By Alex Carr
Is Nioh another opportunity to praise the sun?
Dark Souls is a great game. I mean it’s gruelling, rage-inducing and is likely the cause of many broken controllers the world over but still, it’s a great game. The problem with great games though, is that when anything similar comes along it will inevitably be compared with that great game, sometimes unjustly.
Such is the case with Nioh, an action RPG developed by Team Ninja. Now, I am not going say that these two games are completely different, they aren’t. Both have you fighting bosses ten times your size, both incorporate dying into the mechanics of the game and both have checkpoints which enable you to level up using the ‘souls’ of your defeated enemies.
When you look at these two games side by side it is easy to only focus on their similarities, however, if you take the time to look at Nioh on its own you will see the one thing that truly sets it apart in the action RPG genre. The combat is incredible, and I mean INCREDIBLE. Not only do you have access to seven different weapon types, including Tonfas and Kusarigama as well as magic and ninja skills, you also have different skill trees for each type and to top it all off the option of three different combat stances. All in all, this makes for a much more in-depth, tactical and faster combat system than any of the Dark Souls games to date and I’m including Bloodborne.
The story is far more front and centre as well: You are William, on a journey to Japan to save a spirit from Edward Kelly, a British agent and alchemist who has been using his power to raise yokai, demons which have been causing chaos across the land. Unlike Dark Souls you will not have to read every item description to understand where you are and what you are doing and unlike Dark Souls your character actually speaks and participates in the many full-voiced cutscenes throughout the game.
Of course, not every difference is a positive one. While the Dark Souls series all have interconnected levels Nioh will have you selecting levels from a map and while this does save on travel time the level designs cannot even be compared to Dark Soul’s beautiful rendered ruined cities, swaps and catacombs.
It is easy to see how Nioh can be labelled as ‘Samurai Dark Souls’ but the reality is there are just as many differences as there are similarities which make Nioh a unique gaming experience in its own right. And hey, even if I haven’t convinced you, is ‘Samurai Dark Souls’ a bad thing? After all, samurais are pretty cool.