Nioh 2 - The Good, The Bad, The Questionable

Nioh 2 is an ARPG developed by Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo. Released in 2021, Nioh 2 reminds us that every game is made better when a ninja can cut a dudes head off with a stick.

We play as a human/demon hybrid on a quest to bring peace to a war torn land because reasons.

Gameplay involves saying "fuck" a lot as you die to everything. Trivial creature got in a lucky hit? "Fuck." Bullshit boss move that ignores stun lock? "Fuck." Two mini-bosses spawn at the same time? "Fuck." Think you carry momentum when rolling off a cliff to cover a gap over water? Believe it or not, "Fuck."

---

The Good

If you want to flip out and do cool ninja shit, it's hard to go wrong with Team Ninja. It's sort of their thing and with a dozen different weapon types and more moves/magic powers than you can shake a stick at you can be the variety show of murder you were always meant to be. I smacked a dude with a fireball, he fell backwards over a ledge and then I lept after him and stabbed him as we were falling. Like...fuck yeah? More please?

The Diablo-esque loot pinata experience and depth of customization is insane. What I like about it is if you want to tinker with upgrading gear you can make it so it lasts the entire game. Or you can just not bother and slap in whatever gear you picked up last that has the biggest number.

Some bonuses you can get on items are worth learning how to get, like the ones that show you were enemies are. That way if you're not good at the game you don't have to worry about enemies jumping out of nowhere, yelling "fuck!" and slamming your dodge key like it was on fire.

---

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/DrB69Wa.png

Gee that's an awful lot of player grave indicators. You trying to warn me about something?

---

The Bad

They didn't do a great job with the silent protagonist bit. You spend most of the game with zero motivation other than "Well it beats sleeping in I guess." I like to think the main character doesn't even speak Japanese and had no idea what anybody was saying. That would explain the constant dumbfounded expression.

'Nobody plays these games for the story' isn't much of an excuse either. The story in Nioh 1 wasn't much better but at least William had some personality. The saving grace is this is set during the Sengoku period of Japanese history and I'm just enough of a weeb to consume any related media. I am one of the dozens of people who watched the Sengoku Basara cartoon for the uh...plot.

---

The Questionable

This might end up being a controversial take. I am starting to feel my age and my reflexes/eyesight aren't what they once were. That being said...

For all the things they made better in terms of gameplay and QOL, I'm not sure how I feel about how boss encounters changed. In Nioh 1 I enjoyed getting to feel like -I- was the boss monster. I was just as OP as they were and when I had the right tempo they had to respond to me. You didn't need carefully optimized end game gear to do it either. Right out the gate you got to be an angry badger.

Nioh 2 felt far more defensive. They spent a lot of time adding more ways to avoid taking damage and by golly you're going to use them. Fights rely more heavily on blocking/dodging around attacks, getting in chip damage here and there.

It's not quite Fromsoft levels of dodgerolling to victory, you're still mostly on the offensive. I had fun but I had to spend a lot more time worried about the boss attack pattern rather than knocking it on it's ass and telling it to stay down.

---

Final Thoughts

It's a brutal game, but it's still Team Ninja so you still get to kick a lot of ass and have fun doing it. My only lasting gripe is while getting to make my standard anime waifu with pink hair protagonist was nice, if I'm going to spend 12 hours staring at a character's butt in a video game, I'd like them to have a personality.

---

Bonus Thought

I love that KOEI has been making games featuring Oda Nobunaga ever since Nobunaga's Ambition back on the SNES. I love even more that they fully committed to using basically the same image for him each time. Even other franchises like Capcom when they tried to do games featuring him were like, "Screw it, that's what he looks like now."

---

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Glad to enjoyed it! I love how many options you have to tackle your enemies. The last few bosses are extremely brutal though lol

Also, minus QoL improvements, now that you've played Nioh 2 you've basically played Nioh 3 lol. Not very patient of me I know. But yeah most enemies have been reused from 1 and 2.

