The Souls series has always had a curious relationship with the idea of life, death
and struggle.
The very first Dark Souls saw players fight incessantly, banging their heads against the
wall time and time again until eventually it budged.
The sense of satisfaction was (and still is) palpable, but what was it all in service of?
Some vague objective to relink the flame given to some hollowed out nobody for seemingly
no reason, whose desiccated corpse you inhabit as you’re thrust into a vast, uncaring world
whose decay only becomes more apparent the more you explore; whose glorious vistas are
little more than an illusion and whose oddly distant denizens seem to welcome their impending
doom as it’ll end the monotony of their existence.
With that in mind, there’s something about the so-called bad ending of Dark Souls, where
you abandon your duty, you thrust the world into eternal darkness by walking away and
letting the flame die out, that has always struck me as the more positive outcome.
It not only embraces the inevitable – as further games would prove the flame must be
relinked time and time again and our character probably ends up becoming the husk we initially
found at the first game’s conclusion – but it’s one of the few times in which you’re
granted any kind of agency over your own existence.
You get to say no here; what perils you venture into are unknown, but what you’re venturing
away from is very much a known quantity, and somehow it feels like you’re better off
leaving it behind.
Now neither ending of Dark Souls is particularly satisfying or conclusive, but it was never
about the ending or a higher purpose, those things were always beyond our character’s
understanding.
If we are to derive any larger meaning from our struggle at all, it’s that our seeming
inability to give up against overwhelming opponents suggests a kind of absurdist joy
in the act of struggling itself.
In the eyes of a philosopher like Albert Camus we must not give up, because continued existence
and the overcoming of those struggles is its own reward.
Fast forward to 2019 and we have Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a game about bringing an end to
continued existence and the pain that seems to come with it.
Our protagonists are unflinching in their cause; they do it gladly, we gladly go along
with them—we are united in a common purpose.
The end goal here seems like the only viable option because the destructive, painful nature
of the other path is made abundantly clear.
We must extinguish the flame that keeps us alive because, as discovered upon playing,
to merely exist for the sake of it is to corrupt oneself—undying begets stagnation.
This is our purpose; we have a higher meaning and we willingly sacrifice for the common
good.
We have moved from the absurdism of the Souls games to something more utilitarian.
It’s a different, altogether less bleak outlook on existence, despite sharing a good
deal of the series DNA and tackling a lot of the same existential issues.
And this comes down to the way the narrative is framed here.
Storytelling is decidedly more self-assured this time round; not solely limited to item
descriptions found long after the fact but directly communicated to your fully voiced
character with a personality and an arc and the chance to respond, meaning players aren’t
merely talked at or down to anymore, the world feels less distant; all without sacrificing
the air of mystery that makes unravelling a From Soft story so appealing.
We’re encouraged to get to know these people around us.
We have time to stop and drink with them as t hey tell us candidly about their pasts;
we become more closely attached to them because we can see Sekiro warming to them as well.
The price of failure, and therefore your drive to succeed, goes beyond the size of your own
health bar—if you die, the people around you get sick.
Sekiro, and therefore the player, has purpose, a duty, which is not something that’s always
been made clear to the players of Souls games, whether deliberate or otherwise.
But wait a minute, this sounds great!
Why is ending this existence viewed as a desirable end goal when fighting for the sake of it
is reason to continue in other From Software games?
Well, in order to examine that we have to take into consideration the fact that we now
have real-world historical and spiritual parallels with which to codify the questions at the
heart of the game.
See, where other games explored fairly typical Western fantasy tropes, Sekiro is placed very
firmly in a specific period of Japan’s history – the latter years of the Sengoku Jidai
or civil war period – and one characterised as much by its socio-political turmoil as
its endless battles that ravaged the country for well over a century.
The warrior classes fought and betrayed each other over a now fragmented Japan, with power
shifting in the blink of an eye and the strict feudal hierarchies that kept the peasant class
in check yet to be reinstated by the ultimately victorious Tokugawa shogunate; in short, it
was a time of intense distrust and existential uncertainty.
In similar disarray is the game’s main spiritual anchor.
Buddhist imagery abounds in Sekiro – from the NPCs you come across to the environments
you navigate to the bosses you fight – and with that comes a very specific view on the
nature of existence; one that many of our antagonists are actively rebelling against.
It’s an idea we can see in something like the Curse of the Undead, except here we could
more accurately describe it as the dukkha of samsara.
See, Buddhists believe that existence is suffering—it keeps us aimlessly fixated on impermanent
things, and without realising this we end up stuck in an eternal cycle of death and
rebirth, keeping us from reaching our true potential through nirvana.
