oh, microsoft is actively in the process of doing exactly this

to be fair, it did come out two months ago. I'm way behind on this one, as I was finishing other games first. So I'm not surprised people aren't playing it anymore. I'm more just surprised that more people in my circle haven't played it.

And I just don't know if it's me or the game. I got to the end of Sekiro and then stopped playing before the boss for some stupid reason. I beat Owl and the dual Guardian Apes. I know how to parry in a video game. I can't figure out the parry timing, but some part of me knows the parry timing.

With all that said, I'm currently stuck on the second battle against this character, and I've come within a hair's breadth of defeating him three times. Sometimes, I have the parry timing for him absolutely dialed in, I have his number. And then other times, it's like I'm parrying for the first time

Musashi is a provably real person, but a lot of this stuff came from the 1935 novel Musashi by Yoshikawa Eiji. But whether it's real or not, it's a fun little set of references to the legends around this character.

In the final showdown between Musashi and Kojiro, Musashi is said to have used a boat oar, having not brought his trademark dual swords to the fight. When you fight Takezo for the first time, he wields a boat oar along with a katana.

There are some fun details if you're familiar with the legends around the figure. Before choosing the name we know, he was Shinmen Takezo. Musashi had a long rivalry with another swordsman named Sasaki Kojiro; your first battle takes place at Sasaki's Cove.

the combat isn't my favorite, and I'm largely happy that I've been playing with the combat set to Story difficulty and Puzzles on Hard. I want to raise the latter to Lost in Fog on my next playthrough, but the puzzles have been fun so far, especially the Scarecrow puzzle as a standout.

this dude is calming as fuck to watch

it's weird at times, but the weirdness is definitely more the structure. There's pages and pages of footnotes, asides from the narrator, and so it's a lot of jumping around. It's like trying to read three books at a time. It's doable, but it feels like studying at times.

I started the book in 2019 and put it down because of that character and his narrative. But I've been pushing to read more lately, and I need to read something other than Richard Stark at least a little bit.

But this kind of horror--this cold, unfeeling, unknowable space--is exactly my shit. It's that empty kind of scary. It's great weird cosmic horror. The driven explorer, pushing deeper into something he probably can't come out of, is great, too. But then also there's Johnny Truant.