It is just more Nioh for better or for worse.
I loved it, I appreciated all the new additions to the combat like Yokai abilities and burst counters. The combat stayed exciting up to the very end. Most of the bosses were really fun to fight<3
Unfortunately some problems of the first game still remained. Problems like low number of type of enemies, recycled bosses, recycled levels. I wish the game was a bit shorter so it didn't have to relay on recycling stuff so heaviely in the later part of the game.

Despite having always been a Souls and Soulslike fan, I never played Nioh 1. The main reason is that I found the presentation very intimidating: randomized loot like Diablo; a lot, and I mean A LOT of menus; an inscrutable blacksmith system; several movesets for each weapon with customisable active combos. I like action RPGs, but Nioh delved a bit too much into hack-and-slash territory and I'm terrible at those.

But Nioh 2 introduced an element that encouraged me to try: character creation. Boy, do I love me some character creation tools, and the ones in Nioh 2 are FANTASTIC (despite the fact that, from my online coop experiences, I can tell that 90% of players used it as a waifu-creator), so I figured that I would try this one.

I immediately had a lot of fun with it but, needless to say, it did feel very overwhelming. Too many menus, too many item effects and rules and weapon movesets and... you get the gist of it. Some might say it's part of the genre. After all, even Dark Souls is pretty inscrutable on a first playthrough. But I found that Dark Souls gets pretty intuitive once you get around the convoluted menus (which were made 10x better in the sequels) and the deeper-than-normal levelling system, with Nioh there is simply too much.

So, despite the fun that I was having with the game, I shelved it for a good few months during which I didn't feel like having to do that much learning. I picked it back up a few weeks ago, mostly out of guilt for having paid full price and barely played it, and started playing it while watching a Nioh 1 expert's let's play on the side — whenever I finished a mission, I'd watch him play the same mission, so I could learn while being entertained and stay spoiler-free. Well, I could hardly go a day without playing it.

Nioh 2 is, above all, fun. But the fun is hidden under an incredible layer of menus. If you never played it before, it will probably take you until the NG+ to learn all of its mechanics (I know I barely used the blacksmith until the mid-late game) but, if you're a fan of the genre, this is a must. It's the closest to an authentic Souls experience that any non-FROM developer ever created, but it's enough of its own thing that it doesn't feel derivative.

The areas are a blast to explore. The fact that they're all self-contained and, unlike in FROM games, don't need to be interconnected makes it so that their designs can be very heterogeneous and the internal maps very complex. The bosses are astounding, bar a couple that were well-designed but thrown into arenas far too small to work with the game's janky camera (I'm looking at you, Shibata Katsuie), but they are mostly fair and well-balanced.

I guess the only times I was frustrated were during secondary missions, which very often come down to lots of enemies thrown at you in a small space. It's a lazy design choice that artificially increases the difficulty, but I understand how time-saving it must be given the sheer amount of sub-missions that the game has to offer. Which is the reason why I'm ready to forgive the repeat bosses too.

The story was fine. Nice to see familiar faces but a bit younger. The combat has definite improvements over the first game, what with the yokai shift abilities and the burst counter mechanic, but this is very much Nioh 1.5. The bullshit inventory nonsense and blacksmith stuff is still there, possibly worse than ever. Random loot doesn't feel right in these kind of games.

It goes on far too long. On three separate occasions I thought I was at the last boss only for the game to fuckin' Columbo me with "Eh, just one more thing".

I didnae finish it. I got the final boss to a pixel of health countless times and he just annihilated me time and time again with ridiculous attacks. It stopped being fun hours ago and I don't care anymore. Even before this, at the late midpoint it felt like I was being punished for focusing on just being a big strong sword boy. Having to try and scramble together resistances to all the status shit and having talismans/jutsus and whatever the fuck else this late in the game just felt really cheap and unbalanced.

The original Nioh’s mix of Ninja Gaiden-esque combat in a Dark Souls shell proved successful as it was one of the few Soulslikes that wasn’t just a hollow imitation. It earned its place in the competitive genre, but, much like a lot of promising debuts, it left a lot of room for improvement. Nioh 2 sharpens many of its predecessor’s dulled areas and goes an extra step further, creating one of the best and most satisfying hack and slash RPGs the genre has ever seen.

Read the full review here:
https://www.gamerevolution.com/review/637652-nioh-2-review-ps4

If you liked the first Nioh, you'll definitely like this one too.

It's mostly more of the same with a bit of a revamped combat system giving you some new yokai powers to use, new weapon skills, a couple new weapons and a massive skill tree, there's tons of variety and you can really experiment and play around with tons of different builds. You're also playing as a custom created character in this game instead of a set protagonist like William in the first game and I have to say the character creator is pretty damn great and detailed.

