Nioh is Dark Souls for insane people, and that’s a compliment.

You play as Geralt the Witcher as he travels to the Dark Souls world for some real challenge as his world was too easy!

Jokes aside yeah, I originally got it because I couldn’t afford Sekiro, but Nioh has been the single greatest co-op experience I've ever had. My wife’s boyfriend and I spent so many evenings playing it; we eventually both got all the regular achievements, as well as all the DLC ones, and we STILL kept playing. Honestly, nothing has come close to it since. Don't try it if you are trying to quit smoking though.

Nioh is one of the most fun 3rd person action games I know. I have been a Dark Souls fan for years, and I went into Nioh thinking "Oh look, another attempt at poorly replicating Dark Souls." The second I jumped into it though I was completely surprised at how unique of a take on the game style it was. It is an amazing game all around! The combat is just so damn fun and the amount of tools that you can play around with is amazing. If you approach it more like an action game and try to screw around, it really shines. It’s just so fluid and allows you to play really aggressively letting you dominate enemies and bosses if you know what you're doing. There is nothing better after a stressfull work day than to chill out and slay some demons.

Now Nioh is one of my favorite game series but it's a bit particular, and there are probably as much haters of the game as there are lovers. So when determining whether to buy this you have to see if you fall under the category of a person who will love the game or hate it. What makes the game controversial for some is the fact that it resembles a Soulslike but it doesn't feel like a Soulslike game. It's a combination of Character action (DMC, Ninja Gaiden), Diablo, and Souls, with Souls arguably having the most superficial influence. So if you like Soulslike games, you might like it at first but start to hate it because it does things so differently.

Soulslike games are about exploration. The worlds are interconnected and it feels like you are in a living world, and enemies feel like they are in their habitat. Nioh has missions, so levels have a definitive start and an end. It also reuses the same levels a lot, as there are main missions and sub missions, where the sub missions use a small portion of the main mission level. If you like the feeling of adventure and exploration, Nioh will be jarring.

Nioh also uses Diablo style random loot. That impacts exploration, as you won't look into nooks and crannies to find a specific weapon. Rather, you are just hoping that the chest you open or boss you kill drops interesting stuff. It also affects the way you make builds. It follows Diablo style buildcrafting, which basically means upgrade your equipment with new stuff you pick up until late NG+s. You will also allocate stat points differently compared to Souls games. A lot of people are annoyed with the random loot because they don't like sifting through tons of loot. Thankfully, you don't actually have to look at every loot piece and Nioh gives you ways to mass/discard your loot for more useful things. But you'll have to learn a different way of dealing with loot and buildcrafting, which is a barrier for many.

Finally, Nioh's combat is way more complex than Souls. Souls games are usually very simple. You basically dodge, dodge, dodge, then attack, attack. It's all about finding the rhythm of the enemy's attacks and hitting them during their downtime. In Nioh, you have actual moves and a system to regain some of your lost stamina. Your combat potentially becomes more aggressive and more stylish. The skill ceiling rises tremendously but at the same time the skill floor rises too, as you need to get good with stick skills. If you like stylish, cool, challenging combat, the Nioh series is arguably one of the best, and many people regard it as having some of the best combat in all gaming. It might not be for you though.

Nonetheless, if you like skill based challenging combat and like or are okay with Diablo style loot and a mission based level design, this is the game for you. The combat for me is second to only Nioh 2. The game has a ton of depth and a ton of content, and it's fantastic. You just have to really be aware if it's for you or not from the start. Even if you’re in doubt though , on a sale I still think it's worth a shot. Give it a try, if you’re into these types of games you won’t regret it.

10/10

2100+ deaths later and I feel pretty done with this journey.

The negative reviews are mostly from salty bad players who give up way too easily or people who complain about the keyboard controls but even so if you just google a little bit or check the steam guides you can configure them if you want to so I really don't agree with most of them. There is also a 60 fps cap which I personally was very happy to find out that a software on Steam called Lossless Scaling helped with providing more frames very easily.

