Nioh 3
Additional Nioh Game Product, 9th Edition
The Nioh games are Team Ninja’s attempt to get in on the Souls-like fever of the 2010s. They’re also easily my favorite of the non-Fromsoft Souls-likes, a potent mix of character action, exploration, and RPG progression that I don’t think anyone else chasing that dragon really nailed. They’re far from perfect, but Nioh and Nioh 2 [and all their DLCs] scratch a particular itch that I think even Fromsoft themselves can’t, and with a strange stylish flair that helps them stand out from the pack. I’ve spent the past several years watching the release of Wo Long and Rise of the Ronin thinking ‘why don’t they just make another Nioh game already?’
Well, they made another Nioh game, and it is one of the most ‘another’ Nioh games imaginable. Nioh 3 takes the Nioh format, gives itself the ‘open world’ tag as the world looks on in mild confusion, and then struts around like it’s won a gold medal. And that’s pretty much it.
Let’s start with that so-called open world, because it is at once both the biggest change in the series and the most overblown claim the game makes. Just to be clear, Nioh 3 is not actually an open-world game in any meaningful sense. It technically has very big maps, yes, with tons of pins indicating micro-objectives and collectables, and you can explore optional side areas and just kind of run around killing respawning shit in a big field. But these ‘open worlds’ are split into three distinct maps for the major acts, unconnected and unrelated, with most progression limited to a linear path to the start of an isolated area that plays out essentially the same as the ‘mission’ structure of the first two games.
And instead of making the game feel bigger or more coherent, it actually makes it feel like all the content has just been smeared thinner over a wider area. Missions that would normally be a dense tangle with layered floors, nooks and secret areas to uncover, shortcuts and ambushes, are now just a bit less so. You get a lot of your skill points, weapon skills, and a multitude of distinct currencies by combing through the giant, sprawling maps, sniping balloon ferrets, kicking open chests, chasing ball cats, collecting Korok seeds, clearing enemy camps…
The ‘open-world’ maps are technically chunked out into smaller regions, and each one has its own level scaling and completion percentage to chase. Reaching higher tiers of completion for a zone gives you permanent bonuses, and eventually just reveals every point of interest in that location, infesting your map screen with pins and checkmarks as a reward for putting checkmarks on enough pins. The level scaling sounds like a big deal, but it really isn’t past the first chapter – I went the ‘wrong’ way at the start of the game, beelined up a route that turned out to have been the highest scaling available, and wound up brutally overleveled for all the rest of that map, but the differences become pretty muted past that point. The game is just kind of easy in general, though it’s hard to say if that’s the result of sloppy balance, open-world scaling, or me spontaneously getting much better at games in my old age. Compare that experience to the first two titles, where skipping optional missions means you’re doing pretty much the entire story extremely [but enjoyably] underpowered.
The pseudo-open-world format also means the level design suffers. Prior games had a real mixed bag, with some frustrating levels, some fantastic levels, and plenty of kind of forgettable and interchangeable ones. In Nioh 3, frankly, they’re all pretty forgettable. ‘Dungeon’ areas are mostly split between urban crawls through buildings, most of which feel about the same as any interior space in any Nioh game, and ‘Crucible’ areas which are all the same reddish hellscape of random lava pools, ragged cracked spikes, and floating platforms. The addition of a jump button… hell, actually a double jump, right from the start, also means that playable spaces are actually a lot less interesting and thoughtfully designed. Areas with roof items are now generally accessed by just hopping up some hay bales or whatever instead of finding a ladder, a lot of enemies can be cheesed by just changing elevation and catching them as they hop along to catch up with you, and the game has to make even more obnoxious use of invisible walls to box you in.
But jumping isn’t just relevant in exploration – there are now jump attacks, aerial combos, and more flying enemies to account for your expanded mobility, and it’s all just whatever. The combat in Nioh 3 starts out feeling a lot more complex than Nioh 2, just as Nioh 2 ramped up the options from Nioh 1, but a lot of the changes end up amounting to just that – changes for their own sake, with little perceptible additional depth.