The boss design is absolutely killer, all the main game bosses look really cool and have some great move-sets, especially the late game bosses really wowed me, but holy shit some of them are difficult as fuck, multiple times I audibly screamed while playing this game and I wanted to throw my controller at the wall and I'm used to Soulslikes. Level design is a step up from the first game, but still kinda weak in some areas. The story is pretty basic and it is very slow in the beginning, but does pick up in the later chapters and gets more interesting and I did actually start to care about the characters, there's some fan service-y moments since it's a prequel and you do visit some areas you went to or worked with some people you fought in the first game, but I think it's pulled off very well. However if you decide to read all the lore entries for the different yokai and the character backgrounds, that stuff is arguably more interesting than the main story itself.

My biggest problem with the game is the side missions being very bland (much like the first game) and a lot of them you just fight waves of enemies or collect a specific item and to make it worse almost all the side mission level design is not original and just re-uses previous levels in the main game and previous bosses, so you might go through the same area like 5 different times or fight the same boss repeatedly and it gets boring quick. My biggest advice to anyone who picks up the game is just play through the main missions first and if you enjoy it enough go through the side missions afterwards, because I did most of the side missions as they appeared and it broke up the pacing for the main story pretty bad.

Anyways, if you liked the first Nioh or just want a great and challenging Soulslike to occupy your time until Elden Ring comes out I'd recommend grabbing it, I thoroughly enjoyed the 70 hours I spent on the game.

Nioh 2. It's Nioh 1, but with more Nioh. Take everything good about the first game and amplify it by about 100 magnitudes. Take everything bad about the first game and... well actually the bad parts are pretty much the same (i'm looking at you loot system). Nioh 1 was fucking incredible so it only makes sense that Nioh 2 is fuckinger incredibler, maybe even the fuckingest incrediblest. So much content, so much variety, so many ways to overcome the challenges this game will throw at you, yet still time and time again, so many goddamn deaths. What a fucking game.

Nioh 2 is a deep, somewhat Souls like action game with a massive amount of character customization and a large amount of equipment options. Gameplay involves stamina management and making a correctly timed "ki pulse" or dodge in order to quickly regenerate a portion of the lost stamina from your attacks. Instead of an open world element of most Souls style games each area takes place on its own stage in different locations as the timeline of the game advances and you can go back and play previous stages whenever you want, finishing the main game allows you to set enemies in an old area to your current level and you will unlock increasing significantly harder difficulty modes to replay stages in that allow for better item drops while increasing XP limits. You are allowed to fairly quickly and easily reset your stats, weapon skills, or unliked title bonuses, minor passives you can pick from and upgrade as you complete certain goals, even allowing you to save different sets you can swap between.

When it comes to creating playstyle there are 11 different melee weapons that each have their own attack skills, three stances to use them in, and feel to them, three different types of ranged weapons, ninja magic and equipment, spiritual talisman based Onmyo magic, three types of guardian spirits you can transform into, and every single non-human enemy that you fight can drop an equipbable soul core that always you to transform into it for an attack or to briefly summon it for one. You can equip two melee weapons and two ranged weapons at the same time and can quickly switch between them, with certain skills even allowing weapon combos when switching. You can have up to 16 items, pieces of equipment, or magic skills bound to the D-Pad by being able to quickly swap between four different set configurations. The weapons and armor you equip each have passive bonuses that improve your character in certain ways or enhance certain skills and the type of armor you equip can either effect your movement and stamina or allow you to push through enemy blows and continue your attacks. Apart from the variety of options you have for weaponry, buffs, and debuffs many of the weapons, armors, and accessories also grant set bonuses that give you passive buffs to enhance a particular playstyle. As you progress you will also get the ability to join one of 50 different clans that give you further passive abilities.

There are a large variety of human, demon, and boss enemy types. Areas are varied and certain missions might different side objectives to discover. You have a surprising amount of options when it comes to creating your character and crafting options allow you to alter the look of your weapons and armor by making them appear as any other same style type of equipment you have unlocked to further give you the look that you want.

Co-Op play is available and certain missions will have you fighting with NPC allies, even if neither are available to you most missions have spots where you can summon AI ghosts of fallen players that will help you fight. Allowing you some breathing room or possibly needed support as you get used to the game or for difficult fights, or if you just like having allies around.

The worse thing to say about the game is that they decided to put unique skills and crafting drops tied to some bosses. They skills have almost no chance of dropping unless you are stacking a variety of bonuses like equipment and demon soul sets that enhance item drops, buffs that enhance material drops, luck bonuses from equipment, clan joined, and a magic talisman used, and if you knew to never have anything equipped or to take an title bonuses that enhance the completely useless equipment drop chance and even then you might have to beat an enemy 10, 20, 50, 100 times to get the drop you want. The chances don't even improve on higher difficulty and you pretty much have to know that, unless it is a duel map, you can alt tab out of the game and close it to go back to the save right before a boss fight to try to get the drop again without having to play a full stage again (though you will lose all XP you would have gotten for beating the boss however many times, and if they drop three skills and four crafting sets you will still end up needing to replay the stage). It's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen a developer do and a massive hours and hours long effort to get these drops, and is all the more baffling in a game where they seem to have actually put in elements that actually respect their players like ally summons, easy clan changes, and easy character respec options.

