I actually ended up completing the vanilla game a couple weeks ago but thought I'd want to go through the DLCs as well which ended up requiring some preparation, but more on that in a minute

I first played some of this game in 2019 but ended up coming back to it because of how much I ended up feeling oddly compelled by the gameplay of Stranger of Paradise and seeing various comments that it was the same gameplay/engine that served as its base, and after finally finishing this one I can say that's pretty much true; other than the technical aspects there's the same mission based progression where you thoroughly traverse each map the first time for a story mission then you get a few shorter side missions later which go through the same map backwards with a different objective. Gameplay is comparable to something like Dark Souls other than every enemy having a stamina bar, though in this one emptying it doesn't mean a guaranteed OHK opportunity, and yokai also handle it differently from humans where they don't stagger until it's empty but it also doesn't regenerate unless they're standing in their spooky hell dimension circle. Figuring out how to fight all the different yokai types effectively is where the most of the challenge comes from here; in that sense the boss fights is probably where the game is most like Dark Souls where it's mostly about finding a good strategy for outlasting the boss. Pre-endgame builds are largely based on what weapon you're using and what extra skills you've unlocked of which there are a lot to choose from, though ironically I just found out that my two favorite weapons in the game, odachi and tonfa, apparently weren't even in the original vanilla release but were added as part of the DLCs. Wack.

There's also the aspect of tons of progressive equipment loot drops which make the blacksmith/crafting system obsolete until the very end of the game but which also pretty much become the metagame if you want to advance into any of the content that comes after the end of vanilla, since at this point you won't get better stuff unless you start delving deep into the Very Hard™ NG+ content. This became a minor time sink for me at that point since I couldn't rely on just getting higher level stuff from drops consistently anymore going into the DLC missions because of how postgame drops are restructured; you start getting random drops of green rarity "divine items" which sometimes have a + number next to their level which represents a much bigger stat bonus, which you really need at that point because the base level is locked to 150 and relatively low + levels until you reach the NG++ maps. I managed to complete the first main mission of the first DLC with this low level postgame equipment, but then decided to rush my way through as many of the NG+ maps as possible so I could get some NG++ equipment and come back to do the rest of the NG DLC levels since I'd heard... interesting things about the bosses in them. Which all turned out to be true, incidentally; the main challenge there comes from them being regular human fighters who spam living weapon buffs, making them agile and hard to hit while also giving them increased offense, elemental damage and un-staggerability until their stamina runs out at which point it's only a matter of time before they resummon their buff. Though ironically the only boss in the entire game that I couldn't beat without summoning help was the Onmoraki in the second-to-last mission of the final DLC, which spams wind attacks that give you a big offense debuff.

Speaking of the online, I had that off through most of the vanilla game not on purpose but simply because I didn't realize that one of the settings (crossplay with the epic store version) pretty much breaks it and guarantees it won't work (which was a relief to discover since for a while I suspected I was shadowbanned because I was running the game through Special K launcher), maybe I'll go back and do some more of that now that I'm pretty much done with the game but mostly I'm glad that I am so that I can check out some of the earlier Koei/Capcom games (Acquire too, but that was on the table already) with that same kind of setting since honestly one of my favorite things about this game was the style and presentation for the historical fiction part of it even if the dialogue isn't really stellar and the information they have about the characters/yokai in their profiles. I've heard the sequel is also a significant improvement so I look forward to playing that at some point. And hey, the fact that I was willing to put that much more time into this game after I was "done with it" so I could continue on to see every part of the story probably says something to how much enjoyment I actually got out of it.

Playtime: 54 minutes (until the first boss)

Intro

It's Dark Souls, but for weebs. You play totally-not-Geralt and you fight against enemies and the insane control layout.

The Good

• For one brief moment this game was actually exciting.

The Bad

• Items aren't automatically equiped in empty slots.
• It takes forever before the game actually lets you play.
• Menu doesn't pause the game.
• Borderless launches at four times the resolution? Huh?
• Controls aren't under controls in the menu.

The Ugly

• Every single time you boot it display the "don't turn off your computer when this icon is shown because the game is saving" message that has to be manually closed.
• It's Dark Souls, so enemies respawn when you save.
• It's Dark Souls, so there's only save points.
• It's Dark Souls, so you lose all progress upon death.
• The game actually does not show the M+KB controls when you use M+KB. I died a bunch of times because i had to go into the non-pausing menu to figure out what i had to press. I beat the first boss on my second try but then i had to finish him and i died because i had to look up the controls.
• On my fourth try the boss one-shot me at full health while i was dodging. So i quit.

