I’m most of the way through my third playthrough of Nioh 2, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that I’ve got close to 200 hours into the game by now. This has been, for the one or two of you who cares, a switchglaive-and-tonfas build, and last night I finally got to the mystic arts fight for the tonfas, leaving me with only one more Achievement needed to platinum the game.
Let me back up a bit: you have the option of using several different weapons in Nioh 2, and toward the end of the game, if you have used a weapon enough and built enough proficiency with it, a one-on-one fight opens up against another user of that same weapon. If you win that fight, you unlock “mystic arts,” which are basically top-tier abilities for that weapon. There’s an achievement associated with each of them, but that fight can be brutal.
And the tonfas are the fastest weapon in the game, and the mystic arts fight is against Hattori goddamned Hanzo, who is a brutal bastard regardless of the circumstances. This fight is made especially difficult by the fact that my playstyle for this character has been significantly less aggressive and more methodical than usual.
And here’s the deal with Nioh 2, and with a lot of the games that I’ve been enjoying lately: if you fuck up, you’re gonna pay for it. So you are fighting the fastest boss in the game, with the fastest weapon in the game, and if you screw up even once during the fight he’s gonna beat you to death on the spot. I fought this bastard for an hour last night, on a playthrough where I’ve been dispatching most bosses on the first try, and most of my fights were ending with me still having heals left, because you don’t have time to heal if dude hits you once and you die. I had half a dozen fights where I got him down to maybe a third of his health bar and then boom bap dead because of one tiny slip-up.
And then … click.
And all the damn sudden I could see the Matrix.
And I beat the bastard and he hit me one time, and only because I very slightly mistimed what ended up being the killing blow and he clipped me for a tiny bit of damage as I was taking him out. One. Fucking. Hit.
After a solid hour of him annihilating me, over and over again.
I love this damn game.
10:59 AM, Saturday May 16: 1,445,867 confirmed cases and 87,643 American deaths. The death rate really has been slowing down lately, but we should have an idea by mid-week whether states opening up prematurely was as bad an idea as I think it was.
(If you don’t understand the post title, don’t worry about it and don’t ask.)
(Also, fun WordPress fact: if you change the size of an image, it will not display as centered once you publish even if it is resized and centered in the editor.)
Just a couple of things right now, mostly so that I can say I actually posted today, now that it’s nine PM: First, I left the house for the third time since all hell broke loose, and had both my wife and my son with me, since we were dropping food off for both of our dads and the boy hasn’t seen either of them in too long. We talked about when the last time the three of us had been in the car together on the way up to my stepfather’s, and determined that it was very likely in February. The trip home from Chicago on our anniversary, specifically. Insane.
I beat Nioh 2 yesterday, which somehow took ninety hours— I am a completist, and wanted to do everything— despite making progress at a pretty damn solid clip. I’m tossing around writing a full review despite having raved about it in a few posts already; suffice it to say it’s a spectacular fucking game; better than the original, I think, which was a game that I absolutely loved. I have been gaming since the Atari 2600 and I think we are reaching the point where the PS4 is my favorite game console I’ve ever owned.
Tomorrow is the last day of Spring Break, which is going to be weird, since I’m still not actually going back to work in any meaningful fashion. I’m going to try and get all of next week’s lessons set up by the end of the day so I can sort of set it and forget it; we’ll see how well that works. Anybody have suggestions on how to teach stats to 8th graders remotely? Because right now … yeah, it’s gonna be kind of challenging.
I am also going to try and get something up on Patreon tomorrow. Stop laughing, goddammit.
9:07 PM, Sunday April 12th: 555,398 confirmed infections; 22,023 American deaths.
I was loosely keeping track of how many times I said “God, I hate these things,” while I was playing Nioh 2 yesterday. It was … a lot. I love the game, but I have some serious enmity toward some of the monsters. Let’s do an absurdly detailed post about it!
