As a disclaimer, I didn’t finish the game. I got to the 5th region with about 40 hours clocked (felt longer) and the last boss I beat was Ryomen.
I enjoyed the concept of Nioh 1, but Nioh 2 actually hooked me in for a while. The good qualities of the combat stood out a lot more, the weapons were more complex, the enemies felt better balanced, and the yokai form was far more exciting than the living weapon. It helped that the game had a really nice character creator to boot, and a decent bit of QoL.
Unfortunately, the game’s fatal flaw to me is just how unambitious it is. It is a game that decided from the get-go that it only seeks to do what Nioh 1 did, but a little better, and nothing else. It has decided on a formula for its enemies and level design, and it sticks to it like superglue, promising to never bring anything new and exciting to the table.
But first, lemme talk about what I liked.
I mainly fucked around with the three weapons that were added to Nioh 2 (Fists, Scythe, Splitstaff), I found a lot to like in their movesets with many attack and movement options that play well into the ki pulse and stance switch system of Nioh 1. My favorite of these was the Fists, which had a unique mechanic that actually leveraged Nioh’s RPG inspirations for cool gameplay.
The Fists allowed me to cancel special attacks into each other in order to gain a stack of a buff. At first the main appeal is the fact that this lets you string some combos with great reward, but the more interesting aspect is managing the buff. The more stacks I have, the faster the buff runs out, the buff’s timer that can be slowed down with a ki-pulse or reset completely by gaining another stack of the buff (by doing another special cancel). And since choosing to special cancel means I have to forgo ki-pulsing, there are ever higher risks to maintaining the buff, forcing me to be incredibly fast and decisive in my gameplay to maintain it while also not running out of stamina. It’s a mechanic that adds a really nice spin to Nioh’s fundamentals by giving you a reason not to ki pulse, and leveraging it well was a real adrenaline rush.
On the enemy side, I enjoyed how much more manageable attacks were in this game, everything felt really fair to me. I especially enjoy the variety of defensive options and how there is a valid reason to use all of them. High stance dodges give more i-frames, but with more recovery and stamina cost than low/mid stance dodges. Guarding is a real defensive option in this game worth using against many quick attacks, but loses to slower attacks that are meant to be avoided, and using guard to get out of hitstun is a really good mechanic that plays into the ki management that is core to Nioh. There is a lot to think about just playing defensively in this game.
Despite the awful bloat that surrounds the game’s menus and its poorly implemented RPG aspects, I had a good amount of fun with this game...initially. Things started to fall apart when the game started to show its monotony after the difficulty bump of its third mission and began to settle into a formula.
Nioh 1 was notorious for its issues with enemy variety, a complaint that Nioh 2 very much attempts to respond to. However, in their response I feel like they have failed to solve the core of the issue. The game introduces a good variety of enemies, but said enemies are never designed in a particularly inventive way, and don’t force me to engage with the systems differently, usually just bringing a host of slightly different melee attacks to the table, with maybe one projectile.
That’s the problem on a micro level, but on a macro level, an even bigger problem is the game’s never changing encounter design. Nioh 2 seems to have decided on five-ish types of encounters. Ones involving human enemies, some involving groups of small demons, some with two big demons, or one big demon paired with a couple small ones, and variations of those involving some archers in the back. Which big demon or small demon it chooses to bring this time was usually different, but the encounters played fundamentally the same. The game has many enemy types, but it never escapes the mold of its rote encounter design, and even if they wanted to, I feel like the “standardness” of their enemies limits how creative they can be as few of them feel made for synergy with other enemies or level design.
The mechanics themselves also began to reveal issues. A minor annoyance I want to mention is how much of the game’s movesets seem to be tailored around fighting human enemies, with many moves being literally unusable against enemies who can’t be grabbed/tackled, and can’t guard. This makes the game’s abundance of demon encounters to be one of the less fun parts of the game.
But the human encounters too, began to break apart. As I became comfortable with ki-pulsing and stance switching to keep my aggression up, the enemies were never able to catch up. Once their ki was downed, it was very easy to keep it down and the human boss encounters, which were previously the best parts of the game, became incredibly trivial. Enemies began to practically kill themselves with big attacks that expend large chunks of their stamina, and once I start my rushdown they can’t really recover and usually get stunlocked to death. If human enemies fully regen’d stamina after a knockdown, or if the game was better at balancing its values, this could have been avoided. Human group encounters would normally avoid this problem, but never seemed to evolve in the number and types of enemies they mix.
It doesn’t help how boring the game’s texture is, mechanics aside. The new locations and bosses the game brings me to are never particularly cool. The level design felt always by the numbers, its “souls-like" looping shortcuts were rudimentary. It felt like the game was determined to never wow me, and I was playing solely for the thrill of its combat which was starting to lose its lustre. If I was a history nerd, maybe I would have got something out of the narrative, but that ain’t me.
When my experience with this game was ending, I had fought 3 bosses in a row whom I killed on my first attempt. The game’s levels stopped bringing anything challenging or exciting. In an attempt to remedy this, I tried to stop doing the side missions and play underleveled. Another two bosses go down, both on the first try. And then I reach a new region, severely underleveled. I start to die, but not in a fun way. The enemies are still the same, the encounters are still the same, but their health values were bloated and most of their attacks one shot me. The game’s RPG aspects came through to finish it off. And with that, I dropped Nioh 2, wishing it aspired to be more than just a sequel to Nioh 1.
