I finished a playthrough, but unfortunately chose the "short" ending, missing a whole area and a few bosses, also missing out on some materials that can only be obtained if you get to that area.

Decided to move on to NG+, and the difficulty increase of bosses and minibosses is real.

I almost gave up on Genichiro. Getting through his posture needs perfect execution, and although after 20 tries I know all of his moves by heart, the sheer speed with which you need to execute a response can be overwhelming at times. I manage 98% of the fight, but that not enough.

I needed to revert to "cheesing" him in phase 1 by continuously using Shadow Rush, because it's the only attack that consistently chips away his HP, even when he's blocking. Phase 2 is luckily a lot easier.

I still love the game a lot, but I felt Genichiro in ng+ was pushing my limits as an older (albeit experienced) gamer. Other bosses seem a lot less tense, but I'm afraid I'm going into the new last area for the first time on ng+, and then the demon boss also for the first time on ng+. It's going to be interesting to say the least...

@Shinnok789: You will soon realise that most minibosses will require you to be a lot more offensive. Don't wait for a parry to get a hit in, but attack, attack, attack.

While attacking you keep the opponent on the defensive and fill his posture bar. They will be blocking most of the time. When they do initiate an attack, it will mostly be something unblockable, which requires a timely dodge/jump or parry. Get back into attacking, right after.

I was used to playing DS games defensively, cautiously. This one requires you to have a very offensive mindset.

@naomha1: You need to be very aggressive, especially against minibosses. The posture mechanic demands that you don't relent.
Don't play it where you wait to do a perfect parry and then get in some hits, but attack, attack, attack and try to parry what you can in between and jump over/away or dodge unblockable attacks, and get right back in there.

@gustavob: 45 here and still parrying like a pro! ;P

I'm a DS and Bloodborne fan, and I also loved Nioh.

I'm about 20-25 hours in, defeated 2 bosses and a dozen or so mini-bosses.

This game is AWESOME!

The scenery is breathtaking.

The movement and traversal are exhilarating.

Combat is easy enough against normal enemies, but against mini-bosses especially you will need to bring your A-game. Where DS games allowed you to breathe between strikes, Sekiro needs you to persist in your attacks until you break the opponents posture, after which you get a deathblow, and your opponents will try to do the same, which makes combat very tense.

Minibosses also require 2 deathblows to kill, BUT you can stealth strike every miniboss to initiate combat, which counts as one deathblow. (I've only had two minibosses so far against which I couldnt initiate combat from stealth.)

The different tools and upgrades for them also give you lots of variety.

It's seems to be also pretty big. I'm not sure how many bosses it has in total or how many zones, but I'm in awe of what I got so far.

My game of the year, unless TLoU2 manages to come out this year and then we'll see ;)

@crimsonmar: What's a seasoned critic? One with salt and pepper?

You seem to grant credibility to the "institution" of critics.
Critics are just people being paid for their opinion, which should already make you suspicious of what they are saying, because who is willing to give money so that someone can say something about a product?

It's today's modern marketing towards a group of consumers that's grown immune to old-school commercialization. Companies will try to get you to buy their products by trusting not them, but trusting other people that say the company's product is fine.
They may buy reviews, or nudge them with promise of more work, or downright set up their own "independent" critics.

I distrust critics more than I distrust the user reviews.
I go to metacritic and see on the one hand the overwhelming critic acclaim some games get, and then the more moderate response the users give. The trick is to omit the 10's and 1's, and go by what the bulk of the users are saying.

Then again, even that may be perverted. Did you know that there are now companies you can hire that offer an army of internet fora posters to influence the perception of a product on well established critical platforms?

Commercial propaganda at its best...

Played WoW since vanilla and this is the most bare bone expansion ever.

No new class, no new talents, no class quests/halls/...
The new races are re-skins of existing races.
Artifact weapons which had talents/skills and a variety of skins to unlock, got replaced by a necklace, with nothing.
All of the choice of previous expansions has been pruned out.

Everything is trimmed down. Seals for an extra roll can only be bought, nothing implemented to earn them.
Professions are bland and can be maxed in a day, with nothing relevant to make once you hit heroic dungeon ilvl (there is one thing but it's gated behind 100 hours of raidfarming).

Islands are boring (which means they didn't spend enough time developing the idea) and Warfronts are nice, but will get boring once you ran them 10+ times.

Combat this expansion is the least fun it has ever been, due to not having new talents, but also due to GCD slowing the whole thing down even more. There are classes/specs that can be played with 3 buttons.
Imo, Blizzard tried to get combat to such a predictable level (just to not have any surprises in pvp) that they gutted the pve experience and any chance the game had of any emergent gameplay.

The only thing it has going for it, is its art and music.

WoW used to be a masterclass in game development. This one feels like a student took a crack at it.

Pre-sales and sales at launch mean only one thing, that at least the marketing department did its job.

BfA is, BY FAR, the most underwhelming expansion I have ever played in the 14 years I've played World of Warcraft.
Every other expansion offered something uniquely new to the franchise, BfA adds nothing new (island expeditions are just big, 3 vs 3 battlegrounds where you can mine stuff). No new talents, no new skilltree.
Its so called new races are just frigging re-skins of existing races.
It even manages, through its scaling mechanics, to regress in terms of character development.

I've always loved this game, but this is the first expansion that feels like a letdown.
It feels like a filler expansion, a big patch honestly.