PART ONE: YOKAI I DON’T ACTUALLY HATE ALL THAT MUCH:
DWELLERS: Most of this first category is yokai that frankly should never, ever kill you. Are they going to? Yes. Yes, they are. But dwellers, both of the smaller and larger size, are usually pretty harmless unless they’re throwing firebombs at you and you haven’t noticed them yet.
SKELETON WARRIORS: Again, either size, neither of them should be killing you. The ones with spears can be kind of dangerous because that spear usually hits harder than you’re expecting it to, but it’s easily dodged. No biggie.
SPIDERS: I mean, they’re spiders. Don’t attack them from in front, you’ll have a bad time. Other than that … eh.
ABERRANT SOLDIERS: Can be highly annoying at range, but they’re still cannon fodder and they’re generally pretty fair. Slightly more annoying than skeleton warriors and dwellers because they block.
KAPPA (NORMAL): Damn near harmless on their own, but they run away and chasing them down can lead you into other trouble.
SNOWCLOPS AND ONE-EYED ONI: They hit like a truck but their movesets are predictable and they can be blinded. These can be dangerous in smaller rooms, especially if the camera goes nuts on you, but they shouldn’t be a problem unless they’re surrounded by other enemies.
YOKI: Man, these were trouble early on in Nioh 1. Now only the kusarigama variant should even be hitting you, although the new four-swing move they’ve given the ones with the katanas can still catch you if you’re too close when they start attacking. They feel pretty defanged now, though.
ONI-BI AND BIWA BOKU–BOKU: Not dangerous, really, but the Biwa Boku-bokus are always hidden and an endless stream of Oni-bi can be trouble if you’re fighting something else. Plus, in Nioh 2, the fire ones explode after you kill them sometimes, which teleports both way higher on the I Hate You scale.
ENKI: Basically a Yoki but in the shape of a gorilla and with longer-range moves, the Enki are actually kind of fun to fight but their damn grab and stomp move is so fucking disrespectful that I kind of hate them but only a little.
YAMANBAS: Actually, these aren’t that bad. You don’t want to get caught by surprise by them but they’re usually not too much of a threat unless there are other monsters around.
PART TWO: THESE THINGS ARE ALL ASSHOLES:
FLYING BOLT: An enemy that was significantly scarier in Nioh 1, so I have left-over enmity from that, but they’re much rarer in Nioh 2 and I tend to have flame available most of the time so it’s not as big of a deal. Still hate ’em though. (Also, I can not get this image to cooperate, and I’ve used two different pictures of these damned things. I don’t know why it’s being weird.)
GAKI: Properly fought, a Gaki can be disposed of in a few seconds. Which is why there are usually several of them, and they’re hanging from the ceiling to drop down on you and eat your face, or they eat each other and become Super Gaki, or they’re high up on a ledge throwing shit at you. Fuck them.
MAGATSU WARRIORS: I probably should hate these more than I do, but they’re pretty rare, and while they’re tough every one I’ve fought so far has been in a position where I could bring everything I had to bear on them and in a one-on-one fight they’re not that bad. I think if they were around more often I’d hate them more.
MUJINA: Damn near harmless except for the fucking heart attack I have every time one of these bastards jumps out of a Goddamned treasure chest.
WAIRA: Not especially tough, especially considering their size, but their grab attack is bullshit and they can tunnel underground, and they’re much faster than they look.
NAMAHAGE: I hated these a lot more in Nioh 1, where they didn’t show up until the DLC, and I feel like they’ve been defanged a bit in this game, but they can throw shit at you now, and I never remember they can do that until there’s a hatchet protruding out of my Goddamned forehead. Plus I still have leftover Nioh 1 trauma from these things so I always forget they’re mostly easier to handle in this one.
ONYUDO: My single most-feared opponent in Nioh 1; Onyudo and their stupid tongues are pushovers in Nioh 2. Hang back, wait for burst attack, Brute counter, seeya. Still hate ’em a lot, though, but it’s maybe a bit less warranted in this game than it was in the previous one.
