My Nioh 2 Review

[Jackson]

Allow me to explain the Nioh experience. The game is incredibly difficult. It will continually challenge you, all the time. Some of these challenges aren’t fair. You’ll have to decide if that’s the kind of experience you want. But if you push through, you will feel a sense of accomplishment that few other games offer.

If looking to complete everything, this game is aggressively long. There’s a New Game plus feature that let’s you play the story again but changes the enemy locations and allows your character to become stronger. There is a total of 5 playthroughs. If you’re sane, you’ll either get all you want from the game from the first playthrough or stomping through the second playthrough. This is what I’d recommend for most.

The second play through is downright pleasant. In the context of Nioh, it’s easy. In the third, cursed enemies start spawning, which is a flat and soulless way to make encounters more difficult. Cursed enemies are faster, take less damage, and deal more damage to you. They just do this from now on. The curse gets stronger with the introduction of the next playthroughs as well. The fourth difficulty is absurdly difficult. I genuinely don’t think it’s correctly balanced. The item levels don’t really keep up with the game’s difficulty, everything feels like it’s harder than it’s meant to be. If you’re playing, consider this a guide to help you. You will complete side objectives until the final level opens up, then you do that to unlock the fifth difficulty. On difficulty five, the game isn’t “easy”, but you’ve endured worse. You will get through it if you got here. Most games would end here. But this one has a dastardly trick up its sleeve.

Upon unlocking the fifth difficulty, you also unlock the underworld. Foolish me in the past thought it was just an infinite dungeon, so I dropped the game. It’s not. It’s finite, and upon finding that out, I decided to tackle on Nioh 2 again in my life. It is a 108 floor dungeon that goes on for just as long as it sounds. It’s repetitive, unnecessary and not very fun. But you stopped having fun after playthrough 2 or so. But you push on, because you want that sense of accomplishment. An accomplishment that the myriad of games in your library hasn’t given you. And when you finally do it, you are too quick to celebrate. Because alas, there’s ANOTHER dungeon. This time it’s 30 floors. Well, what’s another 30 floors?

I’ll tell you what another 30 floors of agony look like. These aren’t just your normal difficulty spikes. All the barriers of fun shred away and all that’s left is just mean enemy design. Another layer of suffering is introduced with floors 11 through 20, which now have two bosses. You fight one after another. The remaining floors 21 through 30 have 3 consecutive bosses. All have to be completed without dying, or you get to fight them in order again. The bosses are also randomly selected, so you might fight a boss that you’re great at defeating, or you might get a boss that you thought was impossible, and now it’s just one of multiple fights. You have to get good. Real good. Ignore your surroundings good. Hurt your relationships good. You’re going to regularly die mid-fight, and just have to mentally decompress if you want to get through those.

But if you push through, the elation you feel will be unrivaled. You get the screen you’ve been waiting for. The one the intern probably made in 2 minutes. To provide my favorite quote from it "Truly you have achieved what others considered impossible". That’s exactly it. You have become Nioh by the time you’ve finished this adventure. The only thing left to do is uninstall and find the next game to consume your life.

[Nyu]

this is the forum
not the reviews

[Johnnie Walker]

nioh is hard the initial hourse until you understand the system. that is very very very badly explained thats it

[Jackson]

Johnnie Walker a écrit :

nioh is hard the initial hourse until you understand the system. that is very very very badly explained thats it

I know when I first played the game, I had more issues with the Enki enemy in the first level than the boss haha. I did play Nioh 1 first before this game however. That said, Enrera felt like "THE HARDEST BOSS" I've ever encountered. I really questioned how come I couldn't push through it. Now I'm excited to see that boss in the depths compared to most bosses, as the patterns are imprinted into my eyelids.

[Rabbit Doge]

It's like they spent so long making it, they just dumped it on the market since they did Nioh 1 already.

[⭕TheSodaman]

Jackson a écrit :

Johnnie Walker a écrit :

nioh is hard the initial hourse until you understand the system. that is very very very badly explained thats it

I know when I first played the game, I had more issues with the Enki enemy in the first level than the boss haha. I did play Nioh 1 first before this game however. That said, Enrera felt like "THE HARDEST BOSS" I've ever encountered. I really questioned how come I couldn't push through it. Now I'm excited to see that boss in the depths compared to most bosses, as the patterns are imprinted into my eyelids.

Enenra and Oni Shibata were my roadblocks on the first playthrough for how I was playing at the time. Playing blind/guideless, I gravitated toward low effort, low skill methods for progression. And I was only focused on the progression and the victory. I refined and tweaked myself along the way. Reached Depths 30 after much hardship, but still having very much neglected many core mechanics.

Saw a thread here about a player on Dream of the Demon claiming to have issues and wanted someone to critique them what they were doing wrong.

I did the co-op. It was there, I witnessed beautiful, flowing, destructive gameplay. The way that Nioh 2 could have been played. And seeing how much fun they were having, it wasn't about just the victory, but new ways to weave together their arsenal to defeat enemies. I was a simple, effective slug compared to what I witnessed that day and it revitalized both the first and second games for me.

Clearing Depths 30 wasn't the end of the journey for me or the reason to uninstall. And even the first playthrough had new life in it. And every mission on every Dream and the every Underworld floor for mostly a full clear after that. Where when I was progression / completion driven, zipping by enemies or sneaking past enemies on higher dreams or in floors. Instead of treating each encounter as an opportunity to try something new or fight better than I did before in this situation.

And the main two reasons to uninstall were:

1) SSD space can't hold both Nioh games and still have room for more.

2) Would have put another 500+ hours into the game enjoying its combat and trying new builds.

[Jackson]

Thanks for the reply TheSodaman, that was a fun read. Oni Shibata also gave me a lot of guff when first encountering him. I think they must have patched him since the game release, because I didn't have any real issues with him on my latest playthrough. I'm still wary of him in the depths though!

Also, it's great to hear how much enjoyment the game has and continues to give you. I personally try to complete and play as many different games in hopes to identify which games are great and worth replaying. This is definitely one of the greats for me, but my adventure continues into new territory (at least until about a year elapses when I start replaying my favorites).