Nioh

Just like I said in the title, this game is another Dark Souls rip off. Team Ninja needed to make a few extra bucks so they took the DS game mechanics and changed the setting to a 16th century japanese environment, just to make it look different. Too bad they also tried to make it unnecessarily harder (e.g. bosses that one-shot kill you, limited summonings, etc...). The result is an unbalanced Dark Souls clone. If you have money to spend get Bloodborne, you won't be disappointed.

I must admit that after Dark Souls, I wasn't able to adjust to playing this game for a while, and after beating first 3-4 bosses, I quit. Only months later I decided to revisit Nioh and realized I was very unfair not to give this game a chance, because it's easily the best of 2017, one of the best games ever made, an absolute must- have. A game you certainly need to get used to enjoy, therefore take my advice and don't be fooled by the beginning. Consider completing all the submissions before the main ones, since it will give you plenty of cool weapons and armor, and most importantly amrita (the analogue of souls here). Just like in Dark Souls it's important that you are as agile as possible, so make sure you improve the relevant stats. In fact try to level up as much as you can. Speaking of which, although Nioh was inspired by and is the reminiscent of great Dark Souls, it is very different, including the level up system. The combat is amazing once you figure it out. The setting is pure Japanese, it's beautiful but some may need to adapt to the atmosphere, so you might want to see Ran or other Kurosawa masterpieces before playing Nioh, after all it's based on master's unfinished script. Does it live up to the hype? Oh yes. I think Kurosawa would be proud. It's now one of my top favorites that I will be frequently revisiting and goes directly to my 'Japan rocks' list. The bosses are tough and pretty hard. Just how stupid I was to quit playing Nioh back then! I'm really ashamed I thought bad of this game before. And this is where I will address the creators of Nioh "Dear Nioh Team, if you come across any of my negative feedback that I haven't been able to track back and delete, please forgive my foolishness, you have done a miraculous job. Playing Nioh, I feel so happy I'm studying Japanese now, soon I will be able to play it with English subtitles off. Also I would love to say huge special thanks to Yûgo Kanno, the brilliant composer of this wonderful game, the Ogress boss fight theme is one of the most touching and emotional pieces I have ever heard, I have been listening to it for 2 days now and am listening to it as I'm typing this review. God bless you, guys and God bless Japan!"

Nioh...what can one say about such a polarizing game? It had the potential to be one of the greatest games of all time, but ultimately it misses the mark.

Let's get the positives out of the way. Combat system is absolutely scintillating. This game has possibly the best combat in quite awhile. The 3 stances, the wide variety of Samurai, Ninjutsu and Onmyo skills, the Ki and Ki Pulse system, the dodging, blocking and parries...I could go on. It is a joy to experiment with such a combat system that is almost infinite in depth.

The story is quite good bar some cliches if you are able to appreciate the fact that the characters are based on historical figures. There is a certain thrill in claiming you bested the legendary Tachibana Muneshige or Oda Nobunaga, and an even bigger thrill in doing quests while being aided by the likes of the One-Eyed Dragon, Date Masamune as friendly NPCs. The showdown against Sanada where you have to pick off each of his Braves in the DLC was fantastic. William is relatable and the cutscenes are engaging. The bosses were varied and for the most part, well designed. However, a couple were designed in such a manner that they require the player to be 100% focused every second to avoid death, which sometimes made beating them a chore as opposed to being fun. But that is an insignificant gripe as you get gear to even things up.

Unfortunately, the positives stop there. Team Ninja had the recipe for greatness, but at some point, messed up in adding the ingredients. The level design is bad. And by bad, I mean horrible. And by horrible, like really, really dismal. Except for a couple of levels, there is literally no immersion, no joy in wading through the levels and some of the shortcuts (a clear attempt to mimic Dark Souls) are absurd. The blandness of the levels is compounded by the loot system. Besides involving tedious grinding, loot comes in what is basically a bunch of stats that you need to carefully shift through for affixing the best ones. Since you get gear from revenants, there is no need to go looking for the same loot in chests or corpses hidden in the levels, and this totally kills the joy of exploration. As you can see, level design problems are exacerbated by a lack of motivation to search for loot, and by a tedious loot system overall.

Which is further aggravated by a lack of enemy variety. You trudge through bland level after bland level, with no motivation for exploration, all the time facing just the same handful of enemies -- Dweller, Skeleton, Horned Yokai, Oni and Onyudu. These guys are literally in every level and there are few variations other than reskins. The point of a brilliant combat system is defeated when you have so few regular enemies to use it on. Limited enemy variety adds to the tedium created by poor level design.

The final stamp of mediocrity is the deliberate bloating of the game by a number of pointless side missions which reuse the same levels and same bosses over and over, or make you face 2 or 3 of the previous bosses together, just for the sake of difficulty. Not counting the twilight missions which again use the same map and bosses, with just higher difficulty. This really contributed to the game becoming a slog at the end, the fun evaporating altogether. The side missions could have been cut down to 2-3 per region which would have probably made the game less exasperating and papered over some of the negatives like poor level design.

The DLC and dual boss mission difficulties do not naturally flow from NG, but is scaled to a level that forces you to embark on a tedious grind for better gear to face them competently. This prolongs the already tedious game even further.

In conclusion, Nioh had many elements for greatness, but its' insistence on levels just being "arenas" as opposed to encouraging exploration and immersion, coupled with repetitiveness, limited enemy variety and a diablo inspired loot system, just fails on many more levels. I don't think Team Ninja have any intention to change a great deal in Nioh 2 as the game has performed well. It is certainly a pity, for all the game requires is a bit more polish and attention to details other than the combat. I give 4 points for the combat system alone, 1 point for cutscenes and NPCs inspired by historical figures, 1 for good boss design and 0 for every other aspect of the game to arrive at my 6 rating, which feels pretty fair for what this game offers.

Nioh is a third-person Action/Adventure Fantasy RPG of the same style as Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, etc. But from a different dev. You play as a man who, in order to further his quest, must fight and kill countless bandits, samurai, and Yokai, which are Japanese Demon like creatures/spirits. Be warned this game is VERY difficult. Even harder than the Souls games. But it is a very fun, challenging, satisfying and enjoyable experience. It does feel unfair at times and has really rage inducing Boss fights and certain sections. Overall I'd give Nioh an 8.5/10. Really great and would recommend getting The Nioh Collection on PS5 that includes both games and all DLC.

To start, this is the first time i'm writing a "review" of anything.

The thing about Nioh is that it's much more than just some clone of Dark Souls. Sure there's some similarities to Souls-games, like gaining levels with your Amrita (souls) and altars (bonfires) or when dying you lose everything,but those similarities end there. Sure the combat too may look like it's the same kind that was in Souls, but it's more fast paced here and reminds a bit of Ninja Gaiden.

Although they released the game back in -17, i however got the game just a couple months ago and so for me it's new and fresh experience.And cause it's so new to me so i can't say if that's why, but i personally like Nioh more than i like Souls-Series.

To this end, i realize that this wasn't much of a review, just wanted to write something about the game that i've fallen in love with. :D

Peace ^^