NURIKABE: Most of the time, fights with Nurikabe can be avoided since you can usually gesture your way past them. Nurikabe are high on my hate list because they usually have shit hidden behind them, and the last thing I do before finishing any main mission is spend a month looking for the one damn wall in the entire level that has Goddamned eyes on it. Plus, if you do have to fight them, they’re tougher than they ought to be.
UBUME: Ubume aren’t actually that dangerous or hard to kill, but the central conceit of the damned things is that they’re yokai that were formed from grieving mothers, and about half of them are carrying around a baby-shaped chunk of spirit stone that you have to shoot if you want to actually fight them. I’m all for the occasional dead baby joke but man this is bullshit.
LESSER UMI-BOZU and TOXIC SLIME: Sneak-attack ass motherfuckers, all of them, and I hate them, especially since I should be smart enough to look for the sonsabitches by now. Slightly lower on the list because pretty much any fire attack will kill them; they’re a huge pain in the ass if you happen to be out of fire, though.
ONE-EYED IMP: Awww, isn’t he cute? NO, he’s not fucking cute, he’s going to swat you with his goddamned tongue and then jump away toward fifteen other enemies and then while you’re dealing with those he’s going to turn into a goddamned One-Eyed Oni and mudboot-stomp your ass when you’re not looking. Fuck these things.
MITSUME YAZURA: Sure, he’s all heads and legs, and that’s fun, but I hate these things just because they look so much scarier than they actually are until you get complacent, which they have a magical power to make happen, and then they grab you with their feet-hands and hold you over their many heads and rip you in half, and fuck these things.
KARAKA: Not terribly hard to defeat, since their distance attacks can all be interrupted, but their habit of masquerading as fucking torches is really Goddamned annoying and they tend to pop up at the worst possible moment. These things raining fire on your ass while you’re trying to deal with something more immediately dangerous is hellaciously annoying.
PART THREE: FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE ON THIS LIST, THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE ALL ASSHOLES AND SERIOUSLY, FUCK THEM:
MOTHERFUCKING WHEELMONKS: I hated these motherfuckers in Nioh 1, and now they can jump. They move at the speed of light, they are the only enemy in the entire game who can hurt you just by touching you, and half the fucking time when I get killed by these bastards I hadn’t even seen the fucking thing yet and it just buzzsawed me into a corner and killed me dead before I knew it was there.
GODDAMNED ROKOROKUBI: I’m not even sure these assholes are supposed to be top-tier enemies, but something about them makes them impossible for me to fight, and a single rokorokubi can take me down under damn near any circumstances at all if I’m not either incredibly careful or using massive overkill. Their grapple attack sucks, occasionally mistaking one for human sucks, their range sucks, they suck. Fuck rokorokubi.
PIECE OF SHIT TESSOS: They fucking fart on you and then you can’t heal properly. Another fast-as-fuck enemy, they’ve also got this bullshit Sonic the Hedgehog spin around like a crackhead move that I hate, and they even have the fucking temerity to have a weak spot in their tails that I can somehow still never take advantage of. I think these are my most hated of the enemies new to Nioh 2.
PUNK-ASS FUCKING KARAKASA UMBRELLA MOTHERFUCKERS: Yes, that’s a fucking umbrella standing on a foot with an eye. These goddamned things have no excuse to be as annoying as they are because they’re tiny pieces of shit and oh also they’re umbrellas and if you don’t know how personally insulting it is to be killed in half a second by a fucking possessed demon umbrella then imagine how mad you get when it happens twice in a row.
GARBAGE MONSTER RED KAPPAS: Neither harmless or as useful as the regular kappas, no, these assholes jump on your back and break your spine when they aren’t Koopa-ing around on their goddamned shells faster than you can keep up with them. Dicks, all of them.
THESE FUCKING KARASU TENGU BASTARDS: I hate them. I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them. I hated them in Nioh 1 and I hate the assholes now. This game is set up poorly to be able to manage monsters that can fly, and the fact that if they look at you crosseyed you lose 2/3 of your health does not help. Fuck fucking tengus. They’re assholes, all of them.
