To think of someone calling it mediocre I have to wonder about that person. What an insult to this game.
Hey, that's me. Nice to meet you!
I'm obviously speaking only for me and my individual subjective feelings. I went into this game not expecting a Souls game and being happy they tried something else. I'm all for new ideas and directions. Therefore I judged it like an individual game. As it's part of the body of work from From, there are still valid comparison points to be made. I didn't expect Sekiro to follow the footsteps of the other games though.
I like some of the stealth, paired with the mobility options, it's fun. Combat animations are well done and level design was also largely interesting.
But for me, there was also a lot of stuff that I didn't like. The main character was not interesting, deep, funny or anything to have an impact. Same goes for the story, which failed to make me want to see more. The storytelling was also pretty mediocre. I simply didn't care. NPCs were forgettable as well. Same goes for the environments which were ok but nothing special. So the story, characters and the world failed to create emotions and make me feel involved.
Which is a big part of any game. The atmosphere was kinda good mostly, but some nice levels alone weren't enough to involve me emotionally.
Gameplay wise, they forced the player into a pretty clear direction how the game was meant to be played. And that direction didn't resonate with me that well.
In combat, I enjoy stuff like positioning, distance management, dynamic movement. In Sekiro, fighting a big part of the enemies, I could just stand directly in front of them and play the rhythm deflecting game. No need to move. Some enemies and bosses required you to jump or dodge. But it always felt very static because I felt like the game encouraged me to literally stand there and wait for the next button to press.
Some might call that strategical and tactical. I call that kinda boring. The combat was way to "distilled" for my taste.
Visually, it wasn't above average tbh. It was somewhat fine, but there is a lot of way better looking stuff out there.
At some point I asked myself why I'm even playing this. The whole package failed to motivate me to push further. Unlockable abilities alone weren't enough to keep me going. Story and characters certainly weren't and the combat got tedious. The world wasn't interesting enough to push me forward.
That made it a pretty mediocre experience for me. I'd give it a 6/10, slightly above average and one of the bigger disappointments of last gen.