Definitely will stream again! Maybe Thursday night, depending on what's going on, but I'll keep everyone posted. Also it looks like I didn't have it saving my past broadcast, so I lost that footage. Going forward I will be sure to capture everything and maybe throw them up on YouTube as well.
The DLC for 3 was super fantastic. Gael and Sister Friede might be two of the best fights of the series. Plus they brought back a boss fight that involves other players like in Demon's Souls. The settings and lore were just great. It's tough to top The Old Hunters DLC, which is still my favorite Soulsborne DLC, but the complete version of 3 was just great.
For what it's worth, I played Souls 3 no shield. I think Bloodborne just demonstrated how that's the way to really play and I've gone back since and played all of the games without shields and it just makes those experiences so much better.
Sekiro was also a divisive game because it was hard as hell to learn, but once you did, it just felt so good. It reminded me of learning Souls games for the first time. Super satisfying and a really solid experience.
I might be an outlier, but I pretty much haven't stopped playing all of these From games since I first picked up Dark Souls.
Dark Souls 3 is actually my favorite. I felt like it was the perfect blend of Bloodborne and Dark Souls. Opinions on it seem divisive, but I really loved it, especially the PVP.
That said, you should totally check out Sekiro. It feels like the first time playing a Soulsborne game and there's a fresh learning curve/system to master. I totally loved it and can't wait to play a third time and get closer to that Platinum.
I review the modern day upgrade called Qix++ some years back. I had never played the original, but had played lots of Jezz Ball, which I always really enjoyed. Great review!
Stealth can be important at times, but by no means is it a stealth game. As someone who also loves a good stealth game, I felt like Sekiro underdelivered in this department. It has the dressings of a stealth game, but never really commits to that. It uses stealth as part of your combat arsenal to make quicker work of some of the enemies, but that's the extent of it. Unfortunately, I suspect your Tenchu comment is spot on, it's unlikely that they'd make a new one granted the success of Sekiro any time soon.
In any event, and I really don't mean any disrespect with this, but I don't think you've picked up the finer points of the combat just yet. I think you've probably got the broad strokes, but I think that the finer points take most of the game to really get down. As a matter of fact, you haven't even seen all the bits of the combat yet and they're all very instrumental to mastery of the game's systems. The basic enemies have huge parry windows and they're generally one-trick ponies, whereas the mini-bosses and main bosses really bring the broader arsenal and force you to chain together everything you know.
Hesitation comes up a lot when talking to NPCs because I think it's trying to subtly tell you that you don't really get time to think, you have to be in the head of the enemy and know what they're going to do by reading their tells. Along with the nuance to the combat, the game slowly teaches you how to read enemy tells more effectively. That said, I honestly don't think the goalposts really get shifted, you're just seeing bits of the broader experience as you progress and at the moment, because you haven't seen much, they seem unrelated even though they're not.
The lessons aren't easy and they take a long time to really sink in. I struggled through most of the game and it took beating the final boss before I really felt like I "got it". Starting a new quest demonstrated to me how effective the game was at teaching me how to play it better. I was able to blast through all of the parts that once hung me up, defeating each mini-boss and boss with almost no effort using the same tools I had at my disposal in my original playthrough. I don't say this to brag, just to give some indication of how the game slowly forces you to master it in order to complete it. You have everything you need at the outset to be successful, except the experience.
All that said, I just want to take a moment to reflect on the hilarity of this situation where I'm standing up for a FromSoftware game with you on the attacking side. I remember all those years ago when the roles were reversed and you were trying to convince me that Demon's Souls was actually fair and I was vehemently disagreeing 
I hope it didn't come across too much like I was saying to "git gud" in Sekiro. I mean, ultimately, yes, it's what you need to do. But the game is basically a journey of gitting gud. I sucked hard through the vast majority of it until it finally all clicked into place.
I get very stuck on the Shinobi Hunter for sure. If it's of any help, you can unlock the gate that leads back to the idol for more of a straight shot. You can also just run past everything on the way there and hide in the high grass to both lose the enemies you aggroed and sneak up on that bastard for a deathblow. That fight has you stacking Mikiri counters and deflects to really build up his posture. His health bar is basically meaningless.
The tracking on the Chained Ogre is pretty excessive. You definitely fight him more like a Souls boss, so I managed to get him on my second try. Unfortunately the tracking (for the purposes of the deflect system) is turned way up in Sekiro compared to Souls, so that makes the Ogre even more difficult, but is appropriate for most everything else in the game. I think I mentioned on Twitter that he was placed a bit too early. They could've pushed him into the castle or even beyond. The flame vent definitely makes easier work of the fight, so make sure you grabbed that.
Anyway, I totally understand how you bounced off of it and how the grind of it can become very un-fun if you're not getting the vibe of the boss battles. Me on the other hand am madly in love with the game and I can't seem to get enough of it. I'm working through NG+ right now and I'm definitely headed for the Platinum Trophy (never gotten one before).
I love Dark Souls 2 as well. Don't get me wrong, it's bottom tier for me in the ranking of Souls games, but even then I still like it more than most every other game.
To me, DS3 felt like the perfect mix of the improvements Bloodborne made with the Dark Souls formula/builds/etc. I really loved the PvP there and have clocked close to 400 hours doing that alone. I'm actually curious to go back to it after putting a solid 60 hours into Sekiro. I feel like it's going to be tough to reacclimate to both it and Bloodborne.
Dark Souls III is definitely my favorite of the modern FromSoftware games, so my vote absolutely goes in that direction, with Persona 5 as a close second. Speaking of Persona 5, it's too bad that the "Switch" port thing didn't pan out. Would've loved to play that one on the go.
Totally! I'm actually completely rewriting it. New technology and everything.
Most importantly, it'll be responsive, meaning it'll format nicely for all screen sizes, whether that's your phone, tablet, or PC at any resolution. I'm also changing a whole bunch of core concepts about how the site works. Going to mesh together the staff tools and the user tools, allowing anyone to effectively create content for the site, which can be promoted to an official article if it's nominated by the community or the staff.
I'm also thinking of changing some other stuff and moving to a purely tag-based system, but I'm still working through the details of that. I'm going to be moving image hosting to imgur, authentication/login is moving to Auth0 and I'll be using OAuth 2.0, which should allow you to sign in with your Google or Facebook account (you'll have to do a data conversion after login to associate all your old content with your new account).
The new tech I'm using should also make the site a lot faster to navigate and I can do a lot more fancy stuff. I built an open source framework for building stuff on Angular and REST, which I'm using to do the rewrite, so it should make it much much easier for me to be able to leverage everything I've done.
