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Uniquely, since it's a Team Ninja game, I also ought to touch on the love-it-or-hate-it Menus / Item system.
Get used to it, it's Nioh.
Early on, menus were actually pretty leisurely. Decent bit of Quality of Life across the board, for example you don't need to craft up your Forging materials to higher qualities, you just use the core material (eg, no Common / Uncommon / Exotic Lacquer, it's just Lacquer, and fixed at 50 to forge Exotic). Income seems generally higher, and much less resources are needed for dumb shit on top (the only limited resource being money, which is common across all facilities, and should be substantially easier to farm since it's just the 1 thing). About what you'd expect, especially since I was focusing on getting my Facility-based Titles online, so that involved using all the facilities evenly (Donating, Disassembling, Soul Extraction, Clan Donations and Selling).
Also, notably higher Item Box cap, so you can put off dealing with the menus for much longer, rather than needing to keep on top of them mission-to-mission - for my entire playthrough, I only say down to chew through my items 7 times (total), as oppose to inbetween every mission.
Another immediately obvious improvement is that all your stats and bonuses are now presented in a clean way, so you can easily tell what's what in your build. However, it still suffers from vague skill / perk descriptions, and some of the skills / perks on offer in your menus / from Titles are pretty broken. For example, I knew from a shitton of testing in Nioh 2 already, that Stealth is a completely fucking busted perk for exploration (essentially enabling you to crouch-walk ~5m away from an enemy undetected, and do execution kills in the plain open without alerting everything around you) - and one of your Title Perk options is just that, free. Permanent A- in Stealth at all times, no concessions. In another case, when I joined the Todo Clan in the Teahouse advertising a C in Life bonus (Stamina), I was expecting, maybe 200, 250HP tops. Like, a neat extra 20% HP. I went from 1,730HP to 3,900HP at 41 Stamina, more than double my health - and this was treated as equal to "Melee Ki damage = +2.5%". And the kicker was that you're not allowed to change Clans for 8 hours, so I was essentially stuck on easymode for a full night of playing (only later found out you can disable Clan bonuses, because you can equip bonuses from opposing Clans if you max out enough Clan affinity for each). Suffice to say, I didn't die once for the duration of that session, and I was not happy.
It feels like we're still feeling the fallout of the balance arms race in Nioh 1; how the weakest stats are the most obvious, while the strongest are often the most vague. The only menu change I disagreed with, was that the Weapon Skills no longer light up their nodes when you're looking at them zoomed out in the zoomed out view / by categories (significantly better presentation in Nioh 2) (sovl, even).
Lategame menus however..... after I understood the new Forging system's "skill floor".... it's significantly worse than Nioh 2.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't give a fuck, then refer to the former part - you can ignore shit / set it to filter, etc. This doesn't affect you.
However, if you do "get it", then yeah, it's way worse. Previously the name of endgame Forging was Umbracite - you didn't need to pay much attention to what you were disassembling, just Disassemble the shit you don't want for Umbracite, combine your Umbracite into Quality / Divine Umbracite so you had access to the best perk pools, then reroll your skills a few times to get something cool / usable. Now, rather than rolling for equipment bonuses, you can actually choose exactly which bonuses you want. Great right? Well for that, you need Material Essence, and specifically the Material Essence corresponding to the perk category (eg, Ki Material Essence for Increase Recovery Speed or Ki Damage or Extra Ki). You only get Material Essence as a rare perk on item drops, and each type of Material Essence is distinct. There's like 15+ of them, and they all drop 1-at-a-time, and can only be used once each.
And in another menu category, you need Azure Soul Ore from Soul Extraction to +1 your gear, which are only sourced from Gear with a +1 value. And, as I mentioned, Disassembly is pretty suboptimal outside of Material Essence, since all the materials are simplified + cheaper. You instead want to be selling your trash gear with no Azure Soul Ore or Material Essence, so you can afford the Forging process. So you can't just blindly chuck everything in the Disassembly, because you need to go through menus to individually pick out the rarer gear that disassembles for these materials, leave, and sell the rest.
