Innovation is the ki to success for Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo, as Nioh 3 iterates on the formula once more to take an already great ‘masocore’ series to new heights.
The Nioh series isn’t exactly known for its nuance: there is good and evil, strong and weak, and little in-between. From feuding clans to the machinations of political elites, this binary is at the heart of everything in Team Ninja’s pseudo-historical canon. Nioh 3 takes this black-and-white worldview and applies it to the feuding Tokugawa brothers at the start of the Seventeenth Century. Your character, Takechiyo, is good: noble, just, proper. Your brother, a bitter little rat tempted by ancient powers beyond his understanding (of course), is evil. His desire for power and notoriety is so distinct, in fact, that it has somehow summoned a supernatural ‘crucible’ from the darkest reaches of space-time, and this consuming chaos is so profound, it has managed to seep into four major eras of Japanese history. Uh oh!
Nioh 3 review
- Developer: Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo
- Publisher: Koei Tecmo Games
- Platform: Played on PS5 Pro
- Availability: Out 6th February on PC (Steam), PS5
So begins the tale of Nioh 3. Inexplicably, playing as the sickliest of the great Tokugawa Ieyasu’s grandchildren, you are whisked away through various periods of Japanese history. It is your task – nay, your birthright! – to insert yourself into the thorniest bits of political intrigue in shogunate canon and undo the evil influence called forth by your brother across the Heian period, the Bakumatsu period, antiquity, and beyond. Even by Nioh standards, this is nonsense. But therein lies the charm, I think.
What this ‘time cop’ setup does is pretty convenient for Team Ninja: after two games set during the major conflicts of the Sengoku period, this gimmick gives the developer free rein to jump outside its established timeline and show us other parts of Japanese culture: modifying history with myth, and giving more context to the ‘spirit stone’ MacGuffin that lies at the centre of Nioh’s complicated web of lore.
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I don’t think it adds much to Nioh’s story, though. The bulk of narrative is still delivered through campy cutscenes that don’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’re paying a lot of attention, with short animated sequences giving you insight into character motivations and key conflicts. There’s a lot of yelling, dying, and asking the main character to continue forward whilst people sort things out back here. It’s anachronistic in terms of storytelling, sure, but that’s not why most people come to Nioh, is it?
Personally, I come for the combat and the menuing. Yes, really – the build-crafting of Nioh has always been this series’ strength. The previous Nioh games were sumptuous feasts for fellow loot goblins, and Nioh 3 is even better. Now, there are two whole character builds you can enjoy: samurai and ninja. Before, you had to choose one or the other, and that meant that quick weapons like kusarigama or dual swords would have to share a build with massive, powerful weapons like naginata or odachi.
In Nioh 3, you can flit between ninja and samurai on a whim. This means two whole, unique builds available to you at the tap of R2. Common sense dictates you’d have your ninja – which can evade without using stamina and ready back-attacks with uncanny ease – focus on quick, stamina-draining moves, whilst your samurai is poised to dish out huge damage with slower, more ki-hungry attacks. There are probably other setups that work, but that logic carried me through 60 hours of Nioh 3 with only about two or three major roadblocks in terms of progress (so, yeah, it’s easier than the other two games).
But two loadouts means two sets of menus. I think the longest I spent gazing at stats, armour set bonuses, and the meagre differences between 0.1 percent increments of buffs was about 28 minutes in one go. I can feel some of your eyes glazing over as I write that, sorry. But there are also people looking at their screens now going ‘yes, yes‘ because you, like me, are deeply unwell and find comfort in this sort of Spreadsheet Simulator nonsense.
Thanks to the powerful level-scaling in Nioh 3, though, every whisper of stat increase counts. Swapping out new gear every five or so levels is pretty integral to the core experience (and Team Ninja has made it very easy to auto-sort your lower-level gear whenever you pray at a shrine, ridding you of some of the more taxing busywork and rewarding you with level-up materials basically for free). You can also auto-equip the best gear in your inventory, which can be adjusted for weight class or set bonus, meaning you won’t accidentally go fat-rolling into battle against a tengu next time you accidentally wander into an encounter area.
Image credit: Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo
When you’re all kitted out, it’s time to grit your teeth and employ a bit of kiri-sute gomen (or: right to strike). The open-ended regions of Nioh 3 take inspiration from Elden Ring, sort-of: yes, there’s a singular marker for story completion, but it’s bolstered and decorated with a decent, not-overbearing selection of side activities. Clear out bases, hunt down formidable enemies, chase some cats around, shoot weasels out of the sky, engage in secret boss battles, weaken the integrity of the pulsating, intimidating Crucible throbbing overhead at all times… Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed this is not. Team Ninja calls Nioh 3 ‘open field’, not ‘open world’, and I think the sizing and design of the maps is pretty perfect – I only found myself getting bored with one of the four huge areas, and only because I’d over-levelled myself to some degree re-doing an optional mission over and over again to get gear for an odachi-based build that carried my samurai through most of the game.
