It would be an understatement to say that I’m excited for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The upcoming title from Dark Souls studio FromSoftware and director Hidetaka Miyazaki looks to break away from the studio’s traditions and deliver an entirely new gameplay experience. And with only a month to go until the title’s March 22 release, a ‘story’ trailer has been released to tide us over. Check out the English version below:
The trailer essentially shows the ‘origin’ of the titular protagonist Sekiro, as he is saved from the battlefield by an older mentor figure known as ‘The Owl.’ A recent Game Informer interview with Miyazaki confirmed that Sekiro will be part of a larger cast of shinobi characters, of which The Owl is a part of. Furthermore, the trailer also tells us that the period in which the title is set will be the Warring States period, although that much was probably a given due to the amount of samurai.
What’s got me thinking though, is how the ‘master’ so prominent in the 2018 Tokyo Game Show trailer fits into all of this. If Sekiro is already part of a group of shinobi, what needs does he have of a master? What exactly motivates Sekiro to ‘return’ to them? And how do the two even meet in the first place?
These are questions that can only be answered by playing the game, no doubt. I’m absolutely fine with that, as one of the key features of FromSoftware games is uncovering lore as part of a community effort. If everything was given to us in the trailer, then that’d be no fun at all.
Coincidentally, in my search for more information, I also checked out the Japanese language version of the trailer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find much. The narration in the English trailer is pretty much a direct translation of the Japanese, although it does lose some of the more poetic phrasing. No dice for the Japanese either, then.
In this sense, the lack of linguistic divergence could be put down to careful work from FromSoftware in trying to play it’s cards close to it’s chest. But perhaps this is just good translation work from whoever publisher Activision have picked for the job. The publicity for the game thus far has been remarkably international, with the release date even being the same worldwide – no doubt due to the fact that FromSoftware is having it’s game published by a western company rather than a Japanese one.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice release in little over a month from now, on March 22. You can check out it’s official website for more information.