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The games developed by FromSoftware have held a place in my heart because there’s a depth to them that is not strictly unique, but is tough to find. Many other games may invoke themes that are interesting, but there is an invitation to many of these FromSoft games that is hard to replicate. Indeed, the invitation is what helps draw you in as a member of the audience – the invitation to learn and investigate and want to understand what is going on.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a game that interestingly straddles the line between your more run-of-the-mill game and the “classic” Souls formula. I put “classic” in quotations here because the Souls franchise is what effectively made FromSoft most famous, but it is also a series that comes late in their development history. Regardless, games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne were built primarily around being opaque. You caught a whiff of a story, but were given only the bare bones. To be fully invested, you would need to grab more information to learn about the world as a whole and where you fit within it. It is only by gathering this information – often through multiple playthroughs as you learn about alternative endings – that the themes of the game come into focus.
Sekiro has a narrative that is notably clearer, and in some ways by having that clearer plotline it makes the themes both harder and easier to see. Easier in the sense that the game is now able to lay those themes out in the open, to voice them in a way that they were left silent in other games. Harder in the sense that the themes can effectively hide in plain sight – by being stated, you might not even realize that they’re there. It is a bit of a double-edged sword – unless you want to directly tell the audience “this is the theme of the work,” people are going to miss it because they won’t be curious enough to put the pieces together. But then, that is true of the “classic” approach as well. If you make them tougher to find, some people won’t want to put in the work. Neither approach is strictly better, but the difference should be noted.
Sekiro follows the adventure of a nameless shinobi who is eventually dubbed Sekiro to mean “one-armed wolf.” He is the guardian of the Divine Heir, a young boy who possesses special blood which makes him immortal, and allows him to bestow this immortality upon others. The Heir wishes to rid himself of this power, believing it to be a curse, and so enlists Sekiro to help. Sekiro must then gather various items to be able to remove this divinity, with different outcomes depending on how the player explores the game and what choices they make.
Immortality
The core theme of Sekiro focuses pretty plainly on the attempt to escape death through immortality. And in particular the way this pursuit corrupts both individuals and groups. We can see the implication that death is a part of human living that is to be accepted – life ceases to be life once death is removed from the picture. To be immortal is to be cursed.
The obvious component of this lies within the plot itself. The Divine Heir that you are tasked with protecting throughout the game is immortal and seeks to remove that immortality. The Heir is not only insistent on doing everything to remove this curse, but is continually pursued and captured by others who want to use his powers to their own ends. As a player you can make a decision about what the cost of removing that curse should be – you might alternatively choose to let the Heir die to free him, to kill Sekiro to free the Heir, or to try and remove the curse entirely. The final one is arguably the “canon” choice, given the nature of the theme. But as with many FromSoft games, getting any ending other than the default one (where the Heir dies, which obviously feels bad) requires additional effort which might be…a bit tough to figure out without assistance of some kind.
However, the idea that immortality is a curse can be seen through multiple interactions with other characters and enemies throughout the game.
The clearest example comes from a group of monks located in a temple atop a mountain. Your goal in traversing the temple is to acquire a special sword that can kill anyone, including anyone immortal. The monks in that temple have been seeking to replicate the immortality of the Divine Heir. This quest involves experimenting with children to create their own copy of the Heir – a process that leads to the death of all but one of those children.
And even when they finally succeed, the immortality they receive comes through a kind of possession. The bodies of the monks are inhabited by large centipedes which are responsible for reviving them. It is not entirely clear to what extent anything infected by these centipedes are in control of themselves – another character that is also possessed seems to be sufficiently lucid to be himself no matter how many times he is killed, but everything else you encounter seems to be controlled by their parasite. The monks you encounter look like skeletons, as though they have rotted away and the centipedes simply operate the husks. The other two enemies you face in this context are bosses that you encounter a few times, and with no dialogue or other indications it is unclear to what extent they are really “themselves.”
Regardless, the one clear thing you get from this grouping is the dialogue from the one centipede-infested character you can talk to. You encounter him quite early in the game, as he serves as a sort of training dummy for you to practice the gameplay. And he is very insistent on finding someone who can finally kill him.
And lest we gloss over the point, the process of seeking immortality among these monks requires experimenting upon and killing children. The monks have essentially discarded their humanity in their pursuit of everlasting life.
