I can't seem to bring myself to keep playing this game for long, so I thought I'd put my thoughts into words.
As much as I do enjoy the game feel of Nioh (both games), I think I've just started to get bothered by its flaws much more.
The combat is really pretty fun in the moment, with a satisfying pace but it has so much fake depth to it. Different stances really don't matter all that much other than spamming High attacks against guarding foes. Most skills are downright pointless, specially all the ones that only really work on human enemies. It all feels like pointless fluff. I forget most of the skills I even have because there's just no real reason to use them. Compared to its most blatant influence, Dark Souls, it's the polar opposite. You have a lot of tools but they're meaningless. In Dark Souls you have limited movesets but everything matters. Dark Souls does so much more with so much less, it's unreal.
This extends to gear somewhat. You get showered in loot but most of it is trash and the modifiers barely matter until endgame. I do kinda like the loot, as I'm a sucker for Diablo style loot, but there's just too much time going through trash gear for minor upgrades. Specially rerolling for the few modifiers I do want.
The worst of the lot is your skills. Active skills I already mentioned as feeling like you get a lot of meaningless moves that you have little reason to use (not all are meaningless, just most, clarification). Passive skills are even worse, with some absolutely epic skills such as doing 4% more damage or some other dumb boring shit like that. It makes the skill trees feeling boring as hell when you're just getting these extremely inconsequential buffs. Also both Ninjutsu and Onmyo magic are boring as fuck 90% of the time.
The worst thing about these games, though? Enemy variety. In Dark Souls, every area has its unique set of enemies. Sure, some do repeat here and there. But Nioh takes it to the next level, with a very small pool of enemy types that you keep fighting the whole damn fucking game. And that's accounting for 2 being a lot better in this regard than 1. Though 2 is also reusing all enemy types from 1, so even across games you're fighting the same enemies. The thing is that the enemies themselves don't really even have enough abilities for them to be reused so much, either. It really makes the game feel shallow. Bosses are great though, no complaints there... for the most part. They're easily one of the game's high points. Still pale in comparison to anything in Dark Souls 3 or Sekiro though, but yeah.
Now, coupling the enemy variety and loot issues together... exploration fucking sucks. Other than getting the little green fellas (forgot their name) there's very little reason to explore. Level design is alright but nothing special anyway. Environments are okay. But yeah, 0 reason to go out of your way for loot when you're just gonna get more trash to go through later. At least enemies drop their abilities as Soul Cores in this, so there's an incentive to fight them as much as possible, but you're still fighting the same group of enemy types for about a hundred hours.
Basically everytime I play this lately, it just feels so fucking shallow. There's so much shit but the vast majority of it is meaningless. Yet where I would love for the game to have a lot of pointless variety, like enemies, I get jack shit and just keep fighting the same damn enemies over and over. Not to mention some dumb jank that's still in the game, like fallen enemies standing up again when killing (minor but it always looks retarded) and wonky hitboxes. It all just makes me crave Dark Souls instead. So while I do enjoy playing Nioh for a while, nowadays I just drop it in favor of Dark Souls (both replays and mods). Because Dark Souls just does almost everything better. Well, Nioh has hotter and prettier women but that's about the one thing it has an edge on over From's games lmao. I might still chip away at this every now and then when I'm in the mood, but damn I guess I burned out. Wish I hadn't played 1 first.
As much as I do enjoy the game feel of Nioh (both games), I think I've just started to get bothered by its flaws much more.
The combat is really pretty fun in the moment, with a satisfying pace but it has so much fake depth to it. Different stances really don't matter all that much other than spamming High attacks against guarding foes. Most skills are downright pointless, specially all the ones that only really work on human enemies. It all feels like pointless fluff. I forget most of the skills I even have because there's just no real reason to use them. Compared to its most blatant influence, Dark Souls, it's the polar opposite. You have a lot of tools but they're meaningless. In Dark Souls you have limited movesets but everything matters. Dark Souls does so much more with so much less, it's unreal.
This extends to gear somewhat. You get showered in loot but most of it is trash and the modifiers barely matter until endgame. I do kinda like the loot, as I'm a sucker for Diablo style loot, but there's just too much time going through trash gear for minor upgrades. Specially rerolling for the few modifiers I do want.
The worst of the lot is your skills. Active skills I already mentioned as feeling like you get a lot of meaningless moves that you have little reason to use (not all are meaningless, just most, clarification). Passive skills are even worse, with some absolutely epic skills such as doing 4% more damage or some other dumb boring shit like that. It makes the skill trees feeling boring as hell when you're just getting these extremely inconsequential buffs. Also both Ninjutsu and Onmyo magic are boring as fuck 90% of the time.
The worst thing about these games, though? Enemy variety. In Dark Souls, every area has its unique set of enemies. Sure, some do repeat here and there. But Nioh takes it to the next level, with a very small pool of enemy types that you keep fighting the whole damn fucking game. And that's accounting for 2 being a lot better in this regard than 1. Though 2 is also reusing all enemy types from 1, so even across games you're fighting the same enemies. The thing is that the enemies themselves don't really even have enough abilities for them to be reused so much, either. It really makes the game feel shallow. Bosses are great though, no complaints there... for the most part. They're easily one of the game's high points. Still pale in comparison to anything in Dark Souls 3 or Sekiro though, but yeah.
Now, coupling the enemy variety and loot issues together... exploration fucking sucks. Other than getting the little green fellas (forgot their name) there's very little reason to explore. Level design is alright but nothing special anyway. Environments are okay. But yeah, 0 reason to go out of your way for loot when you're just gonna get more trash to go through later. At least enemies drop their abilities as Soul Cores in this, so there's an incentive to fight them as much as possible, but you're still fighting the same group of enemy types for about a hundred hours.
Basically everytime I play this lately, it just feels so fucking shallow. There's so much shit but the vast majority of it is meaningless. Yet where I would love for the game to have a lot of pointless variety, like enemies, I get jack shit and just keep fighting the same damn enemies over and over. Not to mention some dumb jank that's still in the game, like fallen enemies standing up again when killing (minor but it always looks retarded) and wonky hitboxes. It all just makes me crave Dark Souls instead. So while I do enjoy playing Nioh for a while, nowadays I just drop it in favor of Dark Souls (both replays and mods). Because Dark Souls just does almost everything better. Well, Nioh has hotter and prettier women but that's about the one thing it has an edge on over From's games lmao. I might still chip away at this every now and then when I'm in the mood, but damn I guess I burned out. Wish I hadn't played 1 first.