Is Nioh 1 better than 2?

[WindBlownLeaf]

For me, there are a few things i like more about 1. I like the style of the interface and the color scheme (more muted colors) and i like that it doesnt have anti aliasing (nioh 2 has forced aa that makes the game look blurry)

As far as gameplay is concerned, i actually dont like soul cores. to me, it feels more like a gimmick than anything else. yokai shift is another disappointing feature imo. its just... bad. idk why they hated living weapon so much honestly, as a 'limit break' feature that is present in many games, the whole point is to become op during it. yokai shift is actually even worse than running around hitting stuff with my weapon. aside from weird soul core spam builds and phantom mage, it is just useless. the concept of turning into a demon is really cool, but somehow we are weaker than in human form. i dont get it.

a bunch of jutsu also didnt make it into nioh 2 for some reason.

i could go on, but you get the point. in nioh 2, i feel like they made changes just for the sake of making changes. personally, i have no problem with games that just make some improvements from one version to the next (the way MH does it). like, if they just fixed some of nioh 1's mistakes, like cramped convoluted levels, but no, in some ways nioh 2 levels are even more lame.

[WindBlownLeaf]

Originally posted by syn:

Originally posted by f0Ri5:

As far as gameplay is concerned, i actually dont like soul cores. to me, it feels more like a gimmick than anything else. yokai shift is another disappointing feature imo. its just... bad. idk why they hated living weapon so much honestly, as a 'limit break' feature that is present in many games, the whole point is to become op during it. yokai shift is actually even worse than running around hitting stuff with my weapon. aside from weird soul core spam builds and phantom mage, it is just useless. the concept of turning into a demon is really cool, but somehow we are weaker than in human form. i dont get it.

I think most would agree Nioh 2 offers a huge improvement in general gameplay. However, if you were already pushing your mental bandwidth limit with 1, I can completely understand how 2 could feel like there's just too many things you need to juggle now to feel as strong as you used to.

LW being a supremely powerful ability akin to a limit break is exactly the problem they sought to address, because when you aren't using it, you are really weak by comparison. In Nioh 2, that power was split across Burst Counters, Soul Cores, and Yokai Shift, and two of the three are things you're encouraged to use constantly, greatly speeding up combat and allowing the player to be much stronger than they were in Nioh 1 outside of their LW window.

In Nioh 1, if LW was 10/10 power, non-LW was 3/10 at best. In Nioh 2, if you're making good use of Soul Cores and Burst Counters, you're at minimum 6/10 all the time which feels much better.

Originally posted by f0Ri5:

a bunch of jutsu also didnt make it into nioh 2 for some reason.

There's a ton of new ones, and boss abilities, so overall your spell and ability pools are much larger.

but u do less damage in yokai shift than human, so it doesnt count as a power up at all

[Xorik]

Nioh 2 is objectively better from a developer and overall community perspective. It addressed an abundance of bugs, made several builds that dropped off in Way of the Wise/Nioh more viable, added more builds, and was more accessible to the majority of players with the removal of several enemies' on-hit effects that players attributed to being artificial difficulty (despite players putting a lot of emphasis on not getting hit). It shrunk the huge gap between players who completed the game and those who didn't, a gap caused by the exponential increase in difficulty from Demon and onwards.

I wasn't a fan of Yokai Shift or soul cores either, but I've seen people do really well with them. I just wish players wouldn't use builds they find online so often that you only seen a few soul cores being used. That was one of the biggest disappointments I found with multiplayer in this game alongside with everyone using the same 6+ Onmyo buffs. Nioh 1 was much worse though since so many people said to use the same one or two builds using the same set armors, skills, and Kato for Sword, Dual Swords, and Kusarigama.

Overall, Nioh 2 had more accessibility and build variety that are expected and desired in ARPGs with less bs moments.

[WindBlownLeaf]

Originally posted by syn:

Originally posted by f0Ri5:

but u do less damage in yokai shift than human, so it doesnt count as a power up at all

It makes you functionally invulnerable and allows you erase massive amounts of Ki via rapid Soul Core use that's separate from your Anima pool. It's not "turn on and mash square until the boss dies" like what we had in 1, but it doesn't need to be because the rest of our kit has been significantly improved.

doesnt make you invulnerable. any kind of damage will deplete your guage stupid fast. however, it is possible to make yourself unkillable in human mode. also, you can easily make a soul core spam build without using shift

so it has bad damage
has bad survivability
and also is not necessary for a soul core build

i like yokai shift thematically and i think it could be very cool (i wanted so badly to make it work, struggled for a while trying to make a build) but it just gets outshined by 'human' mode in every aspect.

only time its worth something is in new game when you cant really make builds yet, but as the game progresses, it falls off more and more