If, for any reason, you need a consuming, maddening, hugely deep action RPG to distract you from something this weekend, PS4 has you covered. Nioh 2, the sequel to Team Ninja’s Samurai Soulslike that released to critical and commercial success in 2017. We’re getting another one tomorrow, and I’ve been playing it for a bit now. It’s a good, solid game, and a good way to keep the world’s demons at bay for a few hours. Read on for the release date and 5 things to know before you play.
Nioh 2 releases on March 13, 2020, as a PS4 exclusive.
You’re a Sengoku-era Japanese Demon Warrior: The first Nioh put us in the shoes of William, an Irishman turned Samurai fighting demons in Sengoku Japan. This is a prequel, and but you’re still controlling someone caught between two worlds of a kind. You control a half-Yokai(a genre of supernatural creatures), half-human warrior that has to traipse around the country slaughtering humans and demons alike.
That means that you have access to all the systems of Nioh and then some, with the opportunity to go full-Yokai and tear into your opponents every once in a while. It’s fun to do.
It’s Hard: Nioh 2 is in the grand tradition of the modern Soulslike, just like its predecessor. That means it is a tough unforgiving experience that asks you to master its systems or be killed trying. Every enemy in this game poses a threat, from the lowliest bandit to the most terrifying Yokai. It is not a game with a lot of wiggle room in it, and if you drain your stamina at the wrong time and find yourself exposed, you will be punished.
So expect to die. Expect to lose progress as you do. Expect to get one-shotted by a weird hopping demon, expect to make great progress against a boss and then get annihilated within the span of 10 seconds. Have patience and keep your calm, this is how it goes.
But there are accommodations in place: This isn’t Sekiro, which eschewed the genre-standard summoning system for taking on tough bosses. If you’re overwhelmed in Nioh 2, you have options. The summoning system, for one thing, is in place, and it allows you to bring up to two other players into your world to help out. And once you’ve got three players in the mix, the difficulty really melts away in favor of an insane hack and slash.
But that’s not all: there are also now “benevolent graves” that can offer you a handy AI companion at any time, with no need to wait on someone else to help. This is useful for when you just want to explore, if you need a leg up to recover your progress after an annoying death. The only problem is that the “acolytes” summoned from Benevolent Graves are dumb as rocks, and they won’t be much help against bosses and tougher world creatures.
It’s really, really complicated: There is a certain essential simplicity in the Dark Souls formula that presents endlessly complex ways to deploy what are ultimately a relatively limited system of abilities, stats and skills. That is…not the case here. Nioh 2 has just an absolutely huge amount of stuff going on, and it gets overwhelming. There are 9 weapons, each of which can be held in low, mid, or high stance, and each stance of each weapon has a skill tree. You can select up to two Yokai attacks to augment your other abilities, and you have another tree for your demonic Yokai form. You have magic items and ninja items, you ranged attacks, you have an absurd font of loot spewing forth from basically every enemy. There’s a lot to wrap your mind around, so be prepared.
It’s not as impenetrable as it seems: Soulslikes can be intimidating, and I maintain that they should all have difficulty and accessibility options for those that choose to avail themselves of them. I went into this girding myself for such an experience, and that’s more or less what I had for the first couple of hours.
After that, however, things opened up. The wealth of weapon and ability options combined with the benevolent grave system make this game a lot more forgiving than you think it’s going to be, giving you a wide range of tools with which to deal with any encounter, and in some cases trivialize them through one exploit or another. You can tool this to be a brutal experience if you don’t take advantage of what’s on offer, but those inclined to simplify things will find it possible.
