I like the verticality and openness of some of the levels, the parry is very well done and satisfying with a lot of sick situational animations, the aggressive style of play is great, the presentation is on another level in comparison to most modern Koei Tecmo games, and it just feels really nice to hit buttons despite the game’s simplicity. When it fires on all cylinders, the game can be quite fun. Unfortunately though, I feel it's very let down by other parts of that aforementioned simplicity and lack of encounter variety, among other aspects of the game.

You approach 90% of your fights the exact same way (on the exact same enemies past a point), give or take a deliberately weirdly timed parry to throw you off, and the remaining 10 are the hit and miss bosses that often feel a bit sloppily done, easy, and end up exemplifying the problems of the game as a whole (not to mention, unless I missed some sort of trigger or explanation for it, I continually experienced a glitch where back to back boss stagger gauges would reset for no discernible reason).The game has many strange design choices and weird changes I can only assume were solely done to separate this from Nioh and not for any practical reason. And speaking of Nioh, I couldn’t have imagined they could find a way to make that game’s loot system any worse, but they found a way with how seldom I actually earned anything worth a damn outside of side content.

There is so much promise here that feels squandered, promise that I could see being fulfilled by a few tweaks should they choose to make a sequel. But maybe the safer bet is to turn Nioh into a trilogy…