Nioh 3: The Kotaku Review

Nioh 3 is a risk-taker. Shaking up what fans have come to expect from the series, it tosses out the old formulas of straightforward missions and replaces them with an open-world twist that works shockingly well. In the midst of wandering the hidden corners of Japan, players will find fantastic secrets and evocative battles, but what’s gained from this ambitious scope is just as often hampered by a surprising lack of challenge and a deadweight story that completely overstays its welcome.

When Nioh released in 2017, only two years had passed since the arrival of Bloodborne and the market wasn’t quite as flooded with action-RPGs of that form. While many such games have come since then ranging from the impressive Lies of P to the more middle-of-the-road The First Berserker: Khazan, when Nioh released, there weren’t as many options for ultra fast-paced “Soulsborne” experiences. Team Ninja was ahead of the curve, kicking off a series packed with intense boss fights, responsive gameplay that contrasted with FromSoft’s weightiness, and a quintessentially Japanese sensibility mixing historical fiction with broad epic storytelling. And it kicked ass.

Nioh 3 continues this tradition and thrusts players into the role of Tokugawa Takechiyo, grandchild of the famous shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. Awakening one morning to find the capital city under attack by an army of demonic yokai, Takechiyo is eventually whisked back in time to the war-torn Sengoku period. This kicks off adventures that take you through all kinds of fantastical places as Takechiyo works to prevent future tragedies, all caused by a mysterious Great Evil Demon Guy.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

To match this epic scale, Nioh 3 makes one very big change to gameplay and structure that breathes a fresh bit of life into the yokai-smashing antics: it shifts (mostly) to an open-world design. Split between multiple maps, Nioh 3’s world is expansive and packed with areas that you can tackle in mostly any order. While there is a main story route if you want to keep things focused, the greater rewards come from wandering off the beaten path. You might find a hidden dungeon packed with loot or even run into a boss out in the wild. There’s many surprises.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons to 2022’s Elden Ring but the more obvious and meaningful antecedent is Team Ninja’s own Rise of the Ronin. Adapting lessons learned from that open world, Nioh 3 expands the possibility space of the series and at the best moments, which are usually found on the less rigidly structured early maps, playing Nioh 3 is surprisingly relaxing. You are never far away from something interesting and time will melt away as you explore.

From time to time, this structure builds unique stories. In one early game map, I needed to dispel some barriers in order to reach the Great Evil Demon Guy; each of the barriers was guarded by a boss. Instead of going the route which Nioh 3 intended, I moved in reverse order and hit the highest-level boss first, encountering a tricky soldier who fought with a cadre of summoned demon minions. It wasn’t the hardest fight but the fact I could cut my own path to face this challenge is a real testament to Nioh 3’s world design. It was a lot of fun.

This openness starts to constrict as the game moves along and some of the most interesting maps are less a collection of “zones” than levels connected by corridors. The freewheeling early game gives way to a more traditional endgame and while that means losing the freedom that helps Nioh 3 stand out from peers, fans of the prior games will appreciate the chance to dive into more demanding and focused dungeons explorations with a bit more spice. 

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

The most impressive of these are areas taking place within something called “the Crucible.” This hellish red nightmare realm envelops certain castles and hideaways, populating the area with highly aggressive monsters. Take damage in these areas and a portion of your health bar is removed entirely until you can attack a few monsters and undo this dire debuff. Nioh 3 continues the series’ mixed-results level design when it comes to dungeons—other games are simply more clever—but shifting between open-world exploration and Crucible areas is always exciting.

This all comes with the series’ love it or hate it approach to loot. Team Ninja action games are packed with loot, even the most basic enemies popping into multi-colored pinatas of weapons, armor, and other goodies. Progression is slow but certain as you pick up a slightly better helmet here or find a rare spear there. For players who hate inventory management, it might be annoying to occasionally pause exploration in order to sell off extra gear or break it down for crafting parts. Sickos who love shiny things and the thrill of slowly optimizing their character over the course of lengthy adventure, meanwhile, will have a blast. The gear rains like manna from Heaven.

How does this all play out when you’re fighting the baddies? Isn’’t that what this is all about? The short pitch is: combat kicks ass and Nioh 3 remains a best-in-class action game. The messier version is that for all the excitement, your victories aren’t always satisfying.