MOISTENED BINT NURI-ONNA: Wait, did I say tessos were my least favorite new enemy? No, fuck that, there are at least two that are worse: Goddamned Nuri-Onna, for starters; these assholes can hide on ceilings, under water, have long range, a grab attack, eat your face, and God help you if you miss a burst attack and get hit by their fucking paralysis vision. Fuck that. These can be handled if you know they’re there, and don’t tend to have a ton of stamina, but that just makes it more frustrating when they kill the shit out of you.
I’m in the neighborhood of a third to halfway through my first playthrough of Nioh 2, and to a very real extent I don’t even need to write this review, as it doesn’t take long to say “Other than the inventory system the game is damn near perfect, and I’m used to the inventory system by now.” Like, that’s the review. Nioh is one of my favorite games of all time– it’s kind of amazing how many of those games I discovered during this console generation– and the sequel improves on the original in damn near every way, adding a ton of new enemies, a few new overlapping systems, a couple (not as many as I’d like, which might be my only complaint) of new weapons, and other than that just keeps everything rolling. The original game’s horrifying, punishing, kill-you-in-a-second-if-you-stop-paying-attention difficulty is still there, for sure, and the boss fights so far have been really satisfying. About half of them I’ve managed to pull off within a couple of attempts, and the other half have been those great kind of boss fights that start off with getting obliterated in seconds without laying a finger on anything and then you just keep learning patterns and getting better until you win. The fact that I don’t have to be back to work for five weeks and I still wish I had more time to play should tell you something. I suppose it’s always possible the back half could go repetitive and dull, but I doubt it; everything’s been amazing so far.
Finally getting around to wiping the hard drive on my old iMac– or, at least, I’m staring at it as it slowly reformats itself. The computer has been replaced long enough that the computer I replaced it with has been paid off, but is still sitting, forlorn, on my desktop waiting for me to do something with it so I can have it recycled. I need to get the office under control– my wife pointed out that there was a litterbox clearly visible in the background of one of my instructional videos the other day, and I actually started one of them with the words “Welcome to my filthy office!”
That’s gotta stop, and the first step to getting that done is reclaiming the desk so that I can take everything else that used to be on the desk and put it back, which will, along with some heavy decluttering, go a long way to making the room look a lot better. Again, I’m off for weeks. It’s not like I don’t have time.
School will be open on Monday, as apparently they’ve decided to break from past practice and send computers home with the 3rd-5th graders, requiring a whole lot of people to spend time disassembling computer carts today. Starting Tuesday, we are closed for “at least” two weeks, and seeing as after the third week we have Spring Break anyway I suspect we will not be returning for it. So there’s a very good chance that I’m about to be off work for a solid month, expected only to produce e-learning assignments and lectures for students who will not do the assignments and not view the lectures. I’m considering making one of them a profanity-laced tirade just to see if anyone notices. Since my kids don’t need to come to school to pick up Chromebooks, and since no one with any sense is going to send their kids to school under these circumstances (one single day followed by two weeks off, in the middle of a pandemic?) I expect to have less than 25% of my students in the building and I have no plans to actually provide any instruction. Pretty sure it’s going to be completely pointless to even try. I’ll spend Tuesday at home recording lectures and putting together simple assignments, and that’ll be that until April.
I guess it works out for me that Nioh 2 came out today, then.
The original game ate my goddamn life when it came out. Ate my goddamn life. I think I’ve got … 200 hours in it right now? More? I’m scared to look, but it was the only thing my PS4 was for for months after it came out. I put about three or four hours into it today (note that today was the last day of the 3rd quarter and a teacher record day, so the kids weren’t at school and I ducked out early once I finished everything I had to do) and I see no reason to believe that it’ll be of any lesser quality.
Oh, right, and I’ll have the boy with me the whole time too, because he’s also off until April. I have to feed them every day, right? That’s how that works, with kids?
