I mean, come on. It’s a Nioh game. I rate it 800/10.

I officially beat Nioh 3 this afternoon and collected the Platinum trophy, with about 80 or so hours of gameplay needed in order to do it. This is the easiest of the trilogy by a long shot; anyone who has been around for a long time and has a really good memory might recall that the hardest boss fight I’ve ever had was in the original Nioh, and there were a bunch in Nioh 2 that were tough as nails. This one? I’m either a much better gamer after all this time or it’s easier. Both are possible; I’m going with “easier” anyway. Nioh 2, along with Elden Ring and Sekiro, is one of my favorite games of all time.

How does this one stand up? Pretty Goddamn well, although it’s not going to get four complete playthroughs before the DLC comes out like 2 did. The biggest change Nioh 3 makes to the series is the addition of an open-world aspect to the game; there are still more linear missions like in the earlier games, but in between there’s a wide-open area with some side missions and a whole ton of exploration to do. As I’m getting older I’m appreciating exploration-style games more and more, so that was something I really liked seeing in a series that was already in my personal pantheon. All of the technical stuff— the combat, the graphics, all the gameplay, basically, is up to expectations against the previous games; I can’t imagine any reason why anyone who enjoyed 1 or 2 might not like 3.

What didn’t work? This is going to be kind of a weird gripe, because it’s kind of a weird system, but this series has always been pretty big on build diversity, right? You can go with super-fast ninjutsu weapons or a magic-heavy build or a more armored, slower samurai-type build or you can mix and match to your heart’s content. This game added a system that I’ve never seen in a game before; you get a “samurai” build and a “ninja” build, which share certain things like ability scores and health, but who have different weapons and armor and Guardian Spirits and skills. Ninja have their complement of ninjutsu skills like shuriken and bombs and a whole mess of other stuff; Samurai have the three combat stances from the earlier games (the ninja weapons drop the combat stances) and a few other things. You can switch between your ninja build and your samurai build at the touch of one of the triggers.

Now, I feel like this should be cool, because you can effectively run two entirely separate builds and switch between them at will, and generally flexibility is a good thing. But the metaphor, for lack of a better word, never made any sense to me. Again, I know this is a weird thing to complain about when you’re playing a game where you’re a fireball-flinging ninja fighting demons in sixteenth-century Japan, but how the hell does this work from a storytelling perspective? The samurai and the ninja are the same person. And you hit R2 and bam, your character does a little spin and your armor and weapons change. I don’t know why this is hitting my suspension of disbelief so hard but I just can’t buy it. I ended up playing most of the game as the ninja anyway— I want to be fast in these games, and tonfa goes brrrrrrrrrrrrr was really all I needed except when I wanted talons go brrrrrrrr, and luckily those are both ninja weapons. You can also respec whenever you want, so if I decide I want to go mostly samurai in NG+ and do axe and odachi or whatever, I can literally just respec my character to do that on the spot, without even any in-game items to spend for it, and go be axe-odachi guy.

This is why the game is 800/10 and not 1000/10, of course. It doesn’t make the game less fun or anything— I mostly ignored the system altogether except when I wanted to fire my rifle, which I kept as my samurai’s distance weapon— but it never really stopped feeling weird. That’s my only complaint, though, and unless I’m stupid enough to download Crimson Desert, this game is pretty likely to keep holding my attention for a while, especially since there are still 3 DLCs coming this year.