"Nioh" Review

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Yahtzee Croshaw's reviews, so in the next sentence when I sorta-kinda steal the format of a joke he once used when reviewing the original Nier (not to be confused with the subject of today's review) back in the day, know that I do so out of respect. I would like to thank the developers of Nioh for naming the game after how I would respond if somebody asked me if I'd recommend it. I really and truly wonder if I accidentally got an early beta version of this game, because everybody else is giving it scores between 8 and 10, and I honestly don't think it even remotely earns a score that high. I want to be completely clear about where I stand on Nioh. It isn't a bad game, in fact, it has its high moments. Unfortunately, its just so painfully average in every other area that I couldn't even muster up the motivation to finish it when significantly better games were coming out. It could be that Nioh drastically improves after the point I stopped playing, but given how copy-and-paste the game has been up to that point, I highly doubt it. It's always difficult to review mediocre titles because its hard to get passionate about it. If Nioh totally sucked, I could rant for pages about it. If it were a good game, I could sing its praises for an equally long time. I also know for a fact that there will be those who say, "What? You gave Mass Effect: Andromeda an 8, but you gave Nioh that score?" It's certainly true that Nioh is better put together than Andromeda, but the fact of the matter is that it just isn't all that compelling a package. I don't think this game has quite the same fanbase as Dark Souls or No Man's Sky, so I hardly think I'm actually going to be destroying anybody's sense of identity with this review, but just know that if you liked Nioh, I truly envy you, because I really wanted to. *sigh* Lets just get this over with.

Nioh takes place in 17th century Japan, and its story evidently follows a real historical figure named William, a British man who travelled to Japan and I guess became a samurai. Anything resembling history is quickly thrown out the window though, as the story has William traveling to Japan after a magical kind of mineral called Amrita and being pursued by a shapeshifting man with glowing red eyes. As far as the story goes, thats about all I could figure out. There were references to conflicts between two Japanese warlords that may or may not be historical, but they were poorly written and we're given zero reason to care, so they kind of fall by the wayside. 

By now, I'm sure everybody has heard that Nioh is basically Dark Souls, but that's only partly true. In truth, I'd say that Nioh is Dark Souls as described by a Let's Player. It's Dark Souls as described by a trend-follower who believes that Dark Souls' appeal is due to its difficulty. In other words, its Dark Souls described by somebody who clearly doesn't understand Dark Souls. So, yes, Nioh is hard, but it's about as deep as your average puddle and it builds its world about as well as I built my spaghetti bridge in High School physics. In Dark Souls, the world simply radiated history. Every hallway felt like it was built with purpose, as if every column in every building had been placed there by actual architects in the history of the world. In Nioh, there is no such feeling, and have you already realized why this is a problem? Because unlike any location in Dark Souls, Japan. Actually. Exists. Nioh's location does have history attached to it; thousands of years of it, in fact! They didn't have to write anything new, the history was literally already there and it was ripe for the taking! Despite all this, Nioh's world just feels shallow and secondary to the action. This is due to the statement I made earlier: Nioh is Dark Souls as described by somebody who doesn't understand it. The story and world building in Dark Souls is drip-fed to you, and many of the details are vague. However, item descriptions and little bits of dialogue with NPCs give you little hints that enrich the massive lore, and every boss holds a place in the history. So, while the story is always vague in the Souls games, its ever-present. The story and world building in Nioh, on the other hand, is just vague. Bosses are just thrown in at random with no context before or after the battle, and the NPCs take the cake from Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in terms of forgettability. Again, we return to Dark Souls. NPCs would only give little bits of dialogue, but their story arcs were always expansive and sometimes truly heartbreaking, and at the very least, each NPC had some kind of physical quirk that allowed the player to distinguish them from others. Solaire of Astora had the iconic sun shirt and knight's helmet, Petrus of Thorolund was fat and had a green tonsure, Siegmier (or Siegward...I forget) of Catarina had the equally iconic onion armor, the list goes on and on. What characters do we have in Nioh? Well, I remember Hanzo Hattori because he had a special kind of hat and William because he was the protagonist. And one of the two women wore a blue outfit but I can't remember her name. All of the characters in Nioh have exactly the same kinds of outfits and just blend together. There is nothing to distinguish one character from another, not even voice given how most story based dialogue is delivered in text. The icing on the cake is the fact that William, our protagonist, is about as interesting as his name. He never hits any kind of development, not even a John Smith kind of arc where he realizes that he's meant to join the Japanese (at least, not as far as I got). Add all of these things together and you have a weak story, weak world, and weak characters. Not exactly off to a good start.

Sometimes when a world isn't well-developed, the way that it's rendered can save the day. Think back to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Its World of Warcraft style graphics may have been a little corny, but it was the best way to render the world. It fit the kind of otherworldly fantasy feeling that the story gave off, so even though the world building was actually pretty weak, it was at least presented well. Unfortunately, Nioh didn't quite get the memo on that. All critics have mentioned that the graphics in Nioh aren't the best, but many of them have claimed that the game is gorgeous at times. I'd like to know which version of the game these critics were playing, because the game was hideous at all times for me. Not just hideous, I should say, but also mind numbingly dull in terms of its level design. Nothing says epic fantasy like mostly flat areas with the occasional bits of rooftop. The story takes you from a butt-ugly impoverished fishing village to another butt-ugly impoverished fishing village to a butt-ugly mine to, you guessed it, yet another butt-ugly impoverished fishing village. These were different butt-ugly impoverished fishing villages every time, but they were one-dimensional and uninteresting every time as well. Some might argue that, due to the fishing villages being impoverished and butt-ugly by nature, there isn't a way to render them well, but I would ask such people to look at Fallout 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Those games had downright terrible graphics at times, even for their years, and yet they still managed to render filth and poverty in a way that made it compelling. Nioh does no such thing. In my Mass Effect: Andromeda review, I mentioned that, as a Dragon Age fan, I'm the last person who gets to complain about graphics, but when no effort is put into making subpar graphics at least stand out, it annoys me. On the positive side, the game keeps a pretty steady framerate going, as I never noticed a single drop in my time with it. Its just a shame that this stable performance doesn't actually do anything for this game's visual appeal or level design. Really, the place where the graphics actually do somewhat shine is in a certain side-quest village that is bathed in sunlight...and you'll get plenty of chances to see that, because when it comes to side-quests, Nioh does a copy-and-paste job that puts Dragon Age II to shame. 