A more minor negative is the terrible description of certain skills, which is mostly fixed by just checking how things work online. A few enemy types really abuse i-frames where it can be pretty annoying when you are visibly cutting them in half only to be told the attack missed because they did a backflip.
The first Nioh is one of my favorite games and, with the exception of the story as it has the awkward silent protagonist, this is better in basically every way by being even larger, more weapons, more enemies, more combat options, and more customization.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1246717947789201408

Easily the best souls-like game to come out of a studio other than From Software. Runs like an absolute dream even on the base PS4, which goes a long way towards making it play smooth as butter. The combat draws inspiration from Souls as well as Team Ninja's character action background with Ninja Garden which combine into something very special. The switchglaive is one of the most fun weapons I've used in any game period and that's only 1 of the 10+ options. The only area it really lacks in is the story, which was pretty barebones and hard to follow as someone without a background in Japanese history.

I'm honestly a bit blown away by this game.
An improvement over the original in almost every possible way which is how a sequel should be.

This game might have one of my favorite soundtracks in the last 10 years which might be saying a lot or barely anything depending on your tastes.

This doesn't reinvent the wheel or anything like that in fact It's more of the same if you are coming off the first game so if you didn't like that then this certainly won't change your mind since it doubles down on what the first game started.

The combat is similar to the first game but with quite a few additions to mechanics such as the Feral counters which there are 3 types of for you to choose from.

4 new weapon types (including the 3 DLCs) and a metric fuck ton of moves and abilities to acquire both from buying them with skill points and having certain skills drop from bosses.

the latter being my main and one of the very issues with this game because good lord it can take you hundreds of runs before you get a boss skill to drop or you can get lucky and have it drop right away it's RNG that can be extremely brutal at it's worst.

The bosses can also be hit or miss in terms of difficulty some of them are really challenging and others feel extremely weak and easy to exploit the latter being mostly the human bosses since I found it extremely easy to set them up to where I can break their stamina and do damage in an endless loop till they die.

If I'm gonna nitpick I would also say that I'm not exactly a fan of the endgame for Nioh 2 as it devolves from carefully planning attacks and learning timing and good defense into unga bunga who melts the other first which is a shame but you most likely will never see this problem rear it's ugly head if you are just in it to beat it once or twice and leave it at that.

The pros eclipse the cons by a country mile tho so I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone who's a fan of the genre.

You can think of sequels as existing on a sliding scale between refinement and evolution. On one side you have Yakuza, where you’re doing essentially the same things in the same locations with an increasing amount of polish, and on the other end you have Final Fantasy, where every game plays very differently from its predecessors. Nioh 2 has enthusiastically thrown itself onto the refinement side of the scale, with pretty much every system from the first game being polished to a mirror sheen. The amount of quality-of-life features is truly staggering, from tiny things like being able to change the colors for different tiers of equipment rarity, to more immediately useful things like being able to save equipment and skill loadouts to swap between builds instantly. If you just wanted a smoother Nioh experience, this game will probably be ten out of ten for you, but the focus paid to refinement naturally came at the cost any significant evolutions. Personally, I enjoyed how the first game was so different from its contemporary action RPG’s, but Nioh 2’s locations and enemies are essentially copy-pasted from the first game. Although the combat has been refined with new abilities and finer balance, it still has the exact same feel overall. That puts me in a hard spot when it comes to a review, considering that in an “objective” sense, it’s just the first game all over again with additional upgrades and features, but when it comes to the experience of actually playing it, the comparative lack of imagination leads to a markedly lesser experience overall. It gets even more complicated when the question naturally arises of whether it could be recommended to people who haven’t played the first game. And honestly, I couldn’t tell you. The stories are mostly unconnected, but connect at the end, but the fragmented and confusing presentation of the story made it so confusing even for someone who had played the first game that it was nonsensical anyway. I think you could enjoy it without the explanations from the first game, but the difficulty is so high that maybe going in without the experience would be utterly miserable. So, as much as I think this game is extremely well made, I can only recommend it to the narrow subset of players who had played the first game, loved it, and just wanted more without significant changes, and also didn’t care about the story at all. If you’re one of those people and haven’t played it already, go nuts, but for everyone else you should probably wait for a sale.

If you played Nioh, you'll be immediately familiar with how Nioh 2 works. Not meant as a negative, it just means that the game can focus on improving itself instead of trying to reinvent itself to prevent getting stale. The game thankfully knows what it's doing: it doesn't waste much time explaining things it doesn't need to explain, from the get go it gives pretty vital moves that the first game made you unlock, and in general it all feels a bit harder, and much tighter.

That's what Nioh 2 is, a game that knows where it's getting at and what it wants to do. It learns from the first Nioh, which was a game where it felt like the team was throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see what stuck, and made it more focused on the good stuff (the combat) and makes it less reliant on the RPG/Diablo mechanics. Add actually decent level design, a new parry system that despite first impressions actually changes and adds a lot to the combat, and there isn't much more you could ask out of the game. Maybe more enemy types and better average boss quality? Well, this game has those too.

There's only so many ways I can say "Nioh 2 is great", so I'll just say it one last time: Nioh 2 is great. And probably the best action game of its generation, make of that what you will.