The most major change to the action is actually the one I was initially most upset with, but won me over as I played more – the style shift. Unlike the first two games, where Ninjutsu was kind of a side track of refreshable attack and utility items you could sink some points into unlocking, Nioh 3 splits your character into two distinct forms – Samurai equips heavy armor and somewhat more standard weapons, and Ninja gains access to replenishing uses of their techniques and uses a totally different set of weapons. The differences are deeper than just equipment too – Samurai is encouraged to block and counter attacks rather than trying to avoid them, and so has the ability to do a perfectly timed guard, while Ninja has extra i-frames on dodge, and gains full invulnerability when narrowly dodging an attack.
They really do wind up playing very differently, but remain useful situationally regardless of your general playstyle. I loved swapping over to Ninja form to chuck out a few exploding shuriken, or when I had to be more slippery with a flailing boss, then twisting back into Samurai to string together an empowered chain of combo attacks. Each form equips a different guardian spirit, giving you quick access to a variety of special moves and elements, and both can still use Onmyo magic, which is now derived from enemy soul cores rather than a skill tree.
The downside of the quick access to ninjutsu is that Ninja form abandons the entire Stance system that the series’ melee combat revolves around, and half of all weapon types in the game therefore lose about two thirds of their movesets. Really, Ninja doesn’t need that much variety, since the form is more about flipping around through giant hitboxes and plinking shit with throwing stars or grenades, but it is sad to see so many weapon types essentially relegated to ‘rapid back hit on a stunned enemy’ duty.
But even the Samurai form somehow feels like its movesets have taken a step back. More moves are now bound to inputs that require you to tilt the movement stick backwards or forwards, on top of timing a block or whatever; too many moves are restricted to a single stance, and can ONLY be bound to a particular action, meaning tons of them are mutually exclusive for no really good reason. Even once you have enough skill points to start maxing out the weapon types you’re using, a lot of moves or combos for certain weapon types feel kind of awkward and stiff, like they’re missing some kind of linking move that either you can’t have equipped or just doesn’t exist. With only about half the total number of weapons getting three stances anyway, it doesn’t seem like the combat controls should have taken a step backwards, but that’s how it feels.
Another big disappointment is with the enemy variety, which is probably 80% reuse from the first two games. Now, Nioh 2 also had a lot of enemy and general asset reuse, but with a big twist – the Burst attacks added between games, and the flashy, risky, rewarding counters to those new moves, meant that even common enemies could launch a seriously scary assault that would catch returning players off guard. Those enemies still have their Burst attacks, as do the new enemies, but there’s nothing more, no new twist, no unique interaction, nothing but a few additional enemy types, none of which are visually or mechanically that interesting.
Even bosses are underwhelming – the handful of genuinely new, large yokai type bosses are decent, and have movesets that do push you to swap forms and deploy all your tools, but again, the “open-world” means that field bosses, almost entirely just copy-pasted from the first two games, are plopped around in random spots, or crop up as gatekeepers, sometimes multiple times through the game. The worst bosses, though, are empowered human NPCs, who can deflect, dodge, just kind of… fucking ignore your attacks to one-shot you through hyperarmor. All of which a player revenant or normal NPC encounter might do, but now with the added novelty of having about 500 times more health, and a stamina bar that might as well not even exist, so exacting and aggressive you have to be to have any hope of draining it before being forced off and watching it spring back to full in a fraction of a second.
Meanwhile, the one albatross about Nioh’s neck for the entire series has not changed at all – the loot is still insane and fucking pointless. Chests, minibosses, even a lot of enemies expire in a shower of bright glowing items, shimmering in rarity-indicating color coding, the vast, vast, VAST majority of which is utterly uninteresting – weapon types you have no intention of using, variants of your weapons that have a different spectrum of trivial, arbitrary bonuses, consumables you’ll never clear out space on your quickbar to use, armor that looks stupid, is too heavy, and isn’t even part of a set.
Every boss explodes in a shower of crap that you’re obliged to run around Hoovering up, every time you open your equipment menu is a groan-inducing slog through hundreds – I’m not fucking kidding, hundreds – of things to scroll through as you fight against your eyes glazing over, every few hours you’ll have to sit down and spend a couple minutes just channeling Marie Kondo as you purge the endlessly swelling list of shit that, hey, I don’t know, is this number slightly bigger than this other number? Does ‘imbue water’ spark joy in me? What does Pleiades (Ailing) even mean? Here’s a better question: who gives a shit?