Every story mission has a recommended level for you, and that level means jack diddly squat in the end, but if you want to get up to that level, chances are you'll have to do some of the side quests. That wouldn't be a problem (as the side quests are actually the best part of the game), except that most side quests just take place in story areas you've already visited, and the few locations that aren't from the story are re-used in other side quests further down the line, and given how you travel to completely opposite sides of Japan sometimes, this copy-and-paste job really sticks out. 

Now, I mentioned that side quests are the best part of the game, so I'd like to take a break from the negativity to talk about that in greater detail. Story missions are essentially the same every time: make it to the boss and kill the boss. Side quests, however, always have interesting, different, unique objectives to complete. From holding out against waves upon waves of enemies to having a one-on-one duel with a warlord to chasing down a certain type of enemy as it flees through the area to locating a certain kind of medicine in a village, side quests always offer something new. In my time with Nioh, I had the most fun while doing these side quests, without question. That means that I was always above the recommended level for the story, but like I said, that recommended level doesn't actually mean anything when you get right down to it. 

That brings us to gameplay, and another thing that Nioh actually does somewhat well. Much like Dark Souls, combat in Nioh is based on timing and knowledge of your weapons, and in this way, Nioh actually does a fairly decent job of mimicking Souls. I elected to use a Kusarigama, a Japanese weapon that is essentially a chain with a sickle on one end and a metal ball on the other, because if I'm playing a game set in early Japan, darn it all, I'm gonna use a traditional Japanese weapon that doesn't automatically apply a fedora to my head. Like in the Souls games, I had to get used to the weapon's peculiar timing, but once I did, any other weapon would just bring me down. Missions are set in self-contained areas, and every area has a set amount of shrines (bonfires, essentially). As you kill enemies, you pick up amrita (souls) from their bodies, and when you die, you lose your amrita and have to go to the spot where you died to regain it. The similarities to Dark Souls are obviously numerous, but where Nioh differs is in the tightness of its combat. Despite the sheer amount of ways you could play Dark Souls, combat always felt tight and well put-together, like every piece was there for a reason. Nioh, unfortunately, has significantly more fat on its bones. There are several ways to play, but all except pure melee are poorly defined and take more time to figure out than they're worth, and in addition, you also have three different battle stances to worry about. You have low stance, medium stance, and high stance, each of which affects your speed, dodging ability, and overall damage. If there were enemies that were best faced in certain stances, making gameplay about switching stances fluidly, it would be a different story, but as it is, it's just this large unnecessary blob of fat on an otherwise functional and enjoyable gameplay experience. Then theres the matter of dodging. Dodging is an integral part of any game trying to emulate Dark Souls, but Nioh kind of misses the mark here. It's difficult to nail down what exactly the problem is, but it could be one of a few things: 1) Enemy attack hitboxes are too big, 2) you simply don't have enough control over the direction and speed of your dodge, or 3) dodging just isn't meant to be as effective as blocking in this game. Whatever way you slice it, one of the core aspects of gameplay just never felt effective to me. Now, it could be that I just don't have the right rhythm, but as a veteran Dark Souls player, I would think that I've gotten pretty good at timing my dodges just right. 

I wrote this review while stuck in a car dealership for a morning. The idea was to get caught up on my reviewing while simultaneously making the 2-3 hour wait time go by faster. Somehow, just talking about Nioh for this length of time has made the wait feel even longer. I've been incredibly negative about Nioh throughout this review, slamming it for its over-reliance on butt-ugly fishing villages, its terribly executed story, world, level design, graphics, and characters, its copy-and-paste locations, as well as its liberal interpretation of some of Dark Souls' core gameplay features, but its important to keep in mind that I called this game "painfully average" at the beginning, not "bad." I really did love the side quests, and when the gameplay was at its best and when I learned to disregard some of the fat hanging off the system, I really did enjoy gameplay. But after a while, without the promise of a compelling story or world to drive me on, the challenges of Nioh stopped being a worthwhile mountain to climb and instead just became a chore. If you really are a sadist who just plays Dark Souls because its hard, then I would recommend Nioh to you any day of the week. By all means, purchase this game if you're that kind of person, because you'll have a blast, and I'll be jealous of you for it. For a while, I was having a blast as well, but this just isn't a game that improves in any way with time. Your experience at the beginning will be your experience further down the line, so if you're looking for a game that's going to blow your mind with its originality, tight gameplay, and interesting historical narrative, I would suggest that you say "Nioh" to Nioh. 

Let us review:

Weak story, characters, world - 1.0

Re-used locations - 0.3

No location variety and poor level design - 1.0

Various gameplay negatives - 0.5

Not compelling enough to finish - 1.0

The final score for Nioh is...

6.2/10 - Slightly Above Average

Better luck next time, Team Ninja, better luck next time.