Nioh 2 is a balanced and beautiful game. It will certainly frustrate you to the point where you will want to walk away, but that first victory over a big bad demon will ignite a thirst in you to continue your difficult journey through ancient Japan. This game is not for the weak of heart, but most know that going into it.
Just when you thought it might be safe to hack ’n slash your way through a game, we get the evil cousin of Dark Souls with Nioh 2.
Nioh 2 is a fascinating action/RPG/torture device from Team Ninja, a developer known for epic series such as Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. The game follows Japan in 1555 and throws into the mix a slew of mythical Japanese demons that are ravaging Japan as a whole. The demons have decimated villages, killed thousands of people, and have cursed the land that is struggling to find its way back to the light. The demons are unpredictable, creepy as shit, and they come in all sizes (enjoy this). You are tasked to rid the country of these demons and to do so you are equipped with a customizable character, who complicated as they are continually dying.
Nioh 2 is a hard game. If you are familiar with the first game, then imagine that times two. It doesn’t pull punches with its intentions and doesn’t apologize for pissing you off. It is simply built for you to fail and fail hard, which is where the challenge of succeeding will rear its head. While that may not sound like an experience every gamer wants to go through, it certainly fits a particular group of gamers that enjoy the challenge of going as far as you can, dying, and then restarting the experience to find a better way. The game is based on you strategizing and executing. Sometimes the strategy doesn’t work, sometimes it pays off, but the only way to test the waters is to keep going and going. It’s like running code to see what fails, then re-writing, tweaking and fixing until you get it right. It’s how you would play the Dark Souls series, as well as Nioh.
If you go into the game knowing that this is going to be your playing field and, more importantly, knowing what you’re in for, then you won’t be disappointed one bit. I know that our resident Dark Souls guy, Eric Layman, eats this type of game up for breakfast, then goes all Hobbit and has a second breakfast. Eric is amazing at this type of game, as is our other senior editor Steven McGehee. I envy those guys and their love for this type of torturous gameplay. I used to fill that sort of gameplay void with the likes of Dragon’s Lair, but apparently the gaming world that this sort of gameplay type should be slightly more complicated.
Anyway, the core structure of Nioh 2 is that you’re going to die many times, start over many times, and eventually inch your way to completing stages. It’s not a bad gig and Team Ninja knocks this structure out of the ballpark by giving you motivation in the form of gameplay mechanic options/upgrades to create a proper player agency. You need something balanced to get gamers to forgive you for the brutality of the gameplay.
The first big part of this game that helps the hurt are shrines at the beginning of new areas to signify that ‘you’ve made it’ and can relax a bit. They are checkpoints of sorts that save your progress and allow you to do things to your character like level them up. Leveling up is easy to understand here, and will be explained shortly, but other options at the shrine include making offerings to receive Kodama blessings. The offerings usually come in the form of weapons you gather as you lay siege to monsters and other soldiers/villagers. Kill a ‘thing’ and receive a ‘thing’, it’s just that simple. Once offerings are made, blessings come in different character types with different attributes affected. For example, if you get a samurai blessing, then you get a drop rate increase by 1%. These offerings can help out more and become far more significant as you continue your fateful journey toward the end. Very fateful journey.
The shrine can also open up the Kodama Bazaar, a place where you can purchase items that help you along the way. You can pick up extra health packets that help you through fights, arrows that will strike hard and true, and the most valuable of the bunch, at least early on, the Ochoko Cup. The latter item is vital for your success or at least gives you an opportunity to cheat a bit — but, like, cheat in a friendly way that doesn’t make you feel as if you are cheating the experience.
