Sekiro

[Wretchedest]

Yeah... I've been taking lots of breaks. I'm right with you Jinsai, this takes the usual souls difficulty and adds an extreme layer of technical ability and a lot of grinding if you fail too much. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 were relatively relaxing actually. And I'm on a few days break after getting to the next boss after the ape. I haven't tried much. But it is a bit stressful. I think one factor is that this game has a lot more bosses and they're a lot more challenging. There isn't much time cruising through levels or retreading, almost every beat of this game is being stuck on an insane boss. And it's like Dance Dance Revolution except every song is 10-20 minutes in unusual time signatures and you have to memorize the off beats. The best option a lot of the time is to just rapidly spam the block button, which is kind of bad design that not only can you do that, but the game is so opaque that it's the best option most of the time.

You also get punished for losing in a variety of ways. The dragonrot being the most lenient, but the supply of spirit emblems becomes really dry eventually and there cost increases over time.... So it always feels like you're stuck on something.

Gebichiro took me three days, but when I finally had him, I really had him. The true difficulty there was the third phase, which you have to play aggressively and move around a lot more. I figured out that in the first phase you can always mikiri his red attack and in the second you can always jump on him when he does his red. In both phases he has one you dodge away from. With bosses like him it's ok or even beneficial to deflect their longest strings until it breaks your posture, because they pause, like after his seven string. Their posture damage builds up, but when yours breaks it actually resets instantly.

The great ape. Just get used to the first phase. See if you can get to the point where you take it down without potions and with as few firecrackers as possible. The first phase isn't that bad, just run the whole time and get used to when he shows his openings. Those openings become more frequent as the health bar goes down. Two or three times he does a stagger where he staggers again if you manage two blows. His best opening is when he lies on his back and thrashes, go to his head an count the thrashes, on the fourth one close in for around three strikes.

The second phase seems really crazy because he moves so strangle but he actually only has like 5 attacks. He's mostly coming at you with a low sword, just jump over it. It's a bit tricky because you have to be precise, once he's in a sword patter you need to stay exactly behind him to avoid the wide swings. There's a four beat swing and a one off swing. The one off is where you get your attacks in. Get used to 2 or three swings and then always run off because he's going to do the Terri scream, and then wait to jump over his attacks again until your comfortable with your positioning in the arena. When he's doing the scream, if you're at a safe distance just nail the fuck out of him with kunai or shuriken.

He has one attack in this phase where he stands all the way up. With his sword straight in the air. If you deflect that he falls on top of you and you get a ton of free hits.