Nioh 3 Review: A Worthy Sequel, But Still Far from Perfect

The Nioh series has long established itself as the best soulslike after FromSoftware’s projects. Although the first game was a bit rough around the edges in terms of animation at launch, it offered an excellent combat system, interesting bosses, and a linear structure without tedious backtracking. The sequel not only fixed the original’s mistakes but even surpassed Miyazaki’s (Hidetaka Miyazaki) creations in some aspects. However, after Nioh 2, Team NINJA started experimenting: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Rise of the Ronin turned out to be frankly weak and damaged the studio’s reputation.

Nioh 3 is not just a correction of past mistakes, but a full-fledged attempt to restore its former glory. Having gained experience from failed projects, the developers took the best from their experiments and created a worthy threequel. Here’s what makes it good and why you should play it, even if you’re just waiting for the next FromSoftware game.

Let’s be honest: the story in the Nioh series has always been secondary. The crazy mix of real historical figures and fantasy mythology got old back in musou games like Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, and Team NINJA simply can’t present anything truly interesting or intriguing due to their obsession with retelling ancient Japanese wars and battles. At the same time, the third installment offers not only a worse-written story than previous games, but also an outright boring one that isn’t particularly engaging even for someone who’s only vaguely familiar with the names of great generals, yokai, and heroes.

The main character in Nioh 3 is Takechiyo — the most controversial, historically speaking, grandson of Ieyasu Tokugawa, who will eventually become the well-known shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu. Admittedly, this already sounds quite confusing and complicated, and with so many characters with unpronounceable names, it’s simply impossible for someone unfamiliar with Japanese culture to remember them all. So, let’s leave all this historical accuracy aside and get to the heart of the matter. The protagonist needs to travel to the past to find a way to defeat the evil poisoning his present. Yes, this is already the second soulslike this year with time travel, but unlike Code Vein 2, at least Nioh 3 is a good game.

If in previous Nioh games you could more or less figure out the plot without constantly checking historical references, the third installment is literally made exclusively for the Japanese market. Everyone else, at best, should just watch the well-directed cutscenes and not bother with who’s fighting whom or what stones need to be collected. And honestly, the dialogues and voice acting are pure Japanese style: constant sighs, illogical sentence structures, and endless switching of titles and ranks. So, let’s leave the story aside and move on to what Nioh 3 does much better.

After a series of not-so-successful Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice clones, Team NINJA suddenly realized that an obsession with parrying attacks leads nowhere good. We clearly remember the first boss fight in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty — after it, we just didn’t want to keep playing, and surely many other players felt the same. Perhaps that's why Nioh 3 received a deeper and more versatile combat system, where everyone can find something to their liking. Moreover, unlike Rise of the Ronin, the gameplay here has clearly been polished more thoroughly, as even in the first hours of the game, we never felt like Nioh 3 was testing our patience.

The first important difference — and a big plus for the game design — is the presence of two radically different combat modes: the classic samurai style focused on parrying, and a more flexible, active ninja style with dodges and surprise attacks.

The first is classic soulslike gameplay with resource management, stance switching, memorizing combos, and learning enemy patterns to parry in time and land counterattacks in the right animation windows. This style feels like a mix of Sekiro and Bloodborne, where parrying and aggressive behavior are rewarded with fast stamina recovery. In other words, rolling and blocking from Dark Souls are once again ineffective here. While blocking can still be used in the most desperate situations, dodges are so useless that it’s almost impossible to avoid enemy damage with them.

The second style — the ninja — is something completely new, unseen in either previous Nioh games or soulslikes in general. In short, it’s a more agile, fast, and aggressive class, where dodges and rolls play a crucial defensive role, and parrying is left behind. Each attack consumes less stamina, allowing you to literally overwhelm your opponent, not letting them strike back. By performing combos, the ninja can make quick dashes to the side, letting you get behind enemies and kill them in just a few button presses. Additionally, the ninja’s arsenal includes a whole set of shurikens and traps, letting you deal with almost any type of enemy, including flying and armored ones. In short, it’s a killing machine that will surely appeal to anyone tired of endless parrying and the overwhelming damage dealt by enemies.

The best part about Nioh 3 is that you can switch between styles on the fly and play the game however you want. You don’t need to constantly rebuild your character for each class — samurai and ninja each have their own gear sets with unique combat specializations. It’s also worth noting that the game doesn’t force you to stick to one style. You don’t have to worry that one enemy can only be defeated in samurai stance and another only as a ninja. It’s simple: tired of rolling and aggressive fights? Pick the samurai and switch stances. Want speed and traps? Play as a ninja. No restrictions.

Boss fights are always fun to experiment with stances. For example, as a samurai, you can quickly learn the enemy’s patterns to be ready for anything, then switch to ninja and deal massive backstab damage. At some point, Nioh 3 simply stops being a soulslike in the classic sense and starts to feel like a slasher in the spirit of Ninja Gaiden — which, by the way, is also developed by Team NINJA. Essentially, the developers took the groundwork from the recent fourth installment, the best gameplay elements from previous Sekiro clones, and the combat stances from the Nioh duology — and combined them into something that really works and is genuinely interesting.

In conclusion, despite our statements like “the game feels easy,” it’s important to emphasize: it’s easy by soulslike standards, but for unprepared gamers, it will be a real challenge. Early enemies are aggressive and will kill anyone who doesn’t keep an eye on stamina and abilities. So rushing headlong into enemies in ninja mode is a reckless move that will definitely end in the protagonist being stunned and killed.