The Ochoko Cup is an item that affects fighting, or more specifically who and how you fight. Along your journey, you will find graves that come in a variety of colors. Some graves will be blue, some red, and a bevy of other colors. Focusing on the early ones, the blue grave is a grave of a ghost player that is equipped and leveled to a certain point. If you offer cups, then the ghost from this grave type will fight side-by-side with you. Pretty neat, right? Well, believe me, you want to summon them for bigger boss fights. They act as partners and will keep slicing and dicing until they’re sent back to the grave. Now, to get more cups, you can play the game, kill a bunch of people, make offerings with a bunch of weapons — or you can unlock the red graves and fight the hell out of a really tough ghost. Beating the hell out of red ghosts is the easiest way to obtain cups. In fact, you might just restart the level, by visiting the shrine, and continually take down red ghosts. Yes, it doesn’t seem like fun when you read it, but it’s necessary to implement strategies, which is the name of the game here.
As you progress in the game and start understanding it, the game gets even deeper. You will know when to call up blues, when to take down reds, and when to reset and start over. In addition to this strategy, the options of a skill tree make the experience even more intriguing. The skills trees in this game are out of this world nuts. The first part of leveling up is straight from a D&D game. At the shrine, you will find a series of attributes you can level up your character with (constitution, strength, stamina, etc.) using Amrita (basically spirit money) you acquire from killing things in the world. For each attribute you improve, you gain a specific upgrade from it, such as more life or more stamina (you want more stamina — trust me). Your motivation to kill is driven by your need to level up, which drives how far/better you get in the game. All of which equals out to a simple strategy that you would expect in an action RPG.
The actual skills tree portion of the game allows you to increase levels of your techniques that your character uses. For example, if you open the ‘Grapple’ skill under the Samurai skills tree, you can grab weak players, while they’re down, and then perform a powerful attack on them. It’s a simple skill that adds more flavor and options to the gameplay. The more you progress in the game, the more skills you can unlock. The skills tree is huge in this game and yet another strategic element to the gameplay design that keeps your mind off of death after death after death and allows you to focus on improving your methods in an extremely tough gaming environment. It’s a delicately crafted balance that could mean nothing in comparison to your performance, or it can mean so much more when it comes to progression and success in the game. For me, I think adding the above elements (skills tree, leveling up, access to ghosts) makes the gameplay far more exciting and worth the unforgiving challenge the game offers up. You need motivation to keep a game like this from becoming so frustrating that you never want to play it — the above create that motivation.
Other items of interest in the gameplay include the variety of different weapons you can acquire and upgrade, which also makes the journey worth it, and the guardian spirit that you get to choose at the beginning. The spirit guards you and allows you to go on the offensive against demonic baddies, and there are plenty of those in the game. Speaking of which, the game does have a lot of big bad guys that will ruin your day.
During gameplay, you will find smaller demons munching on the flesh of human remains, as well as medium to big bad demons ready to scare the shit out of you, then proceed to pound you into the next century. They come in all shapes and sizes, and you will be introduced to large ones right at the get-go. Killing the small and medium baddies will bring you experience and earn you hearts that will prepare you for the bigger ones. For those of you who enjoy running around and avoiding giant beasts, you will not want to do that in Nioh 2. You’re going to find the game becomes easier when you face your fears and take down the small/medium enemies. This was a lesson learned far too late in the first stage. When you see a black pulsating circle on the ground, it will launch a medium demon into reality, one that you will want to defeat. If you don’t take them down, then you’re going to have a tougher time with the big ones. Strategy and trial/error will help you to get past these things, but the rewards are worth it, as they will make the journey in the game far easier.
Anyway, there is a helluva lot underneath the engine of this game, more than I thought there would be, and I commend the good folks at Team Ninja for making the experience motivating and engaging. For someone like me that doesn’t generally enjoy the Dark Souls series, this makes me want to join the Nioh series and stay there. It will still produce curse words, but at least I know those words will not be in vain.
Overall, Nioh 2 is a balanced and beautiful game. It will certainly frustrate you to the point where you will want to walk away, but that first victory over a big bad demon will ignite a thirst in you to continue your difficult journey through ancient Japan. This game is not for the weak of heart, but most know that going into it.
