Dark Souls + Diablo + Okami = Nioh
OK, there's more to it than that. I finished the main story of Nioh on Monday night, so it's time to examine the game and tease out what it's trying to do and whether it succeeded.
Baby's First Dark Souls?
Nioh's DNA is plain for all to see. You'll collect souls blood echoes Amrita by defeating enemies, which you will lose on death and have a single opportunity to recover before they are gone for good. You'll save your progress at bonfires lanterns shrines and recover Estus elixirs for healing. You'll open up shortcuts to create new paths between the checkpoints. In short, the moment-to-moment gameplay looks 90% identical to Dark Souls.
Where the two games are nothing alike is in their world structure. Whereas Dark Souls features a continuous and interconnected (if not truly "open" world), Nioh is divided into discrete missions. You select a mission from the world map, appear next to a checkpoint, proceed through the level, find and defeat the boss (hopefully paying sufficient attention to open an enemy-free path between a checkpoint and the boss arena), then be whisked back to the world map, with some cut-scenes playing if this is a main story mission. (Yes, Nioh has an actual plot and not just lore. See below.)
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| Maybe the game's most distinguishing element? |
On the one hand, Dark Souls players who love exploring a cohesive world (and were likely disappointed by the hub-and-spoke design of Dark Souls II) are unlikely to be pleased by this structure. On the other hand, this may be ideal for players new to the "Soulslike" genre. (With apologies to Mark Brown.) By sacrificing the interconnected world, Nioh eliminates the abstract stressor of advancement into the unknown to focus entirely on the concrete stressor of staying alive. In other words, even if the player may not know exactly where they're going, depending on the level in question, they can be sure that they won't wander off into some side area completely divorced from their current objective, a description of which is available at the press of a button.
By this measure, Nioh manages to preserve the combat rhythms and difficulty of a Souls game while making the overall experience much more approachable. This isn't to knock Dark Souls: "approachability" was deliberately not a concern, and there are obviously more than a few gamers for whom the "tough love" approach tickles their fancy. However, it seems likely to me that another sizable group are interested in the Souls games but are intimidated by their legendary impenetrability. I would recommend that these people give Nioh a try and work their way up to Dark Souls or Bloodborne if they enjoy the core gameplay.
There is no cow level.
As mentioned above, there's more than a bit of Diablo incorporated into Nioh's design. Enemies will drop random leveled equipment, and you'll be continually swapping out your gear as you find better items. Weapons and armor are color-coded for your convenience, with white at the bottom and green at the top. All this works well enough, though it's certainly nothing we haven't seen before.
What doesn't work so well are the advanced features of the loot drop genre that are accessed at the blacksmith's shop between missions. In theory, you can buy randomized equipment, forge equipment from crafting materials, reforge existing equipment to get better stat bonuses, and do something called "soul matching." In practice, I barely interacted with any of these systems. There's no tutorial to walk the player through how these features work or, more importantly, why you should use them. The blacksmith will give you a vague description of what they do, but it's woefully inadequate. Rather than trying to figure this out by yourself, it's much more satisfying to improve your gear by actually playing the game. Perhaps these features become helpful once you hit the level cap and your random drops stop improving? Either way, I treated the blacksmith solely as a place to stock up on arrows and bullets and didn't feel that I was missing anything of import.
This has another unfortunate side effect of making money absolutely worthless. Aside from ammunition, there's really nothing you'll feel the need to buy. Elixirs might have been worth stocking up on, but they're not for sale, so you'll need to farm them from enemies, like blood vials in Bloodborne. The result is similar to playing a high-level character in a Bethesda RPG, where you have all the money in the world and none of the shops have anything worth looking at. Copying the Souls design of making experience points and money the same currency would have worked much better here; players who ignored the blacksmith could simply make their character stronger and be rewarded for their playstyle.
