It’s interesting to look at where FromSoftware is as a game developer now. They’ve become synonymous with quality for a lot of people, and have been rewarded quite well for that reputation with strong sales and the ability to basically make the games they want with little interference from the publishers they chose to work with. But it didn’t always used to be that way.
FromSoftware, for many years, was known as something of a low budget developer that produced games with interesting gameplay and settings, but clunky and obtuse gameplay that was impregnatable at the best, just plain terrible at the worse. Now there’s a sizable number of people who will follow them anywhere. Largely that came along with their Souls games, starting with Demon’s Souls in 2009, but their fans follow them even to games not with the Souls brand, like Bloodborne and the latest game, Sekiro. There’s an irony there, though. As FromSoftware has ascended from a low-tier developer, their games have increasingly become a mediation on the deterioration of the world around us.
Sekiro doesn’t play much like the Souls game, but the tone and world is familiar. Instead of decrepit castles or ran down Victorian style buildings, Sekiro puts you in feudal Japan after war and plague has ravaged the land. While the visual style is less grim than Dark Souls or Bloodborne, there’s still a sense of death and melancholy that hangs over everything. It’s something that even in the older days, before their games were known for their gameplay, that FromSoftware has always excelled at. The environments in their games are off in some way, like something is just not right, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what.
Dark Souls and Bloodborne don’t have much of a traditional narrative, being framed between an big opening and ending cutscene with a few minor ones sprinkled in-between, but the story itself was hidden away in item descriptions, files and random conversations with NPCs. You can play Bloodborne all the way through and have zero idea what’s going on if you never stop to read anything or talk to anyone. Sekiro has a more digestible and traditionally told story, but there’s still large parts tucked away in random conversations.
The main story is about The Wolf, a shinobi who is bound by a code to protect a young prince. He loses his arm against a kidnapper and goes on a journey to right his failure. The story is straightforward enough with a few twists and turns. It becomes a story about hierarchy desperately trying to capture immortality, some for selfish and some for well-intended, intentions, as their status and wealth decline. Your character is cursed with this ability, resurrecting each time he dies, and the more he dies, the more a mysterious disease spreads to those around you.
Tucked away behind conversations and eavesdropping is something else. While Dark Souls and Bloodborne depict a world that has already gone to hell, Sekiro’s is one that’s teetering on the brink.
Probably one of the most interesting bits you’ll find is from a NPC named Fujioka that’s easy to miss. After major events you can talk to him, and he marvels at the state of current politics. While you don’t get specifics, there’s some kind of tensions between the army and the ruling family who presides over the regions from Ashina Castle, one of the game’s central areas. He laughs at people who think the castle getting invaded by the Interior Ministry can’t happen simply because it’s never happened and it’s not ‘supposed’ to happen. It echoes so much from today, of people who think things won’t happen simply because we aren’t supposed to go there again. Another world war, for example. A democracy descending into fascism as a another. Things a lot of people laugh off, as if those things can’t happen again.
You go to the leading temple of the region, and the monks there have also been corrupted by their own desires for immortality. Once sacred ground has been defiled, once blasphemous things embraced and become the norm. Not that I’m big on religion myself, but any kind of authority the church of any denomination once held long since crumbled and done nothing but bred radicalism in the modern age.
While The Wolf does fulfill his main goals, the once untouchable Ashina Castle does get invaded and torn down. The lush grassy areas you traveled around it burning. The temple and its monks stay corrupted, and while Wolf’s story comes to a fairly tidy ending with the source of the plague seemingly fixed, the world around him has changed beyond repair. What was once thought unthinkable has come to.
As the post-World War II world order crumbles, I cant help but feel something of a relation there. While we go on about our lives, society itself is at a cracking point. Between the rise of fascism across the globe, the ravages of climate change beginning to show and the growing income inequality, it seems only a matter of time before all kinds of once unthinkable things come to pass.
Sekiro is filled with Buddhist imagery, which feels appropriate not only because of the time period, but also because it feels at times like a Buddhist mediation. We never engage directly with those themes, but they are a constant presence around as you play, as our dying society is a constant one around us. You don’t have to say anything, just go outside and feel the radically changing weather, look to the newspaper for how many once sacred political norms are being trampled on, how people once thought on the outskirts with radical ideas are flooding into the mainstream, and you can just feel the anger and rage coming from a society teetering ever closer to that brink.
My intention isn’t to sell nihilism, I won’t go too far into how I personally feel about what we can or cannot do, but much like Sekiro, life goes on, we are all living our own stories, our own lives, but it’s always worth a meditation on the bigger scope of things, because we are all living as a world and society crumbles slowly, but surely, around us.