More than just a "Samurai Dark Souls" Clone

“Samurai Dark Souls.” I’ve heard this term thrown around a lot when talking about Nioh. While it may seem accurate at first glance, it’s also a bit unfair, not only to Nioh but to Dark Souls as well. Team Ninja unabashedly takes elements from the Souls-Borne games, not in an effort to “cash-in” on what games those games popular, Nioh seeks to celebrate what FromSoftware has done. Nioh isn’t trying to “steal” from Dark Souls, but instead tries to show us that FromSoftware has created something special: a new genre in video games.

Nioh is set in the 1600s, Warring States period of Japan, just after the death of Oda Nobunaga, but not from any perspective you might expect from a game set in that time period. Nioh is played from the perspective of William Adams, known widely as the first Western Samurai, with a bit of supernatural flourish, of course (because video games). William Adams, in this context, was an Irish-born Englishman who spent his adult years as a pirate before falling into the service of Queen Elizabeth I, procuring goods through some not so legal means during a war, until he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped death on the chopping blocks of London (they were pirates after all, can’t have that blemish the Queen’s reputation). He then sailed to Japan after having his Guardian Spirit Saoirse (pronounced Seer-shuh) stolen by Edward Kelley, an English alchemist seeking control of a mystical stone resource known as Amrita. 

It sets a stage for a story packed with historical fiction mixed in with some supernatural mythology in a pivotal era in Japan’s history. It draws on a lot of historical figures, including Tokugawa Ieyasu, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga, and many more with more difficult names to spell out. Unfortunately, the story elements don't all come together in the most coherent fashion.

The gameplay in Nioh is as you’d expect from a Souls-like game in a lot of ways, and very different in others. Where Dark Souls asked you to seek out specific weapons, then upgrade them to tailor to your playstyle, Nioh does something different. Weapon and armor drops are abundant in Nioh; enemies will drop weapons, armor, items, and materials for the blacksmith to use for forging new weapons and armor. Throughout the game, Nioh asks the player to choose their favorite weapon(s) but allows for experimentation. Unlike the Souls games, there are no classes. Players upgrade however they want and that tailors the experience to the individual player. Unfortunately, this also means that getting too used to one specific set of armor or weapon can be frustrating, as it will likely be outmatched quickly. "Amrita" serves as the stand-in for souls in Nioh, and is used to level up. Each weapon upgrades differently depending on where the player invests Amrita. 

The combat is Nioh is definitely one of the places where Nioh set itself apart from other Souls-like games. In Nioh, players have three stances to swap between in and out of combat: High, Mid, and Low stance. High stance uses slow attacks that deal large amounts of damage, but gives the player limited momentum in dodging and/or evading; mid stance is as one might expect, a decent balance of damage and speed; low stance uses a rapid flurry of low damage attacks, but also allows the greatest range of motion for dodging. It’s a tricky system that varies with each weapon. The weapon selection ranges from a single katana, dual katana, spears, axes and hammers, and the kusurigama, a sickle on a chain with a metal weight on one end. There are also Ninjutsu and Onmyo magic, for those players who like to go Ninja or Mage, respectively, with those abilities being unlocked almost immediately. There are also bows, rifles, and hand cannons, each of which can be used at any time, given there’s ammunition available. 

One of the biggest changes Nioh brings to the combat table is the Ki Pulse. Ki (pronounced "key") in Nioh is the equivalent to stamina; run out of Ki, and William actually stops moving entirely, standing in placing heaving to regain his breath as the Ki gauge refills halfway. This leaves him entirely open to enemy bombardment. To avoid this terrifying situation, the Ki pulse mastery almost becomes a necessity. The Ki pulse is a way to regain Ki just after, or even during, a combo. As the player attacks, the Ki gauge depletes and the lost Ki turns red. As the combo ends or slows, the gauge will temporarily turn white. With a quick press a button, a portion of the Ki gauge can be refilled. Another signifier of Ki is white dots surrounding the player, which will group together before coming to a crescendo, the optimum time to hit the R2 and regain Ki. Properly pulling off Ki pulses, which can change depending how you upgrade your weapon trees, can have a monumental effect on your playing experience.

Ki pulses can also be used to dispel energies from the Yokai realm. Yokai are frightening enemies who traded their humanity (and logical reasoning) for increased power. Yokai can summon pools of Yokai energy to replenish their own Ki and significantly increase their damage output if the player is standing in it when they get hit. 