Another major difference between the threequel and previous entries is the shift from traditional linear locations with backtracking to open maps with non-linear progression. Of course, it’s still not full freedom in the spirit of Elden Ring — most maps are still roads and paths — but now you’re free to explore them in any order you like. Additionally, the story takes you through different eras, and the locations visibly change to fit each time period. This means you’ll encounter even more interesting secrets, bosses, and events in the same areas. Essentially, the developers have managed to make backtracking less tedious and boring.

Thanks to branching upgrade systems and overall progression, dozens of interesting items are hidden across the maps, making the protagonist stronger and more effective. In previous Nioh games, world exploration was completely dull: all the good loot was handed out exclusively in story segments, eliminating any chance for over-leveling. In the third game, you can not only return to zones where enemies are now weaker than you, but also collect so much loot and so many abilities that even the most challenging locations become easy by soulslike standards.

At some point, we even realized that Nioh 3 feels more like an ARPG, where collecting items and building your character matter much more than honing combat skills. The inventory is constantly filling up with new loot, eliminating the need to grind or manually upgrade equipment. Moreover, the in-game progression system is so branching and diverse that you simply can’t figure it out at a glance. There’s a skill tree, stat upgrades, prestige titles with points, guardian spirits, an ommyodo box for summoning various spirits, weapon upgrades — in short, it’s a paradise for those who love tinkering with builds and endlessly boosting their character’s efficiency.

And thank goodness there’s an auto-equip button that automatically finds the most powerful gear in your inventory and equips it, because sometimes the overload of progression systems can be downright overwhelming. Sitting for hours, reading every description, and picking out specific items is definitely not for everyone.

Surprisingly, exploring locations feels measured and doesn’t suffer from monotony. The maps here are small, and enemies often don’t pose a serious threat. By completing quests and clearing all points of interest, the hero receives very useful rewards, which are usually better in terms of stats than anything you’ve previously found. In this way, the threequel encourages you to explore all the content the game has to offer and rewards you handsomely for doing so.

However, Nioh 3 is still far from the depth and originality of Elden Ring’s open world. Team NINJA knows how to highlight specific historical eras, but they don’t put much effort into making the locations diverse. This time, the areas are so similar to each other that you’ll hardly be able to navigate without a map. It’s clear the developers didn’t have a big budget for detailed world-building, so every point of interest is filled with the same tents, fences, and temples. And considering there are as many unique enemies as there are locations, the visual sameness quickly becomes tiring. The change of time periods only slightly offsets the visual dullness, which can seriously spoil the overall feeling of open-world exploration.

Still, despite the obvious reuse of assets, the enemies themselves are interesting and unusual. Especially compared to the recent Code Vein 2: they actually have memorable appearances and a diverse set of abilities. Bosses are challenging enough, but also engaging. Some can be defeated quite easily, especially if you’ve managed to pick up good gear. Others gave us a hard time, as we accidentally stumbled upon them much earlier than intended. In any case, the battles are interesting and at times genuinely original.

Nioh 3 doesn’t have the most impressive visuals, but it’s not the utter disaster we saw — let’s repeat it once more — in Code Vein 2. The funniest thing is that the release version’s visuals are noticeably different from the demo. The image looks more torn and blurry, as if the developers did something with the internal upscaling. The more we tried to tweak the settings, the worse the image became. It feels overly sharp, as if Nioh is forcibly cranking the sharpness setting to the max. Because of this, the visuals are harsh on the eyes and can be quite unpleasant.

Team NINJA’s in-house Katana Engine is clearly technologically outdated: the way shadows and lighting are handled brings back memories of early PS4 games and late PS3 projects. Water and reflections look very bad. The color palette is overly saturated, which, combined with the high sharpness, causes headaches.

The location design is nice, and some of the backgrounds look decent. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, there are too few unique places in the game, so all the villages and military camps start to look the same. And considering we’ve recently seen an unreal number of games about ancient Japan, the local scenery is starting to blur together. And believe us, there are still plenty of similar games on the way, so Japanese villages and crooked bamboo fences will be with us for a long time to come.

Enemy and character models look pretty good. The object detail and animations are done at a high level. In fact, these are the only two aspects that can be called more or less modern. Everything else about the visuals is outdated. Even the hair rendering system looks worse than in Nioh 2.

Performance-wise, Nioh 3 is absolutely fine. The developers clearly learned their lesson after the failed launch of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and worked on optimization. There were no frame drops or other technical issues. And honestly, it would be strange to expect FPS problems with this level of graphics. However, it’s worth noting that smooth performance relies entirely on a locked frame rate. According to user feedback, unlocking the frame rate leads to drops, which can be fixed by moving the game’s files to an NVMe drive.

Nioh 3 is the best game in the trilogy and definitely Team NINJA’s finest work in recent years. The new combat system with two distinct styles offers huge room for experimentation and gives freedom to players who are tired of soulslike games with endless parrying. The open world has benefited the game, though unfortunately its execution is nowhere near Elden Ring. Still, it’s filled with interesting items, bosses, enemies, and situations, so the repetitive design and sometimes boring exploration can be forgiven.

First and foremost, this is a game about gameplay. Everything else feels too outdated by modern industry standards. The dull story, unpleasant visuals, and overloaded systems might ruin the experience for those who were hoping for a true competitor to FromSoftware’s projects. If gameplay is what matters most to you, Nioh 3 definitely won’t disappoint. For everyone else, it might be better to wait for something more polished — there will be plenty more games set in ancient Asia in the near future.