Conclusion

Despite Dark Souls being objectively terrible game design (unless you're a Teletubby and love repeating shit), i would still have given this 2 stars if it wasn't for the truly atrocious port. Seriously, you switch weapons by holding Space and pressing 2? Wat?

The first Nioh entry is a challenging action RPG from Team Ninja, often described as a mix between Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden. Set in a dark fantasy version of Sengoku-era Japan, the MC is called William, a Western samurai, battling humans and yokai (demon creatures from the Japanese folklore).

The combat is its strongest feature: fast, precise, and built around multiple weapon types, stances, and Ki (stamina) management. Making the combat look like a precise resource management dance, even more so than the regular Dark Souls games, and with more flashy visuals. Mastering these mechanics feels rewarding, and boss fights are intense and memorable.

The loot system, however, is heavily inspired by Diablo-style RPGs, meaning lots of gear drops that can feel repetitive or overwhelming. Particularly I really hate this kind of approach, it makes everything look generic unoriginal, fortunately you can re-skin any armor and weapon into other ones that you already found through the game. I used this a lot in order to enjoy the the most out of the "fashion-souls" experience.

The PC port added improved graphics options and unlocked framerate, but had some launch issues with keyboard/mouse controls (a controller is strongly recommended). This is a demanding but highly satisfying action RPG for fans of deep combat systems and Japanese mythology, best enjoyed with a controller. I highly recommend this for fans of the Souls-like genre, it is one of the best of it's kind.

Like a weird race to the bottom, I managed to quit a game today just as fast as I did yesterday with Severed Steel.

I've installed and started the game Nioh for the first time ever. What a bloody nuisance! First of all, it took about 4 minutes to get going, then popped up an error message when trying to play the intro movie. It continues to be very bad at teaching me how to play it, including showing controller prompts when I'm using a keyboard. So I switched to a controller. The character is in a cell, with a guard patrolling. I run past him to a room where I find a chest with a sword and boots which seem to disappear as I break the chest. He's right after me and stabs me to death. I restart back in the cell, still in my undies, and again run back to the room, only there's no chest there this time. No idea why. I try to punch the guard and die about seven times before I give up and search an online guide. Apparently I SHOULD be getting those sword and boots. Next retry I search the menus and I'm surprise to learn that the items have been with me ever since I broke the chest, including through dying! I now equip the sword and boots and can see the scabbard on my character. Ah-ah! Now the guard will be easy prey, I think to myself...but no! Even though my sword is "equipped" all my attacks at the guard are still using my fists, so he kills me again. WTF, Nioh!?

After happening to find a "sheath weapon" control on the keyboard layout picture online (but not in the controller layout!) I managed to kill the first guard, go up some stairs then repeatedly die at the hands of the second guard and his crossbow companion. So I just quit. I have better things to do with my time than this.

Dropped this game after beating the first three bosses and doing some side-missions. The game is pretty brutal, and I finished all Dark Souls and Bloodborne. It’s closer to Bloodborne. Much more fast-paced than any of the Dark Souls games. Armor doesn’t do shit, even minibosses finish you in two swings, literally. But there is some kind of parry system against the bosses, and a stamina recovery system. You get most of your stamina back if you press a button at a right time. Also, there is apparenty a combo system that requires you to switch stances in between. A real finger-twister. No, thank you.
There is a ton of game mechanics, and they are introduced all at once. There are stances, that change how fast and how powerful your attacks are. There’s also a “berserk” mode, and a super-move that you can execute once you enter the berserk mode.
Almost dropped the game on the second boss. But turns out the game just doesn’t explain a lot of mechanics. There are healing items. You can run out of them, like Bloodborne and unlike Dark Souls. But at least they are automatically stocked to the max capacity.

Also, you can imbue your weapon, which is also very useful against the boss. So, with a lot of cursing, I also managed to beat the third boss. Storywise, what I didn’t expect is that England would be involved in this. Turns out England learned how to collect amrita, philosopher stone. And now the plan is to incite a war in Japan to collect more of these, and maybe even conquer Spain.

