Despite its constrained design, I am quite fond of the original Nioh. From its fantastical pseudo historic fantasy story to gameplay that remedied many of the grievances I held against Dark Soul’s combat, boss and AI design it was a game I spent many hours playing. Mostly because despite it indeed being constrained by a limited budget in a lot of ways the basic gameplay was smooth enough to offer a challenging yet fun experience that didn’t require achieving divinity tier mastery of the game’s controls or grind and min-max like a madman. Rather I should say till you became mad as I am still fully convinced killing Vendrick for that shiny Platinum Trophy carved out more than a year off my life expectancy.
Setting aside a deep seated growing souls induced psychosis, the matter at hand today was whether Koei Tecmo and Sony’s suicidal drive towards achieving a puritanical paradise would seep into Nioh 2. Sure I have said repeatedly that following the failure Dead on Arrival aka Dead or Alive 6 Koei Techmo would make sure sexy and good design were on full display for Nioh 2, but were companies rational and pragmatic there would be little need to guard against the encroachment of politics into gaming.
Naturally, my first task upon starting up the demo was to ensure “sexy” was achievable in the character creation. To that end, I set out with a simple goal, create a sexy red-haired female protagonist to grind through the ensuing hours with. Why a redhead? Simply because the establishment seems to have something against them, thus female, well endowed, and being a redhead would be the ultimate test for the game’s character creator.
After appreciating how most of the default faces wouldn’t require any overhauling to make them appealing without intoxication, the second thing I was struck by was how flat-chested all the female character models were. As it turned out by default breasts are set to -20 aka could be a trap, better check for the D. Once the settings were located it was a very simple matter to jack the number up to 20 to see what a maxed out character would look like.
Simply put, a maxed-out chest is very well endowed but similar to Saints Row’s dick slider. I wanted something impressive and intimidating. Yet not maxed out so I settled at a well endowed 15, I believe. After tweaking a few other settings I had successfully created a traditionally attractive female character that I later came to realize looked like Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn’s concept art under certain lighting. Not my intention, but I was rather pleased with my work. Despite later finding out my unique creation was indeed unique, but not an uncommon design archetype.
As a whole, the character creator was decently complex to the point I am convinced with enough time and tweaking you could easily recreate a number of iconic characters with it. The only downside I found was the color selector. Yet again outside the default color range, the custom selector is the horrible spectrum and contrast selector design that lazily seems to be making its way into a lot of games. Sure it allows for a greater range of creativity, but it also makes making slight alterations to normal skin and hair colors a lengthy chore.
Satisfied with the character creator I delved into the game itself to discover a vastly overhauled Nioh experience maintaining both the smoothness and charm I adored in the original while expanding upon it in numerous ways.
Sure at the core of the experience still rests the three stance combat system. Featuring High, Mid, and Low stances, but now each weapon category has its own unique feel and style. Rather than the original’s combat options where many weapon categories were nothing more than a fancy skin and animation choice for speed and reach selection of a set handful of styles, each weapon category now performs and functions differently from each other. Resolving one of the chief complaints many had against the original game.
Skill points unlock the same as they did in the original. Max out affinity with a particular weapon then move on to another in the same category. It was and still is a good method to entice players to continue to vary up their play style and equipment choices. Resulting from the limited nature of the demo which I’ll cover more later I found myself settling on one particular weapon and magic without deviating far from it.
On a positive note, the skill trees have been refined rendered easier to navigate. Each tree possesses a quick list of all skills accessible by the press of a button that will then navigate to the location in the tree where the skill lies. Alleviating a great deal of the aggravation and tedium that comes with planning skill progression. It was a small, but a noticeable quality of a life feature that didn’t sacrifice complexity for the sake of ease of use.
From there, there is a bevy of new mechanics that joined the game. Some of which were not fully implemented in the demo, such as weapon sentience. Weapons after so much slaughter would request to talk to you, but you really couldn’t and probably shouldn’t come to think of one’s sanity, talk to your weapon.
