Bloodborne, often lumped in with the series, plays with the knobs: death is less punishing and the game rewards aggression more than caution. The Souls games create tension by punishing death and making death frequent, and in turn reward caution, patience, and attention. Dark Souls, as you probably know, takes a bunch of mechanics from all over the place, from a variety of genres and mixes them all together in a way that creates a very specific experience: a high level of difficulty that requires you to stay invested even in fighting trash mobs maze-like, “Metroidvania” environments with secrets and shortcuts and a checkpoint system that features corpse-runs and punishes death rather stringently. Let’s get all the Dark Souls comparisons out of the way. Nioh 2 plays a lot like Nioh even with some distinct differences. I think this is a good thing, but again, we’ll get into this soon. I’ll get into this comparison more toward the end of this post, but I do think the sequel provides a smoother, and probably slightly easier, experience overall. However, if you instead wanted to like the game but felt that its difficulty leaned a bit too far toward bullshit or felt that you simply ran out of steam partway into the game, Nioh 2 may just win you over.
If you despised Nioh, you probably won’t like Nioh 2 and vice versa. Nioh 2 is largely more of the same compared to its predecessor Nioh, though I think it has several important differences. The games wield their high levels of difficulty in very different ways to create different experiences, and I think the best parts of Nioh 2 are the parts that are unique to it, rather than the parts borrowed from Dark Souls. The comparison is useful, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
I like it more than the first game, if only just, and I think more complex and nuanced combat mixed with a well-designed loot system and incredibly deep customization is a great match along side Souls-like difficulty and game structure.Īnd make no mistake about it, while its a very different take on the concepts, Nioh and Nioh 2 owe a ton to From Software’s storied Souls series. Unless you really don’t like these hardcore action RPGs in the vein of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, this is a great game with a ton of content. Before we get into it, Nioh 2 is a great game and I recommend it almost without qualification.