Warning: video game nerd content higher than usual in this post. Please avoid if necessary.
So I’m playing through Nioh again. This game got months of dedicated play when it first came out, and improved my skills to the point that after I beat it I was able to go back and play through the entire Dark Souls/Bloodborne sequence and beat all four of them as well. Nioh is, to my estimation at least, easily the hardest of the five games. You may recall me devoting a post to the day I finally beat Yuki-Onna after literally respeccing my character twice and an unprecedented several months of attempts. And it turned out that the ninjutsu tree was absolutely necessary to get through the rest of the game– the bosses in this game are stupid hard, and I was only able to beat most of them by cheesing the shit out of them with shuriken and kunai. It’s not unfair to say that I didn’t beat a single boss after Yuki-Onna without at least a little bit of blatantly exploiting the game mechanics.
Well, this time ’round I’m using the goddamn odachi, because I’m a glutton for fucking punishment apparently, and I’m reaching the point in the game where I run into Yuki-Onna again and where I hit a wall. The kusarigama/ninjitsu combo I used to finally get past her is all fast burst damage and long-range stagger, and the odachi is … not either of those things. The complete opposite of those things in fact. I’ve managed to blow past three of the bosses in the early game– Hiro-Enma, Umi-Bozu and the Goddamned raven tengu— who gave me hell the first time through, so hopefully I can actually beat her for real this time.
We shall see. I’ve got shit to do this weekend, so I don’t have a lot of time for weeping and gnashing of teeth and throwing controllers. Somebody’s going down, dammit.
EDIT: Got ‘er. Took maybe 10 minutes, half a dozen attempts, and during that time she one-shotted me at least three times. This may be the greatest day of my life.
The two worst things about Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order are the name and the architecture. The name needs some damn punctuation somewhere, maybe a colon or two, or at least the removal of the words “Star Wars” from the official name, since once you see the word Jedi and there are a bunch of lightsabers on screen you don’t really need the “Star Wars” part in the name because I’m pretty sure people are going to get it. I’ve been mostly calling the game Fallen Order, because that’s good enough, but my inner grammarian is deeply annoyed by how clumsy the title is.
That said, if that’s most of what I’ve got to complain about, and it is, we’re in pretty good shape. Folks have been waiting for a good single-player Star Wars action game since forever, and this one not only manages to fit the bill admirably but tells a damn good story in the meantime. Fallen Order is set just a few years after the end of Episode 3; Order 66 has been enacted and most of the Jedi are dead, but the Inquisitors are still out in force hunting down the handful who escaped. You play as Cal Kestis, a Padawan who got away by the skin of his teeth, losing his master and half his lightsaber in the process, and who has been working as a scrapper on a shipyard ever since. Some hell breaks loose, Kestis is forced to reveal his powers, and we’re off to the races, with him being rescued at the last moment by another fallen Jedi. The main narrative goal of the game is a Macguffin, more or less, taking the form in this case of a Jedi holocron filled with the names and locations of potential Force-sensitive children, and there is much talk about rebuilding the Jedi Order.
Now, this is interesting, right, because we know that ultimately they have to fail in this goal somehow, because by the time Luke rolls around there are legitimately only him, Yoda, and Obi-Wan left among the Jedi, and the Order very much does not get to be rebuilt. So the fact that the game starts off with the ending predetermined and still tells a great, compelling story is a serious plus in its favor. It’s beautiful to look at, particularly in its environments and any chance it gets to pull back and show some of the sheer scale of the ships and creatures in the distance (the initial shipyard level is really amazing in this respect) is going to be something really special. The characters are a highlight as well, especially Cal’s companion droid BD-1, who spends most of the game perched on Cal’s back and gets a number of upgrades over the course of the game to make him more useful to you.