The other examples we get are from two major characters who serve as antagonists. The first of these is Genichiro, basically a rival to our main character. He is also the one who first captures the Divine Heir, with the hope of using his power. In the second encounter with him – when we first get a chance to actually beat him – it is revealed that he too is immortal, having utilized a different method to escape death.
However, Genichiro’s immortality and aims are not as selfish as the monks’. Genichiro is an adopted member of the Ashina clan, and the game largely takes place within the Ashina state. The state itself is crumbling, succumbing to the onslaught of various powers as its patriarch grows old and sickly. Genichiro’s goal is to make the state and clan of Ashina immortal, both literally and figuratively. And for this purpose he is trying to recruit the Divine Heir.
Genichiro’s quest culminates in his final sacrifice at the very end of the game. In the last boss fight of the game you begin by fighting Genichiro. Upon defeating him he then gives up his own life to draw back a single person from the underworld – and he selects the patriarch of the Ashina clan, Isshin, who had passed away shortly before this encounter. Although Isshin is clearly uninterested in fighting to preserve the clan at this point, he engages in battle to honor this final wish.
Genichiro’s wish to keep his clan and country alive are something we can sympathize with in the abstract. And yet, the game clearly shows us that the lands of Ashina are severely weakened and degraded. The country proves to be unable to hold off an attack from Japan’s Imperial Ministry. The idea of wanting to keep the country alive “artificially” contrasts with what we see – perhaps it is best to let both Ashina the person (embodied by the patriarch Isshin) and Ashina the country pass on.
The last encounter is with the character Owl, who is Sekiro’s foster father and mentor. Owl is encountered early in the game, having succumbed to a mortal wound and dying in front of his adopted son. However, this turns out to be a ruse, and roughly two-thirds of the way through the game Owl reveals himself and asks the Divine Heir to accompany him. By taking the fourth possible ending – where you side with Owl and betray everyone else – it becomes clear that his goal was to use his physical skills and the immortality of the Divine Heir to take over the entire country of Japan.
And outside of his ambition, we can see a lot from Owl’s character. He is conniving and – quite literally – backstabbing. He is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, and is not really concerned with honor. When his adopted son outlives his usefulness, he discards him. He is willing to use underhanded techniques to gain an upper hand. Everything about Owl screams that he’s a bad guy.
And the point of this is to show how the concept of immortality and the promise of power that it offers is also a corrupting influence. It draws in people who would seek to abuse that power. In a way, death is protection against evil – while evil can exist, it cannot exist forever as long as there is a natural end to life.
The three above elements are showcased through the clear narrative elements of characters and worldbuilding, but we should not ignore another component of the game’s theming around immortality – Dragonrot. Dragonrot is Sekiro’s version of penalizing death. Where previous FromSoft games had a corpse run mechanic – if you die, you leave a bloodstain with all of your gathered experience contained in it, and if you can reach that bloodstain without dying again you can re-collect that experience – Sekiro is a bit different. Instead each time you die you lose half of your accumulated experience and currency. But there’s a chance you might not. If you keep dying, though, that chance goes down, because you start to accumulate Dragonrot.
Dragonrot is not a quality your character possesses, but instead a representation of what the immortality that Sekiro possesses does to the world itself. NPCs throughout the game become sickly, infected by a new disease. Although characters infected with Dragonrot won’t die, the implication of all of this is quite clear – your own immortality comes at the cost of extracting life from the rest of the world. To be immortal is to rob others of their mortality. The concept of immortality as a curse snaps even more clearly into focus.
Concluding Remarks
Mortality and immortality is one of those concepts that humans have wrestled with for thousands of years, because death constantly looms over us. We are often afraid of it, and that fear can drive us to seek out ways to avoid it. But an idea that often accompanies the portrayals of this fear and pursuit is the claim that perhaps immortality isn’t as great as we would think. It is a sort of “grass is always greener” argument, that because we have to live with death and the troubles that brings, we do not think of the troubles that might come with immortality.
Sekiro’s aim is to explore not only how immortality is a corrupting influence upon humanity, but also how just seeking immortality corrupts us. The ways in which characters decay morally – and sometimes even physically – as they either seek or attain immortality demonstrate how we should not follow in their footsteps. Of course, we aren’t living in the same world as these characters – there are no divine dragons that bestow immortality, no centipedes to act as parasites to keep us alive. But the literalness of the story is not what matters. What matters is that we as humans ought to be more accepting of death in all its forms. What matters is seeing how our own fear of death and seeking to avoid it can lead to harmful consequences, whether to ourselves or to others.
Abstracting Games 