This game has been like crack to my brain and I am scared of how much I will enjoy Nioh 2 at this rate from what I have heard. I have tried all the weapons during my playthrough and went through all the difficulties and feel I am very satisfied for now even if I wish I actually 100% everything inside of the game but that I realised is an insane grind.

Story was kinda hard to follow and nothing special but it is not a very story heavy game like maybe the souls games are and kind of more like Warframe where you get missions and some dialogue and information, sometimes cutscenes.

The game is very punishing in the beginning especially for someones first soulslike game but mid game you kinda get the feel for it and your build starts doing work and then in the end game its basically one shot them or get 1-3 shot with very hard mechanics where you are punished for every mistake especially if you are going with light armour, in this regard I can agree that whilst I don't really want the game to only be one shots in the very end game unless you min max your tank setup I can still appreciate it for what it is.

The first difficulty is more like a soulslike and in the later difficulties becomes an ARPG where you just speedrun through missions/farm them for more loot or faster progression if you want to. The dopamine frying goes crazy with the amount of loot you can get in this game. It really reminds me of the way Borderlands works where you go through the game multiple times with better and better gear and tougher enemies.

There is a lot of build variety and min maxing you can do which probably made me spend way too much time on just figuring out different builds and then testing them out just because it was so much fun for me, the information you can find out about this game is also a little fragmented for an RPG, even the wiki is not completed, it may be because of it's age and console exclusiveness when it came out.

Still a very fun experience even if it made me rage many times but actually most of it was from my own mistakes, I actually think the boss mechanics are pretty fair once you get to know them better.

Can see that this isn't a game for everyone but if you played games like Borderlands 2 for example and didn't mind playing all the way to max level multiple times through the game you will enjoy it. The game is very hard but very rewarding and there is a lot to master and farm if you so wish. You will also be happy with just one playthrough but you won't experience quite all of the game and it's systems in that case since the end game is very long and you progress constantly.

