May 27th, 2019
Nioh 2 was announced at E3 2018 and we haven’t heard a peep about it since. Now it seems that Team Ninja is following the same path as they did with the first game and releasing a series of alphas and betas to get help from the community as they refine their final product. An interview with one of the developers at E3 said that they were going to go “all out” to create their “true vision” of what Nioh should have been, after admittedly being a little more conservative the first time around. Let’s see what “all out” looks like.
Liked
It’s still Nioh: I will admit that Nioh 2 feels a little skittish after playing Devil May Cry 5 and Sekiro over the last two months, but after a while it clicked back. The difficulty, stamina focus, weapon variety, revenant graves, great art for the guardian spirits, ability to change your armor’s appearance, and action game controls in a Dark Souls game are all still there.
Yokai Form: The BIG GAMEPLAY CHANGE from the first Nioh is that your guardian spirit transforms you into a Yokai rather than just empowering your weapons for a few moments. There’s some plot reason for this that the alpha doesn’t cover, but the basics are that you transform into one of three forms of Yokai (based on your guardian spirit) and it replaces your health bar with a new meter that is consumed when you attack, dodge, or get hit by enemies. These Yokai forms have preset moves and weapons, and you can use several special moves with them or cancel them early to save energy for the future. It’s actually rather similar to Dante’s Sin Devil Trigger in DMC5, though with the frustration of ANY action that you take reducing the form’s overall duration. In my opinion what’s going to make or break Nioh 2 is the variety of these Yokai forms, because while the concept is exciting I really dislike the move sets of the three forms the alpha provides, but we’ll see what happens.
Customization: Another new addition is Nioh 2 is character customization. The first Nioh had some great customization options where you could reskin any armor to look like any other kind of armor, but apparently people were still pissed they were playing a default character in a game like Dark Souls (see also the ten people that continue to insist Sekiro was bad). So now there’s character customization as well, though in the alpha the only thing you can customize is your gender and selection of four preset faces. There are a lot of options that are inaccessible in the alpha, including one that’s very exciting for me: the suggestion that you can change the appearance of your Yokai form. As much as I love the Devil Triggers in Devil May Cry I’ve wished on more than one occasion that I could tweak their appearance, so I’m excited to see what adjustments can be made to your Yokai form in the full release of Nioh 2.
Yokai finishing moves: A core mechanic in Nioh is its stamina meter, where both you and your enemies can become staggered and vulnerable to finishing moves if you’re hit with zero stamina. Learning each weapon’s stamina reducing attack is critical to success, but the Yokai enemies always had an advantage because they weren’t vulnerable to the game’s “grapple attacks” which you could use on weakened human enemies for major damage. However Nioh 2 corrects this injustice and now you can occasionally do these grapple attacks with a special knife that your character carries, which is very satisfying.
The Yokai dimension: Yokai in Nioh will occasionally create puddles of dark energy on the ground that reduces your stamina generation while increasing their own powers. We were told that this was them essentially bringing in parts of their own dimension into the real world, but in the original Nioh you never had the chance to visit their reality. This has changed somewhat in Nioh 2, possibly because of your own character’s connection to the Yokai, and now there are entire areas of the map that are covered in this dark energy. These sections are scripted and don’t actually affect the architecture of the map but do add more enemies, poison water, and a neat flower effect when you enter it, possibly suggesting that the area looks different to Yokai then it does to humans. It’s a nice way to expand the lore while emphasizing the Yokai’s corrupting influence, and I hope to see more about it in the full game.
Neutral
It’s still Nioh: Nioh 2 is a game about excess, but the first game also bit off way more than it could chew in terms of overlapping combat abilities and the unnecessary “stances” mechanic. The stances (high, medium, and low) essentially tripled the moves that every weapon could do while also making the interface clunky as hell, and unfortunately this returns in Nioh 2. The overlapping moves also return, meaning that every time you unlock an ability from Nioh 2’s ugly skill trees you have to either make sure its commands aren’t tied to a button you already use for something else, or you have to go into a different menu and disable the moves you already know to make way for the new ones. It’s obnoxious and unnecessary, though it does allow more “customization” if that’s something you enjoy.
Friendly AI: While Nioh 2 still has PvE co-op mechanics like in most Dark Souls games, it also has a new item called Righteous Jasper that lets you send an AI copy of yourself to aid players in other games. These spirits manifest in the form of a blue grave, and you can interact with them to summon an AI partner that’s a clone of the player that placed the Jasper. These AI are dumb as bricks but they can heal themselves, stick around for a long time, and are just enough of a distraction to make difficult areas of Nioh 2 easier if not a complete breeze. It might be a neat feature but I was able to chew through three “mini bosses” with an AI partner, which I don’t see as a positive for a game that’s supposed to be challenging.
Yokai moves: Along with your ability to turn into a Yokai you can also absorb the essence of the Yokai you kill and utilize some of their moves. These include the signature attacks of bosses or just generic useful abilities like poison or paralysis effects, and they’re all dictated both by an energy meter and by your guardian spirit, which limits the power of the moves you can activate. The moves themselves are fine in a pinch, but the problem is that they drop like candy from enemies similar to the rest of Nioh’s loot (more on that later) so it feels less special to pick up a Yokai’s soul when you’ll just find another one some time later.
Hated
It’s still Nioh: I could rant here about how the game STILL lacks the all-important Dark Souls feature of being able to quit at any point and reload back where you were, but instead I’m just going to talk about the loot system. Nioh’s loot system was bad and Nioh 2’s loot is more of the same: endless cascades of loot that is maybe better than what you currently have equipped but you better pop open that inventory menu after EVERY SINGLE FIGHT just to make sure. And sure, maybe this new spear is better than the sword you currently have equipped by three damage points, but you also have to take into account the move set, familiarity bonuses, whether +10 life is better than +8% Ki regeneration, if you really need the 4% damage versus human enemies or if you can switch to the 5% overall increase to bow damage, and whether all this is moot because you either don’t have the stats to utilize these bonuses or if it weighs too much and and and and… It’s just a mess. I’m glad there’s lots of armor variety and weapon designs but with the ability to reskin your gear to look like whatever you want it just makes it all even more irrelevant, plus it clutters up EVERYTHING in your inventory.
The Samurai Skill Tree: Nioh 2 has a skill tree system for every type of weapon and every type of magic, and they’re all leveled up by using those respective items in combat. However there’s a base skill tree called the “Samurai” tree, and almost every ability on there is either situational or forgettable, from reasonable things like +50 life to things you might need in situational moments like 5% bow damage. This doesn’t even mention the stupid ones like 20% unarmed damage which only maniacs or streamers will ever need but since it’s a skill “tree” you’ll need to spend points on it anyway to get other things that might actually serve a purpose. It makes leveling up feel more like a chore than something to feel excited about, and I hope it gets spiced up in the final game.
Many people have made the joke that this is essentially just additional Nioh 1 DLC, and at the moment it certainly feels like it. Nioh 2 is without a doubt exactly what Team Ninja said it would be at E3 2018: the original Nioh but with all the stuff they thought would scare off people the first time. If you liked Nioh then you’ll like it, assuming they don’t change much from this alpha, but if you didn’t then I doubt this sequel will appeal to you. There’s always time for the game to be improved though, and if the differences between the first Nioh’s alpha and beta are anything to go on it’s possible we’ll be seeing a very different game in the future.
