Allow me to explain the Nioh experience. The game is incredibly difficult. It will continually challenge you, all the time. Some of these challenges aren’t fair. You’ll have to decide if that’s the kind of experience you want. But if you push through, you will feel a sense of accomplishment that few other games offer.

If looking to complete everything, this game is aggressively long. There’s a New Game plus feature that let’s you play the story again but changes the enemy locations and allows your character to become stronger. There is a total of 5 playthroughs. If you’re sane, you’ll either get all you want from the game from the first playthrough or stomping through the second playthrough. This is what I’d recommend for most.

The second play through is downright pleasant. In the context of Nioh, it’s easy. In the third, cursed enemies start spawning, which is a flat and soulless way to make encounters more difficult. Cursed enemies are faster, take less damage, and deal more damage to you. They just do this from now on. The curse gets stronger with the introduction of the next playthroughs as well. The fourth difficulty is absurdly difficult. I genuinely don’t think it’s correctly balanced. The item levels don’t really keep up with the game’s difficulty, everything feels like it’s harder than it’s meant to be. If you’re playing, consider this a guide to help you. You will complete side objectives until the final level opens up, then you do that to unlock the fifth difficulty. On difficulty five, the game isn’t “easy”, but you’ve endured worse. You will get through it if you got here. Most games would end here. But this one has a dastardly trick up its sleeve.

Upon unlocking the fifth difficulty, you also unlock the underworld. Foolish me in the past thought it was just an infinite dungeon, so I dropped the game. It’s not. It’s finite, and upon finding that out, I decided to tackle on Nioh 2 again in my life. It is a 108 floor dungeon that goes on for just as long as it sounds. It’s repetitive, unnecessary and not very fun. But you stopped having fun after playthrough 2 or so. But you push on, because you want that sense of accomplishment. An accomplishment that the myriad of games in your library hasn’t given you. And when you finally do it, you are too quick to celebrate. Because alas, there’s ANOTHER dungeon. This time it’s 30 floors. Well, what’s another 30 floors?

I’ll tell you what another 30 floors of agony look like. These aren’t just your normal difficulty spikes. All the barriers of fun shred away and all that’s left is just mean enemy design. Another layer of suffering is introduced with floors 11 through 20, which now have two bosses. You fight one after another. The remaining floors 21 through 30 have 3 consecutive bosses. All have to be completed without dying, or you get to fight them in order again. The bosses are also randomly selected, so you might fight a boss that you’re great at defeating, or you might get a boss that you thought was impossible, and now it’s just one of multiple fights. You have to get good. Real good. Ignore your surroundings good. Hurt your relationships good. You’re going to regularly die mid-fight, and just have to mentally decompress if you want to get through those.

But if you push through, the elation you feel will be unrivaled. You get the screen you’ve been waiting for. The one the intern probably made in 2 minutes. To provide my favorite quote from it "Truly you have achieved what others considered impossible". That’s exactly it. You have become Nioh by the time you’ve finished this adventure. The only thing left to do is uninstall and find the next game to consume your life.