Doing The Math Homework: My Journey Through ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’
By now, I’d consider myself a die-hard fan of FromSoftware – a sentence I cannot believe I am sincerely committing to in 2026. For years, I hated these games. I only came around under the Elden Ring hype, and even then, I installed mods to pursue the final credits. Enter: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the first FromSoftware game I’ve finished without the assistance of a walkthrough or mods. Through eighty hours of sheer tenacity and a trust in the developers, I stubbornly forced my way through Sekiro and emerged with an enthusiasm that cheating never allowed the space for. I want to make the case, against my own predispositions as a player of video games, that Sekiro is the quintessential masterclass in making the dreaded “git gud” meme a reality.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is so onerous that you will routinely hit a wall against a progression point, most commonly a boss fight. Through that process, you might be attuned to what is known as “cheesing” an encounter – a strategy in which you exploit a design flaw in a boss that allows for a surprisingly easy victory in what otherwise would be a nightmare threshold of a skillcheck. At every opportunity, including my first “real” boss, Lady Butterfly, I resisted the urge to cheese Sekiro’s bosses, because emerging victorious did not necessarily translate to learning the necessary skills required to move forward. I would be, in other words, cheating myself.
What to Do When You Hit A Wall in Sekiro
On one of my first sincere boss walls, Genichiro of Ashina, I had not mastered the infamous Mikiri Counter move that your protagonist can utilize to nullify an enemy’s deadliest attacks. Twenty-or-so attempts into this gauntlet, I decided to pursue a tried and tested method: putting on a podcast. Usually, listening to a show takes the frustration down a few notches and I’ll emerge victorious in time to pause my show and appreciate a cutscene. Sekiro (initially) felt no different. So, fittingly, I put on the Cane and Rinse episode featuring Sekiro, and listened to what some of my favorite games critics had to say.
Jacob Geller, the most interesting writer about games today, offhandedly referred to his experience with Sekiro as an exercise that taught him not to cheat on his “math homework,” which is to say, avoiding obvious and inherently tempting cheeses when you hit those aforementioned walls. This analogy transformed my perception of Sekiro. Notoriously, math was my least favorite subject in school. In fact, I’ll never forget asking my Algebra II instructor when I would meaningfully apply her subject in my everyday adulthood; her answer was so pathetically inert that I promptly made better use of my time by going to sleep on the desk. As “math” translates to Sekiro, and FromSoftware games in general, I’ve never understood why you simply wouldn’t use a calculator to make life easier for yourself.
Sekiro smashes your calculator and makes you apologize for it. And frankly, I respect Sekiro more than FromSoftware’s other output primarily because using the proverbial calculator made me worse at the necessary equations I needed to solve.
Playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an exercise in humility. Simple enemies will humble you. Enemies you’ve bested in previous attempts will surprise you. And not-so-occasionally, you’ll fly off the edge to your death, thinking you were making a sound strategic decision by jump-dodging your opponent’s unblockable sweep attack. It happens. But in every case, Sekiro’s lesson is obvious to the player: you have to learn the math problem; you can’t plug this into the calculator. If you don’t know addition (countering Genichiro’s spear stabs), then the idea of multiplication isn’t even fathomable. You’re going to be more stuck when you hit the next wall.
As someone with a decade of experience as a professional educator, I was constantly confronted by parallels to my own line of work while playing Sekiro – which sounds like hell, but fittingly enough, was instructive. By playing Sekiro, I had to examine my own reactions. Instead of monitoring a stamina bar and spamming dodge-rolls like my victories in Dark Souls, or relying on a litany of spells and Mimic Tears as I created distance in Elden Ring, Sekiro proffered no cushioned ways out of its encounters. Either I had to understand the Pythagorean theorem involved with fights like Dual Apes, or I had to relegate myself to a barren playthrough of missed opportunities in which I considered such fights “too complicated.” I chose to learn astrophysics instead of retweeting Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In other words, besting optional bosses like the Demon of Hatred – rather than bypassing them while patting myself on the back for “progressing” – was how Sekiro won my heart.
