

Truly, I wanted to really enjoy this game - totally. The game is beautiful and will keep most interested til the frustrations leaves them to shelve it til patience has restored or those hard memories forgotten. IMHO, if the stamina recovered faster or while even holding block then for me it’d be considered a fair fight. You lose stamina for taking damage, attempting to swing and cannot regen any of it back except to evade til your. falling back to heal or dodge while the stamina on the enemy refreshes. You can’t regenerate stamina if your blocking - this alone killed the fun in keeping any pressure up. You lose stamina when you block or get hit - fair enough. Finally, I did very much appreciate the differences this game has from any Soul games however the whole managing your stamina thing actually pulls away from the fun and engagement. Kind a like you have to face off and repeat til hopefully you land the final blow. You have to stand toe to toe with a boss which usually can be easily beaten by upgrades which are usually well past the encounter. The game doesn’t make out leveling to much a possibility, so it won’t get any easier. Enemies in your area aren’t shown to be behind you so many times you’ll feel cheated til you repeat it all over. If you decide to heal, you better take a two second break and hope you don’t get hit by anything.

Again making it a chore to swap out stances, although the animation is briefly quicker for this. To change stance you have to repeat the process with the other D-pad options. This makes switching in fights a chore since Nioh has to back off to do it instead of it being fluid which every Ninja Gaiden game was able to pull off beautifully.

To switch weapons you have to hold the right bumper and select your weapon by using the d- pad. I’m a newcomer to this game however even after having beaten other soul games, Bloodborne and every ninja Gaiden game to completion my largest I’m a newcomer to this game however even after having beaten other soul games, Bloodborne and every ninja Gaiden game to completion my largest issue is with the convoluted controls.
