Not bad, but not great either.
I do not dislike a difficult game, but I think that between player and developer there should always be a sense of fairness, to use a tabletop rpg metaphor the master should play with the pcs, not against them.
And sometimes, what happenes in this game is the latter. I've dropped the dlcs because getting killed in a couple blows by normal soldier was getting a tad too frustrating. But I guess the main game doesn't have too many moments like that, and the player can also "play dirty", for example with the sloth talisman which completely breaks bossfights.
Narratively, it's really unimpressive. A blank slate of a main characters, to the point that in some scenes he becomes kind of funny, just as the main villain...

The Nioh series is one of, if not the best traditional soulslike games not made by Fromsoft. The gameplay is much faster, and has a larger emphasis on trying multiple builds being able to respec your stats and skills for a moderate fee whenever you want, and being able to have 2 weapons equipped at once, with up to 8 slots for magic, ninjitsu, and regular consumables. The game strips things back a little with only a handful of weapon movesets and mission based singular maps instead of an interconnected world like Souls, but I feel it helps focus the game into a tighter more player friendly style without giving up the genre famous difficulty.

What I like the most about this game is how it takes elements from Dark Souls and resignifies them to its own terms: in DS your actions (movements) have consequences physically speaking, it represents those in a naturalistic way to make you realize that you're in a merciless world that won't put invisible walls and so to help you. The movements of your character have weight, they'll take time and effort (stamina), compromise.
Nioh takes those elements in a martial arts focus, you have to lessen your enemy's stamina, wait until he moves, choose an adequate position to match your opponent, etc.

Actually insane how much of an improvement Nioh 2 is in every way, this feels so bad to go back to holy crap the enemy variety sucks and the double bosses the devs lazily throw at you after the main story??? Fuck right off with that. Thankfully they binned that idea for Nioh 2. Still fun until then though

Two playthroughs:
- 1st on a p-worded copy in November 2018 long before touching Nioh 2, dropped after beating the Ogress
- 2nd with legal Epic version in December 2021, cleared main story

I came into Nioh expecting it to be a kind of decent dark souls game with not much worth noting, considering I've been recommended to skip this title and head towards the supposedly better sequel. Much to my surprise though, it turned out to be an excellent action game with a lot to differentiate itself from dark souls, so much so that I don't see the comparison when this game launched initially.

For being an action game, it has an incredible amount of depth in its gameplay. At first I imagined that the stance switching mechanic wasn't going to be all that impactful. All it did was switch your moveset, so why not just se the high stance so I can get the most damage output? After getting my shit stomped in the first area by common enemies, I learned that different stances have different dodges, which I couldn't see how impactful that was; I'd just stay in mid stance all the time since it seemed to have the most iframe-distance-endlag ratio. After dying to the first boss multiple times, I'd found myself switching my stances all the time to avoid certain attack patterns. That stayed true for the entirety off the bosses later in the game and even when they started introducing tougher enemies. I could talk about my discoveries using all the mechanics this game gives you, but the review would go on forever, so just know: This game does give you more depth that what you will ever need.

The level designs in this game are nothing to write home about. I don't dread going into a level, in fact its kind of easy to navigate, but they do nothing interesting in the levels that they all blend in together. They're not quite hallway-to-hallway linear though, so there is some exploration to be done. But to be honest, I'd probably prefer hallway levels over what the game have.

There's a lot of loot in this game, but my god is there not a good inventory system. You have to painstakingly sort your equipment while deciding which weapons you want to keep and discard while also comparing it to your own equipment and other similar equipment to keep track of the skills. That would be fine, I don't mind spending ten minutes of my time managing my inventory every so often. After finding 100-200 pieces of loot per level, it becomes a major flaw in this game, especially without an auto-discard option.

Finally, the last point I'd like to touch on: As you get towards the end of the game, its becomes a button masher rather than playing it carefully aggressive. It becomes a matter of "how good your equipment is" than "how good your skills are". In the last 1/3rd of the game, I've probably died twice to bosses. I'd go in there, use my guardian spirit and wipe out 1/2 or sometimes 2/3rds of their HP and usually beat them on my first try. Not saying I completely shut my brain off when fighting bosses, but they've become quite significantly easier.

Though in this review I've mainly talked about the negatives about this game, it goes to show how good the actual gameplay is. It hard carries the mediocre level designs, the lackluster music, and the frankly boring story.

When I played this on PS4, I ended up stopping after the first DLC mission. And now, I'm in the same position because nothing is more annoying in a game like this than DLC that buys into its own self-hype about difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty, this time I had basically zero difficulty because poison bombs and blinding bombs are stupid strong and even very strong enemies can't deal with them.

I've never agreed with the common complaints about bad level design (bad? No, at worst serviceable) or the enemy reuse (if your baddy roster is strong enough you don't need hundreds of unique guys).

I will say the final level is pretty bad having just replayed. The first 2/3rds are swarming with high-tier monsters, balanced by having two companions. But then your companions have the intelligence of a seal with brain trauma and will trap you on ladders or push you off thin walkways because they're too goddamn stupid to walk forward.

It is, however, still immensely funny how the first final boss, whose return has been described as the worst possible outcome...just says "nah I'm done with you nerds" and peaces out because actually he doesn't give a shit

My first proper 3D Souls-like game.

The combat is extremely fun and fast-paced, with a lot of variety in builds.
However, that's where my compliment ends as Nioh suffers from a lack of enemy variety and reuses certain bosses as reoccurring enemies, which makes them a chore to fight. Some of the side-missions felt extremely repetitive with bosses that are just regular enemies but beefed up. As for the boss fights, they are not very memorable and the final three bosses were straight up just disappointing. For a souls-like this felt a bit too easy, I expected to pull my hair out playing this.

Despite my gripes, it is still a fun game and I would still recommend giving this a go.