Nioh review
Game Info |
Platform Win, PS4 |
Publisher Tecmo Koei Games |
Developer Team Ninja |
Release Date Feb 7, 2017 |
Nioh is a different kind of game for Team Ninja.
The Japanese developer has been publisher Koei Tecmo’s flagship workhorse in the past, but times have been tough for the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive creators for years. Ninja Gaiden has seen underwhelming installment after underwhelming installment, and Dead or Alive has similarly fallen from relevance in the fighting game scene. Now, Team Ninja hopes to reboot somewhat with a game that capitalizes on the success of fellow Japanese studio FromSoftware’s Souls games — all while remaining true to its roots in mechanically sophisticated action games.
The result is Nioh, a game that straddles a number of genres and ideas, and which often feels simultaneously derivative and new. The question then, is whether it’s successful or not, and whether fans of its very different influences can expect to find something to like. With that in mind, this review is a little different, taking the form of a conversation between Polygon editors Arthur Gies, who loves and misses the glory days of Ninja Gaiden, and Phil Kollar, who could charitably be called obsessed with FromSoftware’s Souls games.
Arthur Gies, Polygon Reviews Editor
So, in our unofficial style guide for Polygon reviews, one of the more explicit rules we have is to avoid comparing one game to another as a shortcut for description. But with Nioh it feels unavoidable to do that. In fact it’s one of the main reasons the two of us are reviewing this game in the first place.
Phil Kollar, Polygon Senior Editor
Nioh’s developer, Team Ninja, has itself been explicit in the games it’s trying to emulate or draw inspiration from here. Specifically, Team Ninja set out to make a game that brings together the team’s hardcore action game roots from the Ninja Gaiden series and the increasingly popular, extremely difficult Souls series made by FromSoftware. I love the latter and you love the former, so we decided it made sense to split duties on this review.
There’s no doubt that Nioh draws from both of these sources, but the more I played, the more it’s set apart — for better and worse — by its differences. Did you find much of Ninja Gaiden in Nioh, and if so, did it improve or hinder the experience for you?
Arthur: It’s funny, because Nioh looks like a Ninja Gaiden game. It’s not like a lot of the, well, we’ll call them Souls-alikes out there that ape the aesthetics and basic weirdness of From’s modern era. It’s a very shiny, colorful game that also feels unabashedly Japanese in its aesthetics and visual inspirations. That combined with the way William (or Anjin, I guess, if you want) runs holding a sword did remind me of Ninja Gaiden. But then I got into the first fight of the game and was quickly disabused of that notion.
The Ninja Gaiden games are defined by extremely fast, violent combat. It’s more about control and a constant assault, and you can be positively unrelenting all the time.
Nioh is ... not that. I do think the control responsiveness and the way you move, the way the game animates, is much more in line with character action games like Ninja Gaiden and Bayonetta than the Souls games. You can do things quickly. You just can’t do much of anything before you need to regroup your ki.
Phil: Learning how to perfectly time the "ki pulse," as its called, is one of Nioh’s greatest and most satisfying challenges. It adds a certain rhythm to combat, and it provided a perfect measuring stick for my improvement as I progressed through the game.
Arthur: There’s a level of mechanical sophistication present in Nioh that certainly eclipses what I’ve seen in my time with Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The ki pulse is part of that for sure — there’s often a risk/reward decision to be made in using it because it causes a split-second pause that can be the difference between avoiding an attack from an enemy that could nearly split you in half in one swing or being sent back to the nearest shrine without your Amrita (the level-up currency in Nioh). It’s an interesting elaboration on combat decision making that comes straight out of Gears of War of all places.
But in addition to ki management and the pulse system, you’ve also got a number of different weapon types and stances that dramatically change the way William fights and defends. Near the beginning of the game I couldn’t be bothered to switch, but a few hours in I was snapping back and forth in a way that felt both very responsive and very satisfying. Nioh allows a lot of space for sophisticated play, which is good, because if our experience is any indication, you’re going to play through the same parts of the game over and over and over. And not just because Nioh will kill you all the time. Though it definitely does that.
