So I think I mentioned a bit ago that the first Nioh 3 DLC dropped?
I’ve been focusing on reading after work (and, well, lesson plans) and so I just really got a chance to dig into Hell Rising for the first time today. You can pretty much jump straight into the DLC content from wherever you want, so Idid that, and got through the first area without a whole lot of trouble, and most of that was related to not remembering details of the controls and some bad habits that Rise of the Ronin taught me. The controls are mostly the same between the two games, but there are some definite differences and Nioh is much harder and button-mashing will get your ass killed. Unfortunately my main weapon in the game is the talons, which are a super-fast weapon that, well, tends to be button-mashy.
Anyway, I died in a few places where I shouldn’t have, but no big deal. Got to the first boss. Held my own for maybe a minute. And then the fucker one-shotted me, and not with, like, a massive special attack that I didn’t see coming. No, I missed a dodge and he knocked me into next week with a regular sword strike.
I forgot that the DLCs in previous games may have said that they were accessible at a certain level, but what they really meant by that was be this level, but also have completely beaten every available difficulty level of the base game, and be really good at it, because it’s going to get even worse when DLC 2 drops.
I have not beaten every available difficulty of the base game. I platinumed the initial difficulty level, but New Game +? It is to laugh.
Allow me to tell you a story about the game Rise of the Ronin. It came out in March of 2024, and was by the same people who make the Nioh games, easily my favorite game franchise of all time that doesn’t have the word Souls in the name. Maybe even then. I was excited about it. I bought it. I didn’t get to it immediately, because I was playing something else. But then I played it a little bit. Maybe the first ten percent or so.
And then Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree came out on June 21, and I was done with Rise of the Ronin. And it sat on my PS5 for literally two years, being ignored and making me feel guilty. I even deleted it and reinstalled it a couple of times, intending to get to it and never actually doing it. And finally, this summer, I had the combination of a wild hair up my ass and nothing new coming out and I finally deleted my old save file and started afresh.
70 hours later, I Platinumed the Goddamned thing, and then I deleted it from my PS5, never to be reinstalled again.
I’m very tempted to say “the end.”
This is an open-world samurai game, clearly a test run for Nioh 3 and honestly not terribly far removed from Elden Ring or any of the other Soulslikes that are more or less all I play nowadays, so you’d think it would be right up my alley. And in a lot of ways, it was! Lots of different weapons, multiple stances for every weapon, customizable special moves, all the stuff I like.
Two fatal flaws: 1) it was way too easy, and 2) every single mission and I mean every single mission boiled down to “go here, and kill all the humans.” Human enemies came in two flavors: Little Guys and Big Guys. There were also dogs and pigs occasionally– and, bizarrely, sometimes you’d get sent to take out a local outlaw and the outlaw would be a pig with a name. One of the big side missions was pacifying unruly parts of the countryside, by– you guessed it– going there and killing everyone. Sometimes everyone there would be a dog or a pig. I have no explanation. It didn’t happen often, but I’m not making this up. Enemy variety was practically negligible, and even bosses were all more or less the same fight– sometimes literally so, because for some reason Team Ninja really resists actually killing people in boss fights, so they were forever escaping and threatening you with more of the same later.
Dude, we have fought five times and I have whipped your ass all five times. Next time run the fuck away.
I have a serious weakness for games with big overworld maps with lots of icons on them, I admit it. But there needs to be some fucking variety in what you’re doing, and everything in this game got to feeling very, very samey after a while, and “samey” combined with “easy” isn’t a great mix. I think the toughest boss in the game took me two tries? Maybe three. I almost never died, and when I did it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. The customizable martial arts moves? I never used them, and even the stance-switching, which was supposed to have a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going on with the stances your enemies used (helpfully indicated by an icon showing whether your stance was the effective one or not) was something I didn’t really bother learning until very, very late in the game. Button mashing would get you through 90% of the game so long as you paid a little bit of attention to your stamina.
So, yeah: sadly, the major achievement of having beaten Rise of the Ronin is that I don’t have to think about Rise of the Ronin anymore, and I suppose I should be grateful that Team Ninja learned some lessons from this game and applied them to Nioh 3, which was a vastly superior game.
And speaking of Nioh 3 and DLC, guess what dropped in the last couple of weeks? So I’m going to go do that for a while now.
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.
Pretty sure today was the first day I completely lost to Nioh 3, and I’m only “pretty sure” because I’m only about 50% sure it hasn’t been more than one day since I last slept.
