Nioh is Team Ninja's first attempt at an action-RPG, and it shares a few superficial similarities with FromSoftware's influential Dark Souls games. The player-summoning cooperative gameplay, corpse-run death system, shortcut-rich levels, and enemy-respawning checkpoints will all feel familiar. However, Nioh is very much its own beast, and is filled with highly technical action and stronger narrative elements than the Souls titles. This Complete Edition includes the original console game, as well as all of the DLC content, so newcomers have dozens of hours of action to master. Perhaps to the game's detriment, Nioh has a mountain of systems that new players must learn before they can tackle the higher difficulties. Still, Nioh won't disappoint gamers hungry for a rich and immersive action game.
The Original Weeaboo
Nioh is very loosely based on the story of William Adams, a 17th century sailor who arrived in Japan and earned the favor of the Tokugawa Shogun. Adams spent the last years of his life in Japan, and he has been popularized as the first Western samurai. Team Ninja embellishes the tale somewhat by adding demons, magic, and ninjas into the narrative.
Adams embodies the stranger in a strange land cliché, making him an ideal protagonist in this supernatural setting. Nioh blends iconic Japanese monsters, authentic equipment, richly interwoven environments, and RPG leveling to create a game that has an air of familiarity, while feeling wholly unique. At first glance, Nioh's systems resemble those found in the Dark Souls games, but Nioh's faster paced action, complex stamina system, buff/ailment abilities, and gear perks push it to the hardcore action side of the spectrum. Imagine a Ninja Giaden-like game with RPG-style character builds and you should get a feel for what Nioh has to offer.
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A Stance for Every Occasion
Combat is melee oriented, though it also includes projectile weapons, such as bows and rifles, to expand your arsenal. You can fight with numerous other weapons, such as spears, katanas, dual blades, odachi, kusarigamas, tonfas, and axes. Each has light and heavy attacks. Light attacks are your bread-and-butter combos, whereas heavy attacks are powerful but more situational, so you only want to use them when your opponent is vulnerable. Every weapon has a distinct feel, so you're bound to find a fighting style that suits you. I loved bludgeoning opponents to death with the kusarigama's ball-and-chain strikes. The odachi offers powerful blade attacks that remind me of the Monster Hunter games' longswords, and feels just as satisfying to use. The standard katana strikes a great balance between speed, offense, and defense.
Every melee weapon offers three fighting stances, which radically change your attacks. Overhead stance is slower and consumes more stamina than others, but deals excellent damage. Low stance offers the fastest attack style and lowest stamina cost, but deals low damage. Mid stance does not excel in damage or speed, but offers great defensive options, making it an ideal opening stance for a fight. Each stance has strengths, so it is worthwhile to learn how to fight with them all.
Dancing on a Razor's Edge
Nioh, like the Souls games, makes heavy use of a stamina gauge to dictate the flow of combat. Attacking, running, blocking, and evading consume stamina, so you must effectively manage it to keep an edge in battle. If you are struck when out of stamina, or block an attack when your stamina is low, you are put into a lengthy, Monster Hunter-style recovery animation where Adams stops to catch his breath. You are utterly vulnerable during this animation, so it is crucial to maintain your stamina and avoid this. The flip side is that enemies in Nioh, from samurai grunts to demons, are also susceptible to this penalty, making stamina damage a viable strategy in any fight. A handy stamina meter appears under every enemy's health gauge, so you know exactly how hard to push to rob them of their stamina, or when to pull back and play defensively.
Why You Should Game on a PC
What really sets Nioh apart from the Souls games is the stamina regeneration mechanic, called Ki Pulse. It works like the Active Reload system from the Gears of War games, as strange as that may sound. At the end of any attack or combo, your stamina gauge turns white and refills rapidly. By pressing R1, you recover whatever amount of stamina has filled in the gauge. You recover very little stamina if you press R1 early, but if you press it too late, the white gauge reaches the end and resets, forcing you to wait for the stamina to regenerate normally. Ideally, you want to tap R1 at the exact moment the white gauge reaches its end. Successful Ki Pulse use lets you fight much more aggressively. It also makes combat more engaging, because even when you are withdrawing to restore stamina, you are actively inputting commands and remain involved in the encounter.
Nioh expects its players to have a solid grasp of Ki Pulse. For example, supernatural enemies spawn dark puddles that greatly hinder stamina regeneration within the area. Using a Ki Pulse within these fields dispels the effect, letting your stamina regenerate normally. But more importantly, Ki Pulse is tied to a host of other skills and techniques, which open up all new avenues of crazy, stylish combat. For example, switching stances at the end of a combo in lieu of a basic Ki Pulse is called Flux; not only do you get the quick-stamina refresh of a Ki Pulse, but you also get bonus stamina on top it. This encourages you to switch stances dynamically during a fight, which is why it's important to learn how to fight effectively with each one. Ki Pulsing can also be used to switch weapons, letting you perform lengthy weapon-swap combos on the fly.