Where trying to combat hollowing in the Souls games seemed like a case of staving off the
inevitable, the buddhist way of thinking gives people a way to escape that fate, even if
the alternative seems equally dire in the eyes of certain characters.
And it’s at the crossroads between the spiritual and historical setting of the game that we
find one of our main antagonists—Genichiro.
In a period that saw power shift between factions in an instant and in the face of impending
doom, Genichiro’s desperation in kidnapping Kuro sees him alter the natural course of
things by attempting to grasp onto his physical form, his clan’s tenuous power, no matter
the toll it will take.
He solidifies the suffering of his physical existence, losing himself in the process.
It’s not just Genichiro either; almost every enemy you come across is plagued with immortality
in some form or another, whether they chose it or not.
Monks at the Senpou temple pursue eternal life above their duty to their belief system,
clinging onto their leaders, defending them as they decay, the endless cycle of death
and rebirth playing out repeatedly, painfully before their very eyes.
They’re too far gone to care.
At this point, the illusion of nirvana is enough for them—at least it’s quiet and
they can decay in peace.
It’s through these observations that Kuro acknowledges the pain caused by endless resurrection
and sends you on your way to fetch the tools required to stop it, in a series of realisations
and actions that see you ascend to realms above your own, recalling nothing if not the
noble truths at the heart of Buddhism as a spiritual practice.
But I feel that it’s also important that Buddhism is the particular brand of spirituality
so heavily featured in Sekiro, because it’s one of the few religions that appears more
as a set of teachings rather than dogma.
It acts in stark contrast to everything Sekiro knows from his upbringing—adherence to strict
codes is his raison d’etre.
When Kuro first suggests severing the ties of immortality we’re given a choice to help
that Sekiro ultimately cannot make, because to do so would be to betray his unshaking
loyalty to his quest.
But throughout this quest he also comes up against multiple characters talking of devotion
to masters and codes of honour and the common feature they all seem to share, similar to
those seeking immortality, is a deep unhappiness, again keeping them from reaching their full
potential.
It’s this unease that arguably comes to a head in your confrontation with Owl, in
which you’re presented with a similar choice of choosing to save Kuro or adherence to your
code.
It’s this game’s “link the fire” moment – down to the fact your choice decides which
ending you’ll receive – and to me the choice was as clear as it was when I decided
to walk into the darkness.
Sekiro is shinobi – someone who utilises disparate elements of different kinds of combat
to ensure versatility in dealing with anything in his path – and its not dissimilar to
the approach he ends up taking with regard to his morality—realising that those who
preach the importance of adherence to a code, those who devote themselves singularly to
a person or a belief system, are just as susceptible to corruption, to manipulating others in order
to serve their own means as anyone else, especially in a period where backstabbing is second nature
to those who supposedly live and die by a code of honour.
Sekiro is subtly taught the importance of acting in the greater good through conversations
had with those around him, when they talk of what they learned from each other and those
that came before, how they pooled their limited resources in order to help each other and
how small, seemingly insignificant moments of kindness in the past ripple through generations
into real, practical benefits that are now available to the player.
With all of this in mind, the only logical conclusion to me was the one that Sekiro states
pretty explicitly upon choosing to go against Owl: a code must be determined by the individual
in order that one can do the greatest amount of good.
And given how the other choice turns you into the demigod Ashura, ascending above the human
plane of existence but only to massacre everyone in your path, I feel like I made the right
decision.
And this is why I argue that as much as it is structured very much like a Souls game,
Sekiro feels like a much more positive outlook on existence and death than past From titles.
By making Sekiro a full-blown character, we’re given a vector through which to care about
the fate of the thematically rich setting he’s placed in.
We get to see characters pulling together for good rather than everyone going their
own way for their own survival.
Multiplayer isn’t as necessary as it was in those older titles because we don’t require
that reassurance that we aren’t alone in our struggle; we’re reminded of it constantly.
We aren’t fighting against the world here; we’re given free rein to navigate it however
we please.
That’s not to say either approach is necessarily better or more correct than the other, but
for a developer whose games are so often described as oppressive, whose narratives are usually
buried within reems of lore text, to see them so confidently tell a surprisingly coherent
story whose outlook is in its own way optimistic, is at the very least a little refreshing.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Sekiro (and remember this is only my interpretation of
the game, if yours was different that’s cool).
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Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Sivaas, Michael Wolf, Artjom
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Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas Ross and
Charlie Yang.
And with that this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time.