What Does Sekiro Mean?

We all kind of knew that a new FromSoftware game was coming, but no one knew what it would be. Now we know, and the game looks great. Still, many questions remain, and while some haven’t been answered, we do have the answer to one that was bugging me in particular. What does Sekiro mean?

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has meaning in every word of its title. The subtitle breaks down to Shadows, meaning your ninja character, and “die twice” which refers to the character’s resurrection ability, which I detail here. Many pieced that together thanks to the reveal trailer though, but the meaning of Sekiro has many baffled.

First off, it’s not the character’s name, at least it seemed not to be as we were told during our developer walkthrough that the character was named Shinobi, which means ninja. Sekiro is a combination of two kanji characters from Japanese. The two appear at the end of the reveal trailer. According to Activision producer Robert Conkey, the first part of the title refers to someone who is missing an arm, as our hero is. The second means “wolf”. So put together they refer to “the one-armed wolf”, or our playable character.