Be like water my friend

This game is unbelievably frustrating, its tutorial is unintuitive, its definitely intended for controllers, and sometimes the gameplay glitches out in ways that will never be fixed.

Sometimes enemies will do attacks you cant dodge without using something that not even the tutorial teaches you (side dodging) and the extra challenge mode is full of stages that would never be in the main game and you cant even play most of them without really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ little circumstances like limited timers or modifiers.

...That said, I bothered to 100% it. Cause its a fun game, and despite all the hand cramps and difficulties I faced with it, the gameplay itself is very addicting.

Get it on sale.

SIFU is a game where the old master's evil star student kills him, and you, one of his beloved pupils, seek to avenge your master's death. You've probably heard of this one before. You probably never heard of the "magical talisman that revives you at the cost of making you older" bit, though. This realistic urban fantasy beat-em-up focuses on more brutal, realistic foes that don’t wait their turn attack only two at a time max, don’t broadcast their intent have glowing limbs that display the attack type used and voicelines/sound cues when they use certain attacks, and and odds are, you will be doing more furniture-throwing and improvised-weapon-thwacking than fist-punching.

• The aging mechanic is brilliant. When you die, the Death Counter ticks up, and your age increases by the number on the Death Counter. The Death Counter ticks down when you kill certain enemies in a stage. Every decade of age, you get less max health and deal more damage. You start at age 20, game over if you die at or above age 70. It's very creative. It encourages you to die as little as possible. It lets skilled players flex as the badass old master. It also immediately begs the question of "Is getting revenge worth literally spending my entire life?"
  
• The choreography is excellent. Without relying on things like launchers and qi attacks, your moveset feels incredibly fluid and deadly. When the actual Sifu of the Pak Mei master choreographer is getting giddy watching, you know they did a great job. Their behind-the-scenes is really good.
  
• SIFU is very rewarding of effort and skill. The behind the scenes mentions there's "160 attacks". Likely a bit of embellishment in practice, as it's likely many of those are variations of finishers (which all occur from the same input on a vulnerable enemy), but something many don't realize is that each attack has a variation with different properties when done facing backwards. For example, reverse Duck Punch has super armor, and reverse Back Breaker is faster and stronger. As you master your moveset and learn what counters what, combat plays like its own kung fu movie.
  
• Amazing art direction. The low poly style looks clean, and each stage has a lot of eye-catching, often psychedelic set pieces and visual effects. The Museum's art design is masterful. The sound design is also very good; hits feel impactful without being comical. The "crack" on structure break and "cling" on-kill are iconic.
  
• High amount of customizability and replayability. After you beat the story mode, you unlock modifiers to make the game significantly more difficult, easier, or just different via things like moveset changes. I also enjoyed the Arenas gamemode, a series of score and time attacks that play heavily with modifiers. The use of modifiers, new stages, and soemtimes just shenanigans makes a lot of Arenas utterly hilarious and highly memorable.
  
• The Detective Board is awesome. The story overall may be cliché, but exploring each stage to piece together evidence to tie the plot together and learn every detail made it very engaging.
  
• I like the Chinese translation bonuses. Only via translation will you notice the protagonist lives off pizza and canned soup. And translating the messages in the room before the final boss is an utterly haunting experience that really adds to the story. I myself can't speak to how the game treats Chinese culture, but I hear it's good in this regard.

• This is the sort of game for the perfectionist type. The age mechanic heavily reinforces this; you start a new stage at the lowest age you beat the previous stage at. If you're starting The Club at age 50, your best chance of success to beat that would actually be clearing The Squats at the lowest age you can first. And there's not a lot of "raw" content, rather, there is a decent amount you're expected to master. Took me 40 hours to beat the story on Disciple at age 20, took another 60 to do it on Master.
  
• SIFU is very difficult, especially on Master difficulty. You'd see this and think "Yeah well of course it's hard", but SIFU is VERY punishing of mistakes. As in, "I missed one parry so I got combo killed" punishing. Often a negative review I will see is "Parry window is too tight", something I also struggled with for quite a while. There is an easy mode (Student) that lets you directly de-age, however.

• I think the XP grind bit of the game is poor. When you defeat enemies, you get XP. You can spend XP on skills to temporarily learn them. Restart or game over, they are lost, purchase a skill 5 times and you learn it forever. Some, like Knockback Cancel, are mundanely powerful lifesavers that I feel should be baseline. Others, like Raining Strikes, are strong and useful, but only within their specific contexts. I think the new player loop of "Game over on an early stage and lose everything, hope you like trickling in basic features like 'not dying when you get tripped' or 'finally making the push/throw moves useful'" feels bad. It's the worst bit of roguelites, in a non-rogue-ish game. And when I NG+, keeping all skills, I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything meaningful. I get it's to ease you in to the somewhat complex movelist, but I think there may have been a better way to accomplish this.
  
• The Dragon Arenas seem hyper-cognizant of the fact that you can instant kill enemies by throwing them off ledges, and they expect you to hyper optimize doing so in order to get more than a single stamp. I found this very dull.
  
• Glitchy geometry. It's surprisingly easy for the player or an enemy to just get stuck.
  
• SIFU is very bad at teaching you defensive options, especially on Disciple difficulty. There's three kinds of attacks: high, mid, and low. Dodging down avoids highs and mids, dodging up avoids lows. I can count on one hand the amount of attacks that hit low on Disciple. This makes Duck Strike and Crotch Punch significantly more useful for offense than Snap Kick. You can breeze by most of the game by just spamming down dodge. On Master, there ARE significantly more low attacks used by enemies, but they're typically only used about half the time for a specific combo. And you can beat the 50/50s by just parrying. Ergo, Master lets you get away with spamming down dodge, and then parrying the occasional 50/50 high/low, which is easier said than done to be fair. The one foe who actually intelligently mixes highs and lows, The Artist, is often cited as a "wall" or difficulty spike. I do think this bit is rather saddening, as parries and dodges are otherwise very fairly balanced compared to the other in my opinion; a rare sight in the "EPIC Parry Everything!!!" era.
  
• SIFU's message is very poor. It is very much "kill all the goons, spare the villain". in its implementation. Sure, maybe your father's killers don't deserve death. But when you're defeating people who weren't even involved in the crime by throwing them off buildings, slashing their throats, and axe-kicking their heads against concrete, it feels confused.
  
• You notice shortly after starting the game, that Yang, The Leader, can be killed or spared. How do you spare him? Well, first you have to kill him to get the bad ending and be told to beat the enemy into submission rather than kiling. Does this mean you can spare everyone you fight? Nope, only the bosses. How do you do that? Break their structure twice. I had to look this up, as you aren't exactly given the means to non-violently confront anyone else.

Overall, I think SIFU is very well-constructed and one of my favorite games of all time.