Currently playing Nioh 3.
It feels a lot different to Nioh 2. Most notably, balance is less sweaty (My experience in Nioh 2 was even when dumping all points into health and wearing the strongest armour I could, I still got one-shot by EVERYTHING)
Seems to have taken inspiration from ER as it's more open world than before too. Though it ends up feeling more Ubisoft-esk in its design where it's just "Run here, do generic thing, move on to the next thing". The only major difference is they made it arbitrarily annoying. You don't get to see icons on the map until you increase your "Exploration Level" by... Completing objectives... So you have to run around blindly hoping you run into enough objectives to then be able to actually see them.
Minimap is also nigh useless as it doesn't show you the area. It only shows north and nearby objectives you've found. So navigation involves a lot of opening up the full map and figuring out where paths are.
Loot is... Not amazing. Very much in the vein of "Looter" games, so you get a bunch of random stuff with random stats (And random levels) and thus have to wade through hundreds of items to look for upgrades every few minutes.
Combat is... Ehh... They've gone and made 2 different combat styles. One is similar to prior titles where you have your 3 stances for different attack styles and you dance between them to maintain your "Stamina" and the other is more like a standard Soulslike... If you were on crack and needed to backstab to deal damage (Also, it has some abilities to do damage at range, though they're pathetically weak in 99% of cases and only really useful to exploit elemental weakness)
This could have been interesting if they were combined... But they're not. They use different equipment and don't interact with each other. So you just pick which one you like and ignore the other (Outside when you accidentally swap modes because the "Parry the big attack" button is also the "Swap combat mode" button)
So in essence, it feel like it's a lot more casual friendly compared to the other Nioh games (And soulslikes in general). Both with the balance being more down to earth and also the new combat mode that goes away from the precision based style the series is known for and is more "Just mash attack and your free dodge"
As far as other non-gameplay related things go:
- Character creator is decent. Offering a range of presets and then many sliders to customize.
- English VA is bad. Most characters sound incredibly wooden and lack any emotion.
- English lip syncing is also horrendous. Not quite as bad as classic kung fu films but it honestly seems like they didn't even try.
I'll have to swap to Japanese VO to see if that is done better.
- Map design, as far as I've experienced (I'm not sure if later zones offer more variety) but everything is dark and dingy. It doesn't look good and it's often hard to actually discern things (Like enemies or objects).
- Story is meh. "You're going to be shogun" something something "Betrayal" something something "You're now back in time for... Reasons"
Overall... I'd call the game mid at best. It's not horrible as combat can be entertaining enough with either mode. But it does have a lot of questionable features (Also, some FPS issues). If you're not a big Soulslike fan but enjoyed ER's more casual approach it'd probably be fine for you too (Though bosses and tough enemies can be a little tricky)