Phil: I mentioned it in a post last week, but yes, Nioh is very difficult. It’s certainly mechanically demanding, and that can be its own struggle. But beyond that there’s a more frustrating element to Nioh’s level of difficulty, which is in how it blends its action elements and its RPG element.
Nioh’s depth extends beyond the moment-to-moment combat and into the systems themselves. Beyond just leveling up and increasing your stats, there is ... an overwhelming amount of stuff to customize. You can craft your own weapons. You can meld pieces of armor into other pieces of armor. You can reroll the stats on individual items in an attempt to get something more suited to your current situation. You can choose between dozens of different "guardian spirits" that offer their own bonuses to navigate.
It’s a lot to take in, and on a few occasions during my playthrough it really dragged down the experience. I’m thinking of one scenario in particular: I got completely stuck on a boss. He was a simple, sword-wielding enemy, but he was extremely fast, and no matter what stance I switched to or what weapon I wielded, I just could not take him down. Eventually, in frustration, I left the level and decided to use "soul forging" to rebuild my weapon with different attributes. When I was satisfied, I made my way back to the boss and downed him in one try.
This incredible range of options is awesome, but Nioh lacks a way to really get across whether deaths are due to your own lack of skills or some behind-the-scenes numbers that you just haven’t juggled properly.
Arthur: Which is a problem, because I actually quite like how Nioh handles ... I’m sure they want to call it loot — comparisons have been made to Diablo, which is the other reason why both you and I wanted to review this game in tandem, as that’s where our Venn diagram overlaps here — but I guess I would call it gear. Early on in Nioh I switched up weapons as I found them, and you find a lot of stuff all the time. But once I got access to the blacksmith and started playing around with soul-matching and reforging, I realized that once I found weapons I really liked, I could stick with them.
It took a really long time to understand that. That said, it does make certain item and gear decisions perpetually useful, and the familiarity system, which makes weapons more powerful as you use them more, gives good reasons to spend more time with weapons and develop a real attachment to them. This did have the side effect of narrowing my focus on the kinds of weapons I used though — which in some cases made me specialize in places I found less rewarding and fun to use but undeniably useful. Namely, spears.
Phil: Yeah, this certainly isn’t the type of game where you can pick one weapon type and stick with it indefinitely. My weapon choice was axes — big, hefty and damaging, but slow as hell. Since a lot of enemies are very fast, it was in my best interest to always have a sword or kusarigama available to swap to. And as with stances, you can switch between two weapons on the fly, which really opens up options in combat and feels great.
Arthur: I think the versatility available is great, but there’s a pretty pronounced learning curve that, even after 50 or 60 hours, I struggled with occasionally. To swap between weapons, you hold down R1 and hit left or right on the d-pad. To swap between ranged weapons, you hold down the R1 and hit up or down. To switch between two sets of active items (used by hitting the appropriate directions on the d-pad) you hit R2. And ki pulses are done using R1 again. Then there are stances and blocking and strong and heavy attacks.
It’s a lot of stuff. And sometimes it feels like the versatility and options are obstructed by how convoluted it can be to utilize them.
Phil: The mechanical demands of the game are also held back at some points by its camera. Controlling your view can be difficult under the best of circumstances; when you’re in a crowded hallway or fighting a fast-moving boss, it be comes a real pain in the ass. I certainly adjusted as I spent dozens of hours playing Nioh, but the camera never felt as it good as it should be given how much the game asks of you.
Arthur: Also, I would just like to aim a disapproving, uncomfortable glare at the person who made clicking on the right stick the button to lock onto enemies — something that needs to happen quickly and cleanly — and also the button that snaps you 180 degrees in the other direction. Away from the thing that you might in point of fact be trying to snap onto before it murders you in one or two hits.
Phil: One element of Nioh we haven’t discussed that I’m curious to get your thoughts on is its level design. The Souls games became beloved in part for having huge open worlds that were a lot of fun to explore. Nioh is mission-based, its levels closed off, though still large and somewhat complex. Did you enjoy navigating these spaces?