As is series tradition, combat is as good as you’ll find in the genre. Nioh 3 is the high tide. I was dubious about the separation of ninja and samurai to begin with (‘I want high poses for all weapons’, I moaned after seeing the baton-like tonfa weapons seemingly relegated to one move pool), but within a few hours I was sold. I can’t actually imagine going back to Nioh 2, now: the distinction between classes feels so natural and so intuitive, it’s hard to believe it was ever any different. The class switch button is also your ‘burst counter’ button, meaning that big, powerful moves denoted by a red aura can only be stopped by switching classes at the right time. This is baked into so many enemy movesets, the game essentially forces you into a dance between the two loadouts. Use both, or die. So goes the unofficial Nioh 3 motto.
Stance-based combat is still there in samurai mode, and I think that remains one of the best, most unique things about the series: dancing from low to mid to high stance to take advantage of enemy vulnerabilities, timing your stance switches to perform ki bursts and purify yokai-affected areas, and then weaving this altogether to pull off a new ‘martial art’ special move and finish off your hulking adversary in one combo string? Pump it into my veins. The newly-added utility of being able to swap to ninja mid-run to recover stamina (or ki) when you over-exert and open up some high-damage back attacks? It’s as close as you’re going to get to poetry in action game terms.
Previous games made using the extent of your toolkit a pain in arse (or fingers, I suppose, with all the dexterous gymnastics you’d have to do just to ready, say, a ‘Sloth Talisman’ to apply a slowing debuff to an enemy). Readying magic, ninjutsu or items all lived on the same set of buttons – your item UI in the bottom left corner. Now, ninjutsu is particular to the ninja class, meaning bombs, caltrops, traps, poison mists, substitute tech and more can only be used in ninja class – and it auto-refills as you deal damage. This one change opens up the Nioh toolkit in a spectacular fashion, and as someone that has platinumed both original games twice (yes, I know), I found myself using so many more tricks and tools in this playthrough than I ever have before. The boomerang-like shuriken pinwheel, for what it’s worth, is a lifesaver. More tools means more by-the-skin-of-your-teeth survivals, and it means Team Ninja can ram more boss gauntlets into the crevices of the game without the risk of pissing you off too much.
Image credit: Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo
Nioh 3 accessibility options
Fully configure controls, including Style Shift and Burst Break separation, toggle Grapple and Martial Arts, button hold, ranged weapon aim control, guard control, stick and swap horizontal stick controls. Toggle whether controls shown on screen. Trigger Effect Strength. Vibration, including control over vibration intensity. Screen Shake Settings. Gore related settings to control dismemberment effects and display blood. Text and voice language settings. Subtitles, including display speaker in subtitles, sound effect captions and subtitle size. Colour Perception Settings for important text colour and rarity colour pattern. Volume controls for overall volume, music, sound effects and voice. Other audio settings for audio output, dynamic range and sound effect assistance.
Since Nioh 2, we’ve seen Team Ninja release Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Rise of the Ronin, and Ninja Gaiden 4. That auto-equip feature I mentioned was something actually introduced in Stranger of Paradise. The massive zones you have to explore in Nioh 3 feel like a cross between Wo Long and Rise of the Ronin, with the stat bonuses conferred upon you for completing various side tasks taken straight from the latter. A lot of the newly-optimised ninja moves feel inspired by – you guessed it – Ninja Gaiden 4.
Nioh 3 feels like the crucible in which all of Team Ninja’s experience has been siphoned into. It studied the fundamentals of every discipline learned by Team Ninja, and wove them all together to create something unique and new, more expansive and more focused. It gives you more freedom in your combat, more depth to your builds, and more expression in how you navigate the nuances of samurai/ninja melee. All the best bosses from the franchise return, and are bolstered by some all-time classics in newcomers in turn. The historical melodrama of the story is fine, and the semi-open world level design shows why restraint is as important as scope when it comes to scale.
It feels as though the series, after three iterations, has finally refined its formula to the point of excellence: like the shogun it so reveres, it has taken the roots of what has come before, paid homage to its legacy, and deigned to build something even more powerful – something even more enduring – on those foundations. Enjoy the brutality, revel in the power fantasy, and let yourself be hammered into the ground by the blunt-force trauma of a world dedicated to seeing everything in terms of absolutes.
A copy of Nioh 3 was provided for this review by Koei Tecmo.