Guardian Spirits
Adams is blessed with Guardian Spirits, as well as magical abilities that give him an edge over most of his bloodthirsty adversaries. Guardian Spirits give Adams a passive buff, depending on the spirit. The Fox Spirit Kato grants a tiny boost to your attack, for example. As you fight, you also build magic, represented by the circular gauge to the left of your health bar. When full, you can summon the Guardian Spirit into your weapon, temporarily imbuing it with their respective element while giving you damage immunity.
The Living Weapon is a buff that boosts your damage output with new abilities based on a particular Guardian Spirit. For example, Elemental Damage deals magical damage to enemies weak to a particular element. Enemies that are weak to fire take extra damage from a fire-imbued attack, while fire-based enemies resist the extra damage. But there are additional debilitations that each element provides. Enemies afflicted by fire take damage over time, for example. Opponents afflicted with water suffer a defensive penalty. Targets that have been shocked move and attack more slowly. Utilizing these effects can make all the difference during major fights, and it is a shame that the game doesn't really go out of its way to explain how this works.
Related to the elemental system are Nioh's support skill branches, which compliment the melee action, much like the spell systems in the Souls games. Magic and Ninjutsu give Adams access to potent abilities that greatly augment his defensive or offensive abilities, or debilitate enemies to make them easier to defeat. A Ninjutsu skill, such as Shuriken, can be used to draw enemy attention, or deal slight damage from range. Elemental talismans let you imbue your weapon with an element temporarily, without having to activate your Living Weapon ability. Firebombs can be used to deal damage or set enemies ablaze for some nice damage over time. You can invest in various magic or ninja skills, depending on your stats, which leads you to some intriguing build possibilities.
Growing Pains
As Nioh is Team Ninja's first soirée into the action-RPG genre, there are a few kinks and odd design decisions that can be frustrating for newer players. Nioh's loot system is one such frustration. Enemies drop gear like candy, and deciding which piece of equipment was worth using or dismantling gave me a headache throughout the first half of the game. A blacksmithing system lets you to dismantle gear into components, or reforge to pass old abilities on to new weapons. Because gear drops so frequently, I was quickly annoyed by how often a piece of equipment had to be painstakingly upgraded, lest it became outclassed within a mission or two. After consulting online guides on the subject I learned that the entire blacksmithing process could be ignored on your first play through: the system is designed to for players tackling higher difficulty content much later in the game, when resources and gold are much easier to collect. It is meant to be something players work towards during the end game, but I would much rather have a simpler weapon-progression system that lets you improve a handful of weapons throughout the game, rather than having a buffet of trash weapons you spend most of your time dismantling or donating anyway.
Nioh's main game is relatively well balanced, but optional challenges, especially on higher difficulties, are brutally unforgiving. In fact, they often pit you against multiple bosses at once. Clashing blades with a boss that can kill you in a single hit is exhilarating, but adding a second one into the mix very quickly feels like a chore. Team Ninja all too often relies on adding a second monster into the fight to ramp up the difficulty, rather than tweaking the AI or altering the boss' patterns. For example, Onryoki, the massive ogre boss, fights the same every time you encounter him: subsequent encounters simply add enemies or give him more health. This is not to say that Nioh lacks variety; Nioh has a very respectable selection of enemies, mini-bosses, and full boss encounters that keep you on the edge of your seat for a long time. However, the optional side missions, which remix scenarios and boss fights, are underwhelming additions.
PC Power
Nioh runs relatively well on PC, though it is more or less a straight port of the PlayStation 4 title. As a result, it isn't a very demanding title. Nioh's Steam page recommends that your gaming rig have at least an Intel Core i5-3550 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 GPU, 6GB of RAM, 80GB of available storage, and the Windows 7 operating system.
You can alter the screen resolution from 720p all the way up to 4K. Rendering Resolution and Shadow Quality can be changed to low, medium, and high, and the display can be switched from 30 to 60 frames per second. You also have checkbox options for Ambient Occlusion, Camera Blur, and Dynamic Reflections.
My gaming desktop's Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 GPU helped run the game at a fairly consistent 60 frames per second at max settings, though it does get the occasional stutter here and there. Not bad performance by any means, but nothing to write home about either.
Adventure Awaits
Nioh: Complete Edition takes a more technical approach to combat than most action-RPGs. The robust systems combine with the speedy combat to create an energetic and demanding action game. While I'm not the biggest fan of the loot system or the developer's approach to side content, there are still hours of content to unlock, weapons to find, and character builds to experiment with as you play.
The PC version of Nioh delivers excellent action and a staggering amount of content. Mastering the gameplay systems may seem overwhelming for new players, but those who stick with it will be rewarded.
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