TL;DR: Nioh boasts the best Soulslike combat currently available, but uses it for a repetitive (if satisfying) loot grind. Its Japanese culture source material is largely wasted, and the story is somehow both too insubstantial to follow and obnoxious. Most importantly, why was this not Koei Tecmo's Berserk adaptation?
The Souls games made such a big impression for their tremendous artistic achievement that it is only in retrospect that we see them as the start of a new videogame genre--something capacious and inclusive and even tawdry. That confluence of novelty and quality is a confounding challenge for later developers. FROM made it look so easy that it’s hard to see the seams where it was put together, to take it apart and rearrange the pieces with new flavors and create something new. So far, the successful approach has been to copy FROM’s method wholesale, from the mechanics to the tone to the quiet dignity to the arcane storytelling, and hope that they cohere in a similar way (Salt and Sanctuary). The less successful approach has been to take the more obvious elements of the Soulslike, like the stamina bar and bonfire system, and fill in the rest with an underwhelming mishmash of videogame cliches. This is the approach taken, for instance, by Lords of the Fallen. It’s also the approach Nioh chose.
Of course, it’s not necessary to invoke anything about the Souls games in particular to explain why its imitators are bad, especially when they’re bad in predictably videogame way. Mediocrity is the norm in every medium, but it’s especially familiar for games. So I’m sympathetic to the argument that Nioh’s flaws don’t really matter, and that insofar as it provides an enjoyable experience (it does) and moves the genre forward (it does), all the rest of the shit I’m about to complain about doesn’t matter. I’m over that argument, in part because I would never have played Nioh if the Souls games hadn’t set such a high standard of quality in the first place, but mostly because it’s 2017 and it’s time to step the fuck up.
There’s really no excuse for Nioh to be as disappointing as it is. The combat feels fluid and engaging and novel, tweaking small elements I never noticed needed improvement in the Souls games and building in new systems that mesh perfectly with the genre’s approach to fighting. On top of the seamless addition of three fighting stances per weapon type (which works much better than Dark Souls 3’s Weapon Arts), the hit detection is superb and well capitalized on in enemy design. There’s a set of intimidating bosses as satisfying to conquer as anything in the Souls games. And many individual enemies and encounters require quick thinking and skill mastery and thought. For the first dozen hours, it’s quite satisfying and promising.
In its aesthetic and story, Nioh feels like it was stocked on a gameshow shopping spree--tons of ingredients, but no recipe. It’s set in the Sengoku Jidai, a historical period full of famous battles and ninja and samurai and guns, and also full of Founding-Father-esque historical figures. To that eventful context Nioh adds a heavy focus on Shinto architecture and iconography, a heaping serving of yokai monsters and a bit of the Onmyo bureaucracy encharged with managing their activity, and even a dash of English occult mysticism. This is a lot of cool stuff! Historical fantasy is my jam, and I was excited to see such a rich vein explored. I’m aware this is a trite comparison, but the Sengoku is kind of Japan’s Game of Thrones. Yokai are maybe unparalleled as a body of quirky creatures with highly idiosyncratic stories. And English mysticism, while an odd choice given the historical context, has given us some of the best historical fantasy out there: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and John Crowley’s Aegypt series.
In each case, it feels like Koei Tecmo found something promising and simply didn’t know how to make good on it. While the combat always feels great and offers a lot of approaches to any situation, the supply of new enemies and situations quickly slows to a trickle. This feels intentional, to an extent. It’s a flat design philosophy, focusing on its tight combat loop foregrounding player skill rather than grinding and progression. Every weapon and combat technique and enemy is available early, which makes it easy to experiment with everything in a single playthrough. This is a welcome player-friendly improvement compared to the Souls games, though it sacrifices the fun of finding and using unique weapons.
The problem is that, well, it’s flat. You’ve fought the same crew of five muscle-bound ogres a hundred times within a dozen hours. The game continues for another 30+ hours beyond that, and the introduction of new engaging enemies slows to a trickle. Even well-designed enemies become trivial and tiresome, a problem compounded by the “sub-missions” and “twilight missions,” which simply remix the same content in slightly different configurations. And while many of the early bosses are great, they tend toward obnoxious gimmicks for much of the game. When some of the game’s best fights crop up toward the end, they highlight how repetitive the rest of it has become.
