080
may know him from Koei Tecmo’s Nobunaga’s
Ambition and Samurai Warriors series). It’s
nice to see your custom character and the
gear you have currently equipped represented
in the cutscenes, but there’s not a lot to the
story. Basically it gives you an excuse to follow
Nobunaga as he sweeps the country in a quest
to unify Japan under one rule.
Set in Japan’s Sengoku era, a time of warring
states (making it a prequel to the first Nioh), a
lot of the game involves battles-in-progress. This
does mean the setting itself doesn’t change all
that much. You fight your way through many a
ruined castle, village, shrine, and cave, plus some
forests, too. But somehow Nioh 2 manages to
make every stage feel unique. Each one has some
new twist, often involving a surge of yokai in the
area. For example, there’s a half-flooded castle
drowned in torrential rain, and a mountainside
prison warped by pathways of solid ice.
If you’re already familiar with soulsbornes,
you’ll immediately understand the process of
exploring these large stages, though by virtue ofbeing stages rather than one big
open world your relationship
with the space is different than
it is in, say, Bloodborne. You
make your way from shrine
to shrine, activating them as
checkpoints, on your way to
a boss – either a monstrous
yokai or a particularly strong
warrior. As you go you loot
stronger equipment, restore lost
kodama spirits to their shrines,
and unlock shortcuts looping
back to checkpoints. The
stages are filled with brilliantly
hidden pathways, found by
kicking over trees to cross
gaps, closing dams, or the
good old-fashioned ‘kicking
a ladder down’.
As you progress stages often
evolve: a town in flames gives
way to a massive shrine in a
poison-dripping cave; near
to a forest castle previously
flooded caves open up when
you divert a river; an owl hunts
you throughout a dark forest
before you take it on in a sea
cove. Boss fights are every bitas inventive as the level design,
and learning their attack
patterns so you can burst
counter them into oblivion is
properly rewarded.UNIFYING JAPAN
There’s a massive amount of
content in Nioh 2, but the
inventiveness from start to
finish keeps it from getting
stale. Optional sub-missions,
geared at level points in
between the recommended
levels from your last main
mission and your next, are
much better this time around
too. With a mix of objectives
and involving clever remixing
of previous maps, these
provide shorter challenges (and
sometimes tougher ones, in the
case of one-on-one duels). On
top of that, Twilight Missions,
which rotate regularly, challenge
you with harder versions of
previously completed chapters.
There’s almost always more to
do, and the game is such fun
to play that you’ll want to keep“WHERE ANOTHER PLAYER
HAS DIED, YOU CAN SUMMON
THEIR PHANTOM TO FIGHT.”
Above The
so-called
demon lord
Oda Nobunaga
oozes charisma.
We’re happy to
serve him.Left Meet up
with allies in a
level and they
might join your
side in battle.