In the Nioh games, combat is the primary puzzle. They provide a sense of progress as you’re almost guaranteed to get farther on the next try after falling for one. Traps are designed to be overcome basically immediately, and this makes them rewarding. It’s always hollows or some other basic enemy. It’s never a black knight encounter that features hiding enemies and falls and blind corners. This makes traps an effective thing to overcome-once you die to it once, you’re ready for it, and you’ll have only your own carelessness to blame if you fall for the trap again or let enemies push you into it. In Dark Souls, for example, the combat is simple and straightforward, so learning where enemies are and what attacks they have is all you really need to worry about. Traps in Nioh and Nioh 2, whether they take the form of enemies hiding around corners, boulders being rolled down hills, or tricky falls, simply don’t belong in this game. One of the bigger issues of both Nioh games, however, is something inherited from the Souls games that just doesn’t fit well in the game. They feature more color and more landmarks, and are less confusing to navigate, while still feeling maze-like and large. Some of the levels are pulled directly from the first game, but the new ones are quite a step up. Nioh 2 is largely exactly the same as Nioh, but with noticeably improved levels. They weren’t terrible by any stretch, but the comparison to From Software’s games do not do them any favors. Overall, Nioh‘s levels were honestly not that good. Shrines replace the equivalent bonfires and lanterns and statues from From Software games, and while Nioh was level-based rather than being set in a single continuous environment, the individual levels are structure similarly to the areas in a Souls game, with shortcuts and secrets. Nioh punishes death at about the same level that Bloodborne does, but also introduces fairly rare items that could be used to skip a corpse run, which made it even more forgiving than Bloodborne. Last year’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sort of tries to do both to, in my opinion, mixed results: it rewards aggression but punishes death so insanely harshly that many players tried to play it conservatively which actually makes the game even harder. Bloodborne, often lumped in with the series, plays with the knobs: death is less punishing and the game rewards aggression more than caution. The Souls games create tension by punishing death and making death frequent, and in turn reward caution, patience, and attention. Dark Souls, as you probably know, takes a bunch of mechanics from all over the place, from a variety of genres and mixes them all together in a way that creates a very specific experience: a high level of difficulty that requires you to stay invested even in fighting trash mobs maze-like, “Metroidvania” environments with secrets and shortcuts and a checkpoint system that features corpse-runs and punishes death rather stringently. Let’s get all the Dark Souls comparisons out of the way. ![]() Nioh 2 plays a lot like Nioh even with some distinct differences. I think this is a good thing, but again, we’ll get into this soon. I’ll get into this comparison more toward the end of this post, but I do think the sequel provides a smoother, and probably slightly easier, experience overall. However, if you instead wanted to like the game but felt that its difficulty leaned a bit too far toward bullshit or felt that you simply ran out of steam partway into the game, Nioh 2 may just win you over. If you despised Nioh, you probably won’t like Nioh 2 and vice versa. Nioh 2 is largely more of the same compared to its predecessor Nioh, though I think it has several important differences. The games wield their high levels of difficulty in very different ways to create different experiences, and I think the best parts of Nioh 2 are the parts that are unique to it, rather than the parts borrowed from Dark Souls. ![]() ![]() The comparison is useful, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. I like it more than the first game, if only just, and I think more complex and nuanced combat mixed with a well-designed loot system and incredibly deep customization is a great match along side Souls-like difficulty and game structure.Īnd make no mistake about it, while its a very different take on the concepts, Nioh and Nioh 2 owe a ton to From Software’s storied Souls series. Unless you really don’t like these hardcore action RPGs in the vein of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, this is a great game with a ton of content. Before we get into it, Nioh 2 is a great game and I recommend it almost without qualification.
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