I enjoyed the concept of Nioh 1, but Nioh 2 actually hooked me in for a while. The good qualities of the combat stood out a lot more, the weapons were more complex, the enemies felt better balanced, and the yokai form was far more exciting than the living weapon. It helped that the game had a really nice character creator to boot, and a decent bit of QoL.
Unfortunately, the game’s fatal flaw to me is just how unambitious it is. It is a game that decided from the get-go that it only seeks to do what Nioh 1 did, but a little better, and nothing else. It has decided on a formula for its enemies and level design, and it sticks to it like superglue, promising to never bring anything new and exciting to the table.
But first, lemme talk about what I liked.
I mainly fucked around with the three weapons that were added to Nioh 2 (Fists, Scythe, Splitstaff), I found a lot to like in their movesets with many attack and movement options that play well into the ki pulse and stance switch system of Nioh 1. My favorite of these was the Fists, which had a unique mechanic that actually leveraged Nioh’s RPG inspirations for cool gameplay.
The Fists allowed me to cancel special attacks into each other in order to gain a stack of a buff. At first the main appeal is the fact that this lets you string some combos with great reward, but the more interesting aspect is managing the buff. The more stacks I have, the faster the buff runs out, the buff’s timer that can be slowed down with a ki-pulse or reset completely by gaining another stack of the buff (by doing another special cancel). And since choosing to special cancel means I have to forgo ki-pulsing, there are ever higher risks to maintaining the buff, forcing me to be incredibly fast and decisive in my gameplay to maintain it while also not running out of stamina. It’s a mechanic that adds a really nice spin to Nioh’s fundamentals by giving you a reason not to ki pulse, and leveraging it well was a real adrenaline rush.
On the enemy side, I enjoyed how much more manageable attacks were in this game, everything felt really fair to me. I especially enjoy the variety of defensive options and how there is a valid reason to use all of them. High stance dodges give more i-frames, but with more recovery and stamina cost than low/mid stance dodges. Guarding is a real defensive option in this game worth using against many quick attacks, but loses to slower attacks that are meant to be avoided, and using guard to get out of hitstun is a really good mechanic that plays into the ki management that is core to Nioh. There is a lot to think about just playing defensively in this game.
Despite the awful bloat that surrounds the game’s menus and its poorly implemented RPG aspects, I had a good amount of fun with this game...initially. Things started to fall apart when the game started to show its monotony after the difficulty bump of its third mission and began to settle into a formula.
Nioh 1 was notorious for its issues with enemy variety, a complaint that Nioh 2 very much attempts to respond to. However, in their response I feel like they have failed to solve the core of the issue. The game introduces a good variety of enemies, but said enemies are never designed in a particularly inventive way, and don’t force me to engage with the systems differently, usually just bringing a host of slightly different melee attacks to the table, with maybe one projectile.
That’s the problem on a micro level, but on a macro level, an even bigger problem is the game’s never changing encounter design. Nioh 2 seems to have decided on five-ish types of encounters. Ones involving human enemies, some involving groups of small demons, some with two big demons, or one big demon paired with a couple small ones, and variations of those involving some archers in the back. Which big demon or small demon it chooses to bring this time was usually different, but the encounters played fundamentally the same. The game has many enemy types, but it never escapes the mold of its rote encounter design, and even if they wanted to, I feel like the “standardness” of their enemies limits how creative they can be as few of them feel made for synergy with other enemies or level design.
The mechanics themselves also began to reveal issues. A minor annoyance I want to mention is how much of the game’s movesets seem to be tailored around fighting human enemies, with many moves being literally unusable against enemies who can’t be grabbed/tackled, and can’t guard. This makes the game’s abundance of demon encounters to be one of the less fun parts of the game.
But the human encounters too, began to break apart. As I became comfortable with ki-pulsing and stance switching to keep my aggression up, the enemies were never able to catch up. Once their ki was downed, it was very easy to keep it down and the human boss encounters, which were previously the best parts of the game, became incredibly trivial. Enemies began to practically kill themselves with big attacks that expend large chunks of their stamina, and once I start my rushdown they can’t really recover and usually get stunlocked to death. If human enemies fully regen’d stamina after a knockdown, or if the game was better at balancing its values, this could have been avoided. Human group encounters would normally avoid this problem, but never seemed to evolve in the number and types of enemies they mix.
It doesn’t help how boring the game’s texture is, mechanics aside. The new locations and bosses the game brings me to are never particularly cool. The level design felt always by the numbers, its “souls-like" looping shortcuts were rudimentary. It felt like the game was determined to never wow me, and I was playing solely for the thrill of its combat which was starting to lose its lustre. If I was a history nerd, maybe I would have got something out of the narrative, but that ain’t me.
When my experience with this game was ending, I had fought 3 bosses in a row whom I killed on my first attempt. The game’s levels stopped bringing anything challenging or exciting. In an attempt to remedy this, I tried to stop doing the side missions and play underleveled. Another two bosses go down, both on the first try. And then I reach a new region, severely underleveled. I start to die, but not in a fun way. The enemies are still the same, the encounters are still the same, but their health values were bloated and most of their attacks one shot me. The game’s RPG aspects came through to finish it off. And with that, I dropped Nioh 2, wishing it aspired to be more than just a sequel to Nioh 1.