Sometimes I like to relax and play a game with no violence, okay?
Slowly working my way through Nioh 3 after I just kinda lost interest in Trails in the Sky: First Chapter (I'll get back to it at some point, but there's just something about that game that gets old fast. Maybe it's the mediocre soundtrack). The game's good, but I definitely prefer the level design, boss design, and gimmicks of the previous 2 Nioh games. This shift to Open World works better than it should, but it also means that you see an awful lot of the SAME level design since what used to be distinct levels now have to fit together coherently.
It was cool to run through a random cliff-face cave at point point and suddenly end up in a stormy seaside shrine area with a giant Yokai chucking boulders at me, so I had to run from cover to cover to get to a safe area. More of that, please. Less cool was triggering a lengthy sidequest after entering a cave, only to end with a combat encounter against a boss that's been re-used since early in Nioh 1 and who is STILL using her entrance CGI cutscene FROM Nioh 1 AND 2. Team Ninja should be up there with Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio for an environmental impact award due to their dedication to recycling.
I'm in the 2nd main area of the game now. I'm really mixed on how they've separated out the weapons into "Samurai" and "Ninja"-exclusives. The weapons that are now in the "Samurai" class basically function how they've always done in the series, but the Ninja class can't Ki Pulse or stance change and it's really throwing me off. It's also really annoying that my primary weapon in these games, the Kusarigama, is relegated to being a Ninja class-only weapon and you have to do a bunch of button and stick inputs to do moves with it that used to be relegated to stance changes. It also means I no longer have my whirling buzzsaw of death I got so used to annihilating enemies with in Nioh 1 & 2.
On the upside, Ninjutsu has never been more useful than it is in Nioh 3, since there's now a dedicated form for it and it refills by attacking enemies instead of having to run back to a shrine. On the downside, Omnyo Magic has never been more worthless. It's all tied to equipping magic cores like in Nioh 2 that you acquire via random drops, and enemies are pretty good at dodging it in 3 compared to the previous games. Sloth has been neutered to the point of basically being worthless, and that was a key part of my combat kit in the previous games. You basically use Omnyo Magic to kill enemies with high physical defense now, and that's kinda it. Even Ninjutsu is typically better at killing flying enemies since those projectiles have tracking.
I see that Nioh 3 also continues from Nioh 2 in the story being absolutely an absolutely pointless sea of forgettable names, as well as being another time travel story because that's what Nioh 2's DLC did. I'm not sure there's a setting with less aesthetic point to having a time travel gimmick than feudal Japan. Yes, the 2nd area has snow. Take away the snow, and it looks exactly the same as the Warring States map.
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