Even once you’re playing NG+7 and engaging with the blacksmith system to carefully construct an equipment set that actually has bonuses that stack and meaningfully augment each other instead of just having 30-odd totally random effects, at what point are you ever going to care getting +6.7% better Ki Recovery Speed (but only after a Critical)? And, this being an open-world pile, or kind of one, New Game is going to involve you spending a lot of time picking up garbage that isn’t even remotely statistically comparable to things you’re already using, as opposed to a steady progression of at least moderately harder hitting sticks. Nioh 3 does attempt some mitigation – there’s loot filters, I think you can technically make your character auto-sell any items below a certain grade, and there’s a very thorough search engine built into the inventory and all crafting menus so you can pull up the exact weapon or armor set you’re looking for. You know what would be better, though? Dumping the ARPG loot pinata shit entirely.
I’m not done complaining though, because Nioh 3 is also a let-down in the one area I was most surprised by in Nioh 2 – the story and character arcs. While Nioh 1 was a kind of confusing series of disjointed vignettes that made little sense to anyone but scholars of Sengoku era politics, Nioh 2 somehow managed to tell a relatively coherent story, focusing more on fewer characters, and tying it back to the first game. Nioh 3 is a return to form, sadly, and is even more all over the place than 1. Since each chapter takes place in a totally different time period, you barely even get multiple cutscenes to see the main characters you’re supposed to be interacting with, supporting, fighting, much less have any context for why you’re slashing your way through another mountain pass, another abandoned village, another fortified cliff. Oh, and the voice acting is terrible.
The Nioh 2 DLCs took your character on a kind of victory lap series of time jumps further and further into Japan’s past, so there’s precedent for time travel and radically different settings even without leaving the Big Island, but Nioh 3 mostly wastes even this concept. The first two chapters essentially revisit the Nioh 1 time period and the Nioh 2 DLC 1 period respectively, and the only really unique chapter is the final one, which takes place in the grim-dark future of the 1850s. And the game doesn’t let you get ahold of a revolver even though an NPC has one. Embarrassing. Why even bother?
I say this as someone who really likes the Nioh games, and had some fun even playing this one – this game has almost no real reason to exist. It does very little that the second game didn’t do, the few new things aren’t broadly good changes, it doesn’t run particularly well or look any nicer, it doesn’t even do the bare minimum that new Nioh stuff usually does, and add a single new weapon type. I mean, unless you count Ninjas holding katanas differently. It’s just more Nioh. Not even more good Nioh. Just more. I thought about trying to beat all the side quests, trying to press into NG+, trying to wring a little more out of this sequel, but absolutely nothing about it has convinced me that I’d ever have more fun in it than just playing Nioh 2 again.
So that’s it. Nioh 3 is Nioh 3. It’s warmed-over Nioh, a sloppy pile of Nioh heaped on a plate and dropped on your table with a shrug by a tired waitress. Some Nioh from a couple days ago, still fine, won’t make you sick, won’t dance on your palate. It’s Nioh that’ll form a fuckin’ turd. Why, you mad you got the Nioh you’ve been waiting for? Wait here a couple months, I’ll go back to the kitchen, see if they can’t microwave some DLC for ya.
Nioh 3 can be purchased on Steam and Playstation 5.
Aw, what a shame Nioh 3 ended up being a disappointment! I really enjoyed my time with 1 and 2, even though I never got around to finishing either of them. When 3 was revealed and the details started coming out the ninja style was what most intrigued me, so at least it's good to see that kind of worked out.
I don't see myself getting to 3 anytime soon, specially after reading your thoughts on it.
“Open world” has to be the greatest concept whose execution never really worked.
For decades I bought games on that promise alone - it seems, to an RPG guy like me, like the ultimate goal. Freedom and adventure! The opportunity to really explore the author’s world! What’s not to love?
Now though it’s just a neon warning sign. It’s a total negative. The only games I can think of that really felt like an open world were Ultima III and IV, and I was like 10 when they came out.
I don’t think there’s a good way to do them. Even when they’re pretty good (say Skyrim or BG3), they still end up being expanses of nothing, that question mark/exclamation point system that I hate so much, or both.