Yokai transformation was fully implemented in the demo, but options were limited. Three modes (forms) exist for Yokai mode, but only one can be equipped at a time. Selection is done by selecting your designated guardian at shrines. Each guardian in addition to offering a plethora of stat bonuses and passives has a designated form players will take when they activate Yokai mode during combat. The demo itself focuses heavily on Brute mode with a plethora of Brute Soul Skills available, but Feral and Phantom modes were also available. Albeit with considerably fewer options.
Soul Skills acquired through purifying Yokai cores at shrines or at the end of the level are then set to a specific guardian. Each skill has a designated form, which if equipped to gives it a bonus I was unable to determine during the course of the demo. Yet because you cannot swap guardians on the fly it struck me as strange skill selection was tied to guardians in the first place. Sure it expedites matters at shrines, leaving you only to have to switch out guardians without worrying about resetting skills. Yet during the course of the demo because of the limited selection of skills and the straight forward nature of Brute’s dodge, I stuck mostly to it.
When I unlocked the more powerful guardian who would remain my designated choice for the duration of the demo, I had to remove the skills from said former guardian and reequip them to the new one. As I never swapped guardians from that point forward I would never spend time in the guardian menu, but spent a lot of time in the set skill menus. Perhaps the final builds increased in the variety of skills and guardians will improve the feel of the design or eventually, players will be able to swap guardians on the fly, but for the demo, it was a design choice that made more sense on paper than it did in practice. 
The demo itself was a straight forward Nioh experience. Improved, overhauled, but still distinctly Nioh, which added familiarity to the experience. A familiarity that after my extensive time with the original, raised concerns about the sequel’s potential staying power. Will the coming home sensation of the sequel lead to faster burnout? I cannot say. Drawing from my recent similar experience with the Surge 2 which featured a very similar issue when compared to its original it raises the possibility.
Whatever the case the moment to moment gameplay remains largely the same. Souls and Nioh veterans should feel at home, but the demo itself was not particularly long. Consisting of two decently length missions and one optional, but amusing boss fight along with some tutorials and minor customization options for your hut, weapons etc the demo shouldn’t take longer than a day to complete a max.
What ate up most of my time with the demo was the first boss. Now in full disclosure, I could have sent out a request of help or teamed up with one of the players seeded NPC summons. I did so for the second boss to find out the NPCs are largely misses with a few successes thrown in. Pride drove me to solo the boss and said boss not only possessed your typical shoot the whoop moves, but a bevy of other attacks so cheap they’re on clearance at the dollar store.
Here the game’s cracks really started to show. I cannot fully say whether this was a result of how the demo was set up, namely throwing a level one player with limited access to features a bit further into the game or if it is the game itself, but the issue was compounded by a few technical problems.
By and large, like the rest of the game hitboxes were immaculate except when they weren’t. No, what really caused problems was the dodge mechanic simply refusing to work. Not in the sense invincibility frames weren’t counted properly, as they typically were, but in the sense you’d hit the input and nothing would happen.
My controller is relatively new and I’ve had no issues with anything else, so it is easy to rule out my console and controller as the cause. I did notice it occasionally throughout the game as if the game had predetermined collision slightly, yet noticeably in advance and simply refused to listen to any inputs of dodging. There was no real consistency or frequency to the issue.
By no means did it break the experience, but hours of frustration coupled a friend laughing at my raging certainly did leave an impression. What also left an impression was how the game’s story doesn’t appear to be attempting to turn Nobunaga into a supervillain or look back on his exploits and misdeeds with a posh and cozy modern lens. A trend all too common in Japan these days. For those unaware Nobunaga was a brutal conqueror, but one whose actions and ambitions laid the foundation of Japan as a unified nation.
Your intentions and motivations appear to be to avenge your lord rather than to spend hours talking about how toxically masculine or evil he was. Refreshing, to say the least.
Overall the demo, while certainly frustrating, left a positive impression on me. Sexy is there, the story appears to be there, and gameplay certainly is there if in need of a little polish. As very much an overhauled Nioh with more small features added than could be put into article form without becoming tedious to read it has left me wanting more rather than wanting to stay away.