Thus, constantly confronted with the kanji for “death,” I contemplated my playing philosophy more than most FromSoftware experiences. I started to ask myself, as the temptation to mod the experience or watch a cheese-tutorial video grew, is Sekiro a game that’s difficult or complex?
Is Sekiro A Difficult Game?
Sekiro is not a difficult video game. Or, at least, if the discussion is framed in terms of difficulty, the brilliance of its design is egregiously disserviced. Sekiro, in my view, is better described as complex.
Distinguishing difficulty from complexity is not as easy as unweaving Penelope’s funeral shroud. Whereas FromSoftware titles are bandied about as pinnacles of games that will induce fits of rage, my experience of them is far more nuanced. Sure, there are moments where I shout “fuck!” to no one in particular in my apartment. But there are also moments where I relinquish the controller, shaking with adrenaline, as “SHINOBI EXECUTION” splatters across my screen. Failure is a more adept instructor than victory, in Sekiro’s case. The complexity of Sekiro emerges within this apparent contradiction. Like its proverbial math problems, Sekiro is a rapid-fire Jeopardy-inspired quiz on your ability to do mental math on the fly. One wrong answer – if you forget to phrase your response as a question – the proverbial ruler raps your knuckles, and all the numbers cease their relevance as you begin your calculations anew.
This knife’s balance between failure and success is why Sekiro feels like a masterpiece compared to games that have already entered my gaming hall of fame such as Bloodborne. Unlike any FromSoftware title I’ve finished, Sekiro’s confidence is unyielding. Like the equations from which it draws its inspiration, it acknowledges the reality that you can cheat on your homework by copying your friend at lunch. But when it’s time to put away the notes and take the test, Sekiro properly evaluates whether you have learned the material. And to be honest, for the first dozen hours, I refused to. Only once I was properly humbled by (unwittingly optional to me) Lady Butterfly did I decide to return to the fundamentals and learn how to solve the equation sans the calculator.
How To Overcome Difficulty in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Without a doubt, if you handed me a controller right now, I could confidently defeat certain bosses with my eyes closed. Arrogant as that may sound, I mean it quite literally. Since, amongst my other realizations with Sekiro, my wall against Genichiro made me ask the most relevant question of all: is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice actually a rhythm game?
It sounds unhinged, but hear me out – after all, I just said Sekiro wasn’t difficult, which should likely tarnish my credibility already. But my sincere opinion is that Sekiro is a vault predominantly opened by its auditory cues far more than its visual ones, which is astonishing because Sekiro might be the most beautiful game I’ve finished this year. In my fight against Genichiro, I realized the emboldened red kanji that indicates a “perilous” heavy attack was, in fact, blockable through the Mikiri Counter. But despite knowing this technique was my way forward, I hadn’t internalized my trajectory through such equations without the aid of a calculator. Sekiro required me to solve the problem in my head, which is to say, listen to the red kanji’s cue, rather than waiting for the opportunity to visually solve the problem.
When the Mikiri Counter opportunity arises, you will initially hear a guttural bass drop, followed by two high-pitched violin notes. I realized against Genichiro that the violin notes were the cues required to counter my enemies rather than the misleading visual indicator or the initial thump of the sound prompts. This realization didn’t detract from my dozens of deaths against Genichiro, but it solidified my ethos that I needed to learn this technique rather than cheese through it. The lessons I learned in this fight alone carried me through the remainder of Sekiro without even a modicum of frustration.
