Recent reviews by Happy

Exactly what I expected and wanted from a sequel to Dragon's Dogma. If you're looking for an older style action RPG with some incredible foundational gameplay, look no further - this is the one.

Having been a long time fan of Team Ninja's games, dating back to the original Ninja Gaiden trilogy on SNES, and also a pretty huge fan of Souls games, I knew I had to give Nioh a try when it was first announced. It took several attempts for me to really sink my teeth into the first game, but what finally waited behind a steep learning curve was an incredibly rewarding maso-core game with diverse, deep RPG mechanics and inarguably the best combat in the genre.

Nioh 2 is a continuation of everything that made the original Nioh great, with some extraordinarily fun mechanics added to the mix. Stance swapping, weapon skills, and armor bonuses all return, with the addition of Yokai abilities, three different Yokai Shift forms, and a slew of other, smaller mechanical additions. The mission system also returns, which may be turn off for some in comparison to the open-world aspect of many Souls-like games. But the distinction is important - I don't view this as a Souls-like game. Team Ninja has taken the best parts of Ninja Gaiden, combined them with some of the more interesting portions of the mechanics Souls introduced, and married them together in one of the most fluid, dynamic gaming experiences in the last decade.

Nioh 2 also does a significantly better job of introducing systems than Nioh 1 did, though there's no hand holding. It teaches through doing, and only very briefly feels like a tutorial. Unlike Nioh 1's initial weapon selection, wherein you looked at words on a screen, Nioh 2 presents them in a play space that allows you to swing them and feel how they're going to play. Similarly, the initial Guardian Spirit selection affects your Yokai Shift form, and they allow you to play with each of them briefly to get a feel for which one will suit your playstyle best. The whole system is a drastic improvement.

Compared to Nioh 1, the individual stages are slightly harder whereas the bosses are slightly easier - this feels more natural, and the flow of a stage doesn't feel like it massively spikes as soon as you hit a boss. There are certainly some stumbling points, but with only a single exception the bosses were fun, engaging, and challenging enough without presenting a multi-hour stumbling block. Likewise, the stages feel dangerous, especially as you start climbing through the NG+ modes or maybe haven't focused on defensives stats; they're also consistently fair and fun.

The story is, in my opinion, one of the highlights of the game and very worth paying attention to on at least your first play through. I won't spoil anything here, but the fantasy retelling of the Sengoku Era is great and there are plenty of enjoyable characters. The quality of the DLC matches the main game and while separate stories, feel fluid and like they're part of main game's story.

The PC port is overall very good with some minor stumbling blocks. Performance has been mostly fine, with a locked 120 fps at 3440x1440 on a 9900k @ 5.1ghz and a 2080 Ti slightly overclocked. When assisting other players or particularly particle heavy scenes the game does seem to chug a bit, but the recent addition of DLSS seems to have mostly eliminated those issues. PC prompts not existing is a small pain point for some (not me, but I understand), but those will be added in a future patch (soon™). My biggest, and really only, actual complaint is that aspect rations wider than 21:9 are not supported in game natively, and still require hex edits of the executable in order to function. My primary monitor is 5120x1440, and playing with empty space on either side is frustrating to say the least. I have ended up primarily playing the game through Steam Link on my TV. I don't know that wider aspect ratios will ever be supported, but I would love to see it.

Overall, Nioh 2 is an easy recommend and one of my favorite games of the last decade. If you're into maso-core games and enjoy dynamic, fluid combat, you need to get it.

Or, you know, if you just want to smash demons with an anime waifu, as well.

Insanely fun combat, incredible (and highly emotional) story. Shot right up to the top of my favorite games list, despite making me crazy with the weapon grind toward the end.

Just know that you're not in this for a single play through - there are tons of endings, varying from 10 minutes to 15 hours required for completion. The weapon grind I talked about is one required for one of them. It's time consuming but absolutely worth it.

Not to mention, this game gave us the greatest soundtrack in a JRPG ever.

Game's not in my library, but it is in my library. Guess I'll just die now?