016
06
Team Ninja defines
the Nioh games as
‘masocore’ – its
own coinage. As
we sit down to play
we’re warned that
our demo, starting at a point midway
through the game, might be a little
tough. It is. (And youcanfindoutjust
how tough for
yourself as the
game hits shelves
right after this
issue.) But we’re
ready for this; the
calluses on our
hands have been
forming ever since
we played the dev’sNinjaGaiden
games on PS3 and PS Vita.
While the Sengoku-era samurai
series clearly owes FromSoftware a
debt for its Dark Souls-inspired
action, Nioh is also the next steppingstone in the koi pond from Team
Ninja’s prickly-as-kunai ninja games.
“When we made Ninja Gaiden we just
wanted it to illustrate the high-speed
combat and the intense battles. And
as a result, it ended up being a
difficult game,” says Yosuke Hayashi,
Nioh 2’s general producer, when we
comparethetwo series. “And with
ninja and samurai
combat, I think Nioh
kind of grew into
the genre as well,
but it was just
an interesting
coincidence.”STEEL RESOLVE
It mighthavebeen with Nioh that
Team Ninja came up with the term
masocore (which Hayashi defines as
“the tension of life or death at that
moment, in this one instant”), but
difficulty has always been a crucialpart of the studio’s games. “[We] like
very difficult games. But we don’t
think difficult equals good. It still has
to be fair,” Hayashi explains. “It has
to feel right when you die, so we
carefully balanced difficulty that way.
And we hope that makes the game
accessible enough for the new
players as well.” The truth is anyone
can make a super-hard game, but it
takes real skill to create one that is
extremely challenging but also has a
fair path to mastery.
But it’s not like Nioh was designed
to frustrate players. “We weren’t
actually specifically making a
masocore game at the start, but we
wanted to express the tension of the
samurai sword battles. As a result,
that genre worked really well with
Nioh. It is currently a masocore, but
it will keep growing and it might
eventually grow out of it. I don’t know
what’s going to happen as itWE DON’T
THINK DIFFICULT
EQUALS GOOD.
IT STILL HAS TO
BE FAIR.Nioh 2 promises to
be a total masocore
How Team Ninja perfected the art of balancing difficulty
Take yokai souls to equip
their powers yourself.
Send ‘em back to Hell.dev talk
“In Nioh we picked
the second half of
the Sengoku era [as
a setting], which is
a time of war until
it calmed down.
[Though] the first
half of the Sengoku
era is the most
popular time period
in Japanese history,
so it was crucial to
use that time period
[this time].”
Yosuke Hayashi
General producer,
Team Ninja