The difference between Nioh 2 and 3, is that Umbracite had a simple breakdown process but a tedious rerolling process, whereas Material Essence has a tedious breakdown process and a streamlined Forging process. Granted, it's not as bad as the absolute shitpile of Exponential Costs that Nioh 1 had, but I think by trying to streamline and optimise the results, the process is significantly more tedious. Sure, in Nioh 2 I might not have been able to get a flawless "Increased Defense (Stamina)" on all 5 pieces of gear - but I also didn't mind rolling and settling for "good enough" Tenacity on one, Anima-on-Hit on another, Lifesteal-on-Quick-Attack on another etc. All this could be fixed with a "Disassemble all Equipment with Material Essence" button in the Additional Settings / Select All..... but it doesn't have that, and none of the post-release patches have had it yet. Maybe by the time the DLC rolls around.
But until then, if you're not ignorant of the ...."menu-gameplay".... ...yeah...... and care enough to want to do your own custom-build, well it's just more time-wastey. At the very least, the Sudama droprate system in the postgame seems like it will massively help you get some decent rolls on gear you actually want to use; even if I've not gotten round to using it yet. Really ought to get a Yasakani Magatama before the DLC. I had a small panic attack that they might not be ingame while I typed that, but yeah, they are in Nioh 3. Phew~
Also Matsunaga Hisahide's back in his teahouse. Would have preferred literally any other historical teamaster, but I guess it's just easier to reuse him instead.
Fuckin...
Hisahide
Now, for a non-review derail. Anon's top tip for Nioh (in general).
Do yourself a favor, just max out your Luck when reasonable.
Just. Do it.
Every gamer ever usually figures out the time-old "Increased EXP gain is valuable in any game, because more levels is more bettererestest" at some point in their GAMER ascetic training, and shit, more Amrita is more Amrita. But take that. Put Luck above that in value.
I got burned in 1 and 2 being shit-out-of-....luck for when I wanted something. And brother; you might not get the thing you're after all the time (for me, I still don't have that Tatenashi Set Smithing Text), but running around with a Grinding Build level of luck (~120) during your base playthrough will mean so many mundane enemies will just fuck off and drop their 2% chance Smithing Texts before you're aware they drop it and you need it. Compared to it being 0.01% and you needing to go out of your way to re-grind them, and the difference is night and day. And they do it pretty often. And when you DO need to start grinding Drop Rates over Equipment Quantity (which you will), you've already got a working Grind Build up and running, and you don't really need to spend a lot of time doing the grind.
Lots of Nioh's mechanics are extremely complex, and it's always opaque and never well-documented. You cannot rely on "just look it up online", even ignoring the SEO clogged up by incomplete FextraShite articles. I don't know who the fuck drops the Tatenashi Armor Text (the "AI enhanced" search result is a hallucinated answer, claiming it's from a mission that doesn't exist), but I want him dead. That said, the one time I had 4 pieces of Iga, and just needed the Chestpiece so I could get the set bonus - hey, what do you know, turns out that I lucked out and whoever drops it, dropped his fucking text without me needing to care. At least entire weapon attacks aren't locked behind a Smithing Text drop like in 2. I was a sucker who just happened to run Hatchets in 2 - meaning to get the Secret Hidden Hatchet skill (which you'd want, because the Hatchets didn't have many skills compared to others, being new weapons), I had to deal with Yokai Shibata Katsuie / one of the harder bosses in the game. It was in the late 70's times-killed when it dropped. Then DLC1 happened and I had to grind the first DLC boss to get the Divine Bird Flight universal skill, another ultra-difficult one for that stage in the game (about 40 times for that one) (at least when he showed up for the rematch in 3 I kicked his teeth in, despite years of rust), and when I found out there was a second Skill Text in DLC2 I just said fuck that - hence why I didn't make that same mistake this game. Hidden Weapon Skills potentially dropping on anything in a Crucible and being shown locked on the menu at all times is a night-and-day improvement by Nioh 3, and I'll take it any day over 2's system.