Like the Souls-like games, Nioh’s enemies demand respect, even from the lowliest skeleton warrior. Each and every enemy can kill you in seconds if you’re careless. This means that the player is expected to pay attention to each and every fight. Taking on multiple enemies in an attempt to power through an area is, as the game’s loading screen advice puts it, "a fool’s strategy for a quick death." Take it slow and careful, learn your enemies, and dominate them. 

Of course, this philosophy is magnified when it comes to the bosses. Each boss presents its own challenge and requires the player learn their patterns before learning ways to defeat them. And you will die. Often. This isn’t meant to discourage, merely a rite of passage and a part of the learning experience for each boss. Many of the game’s bosses have some historical significance or roots in Japanese mythology. For example, Ishida Mitsunari was a powerful military commander of his time; in Nioh, power was turned against him, twisting Ishida into a demonic version of himself. The Joro-gumo is a type of Yokai in Japanese myth depicted as a woman with the lower body of a horrifyingly gigantic spider. 

Besides the main story missions, there are also tons of side missions that break up the pace of the game and offer some pretty unique rewards. Some side missions could have you search for a specific item somewhere in the map, some are area style survival missions, while some feel like small chunks of the narrative missions which fill out the backstories of the many historical figures you meet throughout the game.

Where Nioh gets many gameplay elements right, there are some confusing spots where Nioh trips itself up. While the opening level sets the stage for the rest of the admittedly disjointed narrative, it makes the actual “Dojo” tutorials that follow entirely irrelevant. There are missions in the Dojo training area that appear far too late for them to be of any real consequence. The most glaring of these omissions is that the actual combat tutorial in the Dojo isn’t available until you’ve played through the opening level, forcing you to think your way through numerous combat situations before giving you a small overview on how combat works in the game. Another Dojo mission sees you training with a master ninja to use the ninja weapons shuriken and kunai, along with poison and paralysis bombs. Unless you’ve been playing entirely as one style the whole time up until this point (about 10+ hours in), you’ve likely experimented with these on your own and know what they can do already. It’s confusing and gives off the vibe that these tutorials were added as an afterthought. These missions are largely skippable, but they offer unique rewards of their own for plowing through them, however small.

While Nioh is meant to be a solo experience, there is multiplayer. Players who’ve gone through a level can be called upon to help newer players who are on their first go. It’s a sort of leader-follower mechanic that allows the game to be played somewhat in co-op without giving players the ability to co-op the entire game start to finish. Players can also go into the Yokai realm and fight with a partner for loot there. And it wouldn’t be a Souls-like without a little Player vs Player action going on. While there’s no direct PvP, players can fight Revenants, who are AI-controlled recreations of players who’ve died at any given place which can then be summoned to do battle. Their entire play style is mimicked by the AI, including weapon choice, frequency of dodging, or use of ranged weapons. Revenants also drop stronger loot when defeated, but are often more powerful than "average" enemies, making Revenant fights a high risk, high reward situation.

If there’s any place Nioh really screws up, it has to be the aforementioned disjointed nature of the narrative. Going through the missions feel like each one contributes to something bigger, but that something is too big for the player to really see it clearly, if at all. While the many figures you meet are all interesting in their own way, it’s hard to see how any of these points connect. It is almost a Year-One Destiny situation in that regard. William just kind of moves from place to place, doing this and that, following leads on Edward Kelley, or doing something for a military leader or some such, but you don’t really feel like the story is progressing. I suppose that may be the result of such a long development cycle and being moved around from studio to studio. Team Ninja did the best they could with what they had to work with, and made an amazing game from it, but the story just doesn’t quite hit the mark. 

In all, Nioh is an amazing experience that can easily take up dozens of hours or more. It takes what we thought we knew from the Dark Souls games, adds its own flourish and boldly declares that FromSoftware not only made a great game series, they created a new genre. Team Ninja sees Nioh as a return to form for what the studio used to be, and in doing so, made an outstanding game with one of the deepest, most refined combat systems games have seen in a long time. So again, to call Nioh a “Dark Souls clone” or a “Samurai Souls” game is to sell both games short. Nioh is something special, even among the relatively young Souls-like action-RPG hybrid genre, and certainly isn’t to be missed.