Beating a boss in a Team Ninja RPG is a feat worth celebrating. These climactic duels often force players to learn patterns and think quickly in order to land that fatal blow; there’s no mindless button mashing here. But the joy of victory in a battle well fought is often diminished by the scores of shiny loot on the ground near the boss’ still-warm corpse, as if the freshly slain samurai or demon just dumped their entire dresser out before crossing over to the other side. Such spoils are not a fitting reward here since they only emphasize the increasingly annoying loot problem that has been plaguing Team Ninja’s RPGs for almost a decade.
The abundance of loot is consistent across Nioh, Nioh 2, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, Rise of the Ronin, and, the latest game, Nioh 3. All six games ensure players have to either constantly filter through their gear or only occasionally go through it in fewer but longer sessions, which is dependent on how big the inventory limit is. Team Ninja has raised that limit over the years — it’s 500 in the original Nioh and 2,000 in Nioh 3 — but this slight acknowledgement of the problem doesn’t actually solve it; the underlying issue is still there. Team Ninja has also even spoken about the excessive loot in regards to Wo Long — another acknowledgement that it is a problem — yet that game still dishes out avalanches of equipment.
Nioh 3’s Flood of Loot is Too Familiar
Image Courtesy of Koei Tecmo
And very little of these gear pieces actually reward players with meaningful buffs. Many of them offer paltry benefits that almost seem like a joke. Some of these benefits seen in Nioh 3 include:
- +1.8% aerial attack Ki damage
- +1.4% Guardian Spirit Skill damage
- +2.5% Ninjutsu Ki damage
- +0.8% Guard Ki recovery speed
- +2.1% Ki damage to enemies inflected by Water
These are not outliers or miniscule percentages locked to the lowliest of gear found in the opening hours. These examples are from high-level purple and green gear from the endgame. It’s a ubiquitous problem that’s persistent across Nioh 3 but not exclusive to it. Similar stats can be pulled from all the other aforementioned Team Ninja games, too.
Gear, ideally, is supposed to change how players play, give them access to new abilities, or noticeably change their stats enough for them to make a build, as is the case with games like God of War Ragnarok where new armor changes the experience. That just isn’t the case here — no one is going to feel 1.4% more Guardian Spirit Skill damage or be able to make a build around it — and this deflates the whole system.
And since the stats aren’t there, gear makes for terrible incentive for exploration and doing side missions. It’s hard to want to search around every nook and cranny knowing that a hidden chest behind a mini-boss could just contain a yellow-tier pair of boots and a consumable that will only gather dust. Despite that, it’s hard not to poke around anyway because sometimes that glowing item orb might be a vital key or big experience-yielding Spirit Stone. It might be. It probably won’t be because it rarely is, but it’s difficult to ignore that nagging, completionist-minded inner voice.
Nioh 3 in particular suffers in this regard the most because of its larger environments. It is clearly drawing from Elden Ring here but completely misses why that beloved 2022 title gets players to prod around its every cursed crevice. Its environments are designed for the eye and also usually contain something worthwhile. Nioh 3’s locales are not only more drab, but they also don’t yield the same gear quality.
Image Courtesy of Koei Tecmo
Sifting through all of this garbage is also annoying because it requires players to spend more time in menus than they should. Selling or breaking it all down takes up time players could be using to kill bosses or check off side quests. While games this intense should have downtime, spending so much of that in menus figuring out what to do with hundreds of pieces of junk is not a great change of pace. Team Ninja — again with its tacit acknowledgement of this issue — has added multiple quality-of-life features that are aimed to make this easier. Players can set it so the game automatically offers, sells, disassembles, or extracts excess gear of a certain rarity, but it feels strange to automate something at this broad of a scale when different unanticipated situations might call for different resources.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was in a somewhat similar predicament. While not at the same scale, it bombarded players with all sorts of colored items and required constant culling. Ubisoft purposely took a more measured approach with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla by making its gear unique. Granted, there was still too much of it because it was a wildly bloated game, but that sentiment is something Team Ninja should adopt.
Team Ninja’s venture in the Soulslike genre has been rather fruitful in many other ways. Nioh 2 is one of the best of its kind, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin — while not quite on the same level as Nioh 2 — are still worthy in their own ways. But the loot problem that has persisted since the original Nioh in 2017 has metastasized into something much more than a minor irritation. Great to excellent combat can distract from these headaches, but it remains to be seen how long that can be the case, especially for a studio with such a prolific release cycle.
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