withholds. Both work. They just disagree about whether the tempo should be a secret.

What it owes, and to whom

The visual lineage is legible from the first corridor: the cel shading and the comic-panel sound effects come out ofJet Set Radio (Smilebit, 2000) andViewtiful Joe (Clover, 2003), and the combat vocabulary — light and heavy strings, launchers, a rating screen that grades you at the end of every scrap — is Capcom’sDevil May Cry school, filtered through people who clearly enjoy it without wanting to be brutalised by it.

The real ancestor of thefeeling, though, is older and further sideways. In 1987 I had an Amiga, and the thing that machine did better than anything else in the room was sync visuals to a tracker module — a demo where the bassline drove the geometry, where the music caused the scene.Hi-Fi Rush is that trick, thirty-five years on, with a budget and a character-action game hung off it. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’sRez (2001) is the other obvious forebear, and the connective tissue between all of them is the same insight: the pleasure lies in beinginside a system where causation runs through the rhythm, so that hitting the beat feels like agreement rather than obedience.

Where it fights itself

Three real problems, in ascending order of how much they cost.

The comedy is loud and it is relentless, and it is aimed squarely at a young audience. Chai is written as an idiot with a good heart, and the jokes come at you in a stream. It landed for me more often than it missed. Anyone allergic to the cadence will find eight or nine hours of it a long time.

The rating pressure sits slightly askew from the generosity elsewhere. The game tells you the beat does not matter, then grades your entire encounter on how well you kept it. That tension is productive for most of the run and merely nagging in the back half, when the bosses start demanding rhythm-parry sequences that tighten the window the design has spent hours telling you is loose.

And the platforming is the padding. The traversal between fights is a rhythm game in the least interesting sense — hit the jump on the beat, land on the moving thing — and it exists to space the combat out. Tango knows the combat is the product; the level design keeps interrupting it to prove the world is on the beat, which the world had already proved.

The post-launch work argues the studio knew where the value was. The freeArcade Challenge! update later in 2023 addedPower Up! Tower Up!, a run-based mode with randomised modifiers, andBPM Rush!!, which ratchets the tempo upward as you go. Both do the same thing: strip out the platforming and give you the fights.

The verdict

Hi-Fi Rush is the rare game whose central conceit is load-bearing. The metronome is the skeleton, and the fighting, the level readability and the tone all hang off it correctly. It is the best argument I know that rhythm mechanics do not require punishment to produce flow, and that a design can hand a player every piece of information and still leave them something to master.

Its afterlife is the ugly part. Microsoft closed Tango Gameworks in May 2024, months after the studio shipped a well-reviewed original game and an award-season favourite. Krafton subsequently acquired the studio and theHi-Fi Rush IP in a deal announced that August. The game came to PS5 in March 2024. It is on PC and Xbox, it runs on anything, and it will still be doing this trick in ten years, because 120 BPM does not go out of date.

What to play next:Sekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword for the same flow state with the click track removed, andNine Sols: The Sekiro Parry in a Taopunk Frame for a 2D parry loop that also believes tempo is the whole conversation. If you want the purist counter-argument to Tango’s kindness,Crypt of the NecroDancer is right there, waiting to fail you.

Spoilers below

The structural joke of the back half is that Vandelay’s executives are each a department made flesh — Rekka in HR, Zanzo in R&D, Korsica running security, Mimosa in QA, Roquefort selling — and each boss fight is a satire of what that department does to a person. The QA fight is the best of them, because the encountertests you the way QA tests a build, and the game is self-aware enough to make the joke land mechanically rather than only in dialogue.

Korsica’s defection is the pivot that fixes the combat. Up to that point Chai is a fairly conventional combo machine with an assist button. The rhythm parry arrives, and every subsequent encounter is a two-way conversation with a tempo rather than a one-way beating. It is the correct place to put it — late enough that you have internalised 120 BPM, early enough that you get to enjoy it.

And the Project Armstrong reveal — that Kale’s rollout is a plan to remove the defective from the workforce entirely — is a broader corporate satire than the first hour prepares you for. The game keeps its silly voice while making its point, which is harder than it looks.