The bosses design is great, but they have too much HP, or the character doesn’t deal enough damage. Instead of being a glass cannon, like in many other Souls-like games, you are taking potshots at the bosses most of the time.
There are tons of sidemissions, which occur on the same levels as the main ones, but at different times of the day, and with different starting locations and blocked paths. Must say that I don’t particularly enjoy that game, though. Apart from how fragile the hero is, you also need to manage all those weapons that are dropped randomly, which is simply not fun. A shame, I liked the character design a lot. But life is too short.

I mean, first Darksiders III, now this? Where DIII has the open-world dungeon feel of Dark Souls but is still pretty hack-and-slash, Nioh divides it's gameplay up into self-contained missions with varying degrees of openness, but like Dark Souls will f***k you up if you try to hack-and-slash your way through.

And you know what? I get it. There is a real sense of achievement that comes from getting destroyed, learning from your mistakes, getting destroyed again, figuring out a different strategy, getting destroyed again because you forgot to switch to the item loadout that had elixirs on it, getting destroyed again but this time on purpose because you just wanted to move your grave to a better spot, and then finally emerging victorious, not because you got lucky or unlocked a new skill or just grinded your stats up enough to breeze through, but because you got better at playing the game. And a lot of modern games don't give you that sense of achievement.

It's also incredibly frustrating, for obvious reasons. And it's even more frustrating if you wield axes, despite the game making it very clear that it wants you to use swords, because the reward for every mission is a goddamn sword and the axes don't even get a final Dojo mastery quest but you know what you gave me the f***king option so I'm sticking with it.

Then there's the convoluted crafting system that I used once, the shop that sells almost nothing of value, and the pseudo-economy driven by battling the corpses of other players in order to get their loot, which for some reason is almost always Warrior of the West armor, and since the armor you get from those battles is always better than what you get from the NPCs or useless shop, you end up just committing to Warrior of the West armor for the entire game, and sure it eventually gets you a helmet that lets you heal by collecting amrita instead of using elixirs or a shrine, which is incredibly useful, but it also means that I never tried any other armor, and presumably many other players didn't either, unless there's just some awesome magical armor that's so good the players using never died and thus never left the rest of us a corpse to fight, in which case, f***k those people.

Most of the RPG elements of the game ended up either falling by the wayside or becoming just a quest to make numbers go up bit by bit. Nioh has the kind of nerdy stat/ability system that, especially with equipment, deals more with minute boosts and buffs than with stuff like, "This will make you shoot fire from your eyes, but this will make head be made of stone," and I just don't have the patience or the math to deal with that. And the items, oh man, so many items, that I never ever ever used.

All of which would maybe be fine if the story were great, but I...didn't give a s***t about anything going on in this game, and the game didn't really give me a reason to because my character didn't care either, only looking to catch up to the dude who stole his guardian spirit (not to mention he's got a real case of Geraltitis). I also just didn't know what was going on half the time.

I don't regret playing Nioh, and if a game comes along that marries this level of difficulty-as-lesson with a really engaging, character-driven story, and sets it in a world that's fun to explore and has the open-world dungeon feel of Darksiders III (and doesn't believe that a great way to add variety to a game is to have a butt-load of super specific consumables), I'd be up for playing that (Horizon: Zero Dawn 2, perhaps? Or rather, Horizon: 2 Dawn 2 Furious.) But I'm not playing this game again, I'm probably not playing Nioh 2, and I'm definitely not playing f***king Dark Souls.

Nioh was the first Soulslike game I played. It gave me a really bad impression of the genre when I attempted it many years ago on PS4. Mostly, what got on my nerves was the fact that the character's attribute progression was way too slow and boring. Since the game relies on missions within self-contained maps, gaining experience was extremely repetitive. That made me drop the game.

Years later, I started playing Elden Ring on PS4. Did not finish it before buying my PS5 last year. Eventually, I got back to it on PS5 and had one hell of a time. So, I thought, I should go back to Nioh. But, as soon as I tried it, I saw the huge difference in having a open-world at your disposal for exploration and being caged in self-contained maps.

Since the first time I played and bought Nioh I was actually interested in its story. So, since I wanted to finish it, I bought it on Steam and decided I'd play it again, but this time, I would just mod the hell out of it. So, in just one day I went and finished around 12 missions and got to the final credits.

