In Sifu, skills are not unlocked permanently until the player spends additional XP. Getting a game over will force the player to give up and replay a prior level, and in doing so, all skills without a permanent unlock will be lost and need to be repurchased to use again. By unlocking skills permanently, players will keep their skills after the game is over and will be better equipped to take on levels.
Sifu is a beat' em-up game styled after martial arts movies like The Raid or Dragons Forever. After the murder of their father, the player character seeks vengeance on the five people who took their father's life. Along with their training, the player character makes use of a pendant of coins tied to the aging and death mechanic in Sifu, which brings them back from death at the cost of aging a number of years.
One of the challenges of Sifu is to get through the whole game without using up all the pendant coins. If the player dies too many times in a level, they will have less health and fewer lives to work with for later levels. To counter this, players can replay levels, aiming to complete them with younger age and fewer deaths. However, without permanently unlocked skills, the player will have to work with their base move set, effectively starting from zero again. A tip all beginners in Sifu should know is that permanently unlocking skills can help players beat previous levels with fewer deaths and less aging, as they will have more abilities to use. This guide will teach players how to unlock permanent upgrades in Sifu.
Unlocking Permanent Upgrades in Sifu
Upon dying, interacting with a dragon shrine, or interacting with the tree at the Wuguan, the player will be greeted with Sifu's skill tree, and all the skills the player can unlock. Under all the skills, there are two unlocks. The first is to unlock the skill for the player to use, opening up new possibilities for Sifu's exciting third-person brawling. The second is to keep that skill unlocked permanently. Both are acquired using XP, which is obtained through defeating enemies.
The skill itself is a one-time payment per run. With each new run, the player will need to pay for any nonpermanent skills again. Next to the permanent unlock option is a 5x. This signifies how many times the player will have to pay for the skill to become permanent. For example, if a skill costs 500 XP to unlock, the permanent unlock will cost five additional payments of 500 XP. Whenever the player pays a permanent unlock, the additional cost will drop to 4x, then 3x, and so forth until all five payments have been made.
While nonpermanent skills will be lost when starting a new run, previous payments towards the permanent unlock will stay. Because of this, if the player wanted to, they could continuously redo the first level to build up XP and gradually pay for all the skills, and permanent unlocks. While it is a tedious strategy, it could give those struggling with Sifu's difficulty more of an edge in combat.
Sifu is currently available for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.