Glorious Nippon
Nioh begins by introducing you to the player character, an English privateer named William. He's recovered pieces of the Philosopher's Stone (aka Amrita) for Queen Elizabeth I, who used them to defeat the Spanish Armada. Since he now knows too much, he is imprisoned in the Tower of London, but breaks out with the aid of his Guardian Spirit, Saoirse. (The Guardian Spirit concept is used to explain your character's immortality, similar to Hollowing in Dark Souls.) Before he can escape, however, Saoirse is kidnapped by Edward Kelley, who takes her to Japan to use her ability to find more Amrita on the orders of John Dee.
The game then proceeds to completely forget about this plotline.
It's really quite odd. After completing the Tower of London, you are offered a tutorial mission to teach you the basics of the game. This tutorial is insultingly easy: by this point, you already understand all of these concepts, since you need them to complete the opening level and defeat Thomas Derrick, the game's first boss. My hypothesis is that the tutorial was intended to be the start of the game, but at some later point in development, the English framing story was invented and slapped onto the very beginning (and end) of the game without concern for the difficulty curve.
At this point, we reach the story that Nioh is actually interested in telling. William reaches Japan and joins the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the would-be founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The constant strife across Japan has breached the barriers between the human and spirit worlds, and William is the only man who can defeat the yokai and allow Tokugawa to win his battle to unite Japan under his rule. Along the way, William will occasionally run into Kelley and gesture ineffectually before Kelley uses his Villain Teleportation. You'll see the famous Battle of Sekigahara, now featuring a giant demonic skeleton. At the game's climax, Kelley uses his magic to resurrect Tokugawa's predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, for...something.
Unfortunately, the game's answer to the question of "Why is Kelley doing this?" is obviously "Because it would be really cool!" I never really engaged with Nioh's story, but that doesn't automatically make it bad. I'm simply not in the authors' target demographic. Nioh is a Japanese game (though I was surprised to see so many Vietnamese names in the credits) for Japanese players. Almost all of the dialogue is in Japanese with English subtitles. From my point of view, the cast of characters is a bloated mess of difficult-to-distinguish samurai who enter and leave the story at arbitrary intervals. A Japanese player, on the other hand, is likely to react to each new character with "Cool! I remember that guy from history class!" I have only the most basic knowledge of the Sengoku period, and no doubt most of the references flew straight over my head even after reading the character bios.
Returning to Oda, Nioh lets historical hero-worship get in the way of its gameplay, much to this sequence's detriment. Oda appears to be under Kelley's control, and the player engages him in a boss fight. However, Nioh will be damned before it will let some filthy gaijin defeat Oda Nobunaga in single combat. Once you knock off about three-quarters of his health, you lose the battle in a cutscene. At this point, Oda reveals that Kelley never had any hold over him, and he decides that he's far too awesome for this nonsense, walking away over Kelley's stunned protestations.
Kelley then switches to his backup plan and summons Yamata no Orochi, which William fights as the final boss. Whatever. I've played Okami, I know how this thing works. Just focus on one head at a time. All kidding aside, this boss was surprisingly easy; it was one of the few that I defeated on my first try. Once Orochi's dead, the game ends on a beach, where William finishes off Kelley and the game finally remembers that Kelley's job was to ship Amrita back to England, segueing into a post-credits bonus mission.
So that's Nioh. I'm glad I played it, even if it was a tiny bit of a culture shock. I think it's a must-play for any potential Soulslike developers; it has some important lessons regarding what does and does not work in this genre. It's possible that I even learned something about Japanese history!
There is no cow level.
As mentioned above, there's more than a bit of Diablo incorporated into Nioh's design. Enemies will drop random leveled equipment, and you'll be continually swapping out your gear as you find better items. Weapons and armor are color-coded for your convenience, with white at the bottom and green at the top. All this works well enough, though it's certainly nothing we haven't seen before.
 |
| The end of the game, and the first time you'll see green items. |
This has another unfortunate side effect of making money absolutely worthless. Aside from ammunition, there's really nothing you'll feel the need to buy. Elixirs might have been worth stocking up on, but they're not for sale, so you'll need to farm them from enemies, like blood vials in Bloodborne. The result is similar to playing a high-level character in a Bethesda RPG, where you have all the money in the world and none of the shops have anything worth looking at. Copying the Souls design of making experience points and money the same currency would have worked much better here; players who ignored the blacksmith could simply make their character stronger and be rewarded for their playstyle.
