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Nioh 3 feels tired. Where the old Nioh games had a pretty good go at ‘what if Dark Souls but Japanese mythology’, Team Ninja has failed to create anything interesting beyond what feels like a lacklustre attempt at Elden Ring. Nioh 3 is perfectly competent, with decent combat and just about everything we’ve come to expect from any soulslike.
However, nearly two decades since Demon’s Souls came out and kickstarted the genre, we should probably expect more than mere competence. There’s little to grab onto or care about in Nioh 3, and it feels like Team Ninja is more interested in ticking boxes than making something worth booting up.
An uninspiring playground
You play as Tokugawa Takechiyo, a real-life figure who, at the start of the game, is about to be made Shogun. However, you can still customise your character to your heart’s content, because that’s what people expect from a soulslike, and who is to let a little thing like history get in the way?
So for me, Lord Tokugawa Takechiyo was actually a tan woman with an eyepatch. Being around magic and spirits all the time must have really mellowed the gender politics of the era, because no one bats an eye at this.
The only one who has an issue is your brother, who wants the title of Shogun for himself and is prepared to use an army of angry mythological creatures to take it.
After an initial prologue where Nioh 3 shows the dire quality of its English voice direction, everything, naturally, goes horribly wrong. You’re shunted back in time to your first map of Nioh 3, and the game’s mediocrities really rear their head in earnest.
You’ll find that after the mandatory Breath of the Wild landscape reveal moment, even with Nioh 3’s very own glowing red Calamity Ganon-alike, the ‘go anywhere, do anything’ feeling quickly fades.
Nioh 3’s world is not only quite small but also fairly linear, not giving you much off the beaten path to even look at. There’s a reason Nioh 3 specifies that it’s an ‘open-field’ game rather than open-world. However, this seems like a faulty compromise.
There’s not even that much fun to be had hunting Nioh 3’s collectibles. There are plenty of distractions to have from finding little tree spirits to boost your healing, or shooting down flying ferrets to unlock new fighting styles, but you don’t need to go searching.
After a little exploration, Nioh 3 will just mark all the collectibles, hidden chests, and points of interest for that section of the map. This immediately turns optional exploration into just ticking all the boxes, because you might as well, now that you know where they are.
There’s no real feeling of awe or interest in this dull, unremarkable, and graphically dated world, even when it tries to spice things up with a time jump mechanic, like another recent disappointing soulslike.
My Ninja way
Team Ninja is also trying new things with Nioh 3’s gameplay, primarily expanding out moment-to-moment options by letting you switch fighting style on the fly between Samurai and Ninja.
As a Samurai, you’ve got generally slower attacks, but build up to a stronger ‘martial arts’ attack with your combo.
As a Ninja, you move faster, get in with quicker hits, and have access to Ninjutsu that give you ranged and zoning options. For most of the game, there’s really no reason not to treat this as a budget Ninja Gaiden 4.
Out in the overworld, you can overwhelm most enemies before they ever get much of a chance to retaliate. Anything that’s not a boss is another samey encounter, practically over and done with by the time you get your first stealth attack in.
It’s only in Nioh 3’s boss fights that things can get interesting, but they can be surprisingly infrequent during your time stuck in the open world. When you get to them, they’ll overwhelm you a few times until you get their attack pattern down, but Nioh 3 is keen to hand you ways to outpace its bosses.
I ended up carrying around magic that allowed me to apply a slowing debuff to every boss, which served to significantly undermine the challenge.
With the added ability to summon allies to help with the fight, and the extra burst damage from your Spirit Guardians, you can keep pressure up on bosses pretty consistently.
Bosses are one of the few things propping Nioh 3 up as an experience, but it just makes the distance between them stick out all the more. Even with this, though, they can range from far too easy to plain frustrating.
I’m not exactly a star soulslike player, but I never found a problem in Nioh 3 that I couldn’t solve by just bashing my head harder against the wall.
Mandated fun
Outside of the bosses, the only times when I was having something approaching fun with Nioh 3 were in the Crucibles. These are full-on dungeons that feel like someone designed them with a purpose.
They’re microcosms of a different game entirely, with twisting arenas against foes that sap your maximum health with every hit. You can get that max health back by healing, or better yet, killing enemies, and actually incur some risk in the moment-to-moment gameplay.
However, this still never manages to capture more than an echo of a better-designed game. They’re only better by comparison to the bland world around them, as the occasional hidden enemies or random traps that jump out at you feel soulless. It’s just another thing on the list that Team Ninja thinks Nioh 3 needs because other games have it.
Nioh 3 is made up of busywork between bosses, including the game constantly filling your inventory with new gear every five seconds.
Rather than just having upgrades that feel significant, you’re showered with gear of every quality, level, and type, most of which are destined to go into the auto-grinder to give you more gold or XP.
Even your upgrades and level-ups feel entirely pointless in the grand scheme of things. Oh, my health went up from 1535 to 1560? How generous, Nioh 3, thank you.
Half the collectible rewards are upgrade points for your different weapon abilities, but they’re all sidegrades, extra customisation that you’ll spend indiscriminately the next time you have ten of them to push out the door.
Nioh 3 feels like a time-waster of a soulslike, where the pseudo-open world exists for you to go off on smaller sidequests to gain XP, and to get incremental upgrades, all to reduce the chance that you’ll be unfairly wrecked by a cheap shot from a boss.
In older Nioh games, the path was set and linear, but at least it felt like it was designed by someone who cared. Nioh 3 offers nothing you can’t get somewhere else, and doesn’t have the quality to back up its blandness.
Reviewed on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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