When I “locked in” to the Genichiro fight, I noticed something bizarre: I stopped using the analog sticks. My fight with Genichiro wasn’t a dance of avoiding attacks like Dark Souls had taught me, and I wasn’t always rewarded for being aggressive like in Bloodborne, so I died repeatedly, pondering the ongoing question of how I could break Genichiro down. It’s at this moment that I wrote perhaps the most transformative note in my phone, “the real health bar is posture.” Once I understood that Sekiro was about posture – that is, deflecting enemy attacks and aggressively pursuing them to the point where you can perform a “deathblow” – the game’s perceived difficulty vanished like one of Lady Butterfly’s apparitions.
Genichiro has at least four primary attack patterns within the first two phases of his fight. Some of them feel alienatingly random, like his rapid slurry of nearly ten sword slashes. Others are rather predictable, offering you windows to parry and sneak a slash against his health bar. Once you master the rhythm of combat, you don’t need to dodge attacks whatsoever, sans the rare grab or slash attacks that I never mastered. Boss fights transmogrify into Yakuza karaoke sequences where, once you can sing the song yourself, you can simply tap along to the cadence.
Should You Mod Sekiro If It’s Too Difficult?
As confident as I probably sound to someone currently frustrated with Sekiro’s tenacity, I grew to love this game in the way that I grew to understand music theory after playing guitar for several years. Knowing why a harmony works is equally important as being able to create the harmony itself, and that theoretical principle translates seamlessly into Sekiro. For, no matter your motivations in playing this game, trying to outsmart the game by cheese strategies or modding the game does Sekiro a disservice from a design perspective. You can appreciate the brilliance of Firelink Shrine while one-shotting the game’s enemies; I cannot say the same for Sekiro, because for the first time in my relationship with FromSoftware titles, I desire to speedrun this game.
Considering I literally published an article in defense of Easy Mode in games, as well as a braggadocious account of how I cheated my way through Elden Ring and Dark Souls, you’d think that I’d staunchly remain in the camp I once occupied. But with Sekiro being an action title instead of an RPG, experience-farming basically has no consequence on your ability to progress aside from adding tools to your preexisting kit. The lessons Dark Souls taught me, in other words, no longer applied. As a result, I couldn’t simply acquire all the game’s healing gourds and hope for the best. I had to outdo the enemy, learn its patterns, and truly conquer the fight. In fact, I often emerged victorious from boss fights without having used a single healing gourd; once you understand the fight, you no longer need to heal as often, if at all.
By this point, if I were to dive into the New Game+, I can confidently surmise that the eighty hours it took me to hit Sekiro’s credits could be done in a fourth of the time. FromSoftware, in this fashion, is the greatest teacher I have ever had.
Even in Elden Ring, an objective masterpiece, I could tell you a dozen ways to avoid learning the lessons required to move forward. The game, to its credit, allows for so many playstyles, that it becomes inevitable once you unlock the ability to re-spec your character. There were many moments in Sekiro like the Owl Father fight where I realized I could turn away without regret, progress the story, and move on. But to do so would be to cheapen the experience, for I had stumbled into this fight. If I turned back out of cowardice, I wouldn’t be prepared for the next proper challenge that wasn’t optional.
My truest sense of mastery happened towards Sekiro’s endgame, on my birthday of all occasions. In a seven-hour marathon, I finally bested Owl Father, returned to the Fountainhead Palace, and proceeded to wipe the floor with the remaining bosses. In one play session, I accomplished what would have easily been four earlier in my playthrough. I got incredibly lucky, of course, to the point where I accidentally healed my burn status during the Demon of Hatred fight and emerged unscathed. But the fight that cemented my belief that Sekiro is FromSoftware’s greatest achievement is my confrontation with the Divine Dragon, which I defeated on my first attempt – an unfathomable reality just a dozen hours prior.
Sekiro taught me everything it needed me to know. I just needed to decide to learn through practice. I couldn’t simply write the correct answer to the math problem, I had to show my work. And much to my annoyance, Sekiro, like my many math teachers, were right. Even if I’ll never use math in my daily life, I have now unlocked a new way to look at the world, a perspective that will serve me better than if I had simply, to quote myself, cheated the challenge away.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
