I was at a wall with isshin on my first playthrough for 5 WHOLE YEARS and after playing through elden ring and ds3 again I decided I'd finally give sekiro another shot and i BEAT THAT FUCKERS ASS WITH NO SPIRIT EMBLEMS,NO BUFFS,NO CHEESE NONE OF IT. I FEEL LIKE A LIBERATED FUCKING GOD RN
I never played Elden Ring or any Dark souls game but I very recently beat Sekiro
Honestly it’s a great game. You can’t cheese most of it and with the exception one or two optional or minor bosses, all bosses are fair.
There’s basically no significant grinding. You just need to git gud. Like all fighting games you need to learn the moveset of your opponent but you can’t just run away or grind it out.
For many bosses you will be demolished until you get the gist of it and then when it clicks the boss becomes almost easy af. That’s how good the game is. And when that happens the boss fight won’t take 10+ minutes of chipping away at their ginormous health bar. Instead it goes down in less than 2 minutes because you can punish them that hard.
It’s not a rhythm game like OSU but obviously boss attacks have a cadence that it’s easier to combat if you memorize the rhythm. Hence the analogy. Plus if you time your parries right you can literally deflect anything and never die and that is part of the game.