The best thing about Nioh’s setting is that it faithfully copies the intricate detail of historical Japanese material culture, from Shinto shrines and altars with their extravagant ornamentation to Samurai armor with thousands of small scales. At its best, these are lavish and aesthetic--like the brightly lit bathhouse, wallpapered with period nature art and full of cherry-red lacquer. Almost every level is set in a shrine, reflecting a social valuation of these spaces that Nioh sees but can only gesture at. And as good as these individual objects often are, they rarely cohere into a vista, a mood, a sense of place. A starless black abyss hangs over most levels, casting a diffuse moonlight that leaves everything dim and purple, compounded by both a haze effect and an omnipresent fog machine.
And oof, the story. It somehow manages to be thin enough to be incomprehensible yet still call enough attention to itself to be annoying. The drama of the Sengoku leaders fades into a vacuous outline of famous names and bloody battlefields, places where yokai are drawn by “negative energy.” It’s not clear if the game expects the audience to be familiar enough with these names to fill in the blanks? But if that’s true, why bother animating all those cutscenes, which employ a variety of insultingly cheap dramatic tricks. If they cared about Tokugawa Ieyasu’s story, would they have invented a new daughter for him and made her into a femme fatale samurai, damsel in distress, and tsundere love interest for the player?
The casual racism of Nioh’s choice of protagonist is maybe it’s worst example of dumb game industry habit. The Sengoku period is, of course, full of great Japanese warriors, samurai and ninja alike. Yet Nioh goes out of its way to find, quite literally, the only white person on the island at the time. This choice fits with their odd and arbitrary choice to bring British colonialism to one of the few places it never really happened, and actually probably explains that whole part of the plot. It might make some sense, if they really wanted an outsider perspective, except that there’s a much better choice available: Yasuke. While William Adams was a sailor and merchant given the honorary title of “samurai,” Yasuke was actually a warrior who fought in the battles Nioh depicts. He was an African man, probably also the only black man in Japan at the time, who came as the servant of a Jesuit missionary. The fact that Yasuke was overlooked for the role of protagonist is injury, to which the game adds insult by including him as a boss called only “Obsidian Samurai.” :<
Nioh’s world has more than enough interesting elements to inspire a great story and a rich world. Instead of developing them, it makes them all subservient to its own insipid invention. Named for a Buddhist divine nectar, amrita is a yellow crystal of protean energy with no character, traits, or history. Amrita is Nioh’s uniting sin, the mistake that, at least proximally, ruined everything else in the game. Shinto shrines become places to harvest and consume amrita. Yokai are mischievous and playful beings--they hold parades and trick people into marrying them--but amrita turns them into an army of single-minded demons, controlled and even grown in tanks (seriously). Amrita is made both the means and cause of the Sengoku Jidai, and is even offered up as the explanation for a betrayal whose motivation is one of Japan’s greatest historical mysteries. Amrita is also the resource for which John Dee’s apprentice invaded Japan. It’s a (somewhat) anachronistic colonial resource extraction narrative that paints one Brit as an agent of chaos stoking the fires of war to obtain more power and become a super-human.
Japanese folklore is the fertile soil that grew treasures like Princess Mononoke, Mushishi, Pokemon, and Dark Souls. Nioh takes that soil, adds a fog generator, festoons it with crystallized piss, and says “I made this.” But despite the utterly limp execution, there is still something revelatory about simply seeing this material presented directly. It’s almost like learning that much of Japanese pop culture “takes place in the same world.” Or more accurately, perhaps, being given the rosetta stone to understand the language underpinning all of them. I’ve spent half as many hours reading about Yokai and Japanese history as I have playing Nioh. Wheelmonks, for instance, will be immediately recognizable to any Souls veteran, but until I saw them in Nioh I thought they were original to Berserk. They’re actually considered one of the oldest Yokai.
Speaking of Berserk: why did Koei Tecmo release, almost simultaneously, a Berserk game with no combat mechanics and a highly polished Soulslike with no artistic vision? It’s almost tragic how perfectly these two games complete each others’ flaws. You might be thinking it would be gauche to make an explicit Berserk Soulslike when Dark Souls already draws on Berserk so much, but I hope I’ve established by now that Koei Tecmo is entirely unself-aware of that sort of propriety. The Souls games are far from Berserk adaptations, and the places where they differ--subtlety, nuance, tonal breadth--are all the things Nioh struggles with. Berserk’s strengths and weaknesses match well with Nioh’s, far more so than the historical fantasy they ended up trying, and it’s a shame we didn’t get that game instead.