Sekiro: No Defeat director Kenichi Kutsuna says the anime must recreate a brutal game feeling

Video game movies have a notoriously bad track record because the format fights the medium. A feature film has to fit a story often told over more than 20 hours into roughly two hours, and it also has to copy something games do naturally: the sense of personal exploration and achievement you only get by pushing your own way through a tough fight. In other words, you are not just watching the plot. You are trying to feel how hard it was to get to the next part.

That is why Kenichi Kutsuna, director of the upcoming anime Sekiro: No Defeat, is approaching the adaptation with a dual mission. He is focused on faithfully adapting the plot of FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and he is equally focused on emulating the feel of playing through the game’s big fights. It is a simple line with complicated implications, because the “feel” of a FromSoftware title is the product. If the anime only shows the outcomes, it risks becoming a recap. If it tries to copy the game’s cadence without the game’s structure, it risks turning the viewing experience into something confusing or performative.

Kutsuna’s challenge, as framed here, is basically the same challenge boards and studios run into whenever interactive IP becomes passive media. In games, difficulty is not background flavor. It is the engine that turns learning into satisfaction. When players die, the game communicates information, then asks the player to adapt. In a movie or anime, there is no real death loop for the audience. So the adaptation has to recreate difficulty signals through pacing, framing, and the emotional rhythm of escalation and recovery. That is what makes this move interesting to executives: you cannot solve it with better VFX alone. You have to design for perception.

The other complicating factor is compression. When the original story can take more than 20 hours, the adaptation has to choose what to cut and what to treat as non-negotiable. Cutting is not automatically bad, but the “personal exploration and achievement” piece is fragile. Games can let you roam, fail, and then return with better timing. Anime is linear by default, and that linearity can flatten the sense of discovery unless the adaptation compensates with deliberate structure.

From a market standpoint, the stakes are high because IP adaptations are expected to convert existing fans while still playing well to newcomers. Fans already know the plot. What they want is the transformation experience, the sense that they are watching the story they love through a new lens without losing what made it hit in the first place. New viewers, meanwhile, do not have the game’s context, so the adaptation has to communicate difficulty and accomplishment without requiring prior play. That balance is notoriously hard, and it is exactly where adaptations either earn long-term goodwill or get stuck as “okay for fans” projects.

There is also a second-order business implication. When studios attempt to replicate the “game feeling” on screen, they are effectively making a promise about quality that is measurable in audience sentiment. With a FromSoftware property, that promise is harder because the community is culturally fluent in the games’ difficulty style. The adaptation is therefore not just competing with other anime. It is competing with the memory of the mechanics and the satisfaction of learning them.

And the “big fights” focus matters for strategic planning, too. Action sequences are where adaptations live or die, but they are also where you can accidentally create the wrong kind of intensity. In a game, intensity is tied to player input, stamina, timing, and the constant feedback loop. Anime can mimic the visual language of combat, but it still has to translate the internal journey. If Kutsuna and his team succeed, the audience gets an experience that feels like achievement rather than just entertainment.

For executives considering similar conversions from interactive worlds to screen narratives, Kutsuna’s framing is a reminder that adaptation is not a one-dimensional rewrite. It is a re-creation of experience. The plot is the skeleton, but the “feel of playing the big fights” is the nervous system. If you preserve only the skeleton, you end up with a story that is technically faithful and emotionally thin. If you preserve both, you give the audience a reason to care beyond nostalgia. That is the strategic bet Sekiro: No Defeat is trying to make, and it is the one that will determine whether this anime lands as a true adaptation or just another casualty of format mismatch.