Sekiro: No Defeat anime director on the video game move he had to do justice

Video game movies have a notoriously bad track record because it’s so hard to compress a story often told across more than 20 hours into the length of a feature film while also replicating the feeling of personal exploration and achievement that comes from playing the game. For Sekiro: No Defeat, the upcoming anime adaptation of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, director Kenichi Kutsuna is focused on both faithfully adapting the plot and emulating the feel of playing through the game’s big fights.

“One of the biggest elements that I put in the movie is the guard that you have in the game,” Kutsuna told Polygon in an interview at Annecy Festival, where Sekiro: No Defeat premiered. “When you watch the movie, you can actually see through the sound and the image where there was a guard and when there wasn’t one.”

Kutsuna also sought to convey the grueling feeling of struggling to get through a boss fight.

“I really put a lot of thought into it and through the storytelling, we tried to actually make the viewers feel this difficulty, like after a combat scene people will say, Oh my God, I actually watched something that felt difficult.”

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice takes more than 30 hours to complete, so Kutsuna had to cut plenty of boss fights and stages he wished he could have included.

“If we had put everything in, the movie would last maybe eight hours, so we had to make choices,” he says. “I really wanted to put Mibu Village in, but we had to make choices.”

Sekiro: No Defeat opens in movie theaters in Japan on Sept. 4, where it will have a three-week theatrical run. The anime will stream on Crunchyroll at an unannounced date.