At any rate, regarding the image, I hate that fucking thing, #iykyk.
You were supposed to get a review of a book series today, but my PS5 ate my entire afternoon and it’s about to eat the rest of my evening and possibly the next couple of weeks– I was playing Chants of Sennar all afternoon, which is a puzzle game based on translating glyphs, and now they’ve gone and released a surprise demo for Nioh 3.
The game doesn’t come out until 2026, and this is an alpha build, supposedly, but … I’m gonna go away now. For a while. Maybe I’ll finish that third book tonight and maybe I won’t. The boy’s on me to play Nightreign with him and I officially don’t have time for anygoddamnthing now other than Nioh 3.
So, yeah. Nice knowing y’all. I’m going to go abandon all my earthly responsibilities for a while.
You may not know this about me: my first semester in college, I was enrolled in an Arabic class. I took Arabic out of pure intellectual curiosity, nothing more; at the time it wasn’t really part of any long-term plan of study or anything like that, it was just as far away as I could get from the languages I’d been offered in high school and it sounded neat. I lasted about three weeks, maybe; it turns out that despite being an excellent student, high school had not taught me to study, and as it happens mastering the Arabic alphabet, which not only has a handful of letters with no English equivalent but where each letter looks different depending on its position in the word– letters that start or end a word look different from letters in the middle, and the primary and final positions look different from each other as well– was more complicated than I could handle at the time. I would eventually fill my language requirement with Hebrew, which isn’t quite as complicated as Arabic, but that was the class that finally taught me to buckle down and study.
I have two big academic failures in my life: Arabic and calculus, and I still want to achieve at least a working knowledge of both before I die. I took calculus my senior year in high school but a bad case of senior burnout combined with a math teacher who was, inexplicably, one of the best math teachers I’d ever had for sophomore Geometry but was utterly unable to reach me for senior Calculus meant that as soon as I was admitted to IU and fulfilled all of my graduation requirements I dropped the class and took an independent study period of Spanish.
Stick a pin in that; we’re gonna take a left turn for a couple of paragraphs.
I’ve never particularly considered myself a weeb– a lifetime of aversion to any sort of Japanese animation not involving Hiyao Miyazaki will kind of nip that in the bud– and while it’s not entirely accurate it’s fair to suggest that the presence of a Japanese voice track on really any form of entertainment is an indicator that I may not be into it. That said, I’ve spent approximately six thousand hours since March playing Nioh and Nioh 2, both Japanese-with-English-subtitles and very loosely based on sixteenth-century Japanese history, and I have sunk a similarly obsessive amount of time into Ghost of Tsushima in the last couple of weeks, which is based on the (real) invasion of Tsushima island by the Mongols in 1274.
And god help me if this hasn’t woken up a previously-nonexistent desire to learn more about Japan.
I keep trying to find a decent English biography of Oda Nobunaga, who appears in both of the Nioh games, and I’m discovering, after spending half of my waking hours listening to people speaking Japanese for five months, a certain interest in learning to at least fumble my way through speaking Japanese. I’m not even sure where to start with that; there are apps and such, but anything reputable is way more money than I’m willing to invest. There are probably some reputable textbooks out there, but I haven’t taken the time to look for them yet.
Which, depending on whether this desire sticks around once I get past these few games, will add another complicated long-term intellectual goal to my list. I feel like I probably ought to get started on at least one of these at some point, right? Which one would you start with, at gunpoint if necessary? 🙂
Be it known that after 132 hours spread across my first two playthroughs and an additional 85 hours spread across my second two, and three months and five days after the game’s release date, I have now played through Nioh 2 four complete times, and that unless I decide to go through all of the Twilight missions and beat all of those, I have well and truly exhausted all of the game’s content until the DLC packs start releasing.
… and let’s be honest, I’m probably going to go through those Twilight missions too. Maybe not twice; my Onmyo build has definitely emerged as my favorite, so I’ll probably just do them on that build.
Favorite game of all time? Entirely possible. While I own games I’ve played through four times (at least a couple of the Soulsborne games, all of which I’ve played through at least twice, and I think I’ve got 4 playthroughs of DS3 and Bloodborne by now) I have not ever since the days of the old-school original Nintendo played through the same goddamn game four times before moving on to something else. Nor have I ever ponied up money for DLC before it was released, and I’ve already bought all of it. Nor, to this date, have I gotten every single trophy for any PS4 or PS3 game, although there were a few Xbox 360 games I did that with.
