Review — Nioh

Dark Souls clearly made its mark on the gaming scene. So much so, that several developers use the series as a template for their own title. But what if a Japanese developer known for their notoriously hard hack & slash games steps into the Souls territory? You get Nioh, a brand new action rpg by Team Ninja, the masterminds of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive.

Slaying demons in Japan

In Nioh, you play as William, a character based on William Adams who was the first Westerner set foot in Japan and become a samurai — even if the character looks more like Geralt for The Witcher. Here, William is a mercenary who ends up in Japan during the Sengoku period in his pursuit of Edward Kelley, a man who fuels the conflict in Japan in order to extract amrita. This mystical ‘nectar’ he wants to obtain in order to help England conquor its enemies.

For you however, amrita has another function as it will be the currency you use to improve your character. You level up as you spend amrita on various attributes, increasing the overall stats of your character. Each attribute is linked to a certain stat, like health points, stamina, magical power or carry ingcapacity, and in turn is beneficial for particular weapons. However, when you die you lose all amrita you were carrying and you have one chance to return to your grave to pick it up. Otherwise, it’s lost forever. Sounds familiar?

Yokai Souls

As you can see, leveling up works pretty much like in Dark Souls, butyou’ll discover that all the ingredients of a good Souls game are present: Shrines which function as the bonfires from Dark Souls, the stamina bar (Ki gauge here), the punishing and tactically demanding gameplay with vicious enemies and amazing bosses, a wide variety of gear and weapons, the way the item system works, an atmosphere of dread and constant danger and so on. But Nioh is as much a game on its own as a Dark Souls clone, which we mean in the most positive sense.

First thing you’ll notice is that the combat is much more combo oriented, with entire skill trees for each weapon, and there’s also an ultimate attack where you use your guardian spirit. Here you can clearly see the influences of Ninja Gaiden, as the action is more fast paced than Dark Souls, relying more on dodging than blocking and pulling out combo attacks. The game also introduces 3 stances in your fighting style going from fast to slow, doing less to more damage respectively. The key here is to learn which stand to use against which type of enemy. And as stamina managment is even more important, as running out of stamina will even stagger you for 2 seconds, another thing to manage is Ki Pulse. This refills part of your Ki gauge and if executed correctly, even cleanses Yokai Realm. These dirt spots are created by Yokai during combat and hinder your Ki recovery. But don’t despair, every enemy also has a Ki gauge and exhauting its gauge, or make him fall, will give you the opportuniy to land a powerful execution attack. This makes the combat an interesting excercise in managment and patience.

Another big change is that Nioh has a more focused story with many cinematics and dialogues with NPC’s. It also doesn’t have an open world, but instead opts for a map with missions marked on it. The main missions are the longest ones and feature unique and very diverse locations, ranging from seaside villages to toxic mines and ruinous temple and graveyards. The same level progression system as Dark Souls, where you open shortcuts by opening doors of creating passages along the way, is also implemented here. But once you undertake a mission, the goal is to complete it as you can’t travel between the different shrines and quitting a mission will undo all your progress in the level.

Completing a mission will unlock the Twilight misison variation, which is like a harder version of the mission but with better loot. Then there’s also a bunch of side missions, which will allow you to revisit certain area’s but also feature their own levels. Sometimes these are also repeated, occasionally in a weird way as certain levels are reused for side missions in a different regions of the map. So you’ll be revisiting area’s often, but this didn’t really bother me, as the game is so much fun to play and you’ll always discover new secrets with each visit. And the setup changes too, with different starting points, blocked of passages and other enemies, depending on what kind of mission you undertake (main, twilight or side mission).

Look at them shinies!

Completing side missions and twilight missions is a great way to get new gear, but you can also visit the blacksmith or fight revenants for new items. At the blacksmith, you can buy gear, but also reforge your weapons with different stats and coolest of all: soul fuse them. You can fuse your current weapon or gear with a higher level one to match it in level, allowing you to keep using your favorite weapons and gear. Revenants are the spirits of dead player (and some NPC’s) you can invoke to fight against. Once defeated they drop a piece of their gear which you can loot. This is a nice way to get yourself some better gear, which works a bit like in Diablo 3 for example. Enemies drop tons of loot, but some are of better quality and the best quality is the most rare one of course. As you’d expect, there are complete sets of gear to collect and soon you’ll find yourself running around like a majestic samurai or a sneaky ninja.

During the game, you’ll also align yourself with one of the warring clans, which will give you certain benefits, but defeating revenants of other clans will also help your own clan on the road to domination. Killing revenants also give you glory points, which you can trade in for various items, gear and weapons. As Team Ninja announced that they will add actual PvP combat, this whole aspect looks extremely promising. But for now, you can only summon (or be summoned as) a visitor to help out during a mission. There’s one variation on this called ‘Yokai realm with a companion’, where you basically start at the beginning of the level and you share some kind of ‘health’ bar. Reviving will deplete this bar and once it’s empty the mission is lost. Admittedly I experienced some connection issues, either when looking for people to play with, or during a play session. This can be extremely annoying, especially if you’re near the end of a ‘Yokai realm with a companion’ mission and lose the mission because you lost connection to your partner.

Conclusion

Calling Nioh a mixture between Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden and Onimusha (who remembers that one?!) doesn’t do the game justice, but it does give a good idea of what to expect. If you’re looking for a Souls-esque game to fill the void after Dark Souls 3, you need not look further. Challenging gameplay, amazing boss fights, beautiful and interesting level design, tons of lore,… this game has it all and it even adds some unique mechanics to the mix. Plus, the game is an absolute blast to play and runs amazingly fluent. You can even chose between some different visual modes, depending wether you want visual fidelity or a locked framerate. With tons of stuff to do and discover, and offering a real challenge, Nioh will certainly keep you busy for quite some time.

4.5/5

Reviewed for PlayStation 4