NIOH | Greatness From Small Beginnings
From the moment you start NIOH you’re thrown into a dank dark dungeon with nothing but your fists and wits. You get a little tutorial just to help layout the groundwork of the game for you. It’s a little splash in what seems like a large pond. You have nothing but your fists and wit as you take out the first enemy that you come across. From there it’s a twisting and turning jail with tons of guards and lots of pitfalls. Sadly after you clear the jail and move past the first boss, which you can surprisingly win against which was a nice touch. You’re tossed off a roof, shipped off a boat, and land onto the first level. Losing everything you gained from the tutorial and left with your trusty fists, some clothes, and the knowledge you’ve gained.
NIOH Keeps Things Simple
You start with nothing but you’ll be discarding items in no time (If you don’t die constantly)
The first thing you’ll notice when landing on the beach is a shrine directly in front of you. These are essentially bonfires from Dark Souls, you can level up, collect DLC items, change your Shrine Guardian Spirits and summon visitors for multiplayer. The coolest feature is that you can make Offerings at a Shrine. This allows you to discard items that are not going to use or just aren’t worth using. Doing this allows you to gather Amrita and gain healing items. Amrita is used to level up your character, you just need to choose which way to spec. The game has a lot of options in this regard allowing you to master a slew of weapons.
NIOH Shrine Screen
Specializing Anyway You Want
Level Up Screen
In NIOH you can choose to level up in a pretty interesting amount of ways. It’s a boil downed version of Dark Souls’ extensive array of options but it manages to still feel a tad overwhelming when you realize that everything affects multiple facets. It comes down to which weapons you want to focus on mastering. I start off going with everything that increases my damage with a sword and ax. Down the road, I find a chain-sickle that you can swing around and decide to spec in that direction instead. It depends on how much you want to grind, which can be daunting since the game is fairly unforgivable even in the early goings.
Let’s Go Exploring
From the shrine you collect a weapon almost immediately, however, you also run into your first enemy. You can just power through him, trying out different stances and getting a better feel of what the combat truly entails. It’s almost like a rhythm game in a way, sort of like a more advanced Batman Arkham battle system. You can block, change stances, manage your Kai, change weapons on the fly, and of course flee if need be. Maybe later in the game, you can change weapons more fluidly to make a powerful combo but in the early goings, it requires time to swap weapons and thus leaving you open.
You can’t really button mash your way through enemies
Enemies and Collectibles In Nioh
Kodama are great collectibles (Plus they’re adorable)
Moving a little uphill past a few enemies we run into our first collectible. The little green men are Kodama that hide throughout a level and give you various bonuses the more you’re able to find. This includes better weapons, armor, and item drops. The first few weren’t too hard to find, plus they return to your shrine, it’s cool to see you making progress other than just moving forward through the stage.
One thing you’ll notice as you carve your way through enemies is that you gain proficiency with the weapon your using as well as familiarity. Proficiency equates to skill points that can be dropped into a skill tree for each weapon and stance. Familiarity gains with a specific weapon, allowing it to gain a stat bonus when used enough to max the proficiency. This is something I don’t take advantage of just quite yet because I didn’t know about it quite yet.
Everything Comes Full Circle
Finding a spear I take it for a test drive and impale various enemies and cower from others. From the beta, I remembered that you can drop a ladder from this point of the map back to the starting shrine and make my way around nearly dying on the way there. Finding my way around I drop the ladder and return to the shrine. I spend the rest of the time leveling up, getting rid of items, and obtaining more from the Boons section. Should have obtained them at the beginning but what are you gonna do.
The Mask you get from completing the beta
Well, that’s all I got to say about my first episode back from a to long hiatus. Some things happened in my life that took away from maintaining this site I hope to build into something fantastic. I want this to grow, expand, and be a home for me and my ramblings. I want to play video games, write, record, and talk about them.
Is this possible? Can this be achievable in 2017? Do I have the chops to make this happen? All amazing questions that of course need answers. I have a lot of ideas, passion, and gaming knowledge. 2017 is the year that every game will truly be amazing, that’s a promise.