Is Sekiro in the Soulsborne Universe? (Patreon)

Sekiro, Shadows Die Twice, is the latest game from From Software. It was released in March 2019 to mostly a positive reception and has been the centre of a comical discourse around difficulty and accessibility in video games. It also redesigned combat to focus on breaking the posture of the opponent in order to land a deathblow, rather than knocking their health bar down over time, a change which shifts sword combat to much more closely actually resemble real-life swordfighting and in my opinion the biggest innovation in video game combat seen in the last decade at least. So is Sekiro, the latest game by From Software, in the same universe as their others?

No.

Okay more seriously, I think there’s an interesting point to explore in this question. Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that the games are not connected, do not exist within the same narrative universe, that any hints that might link them together are effectively just easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans. As I say, this is a pretty straightforward query: the author says, categorically, no.

However, there is something compelling about this idea, right? Not only are all the From Software games similar in style, they’re constructed in near-identical ways. I’ve watched a friend start playing Sekiro, pick up the Healing Gourd and say “Cool. Estus flask.” or reach the shrines and say “Bonfire, gotcha!” Elements in FromSoft games are similar to the point that even with the head of the development company saying they don’t occur in the same universe, it remains a compelling thought, an intrusive question.

There are also the little easter eggs like the Katana you can find in Dark Souls 3 that would seem to be nods to the idea of the games occurring in the same world. By comparison, Shadow of the Colossus, Ico and The Last Guardian, all made by Team Ico contain similar kinds of references to each other. It has long been speculated that the horn-headed baby at the end of Shadow of the Colossus is the boy, Ico, and there is a theory that places The Last Guardian as the prequel to Shadow of the Colossus. In terms of actual hard evidence though, there are only really easter eggs there too. A barrel like the ones you feed Trico is placed in the remastered Shadow of the Colossus, and the Queen’s Sword from Ico is an unlockable item.

Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian said, of the connections between the games, “The way I see it, maybe they are from the same world, or the same universe. But anything further than that is really up to the player’s imagination. Everyone has a different level of relationship with the two previous titles, so we wouldn’t dictate that it is or it isn’t. It’s up to the player.”

I think fairly often games by the same developer have this loose connected feeling as if they might belong to the same world, but don’t necessarily. They use similar mechanics, they contain these little textual scraps linking them together, but it’s up to the player, the audience member, to decide what they want to believe.

I think the important question here is: What is the important difference between games being in the same universe and being by the same author?

Sekiro being by the same developer as Dark Souls means there is a connection between them that has to do with the philosophies and artistic themes that the creators like to the explore. It means that later works which tackle the same themes either show a growth and change in position over time, or clarify and illuminate nuances that weren’t shown before. 

For example, I’ve talked before about how the crushing difficulty that From Software pride themselves on creating in their games, combined with the industrial era cobblestone streets city setting of Bloodborne make for an interesting feeling to do with the oppressive nature of capitalism, maybe even comparing capitalism itself to a lovecraftian horror. I don’t know that this is the authorial intention, but the difficulty, the repetitive deaths and rebirths of FromSoft games create a mood that makes the games feel like life under an oppressive system. 

The setting of Bloodborne in a proto-capitalist era city while still reflecting on that theme of oppressive systems, of human despair, of being trapped in cycles of tyranny and exploitation makes for an interesting addition to that theme even if Bloodborne isn’t literally in the same canon as Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls. Making Bloodborne an industrial era nightmare draws attention to the setting of the Souls games. If before they were about cycles of power, suddenly with Bloodborne being set in a victorian-esque city, potentially being allegorical to capitalism, now the Souls games become critiques of serfdom, feudalism, sovereign power.

You can still read Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls as being interlinked with Bloodborne in more or less the same way. Here, being in the same world and being from the same creator aren’t all that different.

Going back to the redesign of the combat system in Sekiro, we can see another example of where new works reframe our view of older ones, this time with game design rather than theme. The combat in Sekiro is focused on breaking an enemy’s posture to land a deathblow, but the combat is also hugely simplified down. You can effectively only do three things: strike, dodge, or parry. Parrying will sometimes help to worsen an enemy’s posture, and dealing them damage will worsen their posture more effectively over time because when they are injured they recover slower. Since dodging includes two types - step dodge and jumps - a few people have made the observation that this essentially makes Sekiro’s combat system a rhythm game. You are playing one of four notes in time with the “music” of the fight - except there is no music, just a guy with a sword who wants to kill you.

That’s what’s so great about the rhythmic combat of Sekiro though: because you have to figure out the rhythm without an actual soundtrack, the combat becomes a puzzle.

Look at the fight with Long-Armed Centipede Giraffe (or don’t look, he’s really gross). The enemy comes at you fast and you try to attack, dodge, or block. Pretty quickly you’ll realise that he attacks too fast and with too much force for attacking or dodging to be worth shit at all, so you parry his attacks, and then you see that parrying his attacks is particularly effective at worsening his posture. Quickly you’ll figure out that most of all you have to do to beat this boss is parry his attacks with the correct timing, and bam you’ve won.
Here’s the thing though: you didn’t win yet, you still haven’t actually beaten the boss, but you feel like you won because you solved the puzzle. This puzzles as combat seems kind of revolutionary. There have been puzzle bosses in games before - bosses that your regular attacks don’t work on and you need to figure out an actual puzzle to beat them - but this is something else, while still actually being a way that you could, technically approach any bossfight, at least in FromSoft games.

So maybe, just maybe, Sekiro refocuses the way that you approach FromSoft fights, right? By stripping away the combat options you have, it makes you appreciate what those options are and choose wisely from your toolset to solve the puzzle of the fight.
I mean maybe?

All I have as evidence is this one meme from the Shitty Dark Souls subreddit, and they’re always posting about how levelling up dexterity is gay, so like what do they know? I love dexterity, and I’m g- oh no.

 The point I’m trying to make is, essentially, everything you might find cool and interesting about these works being part of the same story are already true by virtue of them being from the same author. Much like the game designers discussed here, a painter might make a painting early in their career and another, later, that makes you think something new about the earlier painting, and that wouldn’t make the second painting the other half of the picture, it just inspires those ideas in you - the viewer, the player, the audience. It’s up to you.