The only weapon you get to use is your lightsaber; no initial period of running around with a blaster here unlike several of the older Jedi-focused Star Wars games, and while your powers take a while to open up (Kestis is a Padawan, after all, and he repairs his connection to the Force over the course of the game) once you’re firing on all cylinders the combat is satisfying as hell, with plenty of Stormtroopers around to mercilessly beat the hell out of along with a number of tougher enemies who will test your ability to block and parry. There are five major planetary environments and a few minor sub-areas, and the levels themselves are enormous, enough so that one of the game’s few non-technical shortcomings is that it really needed a fast travel system of some sort. There will be some glitches here and there, too, especially for those of us still on a regular PS4, but no bugs that prevented me from completing missions or anything like that. Kashyyyk in particular featured a lot of three- or four-second freezes during transitions through doors, as the game couldn’t get everything loaded up fast enough. There are enough little quibbles here and there to keep this out of 10/10 territory, but I’m perfectly content calling it a 9/10 or a high 8/10. The combat and the story (and the ending, my God) are more than enough to make this game one of the highlights of the year.
(What am I playing now? I brought my PS3 out of mothball status and hooked it up to the main TV, and I’m playing Demon’s Souls for the first time. I am perhaps a bit more excited about it than is reasonable.)
An interesting phenomenon, at least to me: I’ve noticed that the older I get the more annoyed I get by bad worldbuilding in my video games. This isn’t a story concern, necessarily; what I mean is that I need things like levels to make basic physical sense and seem in at least a cursory way to be things that could exist in the actual world the game is portraying.
Why yes, I am playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order right now. How did you guess?
It’s been a running joke for a while, at least among my immediate family: my wife works in occupational health and safety, so we notice these sorts of things: Star Wars doesn’t have OSHA. Everything, everything is positioned with no railings over a bottomless pit or, if there is a railing, there’s not a chance in hell it would keep anyone from falling over it or, uh, being thrown:
That shit is not safe. And don’t even get me started on this bullshit:
So I’m used to the idea that in a Star Wars video game there are going to be some fall hazards. The idea doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t make sense on a fundamental level, but it’s pre-established in the world. But here’s my problem with Fallen Order: you unlock your Force powers as you travel through the game, and you use them extensively to get where you’re going on whatever planet you’re on– particularly the wall run ability, which is used constantly.
So if I had to use half a dozen Jedi wall runs, had to Force Pull a convenient vine over to myself to swing across a huge gap, had to use Force Push to break through a conveniently weak area of wall, and — oh, right — had to exterminate hundreds of incredibly dangerous examples of the local fauna in order to get to an area, how the hell are there two dozen Stormtroopers already there when I get there?
(“Why the hell are the Stormtroopers so much less dangerous than this space goat” is another question relevant to the game, but not the one I’m discussing at the moment.)
This shit gets to me, guys, it really does. You don’t have Jedi powers, Stormtrooper! How the fuck are you here? How did you get to the top of this wroshyr tree on Kashyyyk that I’ve been climbing using my magic Jedi abilities for twenty minutes? Did someone drop you off there in a ship? Why did they do that? Are they going to come get you? Are you here just in case a Jedi shows up? Because they’re supposed to all be dead.
How did any of these chests get here?
Remember these goddamn things?
Random huge pieces of machinery with no clear function whatsoever that seem to exist only to impede player progress are starting to get on my nerves. There are tons of enormous machines everywhere (on abandoned planets; who built all this shit?) that serve no purpose other than to kill you if you don’t figure out how to properly avoid and/or slow them down (Oh, also: Jedi slowing powers. I had to slow down a huge fan and sneak through an airduct to get here! How are you here, Stormtrooper?) and I just want to know what they’re for. Why are there giant spinny blades with holes in them in this area? What’s this thing, that just slams back and forth but doesn’t seem to do anything? Who decided that these catwalks needed to have places where you had to jump over holes? Because every fucking catwalk has holes, and they don’t all appear to be damaged. Some of them just aren’t finished. Why? Is the Empire suing the shit out of their contractors? Because they need to be suing the shit out of their contractors.
I’m having a lot of fun with the game– don’t get me wrong. But Jesus, the level geography is like they deliberately tried to make no damn sense at all.
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