Patreon Letter - 5th May, 2018 (Patreon)

It's Jackson here with another Patreon Letter! I've spent the bulk of my week doing two things. One, working on my God of War piece for deorbital that is going to drop some point next week. I am told by people much smarter than me that it is "very good," so please look forward to that! But I've had time for video games as well. My friends, I have been playing Nioh.

I have played Nioh for approximately 23 hours, and I have completed one of the six regions that comprise the main campaign. Nioh is an exhausting video game, extracting a physical and mental toll, and one that threatens to consume me whole. Nioh could be one of the greatest action games of all time. But it isn’t. Because Team Ninja just can’t help themselves.

On a very basic level, Nioh is Samurai Dark Souls. Every fight can kill you. Combat is designed around animation priority and stamina management. The labrynthian levels are extended jokes played upon the player. It hits all the Dark Souls beats that you would expect, and it executes upon them well. It’s a good game.

What sets Nioh apart is the combat. Nioh is a gift for all the people who complain about the combat in Dark Souls being bad (me, sorry). It exists to adapt what everyone loves about character action games into a genre that people will actually pay for in the late twenty teens. And it does this in incredibly smart ways.

First is the Ki Pulse, which is the Dark Souls equivalent of Active Reload. You slash the sword, the stamina drains, but if you time a press of the R1 button right, you regenerate the majority in an instant. This is a mechanic so good that whoever came up with it presumably retired the next day. It leads to incredible moments where you chain pulses to attacks and with proper timing can tear through enemies like butter. It places stamina regeneration within the player’s control, filling in the blanks left by Dark Souls with some sweet sweet game design. Some would say that space was left blank for a reason, that filling every gap with "more game design" is immature, the Dragonforce of souls combat. 

To those people, I would say: that’s true. It owns.

The Ki Pulse is only the start. Every weapon can be held in three stances, and you can switch between them at will. If you time stance changes with your pulses, you gain attack boosts. Each weapon has a separate, customisable combo tree for every stance. And I’m only twenty hours in, I have so many more skills to unlock.

What holds it all together is that each of these added elements represents a choice. Do you stand still for a split-second and perform a ki-pulse, raising your stamina and attack and setting you up for another assault? Or do you dodge as soon as you finish your strike, taking the stamina hit but putting distance between you and your enemy? Do you fight in low stance, with low damage but high speed dodges? Or do you fight in high stance and take off 500 HP with a single hit? Every one of these additions to the micro design of combat is a decision that has to be actively made, as you weigh th benefits and drawbacks and make your choice while a large samurai launches at you with a fuck off Berserk sword.

The combat is incredible. It is Team Ninja’s triumphant return, a studio that has been living in the shadow of Ninja Gaiden Black (a masterpiece) and Other M (a joke) for the best part of a decade now. It shows that god damn: they still got it.

And then with all that hard work done, someone who I will inevitably travel back in time to tackle on their way to the office bursted into the boardroom where the Team Ninja higher-ups sat and sad: “NIOH SHOULD BE A LOOT GAME.”

It’s heartbreaking. Almost every drop is randomised, every weapon or piece of armour you find has some random stat buffs of around 4%, the game’s progression is essentially Borderlands for Swords. God what a depressing set of words. It should be illegal to take something so precise and finely crafted and just throw all that in the trash. I am sure this will give Nioh a longevity that allows you to replay and replay in the hope of better purple gear, but I’m twenty hours in and I’ve basically just finished the tutorial. The game doesn’t need it and it makes Nioh a categorically worse experience. It’s a crying shame.

There are other issues as well: namely that it’s too fucking hard. And like: obviously, duh, that’s what these games are. But it’s difficult to tell what is a wall and what is a slope. Do you need to level up? Do you need better gear? Do you need to grind for more health potions? Or is this fight just that hard? It’s a game where progression matters immensely, but no single level, gear or upgrade is enough to turn the scales. And to be fair, every Dark Souls game has this problem as well. Slapping loot over the top just makes it exponentially worse.

So that’s my time with Nioh. I love it. I love it so much and I wish it was better. Such is the curse of being a fan of Team Ninja games, I suppose.

Jackson