Nioh

Let's get one thing out of the way: Nioh is a Dark Souls clone. Like many first-person shooters were DOOM clones in the 90's. That doesn't mean Nioh is a lesser game for it. This was clearly a very thought-out choice and the final product is very strong because of it.

Nioh is a third-person action RPG where melee combat is the cornerstone of everything you do or encounter. Set in Japan, during the well-documented Sengoku period, you role-play William Adams, an Irish who sailed across half of the globe to confront an English occult researcher (Edward Kelley), who stole something from William and has travelled to Japan to gather a special kind of resources to fuel war against Spain. I know, it already reads as a complicated narrative. It won't stop here.

First and foremost, Nioh gains a lot from its context. Even if the Sengoku period has already been portrayed in many different ways by different artistic products, Team Ninja (the studio behind the game) extracted every meaningful and characteristic juice from that Japanese period. I bet this knack came from their own nationality and the support of Koei-Tecmo (the publisher), which has years of experience when it comes to transposing that historic context to videogames.

I have to premise this review with a very important caveat: I'm a sucker for that aesthetic. It's probably my favorite one from all of humanity's history. So, I will try to justify the final score with other strong arguments besides my passion for Japanese architecture, clothing and weapon design, and that beautiful oriental music.

Still, I am able to say that the graphics and the music are not amazing, even by my low barrier to entry when it comes to this culture. The music is not very memorable, but does its job well enough and manages to not superimpose itself. On the visuals department, well, it's a Team Ninja game. For those who have past experience with their graphics engine, you know: the textures are not incredible and the characters sometimes suffer from that doll-house effect. However, Nioh is their best game in these departments, and the craft and effort they deployed to introduce variety in the scenarios and wearable items mitigate a lot of their past issues.

Nioh is also Team Ninja's best game in the Controls and Gameplay departments. And I bought an OG Xbox to play Ninja Gaiden Black (and replayed it ~3 years ago). This is where “cloning” Dark Souls generated more dividends. The control is meticulously on point and the player never feels in unfair disadvantage. But it's faster than even the fastest of the Souls games (Bloodborne). Not only faster, but deeper. William, throughout progression, will learn different attack combinations for each weapon and many combat tools with interesting effects. And this is where the trade-off begins for Nioh. Yes, the game separates itself proudly from Souls in this regard, but at the same time loses some of the intentional minimalistic focus of FROM's games.

It is really satisfying to pull off a combination of attacks where you start from mid-stance with your fast dual-swords on a close-range flurry that makes damage numbers pop out of your enemy, back-dash its counter-attack while changing to your spear and poking him back with three-heavies, Ki-pulsing (to recover stamina) while changing to lower-stance and swing that same spear to a combo that will end in a jump that catapults you to the back of your enemy. That was my go-to move against big foes and it always felt amazing! Like that combo you train in fighting games and finally nail it online -- Team Ninja are the makers of Dead or Alive, they know what they are doing.

Yet, despite all that beautiful incentive to master the 5 melee weapons at William's disposal, I don't know if I prefer the journeys and stories I went through with my smaller lineup of chosen weapons in Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Even though you have more weapons to choose from in those games, the systems in place incentivize the player to focus on a smaller arsenal and allocate your upgrade points to those. That lends itself to an experience where you really feel attached to a load-out and ingrains itself towards a more epic role-playing path, like the ones in Fantasy novels.

But that's my opinion. You can still do that with Nioh and play it like Souls. I simply found myself taking a different approach and really enjoying it. I will probably remember more fondly the character-weapon combinations I built in Souls. Nevertheless, I tip my hat to Team Ninja, Nioh's systems are so well-built that I ended up experiencing every weapon and allocating upgrade points to other tools, like Magic and Ninjutsu, because they always felt meaningful. And I tend to min-max in every RPG.

Other aspect that separates Nioh from Souls is the world-building and progression throughout said world. While From Software’s RPGs are known for their open and interconnected worlds, Team Ninja made a more traditional design choice: game levels. One could say that, given the diversity of scenarios that should be depicted to properly understand the reach and rise to power of Ieyasu Tokugawa during that period, a box-to-box approach to level design is better than open-world. Notwithstanding, FROM has proven that you can have the best of both aspects and still come out with a cohesive product.

I think this choice from Team Ninja is intimately tied to the choice they made about game Story. Which, in principal, is the right way to roadmap the design of a game. Yet, in my opinion, and despite how interesting it is to see the perspectives from different areas and factions of Japan, this ended up hurting the final product.

The Story they presented was a bit disjointed. I know, the crux of that period is its disjointedness, but I don't think the game captured that in the best way possible, partly because this wasn't the ideal game for that.

I would have preferred William's journey to be circumscribed to a smaller region and feel that same sensation you have in Souls games, when you are looking to a place you have already been, miles away from the one you are now, which is architecturally different. The trade-off would probably be the loss of the myriad of interesting personalities you encounter throughout Nioh. And despite my love for the boss fights you have with those characters – they were perfectly in tune with my samurai duel power-fantasies – the charisma they exude through their design was not properly flushed out story-wise, due to the flood of people and regions they wanted to tackle.

In the end, Team Ninja managed to entangle all those loose threads into a robust take on the events that lead to the Edo period. Even if William is not as interesting as his real-life counterpart certainly was, getting to know the lead actors of that Japanese conflict from his occidental viewpoint was refreshing. Also, his antagonism with Kelley ends up having more than one layer.

Like I said in the beginning, being a Souls clone did not hurt Nioh. On the contrary, not only helped it become a very strong gameplay experience, but also showed that there are ways to deduce different and interesting design choices out of that formula.

The game has the control fidelity of Miyazaki's games, and they added even more depth to the combat in a way that is meaningful even for players who have the tendency to min-max. Like in Souls games, most of the world-building is done through carefully crafted level and item-design that are coupled with texts that flush-out the lore, and in Nioh they managed to include even more diverse locales and beautifully modeled weapons and armor, all entangled in a narrative that despite its contextual disarray ended up as a very serviceable “Dances with Wolves” or “The Last Samurai”.

Nioh is a very long game, and despite some rehashing of enemies and scenarios, it never felt too long. I come out of it wishing for more elements of Souls, but also for Souls to have more of those elements of Nioh that made me greatly enjoy it on its own. And maybe that's the biggest compliment I can give Nioh: you immediately see its influences, but rapidly know you are experiencing something also unique. I reckon it will be difficult for many Souls' clones, and there will be a bunch of them in the coming years, to do it in such a special way.