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wait....
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'!!! IMPORTANT !!!'=
the babe section
'Team Ninja carries a legacy. A proud, storied legacy.' One that has made many jack-off sessions go by a little bit better NEEDS to be noted on, evaluated, and written down for the ages.
>Main girl
I liked her. 1's Okatsu was too cutesy and didn't do much for me. 2's Mumyo had a clear niche but it wasn't my niche. 3's Himiko strikes a nice balance. She's average, but she's the kind of so-forgettably-average-it's-actually-unusual-and-loops-back-around-to-being-unique. Partly for narrative reasons too, which was neat. Nice VA, nice interactions; while I can recognise Okatsu is probably more mass-appeal, I'm now on team Himiko.
>Blacksmith girl
No.
1's Senji Tome holds the title for best girl in the franchise. 2's Senji Toyo was a total letdown. 3 - she's got a nice voice, but she wears a fuckin Fox Mask all the time. I thought maybe once you'd finish her related quests, she'd take it off and be a qt3.14, but no. Shame. Still better than 2.
>Other Girls
Nioh 1 had Tachibana Ginchiyo, Fuku, Maria and Lady Chacha. Pretty star side-cast, honestly.
Nioh 2 had the Okuni the Dancer, Minamoto no Yorimitsu, and yo momma. Got the job done, could have been better.
Nioh 3... does not have other girls, so automatically loses here. It's all just Himiko............ {Pause and look into the camera while the stock studio laughter sound plays}
>Yokai sluts
We've got a few new ones that we, as distinguished /monster/fuckers, need to sit down and talk about in an intellectual way. There's 3 fucked up granny enemies / bosses if you're into gilfs (Yamanbafuckers lovers rejoice), but that's just too degenerate even by my standards, and two of them have a mouths larger than their shoulderblades. Mermaid is textbook cute but nothing special; and as you'd mythologically expect, shrivels up into a dried corpse once she's out of Ki. Tsuare-onna is just a glossed up icy reskin of Umbume, which is admittedly alright, because Ubume was up there in the Nioh 2 rankings. Demon of Envy is hot, but forgettable and she's the most hidden optional boss in the game.
But none of those matter in the slightest because Ibaraki Doji takes the prize for best girl in the game, locking horns with Senji Tome for best girl in the franchise. Mismatched mid-quality VA that actually grows on you, but we can use the incredible Photo Mode to pause time frame-by-frame and frame-perfect investigate during specific animations (with helpful extra lighting sources) to discover that under her baggy grazed hamaka, pretty sure she's deliberately wearing nothing nopan (caught in full HD), which just hardsells her already hot as fuck design beyond any conventional measure - EASILY a 'Top 10 juiced up Team Ninja girl', and I'm not even usually one to go for the musclewomen. Yuki-Onna & Kasha might still be the most popular picks for monsterfuckers because literally-just-a-women & catgirl mass appeal Nyotengu cameos in 2DLC3, but that doesn't count, but imo they've been dethroned pretty hard.
Now it's time to die inside because her R34 page will probably be stuck at 13 results (8 of which are crude sketches) once the game's popularity dies down and she's buried under Banana Oni's stuff from FATE / 2hu........ Time to die....
The Halls of Debate are open, if you disagree, state your claim or forever hold your silence.
By the way, for the women and faggots, Nioh's always been a manly man franchise for man men hardcore gamer doods, but I can also recognise the game has more prettyboys than a korean boyband (and even the old dudes look like they could pull women 1/5th of their age), so you're the real winner of this entry, honestly. On that note, it's kind of a shame they didn't go for a 1:1 attempt at facial features for the Bakumatsu NPC's, considering a few of them actually do have irl photo examples, and it would have only added to the game. Missed opportunity honestly.