While you are not as op right out of the gate as nioh 1, you have a lot more tools to be aggressive. Yokai abilities and your yokai counter which is as much a parry as it is an offensive tool that can, depending on the form, let you stagger an enemy or reposition at will, it can be used even when you are out of stamina (tho you still need 1 anima) so you can be far more aggresive

I edited my post to mention the Yokai counter because yeah. It took me a long time to get the hang of it. The red version isn't so bad, but getting the hang of the dodge parry version is -rough-. I still don't think I was doing it right.

Ended up going back to the red version because without it I was getting absolutely stomped by the late game bosses.

I absolutely adored both Nioh 1 and 2, but felt 2 was just refined enough across the board compared to the first game that it's my favorite action RPG of all time. When it comes to gameplay with a high skill ceiling, this is one of the ones that will always swing into my mind. It has its flaws, but nothing comes close to the kind of action-per-minute sort or button pressing that resonated with me, a casual in most aspects, quite like Nioh 2 did.

It is funny that you felt like you weren't the boss. I truthfully never stopped feeling like I could absolutely style on damn near every enemy I encountered. Admittedly, it's been a minute since I played last, but I did go out of my way to 100% it and never stopped feeling like an otherwise unstoppable force.

You're spot on with the criticism on story, though. But I'm always game for some Japanese historical fiction ever since my early days playing Onimusha.

By the time my thumbs recover I'll have forgotten most of it anyway so that's fine. As is I ended up having to watch a recap of the first game because I had forgotten so much of what happened and what was going on.

It might be because Ki Pulsing isn't as powerful right away. You need decent gear and to unlock abilities that trigger on Ki Pulse to really start getting mileage out of it.

It felt better later on, but you definitely spend more time on the defensive. In Nioh 1 it was mostly "Oh it's winding up an attack. I'll just dash behind him keep wailing way on it from behind."

Here's it's more along the lines of "I will wail on this guy and then I either dodge, block or Yokai counter based on the attack".

You're still always attacking when you aren't dodging, so it still feels like you're on the offensive. It's just figuring out how to Ki Pulse properly is not the I Win button it was in the first game.

Worth noting is I never really got into either games end game beyond NG2+. As I understand it the game becomes an entirely different beast once you unlock divine gear or whatever.

Bounced off Nioh 2, I wish it wasn't so fast and obsessed with grabs with no counters.

>The Questionable

>This might end up being a controversial take. (...)

It's controversial, but you're not alone. Changing from 1 to 2, enemies have become far tankier (normal ones even more than bosses) and the dozen+ buff build that were memes in 1 are bascially expected in 2. The majority people commenting on the games praise 2 as improved in basically every way but it's not really true. Personally, i can live with the more tanky combat (though i'd prefer it to be more impactful) but the main reason i like 1 more than 2 is that it is a much more polished game.

Maybe it's because I used tonfa for most of Nioh 2, but to me 2 felt more aggressive. It was mostly because all of my defensive moves were offensive moves. Maybe it's different if you went for some cheesy strats in 1, like sloth + living weapons and so on. Yokai abilities were amazing at pushing bosses around, and even the yokai "counters" were mostly not just counters and could be used to keep the offense going.

The Yokai shift was pretty baller. Being able to chunk a boss for 40% of its health felt pretty damn good. It's one of the better, "Oh you dun goofed" moments where you hit it and get to just let off some pent up rage.

The way to use the dodge version is to dodge into attacks, the counter triggers if the enemy attack hits you while you have the iframes. The big advantage of this counter is that the iframes also work on normal attacks because they're, well, iframes.

Some of your difficulty may also come from the fact that the burst counter system is very overdesigned and underexplained. The game never actually tells you, but there are burst moves that are simply uncounterable by some of the burst counters. The most obvious example is human enemies with GS summons. Because feral and mystic can only counter if you get hit, and the burst attack is not the attack from the GS, but the summoning, only the brute counter works. Otoh, there are some moves that are too fast or have too large a hitbox to be countered by brute.

Can't you dodge the grab?

Because if so that's just good game design, it's like how in ninja gaiden or fighting games grabs go through blocks