There is a moment, somewhere in the first ten hours ofSekiro: Shadows Die Twice, when the noise resolves into music. Up to that point you have been doing what every FromSoftware game sinceDemon’s Souls trained you to do: circle, wait, punish, roll away, drink, repeat. Sekiro tolerates none of it. The dodge is bad on purpose. The healing is scarce on purpose. Backing off gives your opponent the one thing the whole design refuses to hand you, which is time to recover. And then the penny drops, the sword comes in, you press L1 on the exact frame it lands, and the game answers with a metal chime that is unmistakably a downbeat.

That chime is the thesis. Released by FromSoftware in March 2019 under Activision, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki,Sekiro is filed on shelves next toDark Souls andBloodborne, and it is a different genus entirely. The Souls games are about resource management under threat. Sekiro is about tempo. Once you hear it that way, everything from the posture bar to the resurrection mechanic to the game’s famously unbudging refusal of a difficulty slider snaps into a single coherent argument.

The posture bar is the whole game

Every FromSoftware combat system before this one ran on a health bar and a stamina bar, and your job was to spend the second to drain the first. Sekiro keeps health — vitality — and quietly demotes it. The bar that matters isposture, and posture is a balance meter. Land a hit, chip it. Deflect a hit, chip it harder. Let it fill and your opponent’s guard breaks, exposing them to a deathblow: one animated, unambiguous, fight-ending strike.

The clever part is what posture does when nothing is happening. Itrecovers, and it recovers faster the healthier the character is. That single rule is the engine of the entire game. It means backing off to breathe hands your progress back. It means the correct way to kill a boss is to stay inside their reach and keep the pressure on, which is precisely the thing a decade of Souls play taught you never to do. Sekiro spends its first act unteaching you, and the unteaching hurts, because the muscle memory it is fighting is your own.

So the posture bar converts defence into offence. A deflect — a block timed to the frame the blade arrives — costs you nothing, and costs them posture. Which means the optimal defensive action and the optimal aggressive action are the same button, pressed at the same moment. That is a rhythm system, dressed in Sengoku steel, and it explains why the game feels so bad until it suddenly feels superb. You are not learning tactics. You are learning a chart.

Why the deflect window works

Plenty of games have parries. Most of them make the parry a gamble: high risk, high reward, punished hard on a miss. Sekiro does something more generous and much more demanding. Mistime a deflect and you still block — you eat posture damage rather than a wound. The failure state of a perfect input is a mediocre input. That’s a design decision with enormous downstream consequences, because it means the game can hand you a boss who attacks in eight-hit chains and expect you to hold the line through all eight. You will not die from the third one. You will die from your posture cracking on the seventh.

Sitting on top of that are the perilous attacks, flagged with a red kanji, and they are the game’s genius stroke. Each one demands adifferent answer, and the answers are not interchangeable. A thrust wants the Mikiri Counter — step into the spear, not away from it. A sweep wants a jump. A grab wants your legs. The red kanji flashes with barely enough warning to react, which means you cannot read the symbol and then decide; you have to have already learned the animation that precedes it and be committed before the warning arrives. The symbol is a confirmation, not an instruction.

That is exactly how a rhythm game’s approach notes work. The note tells you what to hit and when, and by the time you consciously register it, your hands are already moving. Sekiro isGuitar Hero where the chart is a man with a naginata and the fail state is being taken apart at your own hearth.

Look for the real ancestor and you land onPunch-Out!!, where every opponent was a fixed loop of tells to be memorised and answered, and where “getting good” meant learning a script rather than raising a stat. I’d file the C64 and Amiga fighting games of my teens in the same family —The Way of the Exploding Fist,IK+ — where the whole contest lived in a single well-timed input and the loser was the one who twitched early. Sekiro is that lineage given twenty-five years of animation budget. Its cousins are elsewhere on this desk:Nine Sols takes the deflect and rebuilds it in two dimensions, and does it well enough to be worth the comparison rather than embarrassed by it.

The resurrection mechanic, and what it actually costs

Sekiro lets you die and get back up. Press the button, Wolf rises where he fell, and the fight continues from the enemy’s current state. On paper it’s a mercy. In practice it’s the most interesting piece of tuning in the game, because standing back up mid-fight puts you exactly where you least want to be — inside a boss’s active attack chain, at low health, with your posture recovery crippled. The revival hands you a chance and a worse position at the same time.

