By now you’ve heard that Nioh is Dark Souls, but with samurai. And it’s absolutely true, in some respects. But we’re going to step away from our traditional review format a bit to discuss what people aren’t saying, which is that Nioh is, in other respects, vastly different from Dark Souls, and in many ways an improvement — not least in that it creates its own world to explore.
Oh, the similarities are certainly there. Close combat has roughly the same structure; you have a stamina bar, and even a low level enemy can destroy you if you don’t think ahead. There are mean-spirited traps, although early on the game will demonstrate the rules apply to your foes, as well. There are lots of grotesque bosses that are hard to kill. But as you play, it’s the differences that stand out.
For one thing, this is a game developed by Team Ninja, which never met an excessive moment it couldn’t amp up. Combat is snappier than Dark Souls, and once you get an enemy’s rhythm down that’s usually the end of them. You can deal a brutal combo, snap back out of range, refresh your stamina if you time it right (called a Ki Pulse, here), and lure them in to finish them off. It also adds truly effective stealth to the mix: Once you have a bow and arrow, you can pick off any enemy not wearing a helmet with ease with a headshot. You also have a “super mode” of sorts, called a Guardian Spirit, where you can basically turn the game into a standard hack-and-slash button-masher for a few brief moments, that’s a heck of a lot of fun if something you need to use judiciously.
And while the game has the usual Dark Souls shtick where if you die, you have to retrieve your experience points, it smartly lets you advance in other ways that are more permanent as well. As you use a weapon, you build an “affinity” for it that gives you more perks and makes it easier to handle. As you explore levels, you’ll uncover little guardian spirits called Kodama you can shoo back to shrines that give you drop bonuses. As you do certain feats in the game, you get “prestige points” you can spend on small perks that help smooth the game’s sometimes brutal difficulty spikes.
It’s also got all the fussiness of both Dark Souls and more traditional Japanese RPGs, which can be a blessing and a curse. You will be buried under a mountain of vendor trash and items, but at least their use is a bit more clearly explained and every item is handy. Thankfully the craft system and the game’s economy both let you unload the sheer avalanche of crap you get, either by turning it into stuff you want, using it to improve the stuff you already have, or just melting it down for cash to buy better stuff.
But really where that fussiness pays off, most importantly, is the story. Just looking at the game you’d think that, oh great, another game about a white guy going to Japan, but William Adams is the first Western samurai. Edward Kelley, the villain of the game, wasn’t a thin bald guy covered in tattoos, but his interest in mysticism (and if you’re wary of spoilers, who his boss was) is historically accurate. One of the most pleasant surprises, in fact, is how deep the game digs to create an alternate historical world. Almost every major figure in the game is a real person, often with motives and actions lining up with the facts, and the game offers an unusually, and welcomely, dark take on one of Japanese history’s bleakest moments.
Even better, the game’s approach to Japanese mythology is just as rigorous; the yokai you’re fighting are straight out of myth. Even more fascinating, the game’s writing team took the time to write out a string of short stories that flesh out just what’s happening, in both a historical context and in the game’s story. It often turns out the yokai you kill were once humans, who snapped under the pressure of civil war and became figurative monsters well before they were literal ones. Where From Software revels in shadow and, sometimes, obtuseness, Nioh takes pleasure in offering detail.
Nioh does have some flaws. Outside of the lovingly rendered yokai, the graphics have the clean, bland cosmetics-commercial look most AAA Japanese games have. The game’s giant pile of systems, points, gear, and perks aren’t well-explained; have the wiki handy. And we found in the playing that server connection could be a bit tricky, even if co-op is worth the wait. Still, Nioh pulls off the rare feat of taking a game’s basic idea and spinning something unique out of them, and that’s worth playing.