Crunchyroll has released a trailer for Sekiro — its upcoming anime series that’s based on the popular 2019 video game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
Sekiro will follow the Sengoku era-shinobi warrior Wolf on his journey to rescue his lord. In the trailer, people who’ve played the game will see exactly what they remember playing: a lot of crisp sword-swining action, Wolf’s mechanical arm, and, what appears to be, parry based combat that’s ripped straight from the game.
It’s all depicted in a beautiful hand-drawn style too, from director Kenichi Kutsana and Studio Qzil.la.
In an interview with Variety, Kutsana revealed that the goal of the project was to “take as many elements from the underlying work of the game as possible,” and “it doesn’t deviate too far from what the fans would expect.” He also admitted using “every single element would be impossible and very difficult.”
“With the game, of course, you’re playing in the character, or the player’s, POV, so you have one point of view, and that wouldn’t really work for an anime, so we tried to adapt it as much as possible as an audio-visual type of medium,” Kutsuna explained. “There’s a lot of respect paid to the original game, but there were some liberties taken in the sense of point of view and joining the imagery together, as opposed to being placed into the world in the first person.”
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was a megahit for popular gaming developer FromSoftware when the game released in March of 2019. With over 10 million units sold (as of 2023), it won several year-end awards and still remains considered to be one of FromSoftware’s best games.
The Sekiro anime was announced at Gamescom last year, but details about what it would entail were scarce. Now, Kutsuna has revealed more details about it to Variety, explaining that he worked closely with FromSoftware on the screenplay and storyboarding process.
This anime marks the first time that FromSoftware has had any of its IP developed for another on-screen medium.