Arthur: I think aside from the mechanical differences in the way Nioh handles compared to From’s games, Nioh’s structure is one of the major differentiating factors, and not always for the better. Nioh’s levels can each take a really long time to beat — death comes swiftly, especially with bosses, which I’m sure we both have opinions on — but those levels are actually pretty small, in general.
This leads to spaces that are replayable and give room to experiment with Nioh’s combat mechanics, but the sense of hard fought discovery that the Souls games are so rife with just isn’t here. And I think that undermines the sense of accomplishment I felt in Nioh when I spent literally four hours trying to kill the same boss. When I finally beat it, I held circle over a shiny spot in the level and went back to the level select screen.
More than a little anticlimactic.
Phil: Bosses can definitely be an issue in Nioh. Of the game’s couple dozen or so boss fights, most of them were challenging encounters that tested my abilities but made me feel pretty good upon overcoming them. But for a few — I’m looking at you, giant octopus asshole — they’re presented more as massive slogs that you need to survive, slowly chipping away at your opponent’s health bar without making a single mistake.
In these scenarios, one mistimed dodge can lose 10-plus minutes of progress. That’s not abnormal for this type of game, but when the 10 minutes you now need to replay is just following the same pattern over and over — dodge this attack, block this attack, slash twice, repeat — it’s aggravating.
Arthur: I think my issue with some of Nioh’s bosses is that after a certain point, they don’t feel like tests of skill, or even of memorization — though both of those things are somewhat necessary — but of mindless patience. The most infuriating deaths were the ones caused by my impatience to get on with my life on the fifth or sixth or seventh attempt at a boss, when they were nearly dead and I would rush an attack in hoping I could just end it. It was like rushing a chore and being forced to do the whole thing over again.
In a way, Nioh’s bosses are one of the most Ninja Gaiden things about the game. Ninja Gaiden as a series always struggled with bosses that were challenging while avoiding, well, being total goddamned bullshit. Those games often failed at that, and I think honestly Nioh can as well. Bosses often don’t seem to follow the same rules of combat and basic mechanical limitations like collision detection that every other enemy follows, and that was a real point of contention for me. I don’t mind being challenged to be better at a game. I really like that, and it’s what I liked about Ninja Gaiden Black and some of Bayonetta, for example. But I don’t think Nioh’s bosses hit that sweet spot very often.
I did appreciate that I didn’t have to watch their introduction cutscenes over and over again though, given how many times I had to fight them.
Phil: The speed with which you can skip through cutscenes is a blessing, seeing as Nioh sure has a lot of them and its story is not much to write home about. The best thing I can say about the plot is that it’s inoffensive. William isn’t a particularly likable main character, and his quest to track down and murder a man who wronged him never pulled me in (Arthur’s note: He’s also trying to reunite with his spirit-girlfriend/weapon Saoirse, thank you very much).
On the other hand, I was fascinated with all the other trappings surrounding the plot. Nioh employs Japanese mythology and history in fun ways that urged me to Wikipedia to look up what stories these characters were based on. And if the lackluster story didn’t excite my interest, it also stayed out of the way, which is more than I can say for a lot of plot-driven games.
Wrap Up:
Nioh justifies much of the pain it inflicts
Arthur: Yeah, I think the plot and development for William is kind of thin, but there’s a very large cast of characters, many of whom are fairly interesting (and based on real people, kind of). And that’s sort of emblematic of Nioh in general. Not everything it does is done well, but a lot of it works, and it does so in unconventional ways.
Phil: Because of its complexity, because of it’s myriad of interlocking systems, Nioh can be hard to pin down. More than anything, it feels like a flawed but promising first draft. Team Ninja has taken some big chances here. They don’t all pay off, but the ones that do pull together for a game that justifies some of the pain required.
Nioh was reviewed using final "retail" downloadable copies provided by Sony Computer Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.
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