It also feeds the Dragonrot system, the game’s tax on repetition. Die often and NPCs across Ashina fall ill, sidequests stall, and your Unseen Aid — the chance of keeping your money on death — drops. Dragonrot is curable, and it is not really a punishment so much as a slow, visible pressure. The world coughs when you fail. It is one of the few times a FromSoftware game has made death mean something narratively without making it mean less mechanically.

The upgrade economy runs on the same honesty. Vitality and posture rise from Prayer Beads, and beads come in fours, from minibosses. Attack power rises from Battle Memories, and memories come from bosses. Healing capacity rises from Gourd Seeds. There is no build to hide behind. InElden Ring a wall can be walked around, out-levelled, or answered with a summon and a bleed build. Sekiro’s wall is a person, and the only thing that gets you past them is that you have learned the song. That is either the purest thing FromSoftware has ever made or the most obstinate, and the honest answer is that it’s both.

Where it fights itself

The prosthetic tools are the weakest system in the game, and it’s instructivewhy. Firecrackers, the Flame Vent, the Loaded Axe, the Umbrella — they’re inventive, they’re beautifully animated, and most players find two they like and never touch the rest. The reason is structural: the deflect loop is so complete, so self-sufficient, that the tools have nowhere to sit except as situational counters to specific enemy types. The game builds a second toolkit and then designs a combat system that doesn’t need it. The Loaded Umbrella against the Guardian Ape’s terror scream is genuinely essential; most of the rest is decoration on a machine that runs fine without it.

Stealth has a similar problem. Sekiro gives you a grappling hook, a crouch, ledge-hanging and one-hit backstab deathblows, and it’s a fine way to strip a boss arena of its rank-and-file before the real fight begins. It is also almost entirely optional and almost entirely absent from the encounters that define the game. The stealth exists to get you to the rhythm section.

The difficulty argument that swallowed the internet in 2019 looks different from here. FromSoftware shipped no difficulty options and took a proper kicking for it, and in October 2020 patched in Reflection of Strength for boss rematches and the Gauntlets of Strength — more ways to practise the chart rather than ways to lower it. Whatever you think of the accessibility question, the studio’s position was at least coherent with the design. You cannot ease a rhythm game without changing the song, and the song is the game.

The verdict

Sekiro is the most focused thing FromSoftware has built, and focus cuts both ways. It offers one answer to one question and asks you to get very good at it, which produces a stretch of about six hours in the middle where nothing works and you suspect the game is broken, followed by a click, followed by some of the finest one-on-one combat ever animated. Isshin, Genichiro, the Guardian Ape — these fights land because you arrive at them as a different player from the one who started, and you can feel the difference in your hands.

It doesn’t do the thing the Souls games do, where a hundred people play the same boss a hundred ways. Everyone beats Sekiro identically, because there is one way. Whether that’s purity or narrowness depends entirely on how much you want a game to hold an opinion. This one holds a very strong one, and it’s right.

Play it on PC or PlayStation; it runs fine on both and the frame timing is the whole product, so give it stable hardware. If it takes and you want the same grammar in a different key,Nine Sols is the sharpest descendant going, andArmored Core VI is FromSoftware doing the same trick with a stagger bar and a rocket launcher.

Spoilers below

The design argument closes at Isshin, the Sword Saint. Three phases, no gimmick, no environmental trick, no summon — just the game asking whether you learned it. The first phase is Genichiro again, which is a joke at your expense and a genuinely kind one: the man who annihilated you in hour three is now the warm-up. Isshin’s second phase adds the spear and the thrusts, and every thrust is a Mikiri check. The third adds lightning, and the lightning is the only moment in the whole game where a piece of the toolkit outside the deflect loop becomes mandatory — the Lightning Reversal, learned from a fisherman, thirty hours earlier, in a place you probably haven’t thought about since.

That’s the argument landing. Sekiro’s final exam tests one skill, and the skill is listening. Everything else — the tools, the stealth, the Dragonrot, the Sculptor’s grief — is set dressing on a metronome. The Shura ending, where Wolf turns on his own oath, is thematically the right shadow to hang over a game about obedience to a rhythm. You do what you are told, on the beat, for forty hours. Then it asks whether you can stop.