Sekiro "broke" the entire Soulsborne legacy. It was tailor-made to frustrate all the old tactics, old exploits, old ways of advancing through a Soulsborne game.
Hate to say it... but Soulsborne got too casual. The games are very tough, but they began to retread the same tropes and territory. Combat was adjusted and refined, but at the end of the day it's still about walking halfway up the stairs and quickly moving out of the way before that flaming boulder hits you. It has been that way since Demon's.
Sekiro gives you infinite stamina, the ability to jump, a superior block, encourages you to be aggressive, etc etc and this would normally break a Soulsborne game. Sekiro challenges a player's skills to the limits yet provides several of the best tools from the beginning. Clearly there's something more going on here. It's not just "too hard" when it objectively gives the players so many easy-buttons compared to prior Souls games.
Y
yugoluke
described the combat very well. Quoting below:
Do few things and do them better than anyone else.
This is what Sekiro embodies.
The core of the game is better. The parry system is a great innovation and leap forward for soul's like games. It allowed for an increase in pace of combat while looking fucking beautiful. I expect some variant of the parry system in all FROMSOFT games going forward (including Elden Ring). Not doing so would be going backwards, and not so for practical reasons, but rather because angry fans refuse to adapt.
It's a minimalistic experience that forces you to truly git gud in a way no other Soulsborne has to date. I felt like I was forged into a real warrior by the end!
I wanna piggyback off this because in many respects Sekiro is the most "Souls" since Demon's Souls.
Demon's Souls forced you to git good in a way no other third-person action RPGs had to date. Checkpoints were spaced far apart. You lost your progress (souls) if you died without recovering your bloodstain, you could get killed by online invaders, you could get killed by one of countless devious traps, etc etc.
All subsequent Soulsborne games followed this same core pattern: be cautious, don't rush forward, conserve stamina, watch for ambushes
I think a certain segment of Soulsborne players felt "left out" by Sekiro and that is the core of the criticism. There is no online helper-buddy system. The RPG elements are not robust enough to compensate for bad skill (grinding isn't viable). You can't use the old tricks. Even a seasoned Soulsborne player (*raises hand*) must "git gud" all over again when they are confronted by Sekiro. This happened with Bloodborne: a portion of the core Souls community disliked the de-emphasis on armor, the removal of shields, the removal of ranged combat, the removal of most free backstabs, and so forth.
Sekiro did "remove" a lot of things, but it expanded other things. There has never been a true "stealth" build in Soulsborne even though all the games reward stealth to some degree. Well now you have an entire game to yourself. Traversal and jump-attacks have been in all prior games as well, but they've been clunky (at best). Sekiro refined traversal and jumping and tied it into the combat system. Backstabs are not only back but Sekiro offers countless ways to backstab and instakill enemies. There's a move that one-shots any
enemy monk in the game, for instance. If Sekiro should be slammed for omitting things, it should be praised in the instances where it was expanding and perfecting things.
In time, I expect more and more players will return to Sekiro as it continues to build a reputation as "too hard". Those who've taken a break from Soulsborne and folks who are going in with a fresh perspective will likely do fine at the game, no worse than if they were picking up Bloodborne or Souls for the first time.
And then they'll beat it and post "why did GAF say this game was way too hard? I just beat Sekiro in two weeks" and then everyone will show up and talk about how they always said the game was the easiest game in the entire franchise, you just needed to master the mechanics etc etc etc
How do I know this?
Because the same thing happens every time a new Souls game comes out, ever since Dark Souls 2.