So many low importance enemies have the level of annoyance from the likes of 'Sir Alonne' from dark souls 2... They do a lot of damage, have a lot of speed, (a few) have a lot of health and have a lot of really fast movesets, in the meanwhile, no matter what armour you use, you are likely to only withstand one extra hit from using heavy armour instead of light, a full enemy combo mostly not mattering the enemy is likely to kill you as there are a lot of stunlocks, just about no animation cancels, awful button-queuing, as well as armour making stamina brutally inefficient... It is ridiculously clunky, too little is done to make the experience feel expressive, fluid and fair, and for that, it has a fundamentally flawed combat... What prompted me to write this review was the warrior of the west sub mission fight, a human miniboss that exposes just how unbalanced the resources given to the enemies are in comparison to the ones given to the player... What would have patchworked this fight would be either auto-recharing living weapons or hit-based charging, because in this fight or any others where kills can't be farmed, the most powerful resource that the player has to counter the fundamentally unbalanced combat is taken away... This game in contrast to the souls series, emphasises block as a defense much more effective than dodging, which again, ends up as poor balancing choice when enemies can stunlock you, draining you out of stamina for blocking... It doesn't feel good, the enemies have a billion different ways to render your fighting resources useless, while most of them can rarely ever suffer from the same things that they use against you... It is extremelly annoying to be stunlocked by a regular human enemy with a given attack, and see them ignore completely you using the same attack against them when they easily cut through your momentum... Sir Alonne was my nemesis but this miniboss is so much more hellish, he spams abilities 97.4% of the time, every single time that he dodges he manages to land a hit on you, every single time that he lands a hit on you he dodges, in the meanwhile, the protagonist can't land a hit, while making himself vulnerable every time he tries to do so... Unbelivably poorly programmed, the boss has no cooldown on absolutely anything and the player has cooldowns on just about everything... I hate this sort of immersion breaking design, the miniboss has the skill to conquer the world single handedly if he wants to (if the other humans in this game are as useless as the protagonist that is), while the protagonist needs a billion lifetimes to manage a sucessful run against the supposedly unimportant npc... If this boss in cannon had the ability to do the things its doing it'd be much less revolting, but it's just blatant bad design to create a human that just so happens to be a super human in this specific fight, and funly enough, in cannon lost to the boss that was defeated by the player just before this sub mission was unlocked... I hate this, it farmed over 50 deaths from me already but it is the last mission before moving to the next zone so i'm refusing to skip it or farm more powerful gear (if any are even available)... I do have adhd, but no, it's just flawed design, adhd does little to no difference here because even if i wanted to, i couldn't use the character to express what i'd need to express to get this fight done with while looking good... The wiki's strategy for this fight is to let the boss deplete it's own stamina from all of its spamming so you can get some heavier blows on it, because it's so unbalanced that the job of getting the boss to be vulnerable could only be left for the boss itself to do... Also, the hitboxes and lock-in... I think that Elden Ring has a flawed hitbox system but this is so, so much worse... So many times i see my character attacking 90 degrees away from the locked in enemy, locked-in in the air, it's unbelivable, it's like the hitbox of the enemy is floating somewhere away from where the enemy mesh visibly is... In the meanwhile, the enemies have a flawless lock-on on you where they can turn 90 degrees in mid air just to hit you... Forget Sir Alonne... This enemy has doubtlessly killed me more than Malenia, in fact, he has an attack that is rather similar to hers, aimlessly swinging the katana on the air and somehow making that more effective than anything else they can do... In this sort of broken fight it becomes obvious that the boss can only be defeated if it wants to, in which case, rng defines which of the many shades of one-shots you will be seeing from them (probably all from many of these bosses)... It's a rythm game where the song changes every time you try again that is too chaotic to be read flawlessly even a single time as it forces you to be both extremelly agressive and extremelly defensive at the same time (and it's just a bloody sub boss)... I doubt that whomever programmed this, played it... There is absolutely nothing in place to stop the fight from being over in less than 1 second if the AI decides that it wants the fight to be over in less than a second... Fromsoftware understands how unfun fights that can end in a single second are, so they have some systems in place to stop both bosses and players from being dead in a single second, that tends to come first and foremost through balancing an overall fight design, and secondly with some forms of i-frames, on dodges, and on hits, as often in souls games, you become invulnerable for a little after taking a hit so you can't just be disimated in less than a second by any single enemy (that is usually not the case when there is more than an enemy, since you only get hit-invulnerability against the enemy that hits you, so if there are two, yes, you can be just deleted if they hit you at the same time) but in this game, there isn't such design, there is nothing stopping an enemy from dealing three hits to you in a single second... It's absolutely unforgiving... One second of mistakes (likely only one mistake in such a time) can cost you several of success... It's ridiculous... If i could stun this boss as it can stun me, i would have first tried, if i couldn't be stunned in the same way that it can't be stunned, i would have first tried, and most obiviously, if i could one shot it like it can one shot me, i would have first tried... I understand that not every fight needs to be balanced as it could be very boring if every enemy took realistic amounts of damage, but you know, they should at the least add a lore excuse to make a human behave as an absolute super human in a fight, while things go as expected for the player, when taking a hit to the throath ends with you liberated from your mortal coil... After facing Umi-Bozu i think that i can officially declare that i have found the most pathetic protagonist of gaming history... One-shotted by water... So impressive... This game always gives copious amounts of resources for the enemies to destroy the player, getting all achievements would probably be doable in 5 hours if death didn't happen at the ridiculous rate at which it happens... It's very safe to assume that the lack of balance is purposeful filler from people who do not know (or care) to design a world or combat system with as high of a quality as fromsoftware... Even the loot is procedural and carried by rng through constant, sharp level-scalling... The devs just allowed their game to throw randomly generated numbers around in hopes (or not since they clearly adore to have the player be dead in 50 different shades of one-shots) that eventually, better loot starts dropping to give the player small upgrades over what they had... The game was enjoyable for the first few hours but at this point it is unredeemable to me... The devs themselves classify their franchise as 'masocore', not souls-like... It can only be enjoyed by those who enjoy unfair punishments, i suppose that that is possible...