The gameplay is rather different from other Soulslike games because it allows for a great range of weapons and styles of combat. That is what I found most appealing in Nioh. However, this is counterbalanced by the missions and slow attribute progression.

Besides my issues with the mechanics, the story is quite an interesting take on Japan's history, culture and mythology. For anyone that played Onimusha, what you didn't get of mythology there, you're getting it here. And builds its story nicely on the shoulders of historical facts of the warring states in 16th century Japan. The weird part about all of it is that everything happens just because Edward Kelley (or Kelly) and John Dee, two of England's most reputed alchemists, are used as villains in here that use alchemical knowledge (which is, in this game, mostly a kind of magic) to actually make the yokai come to life. It is a bold narrative choice, to say the least.

So, I enjoyed the story, crazy as it is. The gameplay, not so much.

(Alchemy wasn't a kind of magic, by the way. Up until the 15th century, alchemical knowledge was mostly empirical knowledge combined with theories about the inner workings of natural matter. What the game depicts is actually what would be called natural magic or something along those lines, which is a product of 15th and 16th century revival of hermeticism and the emergence of mysticism. Some people, like John Dee and Kelly, practiced alchemy, natural magic, theurgy, divination and all sorts of things in that a human agent dabbled with natural and angelic powers to further some kind of objective. For anyone interested, I highly recommend reading William R. Newman, Lawrence M. Principe, Jennifer M. Rampling on alchemy and Sophie Page on magic.)

Just finished playing through Nioh. This game is absolutely superb. I remember playing the demo and thought there were too many confusing mechanics and the difficulty curve was too high. I got this for free through PlayStation Plus though and decided to give it a fair shake since I usually dig souls-like games.

So, let me highlight some of the things I enjoyed about this game:

• The setting of Japan in the 1600s - It's very cool to see all the classic samurai weapons and garb that we're used to seeing in samurai movies like those of Akira Kurosawa. It's also really interesting the see how the story is weaved into actual historical events and you get to meet actual historical persons who had a huge effect on Japan's history.
• The story - As mentioned above, the story is interwoven with real events and real people which is very interesting; I actually ended up looking a lot of things up on Wikipedia to learn more about the characters and events of the time. More than that though, there is a truly monumental amount of excellent writing in this game that fleshes out so many story details and really colors-in the world. Every weapon, piece of armor, and item (and there are hundreds, if not thousands of them) each have a short description which usually describe the historical context of the generic items, but then a longer description for named items (of which--again--there are hundreds). For instance, you can get a standard sword called "Bizen-den Uchigatana" which is a standard katana, made in the style of the Bizen area of Japan. But then there are also tons of named items like the "Atagi Sadamune" which has a much fuller description which links it to a particular assassination within Nioh's story, but also attributes it to the real-life ancient sword-maker, Sadamune.
• The mechanics - The gameply is superb. And yes, there are a lot of mechanics to get your head around (health, stamina--or "ki", stances, ki pulses, onmyo magic, ninja skills, skill trees for each of the five weapon types, guardian spirits, kodama blessings, etc.), but the mechanics are slowly introduced and I found myself able to slowly but surely understand each and how it interacted with the game's other mechanics. In the end, I was left with an extremely satisfying and rewarding combat experience.

Instead of continuing to gush about each aspect of this game that I loved, here's just a rapid fire list of remaining items that stuck out to me:

• The revenant system
• The item sets
• The item rarity levels, especially the way end-game items (divine items) work
• The equipment familiarity system
• The weapon proficiency system
• The ability to refashion items (make any item look like any other item of the same type)
• The ability to reforge items (swap out their bonuses)
• The ability to upgrade the blacksmith through patronage points
• The variety of enemy types, human and yokai
• The character background blurbs that you can progressively unlock
• The guardian spirit system
• The extremely detailed skill trees
• The multiplayer systems
• The twilight realm missions
• The way the story progresses from region to region of Japan, with side missions and main missions

Basically, this game is way better than it has any right to be. When I first heard of it, I expected it to be a souls-like cash-in, with the aesthetic of feudal Japan. Instead of being a cash-in project though, Team Ninja put their heart and soul into every element of this game. Absolutely every mechanic and system in this game feels like it was given proper attention and honed to a fine edge.

I can't recommend this game any higher for people who enjoy souls-like games.