![]() Unlike in Souls, these are separately loaded areas, but they're governed by a similar emphasis on unlockable shortcuts. From Souls, Nioh derives the idea of dropping your collected XP at the point of death, granting you a single opportunity to recover it, together with moody, winding levels pegged together by shrines full of friendly sprites who restore you while also resurrecting non-boss enemies. Returning players will find Nioh 2 looks and handles mostly as was, give or take some more lifelike animations and a richer colour palette. Ultimately, it's just a bunch of interludes stuffed into a campaign where you pick main and side missions from a Total War-style overworld view. ![]() The dialogue and acting are sparky, but there's little narrative backbone. The first game was hardly feted for its storytelling and the second offers much the same, lavish but scatter-brained mix of period celebrities, eccentrics and pantomime manipulators. The real Hideyoshi's feats include confiscating swords from all over Japan and melting them down into a statue of the Buddha - a source of some irony here, given that you'll spend much of Nioh 2 wondering how to dispose of all the worn-out gear filling your inventory. The gimmick is that you're enacting the secret history of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the real-life daimyo credited with unifying a wartorn Japan, who in this retelling was actually two people. Early on you fall in with a wandering ragamuffin, Tokichiro, who embroils you in a quest for fame and fortune. Set before the first game's events, it casts you as Hide, a custom-created adventurer with yokai blood - a trait that allows you to wield the abilities of slain demons and briefly assume yokai form yourself. ![]() Branding it Nioh 1.5 is too much, but this is definitely a case of ornamenting the grip rather than changing the blade (forgery nerds, feel free to chime in here with a more apposite comparison). If Nioh 2 is full of such surprises, it is not a surprising sequel. These are the reversals that really set Soulslikes apart, the moments when no amount of levelling, gear bonuses, abject pleading or apoplectic rage can stop you dying at the hands of the very first enemy type you killed, 40 hours before. You skitter out of reach, and whoops, it turns out one of those hags was lurking in a closet behind you. It's that when you knock one flat, another may pounce on and devour it, tripling in size. It's not just that they spew paralysing fluid when you punch them too hard, or that they sometimes accompany larger threats - bouncing stones off your skull like unruly children as you duck under blows that will kill you instantly. It's not just that they're fond of playing dead near treasure. Worst of all, though, are the pot-bellied Gollum equivalents who infest the game's Sengoku Japan setting, a world of cherry-blossom villages, spoiling castles and torchlit carrion fields. Elsewhere you'll encounter bandits who are easy prey till they're about to die, whereupon they'll Hulk out and wrestle you to the floor, and deceptively polished samurai who are host to demons that spit fire and poison. But sometimes, it ends with her bowling a knife at your head. Often, it ends with the hag tumbling over in a heap. It's easily evaded and rather silly, more senior moment than special move. Publisher: Koei Tecmo/Sony Interactive Entertainmentįor instance: you'll meet a demon hag whose abilities include a sort of arthritic spin attack, cackling and flailing around as though trying to free herself from a net.It's about the dirty little bastards in the undergrowth, the rank-and-file grunts with tricks up their sleeves. ![]() But this terrific, if conservative and overloaded follow-up to 2017's blend of Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls isn't really about the giants. My standouts include a massive owl demon who periodically turns off the lights, forcing you to track the creature by its glaring red eyes. Nioh 2 offers plenty of bosses, most plucked from the grottier tracts of Japanese folklore and all endowed with the ability to shift the proceedings into the "yokai" or spirit realm, where their attacks are more ferocious - a nifty variation on the idea of boss phases. Marquee adversaries like Ornstein and Smough might command the lion's share of Youtube uploads, but they aren't, or shouldn't be, the things you truly dread. The measure of a good Soulslike isn't the might of its (Nameless) kings, but the deviousness of its pawns. An absorbing, tense and well-wrought samurai adventure let down by a little too much recycling and some muddled new systems.
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