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.
