Nioh platted! For what it’s worth, it’s a pretty fun and painless platinum. Anyway, here is my Nioh review.
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Having played the beta tests before release, I had to make an effort to notice again just how fluid the game is, because it had by then become second nature. The combat is silky sixty-frames-per-second smooth. Every one of the five weapons (sword, double swords, spear, hammer and a novel hook-chain thing) has three stances. Basically slow and strong for bosses, fast and weak for enemies that are easy to stagger and an in-between. Dark Souls’ stamina bar is here renamed “Ki” and a well-timed button press will let you recover some of it to get more slashes in the same amount of time. You can switch weapons mid-combo as a special attack that also recovers Ki. You can sheathe your sword when the bloodbath is done for extra style points and even do that Iaido thing where you do a lightning quick slash from the scabbard. Shooting enemies is fast and satisfying and the twirl/reload animation when shooting a musket is priceless (oh yes, you can be a musket samurai!). The game has Ninja Gaiden in its DNA (and in its dev team) and it shows. Basically, as a samurai simulator, Nioh is already a glorious success.
I think it is to Nioh’s credit that the combat has so many nuances that very few will master them, but that you can do well anyway. You can probably finish the game without ever recovering extra Ki. A great player, however, can combine parries with stance changes and guard breaks to dazzle and confuse. A player-versus-player patch is coming soon and I expect it will create some great fights. Youtubers will have a field day with this and it will make Nioh’s popularity jump to the next level if it is well made. In many regards, the combat is BETTER THAN DARK SOULS. Panic if you must.
Also, I don’t think any game of this type has a faster loading time upon death. It is almost instantaneous, probably a plus for those who need a little bit more “getting gud”, as they say.
There is, obviously, the elephant in the room. Is this a Dark Souls clone? Then again, what isn’t these days? Many, many things are obviously “inspired” by the series: losing experience on death which you get one chance to recover on your grave, stamina bar, bonfire shrines, level structure with narrow passages and pits, shortcuts and items in nooks and crannies and “extreme” difficulty (I don’t think the game is quite that hard, though). There is also the character-building aspect in Nioh, but it’s much more focused on jacks-of-all-trades as no skill requires intense specialization to obtain. It’s easy to create a custom build with a few dirty tricks (I used regen scrolls and poison shuriken, which actually work on bosses). For what it’s worth, I’d say it’s more of a Ninja Gaiden/Dark Souls/Onimusha/Diablo clone. So by that point Nioh is its own thing.
Why Onimusha? Because it is set in the Sengoku period in Japan and all the historical guys from the era are there, with a bunch of monsters plopped into the mix. Kou Shibusawa, one of the producers, made his name doing Sengoku games, so that explains that. Then again, the story is terrible, neither entertaining in its absurdity or interesting in its verisimilitude. Absolutely nothing significant happens until about two thirds of the game. For example, while I was playing in random coop, the game dropped me in the next story mission I had not completed and I did not get to see the cutscenes. So it turns out a character sacrificed himself, but I didn’t even notice that character was dead before a while, had no idea why a sacrifice was needed (it came out of nowhere) and didn’t even really care. Onimusha: Dawn of Souls was anime-style bad, but it had the courage to go all the way with its pseudo-historical hijinks and had an impeccable soundtrack:
For its part, Nioh has a lot of scenes of stern, important people sitting cross-legged in their living rooms while cartoon animals inspect the proceedings:
Every cutscene is like this. And you thought the historical meetings in Assassin’s Creed were boring.
I think the game would unarguably be better if they removed ALL the story, but kept the frame of it and made it a very low-key thing with vague references here and there. It’s probably the one thing they should have copied from Dark Souls, but didn’t. In the same vein, the world map is also very convenient, but it does remove a lot of the tension of being knee-deep in hostile territory. So for the sequel, just make it this: a lone gaijin samurai washes ashore in a Japan scared of foreigners and plagued by bandits and civil war in his lonely quest for revenge. That’s it. No more story needed. Change the title a bit and the less suspecting will not realize it’s a sequel and it will get even more adulation. It worked great for Dark Souls.
In that same vein, the game is about 70% monsters, 30% humans, which is a shame considering humans are the most interesting opponents. They have their own stamina bar and become vulnerable when it is depleted, which leaves them open for an easy critical hit. It’s brilliant, because it’s always better when it seems the AI has to play by the same rules you do (pro tip for developers: copy this mechanic). The ideal mix would probably have been 80% humans, 20% monsters.
There is also the issue of the loot piñata every enemy drops, with random modifiers and quality levels à la Diablo. It’s an extremely versatile system that lets you keep your favorite items throughout the game by enhancing them and even changing their appearance, but it’s kind of a hassle. I’ll quote myself on this:
[quote] My personal worst enemy is the loot. So much loot.
So now I have a plan. Press the controller’s center pad for extra options, then offer all white common items. Then do it again with yellow items, but double-check the list for unusually good accessories/armor. For more room, sort weapons by “ability” and keep the best one by type, then sort armor by “weight” and keep the best one for each model. BUT, if you have purple stuff to get rid of, disassemble it, don’t offer it, because you get highest quality materials, which would be a hassle to get otherwise. You should switch to disassemble sometimes anyway to get spirit stones to reforge, so you have to keep that in mind too. Oh, and if weapons have a very good inheritable properties, lock them and send them to storage for eventual soul matching.
It’s a pretty long process.
Gosh, I should just trash anything that isn’t purple, but what kind of OCD gamer would accept that? Besides, I got a “mere” yellow accessory that reduces the vulnerable time when out of Ki, an exceedingly rare purple special effect (I’ve only seen it once in hundreds of items) that is literally a life saver. Instead of standing there waiting for the coup de grâce, I can usually survive a Ki misstep.[/quote]
There are also many other niggles that could be explained by the fact that Nioh spent a decade in the development doldrums. The game is waaay too dark, probably to hide the fact that the graphical quality is average and would look even worse in the full light of day. The game’s Japanese audio has not been dubbed because it’s more “authentic” that way, but since it’s like 99% Japanese, 1% English (and 0,001% Gaelic), it just feels cheap. There are a lot of typos and weird choices of words and some tutorials seem to contain inaccurate information.
With all that being said, they should get around to start making an even better sequel soon. It has the potential to be truly spectacular.
I’ll also leave this here: