Nioh 3 Review

I’m not a fan of, or good at, souls-like games. Nioh 3 will be the first one I’ll beat. The relentless pace of the Nioh games has always stood out from the crowd, and the third instalment ups the thrill by taking a few pages, nay, borrowing Ninja Gaiden’s scroll. The varying avenues for boosting your stats and experimenting with various play styles can overwhelm even experienced players, and that’s where Nioh 3 shines.

Filling in the boots of a customisable Tokugawa Takechiyo during the Genna 8 period, you’re tasked with demystifying the deviance of your evil-spirited brother, Tokugawa Kunimatsu, as you time-travel through Japan’s most significant eras. Team Ninja takes the charge by immediately infusing Nioh with Ninja Gaiden’s fast-moving traversal and combat mechanics. We’ve also got a large “open zones”, taking inspiration from Elden Ring and recent Ubisoft titles, delicately balanced with the main campaign’s difficulty curve. The result? One of the fastest and most accessible souls-likes yet.

Past Nioh games have served experimental players with plenty of weapon options, but Nioh 3 takes it up a notch by offering free resets for skill trees and levelling, inviting players to keep changing up their strategy and never settling. Passive boons come in the form of prestige points, earned through miscellaneous feats, and Kodama/Jizo points, which you need to seek out in the world. Pushing the franchise in the direction of open worlds was concerning, but after having spent nearly 50 hours with it, I can confidently say that Team Ninja handled it well. Exploration is always rewarded, but seldom unfairly, as was the case with Elden Ring in the early game.

The new ninja style will be praised by everyone who hates (read: sucks at) mastering the Ki pulse in samurai mode. Switching to ninja style offers a new move called “mist”, where players can dodge and leave an imprint of their body to distract enemies while unleashing a flurry of attacks. The mist system, combined with new ranged ninjutsu attacks and evasive manoeuvres, feels straight out of Ninja Gaiden, especially when equipped with the talons. You can’t just stick to one style either, as performing “burst breaks” using the style shift is quite necessary to guard against one-hit kills from enemies.

Every souls-like game always has a moment where it all “clicks” for the player, usually after the first major roadblock. In Bloodborne, it was Father Gascoigne; in Elden Ring, it’s Margit. In Nioh 3, it’s Yamagata Masagake, the tutorial boss, and his subsequent visitations. The first encounter tests how well you’ve grasped the basics, while the latter checks how well you’ve mastered them. There were plenty of moments where I nearly threw my controller across the room in frustration, followed by grinding up to over-level myself. Conversely, the battles following the story’s roadblocks seem rather painfully easy, as if the game decided to shift back its gears for players to keep riding on the sense of accomplishment.

These major bosses are primarily encountered at the end of a “Crucible” level – linear play spaces surrounded by evil energy and buffs for enemies, who can apply “life corrosion” (permanent damage) to your health bar. While they’re challenging areas, they also present a new opportunity: acquiring crucible weapons for their special, overpowered arts.

Nioh 3 maintains its sense of great challenge in its main quests, regardless of how over-levelled you think you are, while the open fields’ fiends can be reduced to a pulp. There’s a slight imbalance, but seeing benevolent graves of other players, also over-levelled, tells me that most players will choose the path of least resistance, at the cost of grinding extra hard. This leads to a disbalanced loot distribution, as even most “rare” weapons I picked up from enemies were several levels below my characters.

Levelling up weapons is also costly, too costly in my experience. While the game rewards experimentation, sometimes it feels forced. I’d go for hours before I could pick up a samurai/ninja weapon art that actually belonged to my equipped weapon’s class. For most of it, it feels like the game is screaming at me to switch up my weapons and give others a try. The same goes for the NPC masters you can challenge, as well as the skill system. There are too many options given too frequently with too few slots to actually try them out without leaving your preferred play style.

The open-world structure does have its faults. Hot springs scattered across the map are usually useless by the time you find them. Enemy bases can get repetitive. Minor crucibles, guarded by tougher enemies, hide soul cores that, when harnessed, imbue Takechiyo with elemental and summon-based powers. Loot is never completely pointless. Sell it, offer it to a shrine, or dismantle it for upgrading your preferred equipment. There are plenty of options to keep improving your stats.

The sense of progression keeps up even 50 hours into the game, with new features unlocking after major checkpoints in the story, usually marked by the toughest enemies in a specific zone. I was blown away when I realised I could equip and switch between two weapons per style, and weave combos between styles and stances while switching weapons, after finishing the first act. However, the recommended level of an area, as suggested on the map screen, seems to grossly undersell the level of danger it poses. Of course, sometimes the fault lies in ineffective levelling. Nioh 3 doesn’t reward putting all your points in strength. Instead, it’s the mastery of the ki and martial arts/ninjutsu that strengthens your character.

While the world is split into different eras and zones, each representing a significant act of the game, Nioh 3 also rewards backtracking. Spirit veins require bespoke spirit guardians to traverse through them, which are unlocked at different points in the story. Similarly, new side-quests from previous areas open up after making significant progress in the story, often with a misdirected level recommendation for good humour.

When the heat was turned up, I turned to co-op, which was sadly broken during the review period. Either I couldn’t connect with my fellow warriors, or I did, and the game wouldn’t render most of the environment’s assets. Performance, fortunately, is surprisingly smooth. On a base PS5, I could easily play through most of the game at 60fps, with the frame rate hitching to the mid-50s in areas with intense environmental effects (mostly the Heian period).

Finally, there’s the story. It’s adequately interesting, though I doubt most players will be raving about it. However, for someone who usually prefers Sony’s cinematic first-party games, I appreciate that it has an active plot and doesn’t relegate the storytelling to lore books and NPC dialogue.