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Longtime FromSoftware dataminer Zullie the Witch has uploaded a new video that interrogates one of the studio’s most memorably strange non sequiturs: The giant guy made of rope who carries you from the kingdom of Ashina to the celestial Fountainhead Palace. It seems like there was once much more to Mr. Rope-a-Dope than we saw in the final game.
Much like the giant crow who takes us to Lordran in Dark Souls 1, or the multiple convenient transportation gargoyles in DS1 and 3, the giant rope guy in Sekiro always felt like a bit of a “well, fuck it” area transition.
Thankfully, the absurd and nonsensical works just fine with FromSoft’s surreal, disconnected house style. I did learn through Zullie’s video that rope man was likely based on the real-life Japanese Wara ningyō dolls, just at a massive scale.
Looking into the creature’s associated files in Sekiro, Zullie uncovered unused AI scripts for the giant Wara ningyō which imply that it was once supposed to have active gameplay associated with it, rather than the single cutscene it has in the final game.
That, of course, begs the question of how such a massive creature would have even worked with Sekiro’s gameplay. Zullie measured the rope man as standing 191 meters tall—that’s more than twice the size of the Statue of Liberty, and almost halfway to the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago.
One possibility pointed out by Zullie is that you didn’t fight the rope man directly, but instead did battle with normal-sized enemies while climbing the thing. This is supported by Sekiro concept art of the rope man that shows various enemies hitching a ride.
That would have presented its own issues, though. Sekiro’s jumping and free movement doesn’t seem like a great fit for such a constrained play space, particularly if it was moving, as the AI scripts imply. Ultimately, I’m pretty happy with what we got: The sort of utterly surreal, unexplained oddity that FromSoft is so good at creating. You can follow Zullie the Witch on YouTube for more deep dives into FromSoft esoterica.
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Kurt Indovina
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