Wei Yidong had never felt this stifled in a real fight.
When players fought in reality, they relied on attribute points and skills. It was a clash of stats, of skill activations, of sequence suppression.
Footwork and the like were indeed important, but aside from a tiny handful of people, no one would actually be stupid enough to rely purely on crossing blades without using even a single skill.
But the [Sekiro] instance did not care about any of that. It directly flattened the gap between players, then set up an entirely new framework, forcing players to fight purely through combat understanding without any stat advantage. What mattered was rhythm, deflect timing, and posture management.
Was Wei Yidong rich in combat experience?
He was.
But the problem was, this instance was modeled on a game.
And much of Wei Yidong's combat experience was built on the premise that he had attribute advantages and skills he could use. In most system instances, his experience was extremely useful. If he ran into an opponent he could clash with head-on, he suppressed them with strength. If he ran into a nimble opponent, he dodged and waited for a chance to counterattack, looking for gaps in the fight.
But in Sekiro, all of his experience stopped working.
He had to relearn how to fight an opponent whose rhythm was completely different from reality, without any cheats whatsoever, relying purely on combat perception.
He needed to completely break away from the combat framework he was most familiar with and start adapting from scratch to a wholly different set of rules.
And under this set of rules, it even encouraged offense! Waiting for the enemy to move first and looking for openings! That was how Soulslike games were played! It did not match at all!
Besides,