Glorious Nippon
Nioh begins by introducing you to the player character, an English privateer named William. He's recovered pieces of the Philosopher's Stone (aka Amrita) for Queen Elizabeth I, who used them to defeat the Spanish Armada. Since he now knows too much, he is imprisoned in the Tower of London, but breaks out with the aid of his Guardian Spirit, Saoirse. (The Guardian Spirit concept is used to explain your character's immortality, similar to Hollowing in Dark Souls.) Before he can escape, however, Saoirse is kidnapped by Edward Kelley, who takes her to Japan to use her ability to find more Amrita on the orders of John Dee.
The game then proceeds to completely forget about this plotline.
It's really quite odd. After completing the Tower of London, you are offered a tutorial mission to teach you the basics of the game. This tutorial is insultingly easy: by this point, you already understand all of these concepts, since you need them to complete the opening level and defeat Thomas Derrick, the game's first boss. My hypothesis is that the tutorial was intended to be the start of the game, but at some later point in development, the English framing story was invented and slapped onto the very beginning (and end) of the game without concern for the difficulty curve.
At this point, we reach the story that Nioh is actually interested in telling. William reaches Japan and joins the forces of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the would-be founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The constant strife across Japan has breached the barriers between the human and spirit worlds, and William is the only man who can defeat the yokai and allow Tokugawa to win his battle to unite Japan under his rule. Along the way, William will occasionally run into Kelley and gesture ineffectually before Kelley uses his Villain Teleportation. You'll see the famous Battle of Sekigahara, now featuring a giant demonic skeleton. At the game's climax, Kelley uses his magic to resurrect Tokugawa's predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, for...something.
Unfortunately, the game's answer to the question of "Why is Kelley doing this?" is obviously "Because it would be really cool!" I never really engaged with Nioh's story, but that doesn't automatically make it bad. I'm simply not in the authors' target demographic. Nioh is a Japanese game (though I was surprised to see so many Vietnamese names in the credits) for Japanese players. Almost all of the dialogue is in Japanese with English subtitles. From my point of view, the cast of characters is a bloated mess of difficult-to-distinguish samurai who enter and leave the story at arbitrary intervals. A Japanese player, on the other hand, is likely to react to each new character with "Cool! I remember that guy from history class!" I have only the most basic knowledge of the Sengoku period, and no doubt most of the references flew straight over my head even after reading the character bios.
Returning to Oda, Nioh lets historical hero-worship get in the way of its gameplay, much to this sequence's detriment. Oda appears to be under Kelley's control, and the player engages him in a boss fight. However, Nioh will be damned before it will let some filthy gaijin defeat Oda Nobunaga in single combat. Once you knock off about three-quarters of his health, you lose the battle in a cutscene. At this point, Oda reveals that Kelley never had any hold over him, and he decides that he's far too awesome for this nonsense, walking away over Kelley's stunned protestations.
Kelley then switches to his backup plan and summons Yamata no Orochi, which William fights as the final boss. Whatever. I've played Okami, I know how this thing works. Just focus on one head at a time. All kidding aside, this boss was surprisingly easy; it was one of the few that I defeated on my first try. Once Orochi's dead, the game ends on a beach, where William finishes off Kelley and the game finally remembers that Kelley's job was to ship Amrita back to England, segueing into a post-credits bonus mission.
So that's Nioh. I'm glad I played it, even if it was a tiny bit of a culture shock. I think it's a must-play for any potential Soulslike developers; it has some important lessons regarding what does and does not work in this genre. It's possible that I even learned something about Japanese history!
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