Sekiro: 11 MAJOR Changes That Will Shock Dark Souls Fans

11. The Reliance On A Parry System For The Majority Of Combat

Where Dark Souls was a game of blocking and Bloodborne a game of dodging, Sekiro is a game of parrying.

Feeling almost like FromSoft have taken the Gwyn, Lord of Cinder fight from the close of the first Dark Souls (where you could only gain the upper hand by mastering frame-perfect counters to open up a weak spot), Sekiro now places focus on breaking your enemy's guard.

Attacking outright or countering at the right time will free them up for a one-hit kill move, meaning that timing is the order of the day, and you can decimate a small group's worth of foes in a blur of face-stabs and arterial throat geysers. Likewise, if you block too much, Sekiro's own poise meter can't withstand so much punishment, and you'll be left in a pronounced stagger animation, suffering sizeable damage if you don't dodge quick enough.

Get it right though, and you end up with this:

It's a unique proposition to grapple with. A potential problem I found with my hands-on time was that every fight with anything other than a boss felt the same: Attack or wait for my turn to counter, then instant-kill.

Animations were repetitive and you could perish for missing that one button press that success is hinging on - something I have to wonder might play a fatiguing role across tens of hours of game time.