Nioh: Complete Edition Review (WhatDaMath)
As much as I'd like to recommend this title, it's too niche to appeal to most players. Someone once referred to this as "Annoying Dark Souls" as opposed to "Better Dark Souls" and I'd have to say that's even saying it nicely. When I finished Dark Souls 1 a few years back, I felt genuinely accomplished and wanted to try more and more on harder difficulties. Eventually jumping into other similar titles. When I finished Nioh, I just felt numb at the end. Nioh has the foundation of Souslike games and starts pretty solid for the first few hours, but eventually turns into a slog of game mechanics that you have to constantly be aware of if you want to succeed.
The biggest difference between Nioh and other soulslike is that in order to becomes "gud" or successful in this game, you don't focus on your skills as a player as much as learning the inventory system with all of the buffs and benefits all of the randomly dropped loot provides. You also always stay underpowered as the monsters grow in level with you, which means they continue to one/two shot you even as you gain 10s of new levels.
It all comes down to spending hours upon hours staring at your inventory screen and trying to forge/reforge a perfect item (you'll usually need at least 5 though) and spending more hours reading/watching videos to copy what others have done. Without these perfect builds (based on TONS of obtuse mechanics) it becomes so frustrating to play this game. Not dark souls frustrating where you learn with every fail, more "so I have to go and grind for that perfect drop in some other level so I can reforge it for hours before I can proceed" frustrating. And since forging isn't even fun or interesting it makes Nioh a very obtuse game.
To make things more difficult/worse, wiki for this game is very limited and there have been multiple nerfs over the years to make many builds useless, so all of this becomes a frustrating rather than enjoyable experience.
And without a strong build that can survive a few hits or decimate opponents quick, you end up constantly underleveled and frustrated as even the basic monsters with usually one shot you in higher difficulty levels.
So even though the game starts as a soulslike and is quite enjoyable at first, once you reach the end of the first playthrough and start to replay some of the missions or do extra content, it just becomes plain tedious as you're forced to start looking up build guides and mix/match stats in your equipment, which in many cases may have already been nerfed.
I'd probably only recommend this to someone who REALLY likes theorycrafting and min/maxing their character in games and enjoys staring at inventory screen for days, rather than actually playing the game. If you want to just go through the game with random drops and don't want to worry about the numbers, there's only so far you'll get before becoming way too underpowered to proceed.
And to make things even more difficult, after every missions you're showered with 100s of pieces of equipment that's often useless but MAY contain that one bonus you want so going through most equipment becomes a must too...so yeah....ugh...just frustrating, can I just play the game instead?
I really wanted to get Nioh 2 before playing this, but now that I've read it's basically Nioh 1 but with more mechanics to worry about, no. I think I'll just skip
I honestly think this game would be SO MUCH BETTER if they did the following:
-reduce the number of mechanics players have to worry about
-add an actual difficulty setting for people that don't want to worry about min/maxing
-make loot more meaningful or at least make a good inventory system where we don't have to scroll through 100s of items per mission in what seems to be a console era inventory screen
-maybe stop the nerf updates? what's the point? it's not a PVP game
-provide some other way of fun for people wanting to go through the game that don't care for min/maxing
It's a fun concept wrapped in poor game mechanics and even worse UI
Edit: finished NG+ and DLC to see if I would be missing some more fun and well...the game does become different in a sense that you mostly focus on perfecting your build and honestly there's only one major build everyone goes for - damage reduction using heavy armor. So the game becomes a bit too repetitive after and considering that all you get is more difficulties and a 999 floor dungeon, but no additional missions or endings, I just don't see the point of playing past NG+
It's ok overall, but the mechanics and the level design make it a bit less fun than other Soulslike and a lot more frustrating in the first playthrough