Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a videogame by FromSoftware released in 2019 and served as a followup to FromSoftware’s previous games, 2015’s Bloodbourne, and 2016’s Dark Souls 3, which was the culmination of the Dark Souls trilogy. The game’s plot centers around a loyal but far from perfect shinobi who goes by a few different monikers over the course of the game (including Sekiro) and his quest to rescue and protect the young lord he is sworn to from a very powerful, but also a very corrupt clan of warriors who seek to exploit the young lord’s special power.
Said special power is literally immortality, but more than that, the ability to willingly grant his immortality to others. This is something he does to Sekiro at the beginning of the game. Hence, the game’s subtitle, Shadows Die Twice, which is taken quite literally in the game from both a story and game mechanic perspective. Naturally, from there, twists, turns, and quite a few surprises are soon to follow.
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At the time of the game’s release in 2019, many saw Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as FromSoftware and game creator and director Hidetake Miyazaki’s magnum opus due to how well the game was constructed, how engaging its story was, as well as how unique it was by comparison to FromSoftware’s previous works. While Miyazaki’s trademark dark, grim setting and tendency to let the player discover the majority of the story themselves were still present, Sekrio: Shadows Die Twice stood out from its contemporaries and FromSoftware’s library of previous works by taking itself seriously in a way that neither Bloodbourne nor Dark Souls ever really attempted to do.
While the stories of Bloodbourne and Dark Souls were epic in scale and featured stories that kept fans coming back to discover more, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, by comparison, presented itself as a sort of opera that was grand in scale, featured plenty of intriguing characters, and had not just a story, but a direction. All of these things helped to cement Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as the single greatest game FromSoftware had ever made at the time. At least until the release of Miyazaki’s follow-up, Elden Ring, three years later.
Having Both a Name and Voice
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Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, much like Bloodbourne and Dark Souls before it, is at its core an RPG. What makes Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice unique from other FromSoftware games, however, is that in both Bloodbourne and Dark Souls, the player can create their own fully customizable character, and the story of both games is tailored to this in that the player character is essentially a nobody with no real ties to the setting they find themselves in and no reputation. It is essential to the stories of those games that someone who is a nobody can still save the world.
In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, by contrast, the player character has a face, a name, a voice, a reputation, cannot be customized in any way, and the sword he acquires at the beginning is the sword he fights with at the end. In this sense, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is very definitively the story of the character Sekiro. As the story of the game unfolds, the player gets to experience Sekiro’s story and the story of the setting.
This is partially why, from a story perspective, many at the time considered Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to be FromSoftware and Hidetake Miyazaki’s magnum opus because, for the first time in a long time, one of his games was telling the story of a particular character who has his own thoughts and feelings about the quest he is undertaking, which he is all too eager to share when questioned. Previous FromSoftware games tended to focus on the setting more than the characters, to the point where the games’ settings were characters in and of themselves.
In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, however, while that story element is still there, the player now gets to experience Sekiro’s story and see all the struggles he goes through not just in combat but as a character, which makes the story of the setting that much easier to digest, as the player gets to experience it from the point of view of an individual within it. With so much focus on the character Sekiro, any adaptation of the game that bears his name will ultimately need to focus on his story. By extension, the larger story around him can be told as he experiences it.
Classic Samurai Story With a Twist
As was stated above, the story of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice revolves around the character Sekiro’s quest to save the young lord he is sworn to from the clutches of a corrupt clan of warriors who seek to exploit the young lord’s power of immortality for themselves. While that is the story presented in the beginning, and indeed would be a very compelling, if unoriginal, samurai story on its own, that is only about half the story.
In one of the first of the game’s many twists, Sekiro is able to save his lord early on and quite easily, but the game does not end there. Instead, Sekiro’s lord then sends him on another, more important quest with the goal of preventing others from exploiting his immortality, just as the warriors who had taken him tried and failed to do. From there, Sekiro embarks on an even more dangerous journey that pushes the limits of his own abilities, shows him the origin of his young lord as well as his own, and ultimately discovers what the cost of immortality really is. All of this attention given to the story is why Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice could very easily be adapted.
