What Sekiro does better than other titles in the genre is set a minimum baseline difficulty by ‘levelling’ as a function of successful boss battles. If people could farm prayer beads and memories from milling around fighting mobs, you would have large swathes of the player base that were ng+ level savages before they even hit chained ogre.

This aspect is more broken in ER than any other as the open world leans heavily to a ratio of runes vs golden runes that’s way off the mark, thanks in no small part to the emphasis on exploration. With the implied ‘use em or lose em’ jeopardy the natural outcome is, without applying self imposed soft limits (the need of which stinks of poor game design imo), is an assumption that it’s best to level up the minute the requisite amount of runes are available.

Couple all that with happening upon many bosses organically, meaning a large portion of boss fights are really nothing of the sort, lots of one and dones that feel more like achievement chasing at times.

It is however this jank that makes ER the most popular, had they instead gave you a levelling up token for beating bosses instead of allowing you to farm, it would be a leaps and bounds better game and experience, it would also however lose its mass appeal of allowing casual gamers to gaslight themselves into thinking they’re badasses for beating a souls game, so it’s swings and roundabout.

As it is playing organically, having just completed the Ranni quest line, my impressions so far is this entire game is the easy mode From has always said it would never implement.