The conventional wisdom on the internet is that games journalists are chumps who don’t know how to play games. They are weak-willed and entirely unable to complete the most basic of tutorials. I am afraid I must complicate that cliche by saying that Nioh 3 is not only the easiest of the Nioh games by a wide margin, it is also perhaps the easiest of this particular brand of Soulsborne game that I’ve played. Some of the reasons for this are good, some are bad.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

At the top of the list is the fact that Nioh 3 has refined what was an already stellar and responsive combat system into what might just be the best-feeling action game I’ve ever played. That’s right! This game is often too easy because the gameplay is so goddamn good. The slightest touch of the analog stick allows for pinpoint movements on the battlefield, parry and dodge timings are intuitive and well-communicated, and your attacks flow gracefully no matter your choice of weapon. Nioh 3 feels amazing and consistently gives you the tools to succeed. 

The special sauce that turns this action-burger into a flavor bomb unlike any of its peers in the genre is the new ability to swap between a Samurai combat stance and a Ninja stance. With the simple push of a button, you can switch from the more traditional samurai style, featuring reliable weapons like swords and spears and axes, to a flashier ninja style. The samurai style is the one that Nioh veterans have come to know and it’s defined by the ability to switch into different sub-stances. A “low” katana stance, for instance, consumes very little stamina but mostly cat-scratches enemies. Meanwhile, a “high” stance will be much slower and leave you open if you miss but break the enemy’s guard.

In the Ninja style, you have access to quick weapons that don’t do much damage but can stagger enemies with their unrelenting pressure. You can also stock up on different ninja tools ranging from elemental talismans to poison or paralysis-causing shuriken, and much more. Swapping between these stances at the right instant interrupts dangerous enemy attacks, staggering them. Nioh 3 is constantly encouraging you to change your weapons and stances to meet the moment-to-moment needs of a fight. As a result, you rarely if ever feel ts a loss for options mid-battle.

This system, a variation of the job-changing action that Team Ninja experimented with in the underrated 2022 action title Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, means that Nioh 3’s gameplay is highly customizable and each player will find their own individual ways of expressing themselves in combat. And while these two modes don’t feel excessively different from each other, they’re distinct enough that you’ll certainly have a favorite fighting style.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

If that already sounds like a lot, brace yourself. I’ve not even mentioned the fact that eventually each stance can eventually carry two weapons—a samurai might have a katana and the transforming switchglaive—and you can also stock up on different magical spells and summons unlocked by consuming the left-behind souls of fallen yokai. When I say that Nioh 3 is the easiest game in the series, it is first and foremost because of how simple it is to adapt to new challenges.

You might start with a fight with your switchglaive in the “medium” stance that has it take the shape of a spear. As you poke at a boss and learn its attacks from a safe distance, you might gain the confidence to switch to Ninja style and attack it with a flurry of small blows from a pair of tonfa, timing your dodges for the last moment—perfect dodges mostly conserve stamina—until you can get behind them and attack their back for double damage. 

As the boss goes into a rage, you might then decide to fall back entirely and summon the soul of one of the bosses you previously defeated to attack with a special ability, maybe a hard-hitting lighting nuke attack. You are constantly making micro-decisions throughout your battles and the potency of these options will often mean that even the gnarliest demons don’t stand a chance.

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  "Let thy step be slow and steady, that thou stumble not."

• Developer:

  Team Ninja, Koei Tecmo Games

• Type of game:

  Piñata Party But The Piñata Are Demons

• Liked:

  This really is the best-playing Souls-like around, characters are highly customizable and all the weapons kick ass, shift to open world work very well and the early game exploration is particularly fantastic, surprisingly good music from time to time, some of these little spirit pals you meet are very cute.

• Disliked:

  This game is (mostly) easier than it should be, loot management remains time-consuming, the story really is a dizzying mess, I feel like some late game map areas could have been fleshed out into full games if they really wanted and worry this is all we'll get now.

• Platforms:

  PS5 (played) and PC

• Release date:

  February 6, 2026

• Played:

  Just short of 70 hours while ignoring some side-quests and hitting very few boss "walls." I'm excited to go back and dive into some of the areas I left less explored.

That said, I would be lying if I left out the fact that for a surprisingly large stretch of time the enemies you encounter don’t offer the greatest challenges in and of themselves either. In one story section, an ally warned me that a foe was “a presence more powerful than we’ve ever faced.” That wasn’t true; they died on my first attempt. Mileage will vary from player to player but this was a common occurrence in my playthrough. It took until maybe my fortieth hour before I started encountering bosses that felt threatening, and that’s a long time for things to feel “easy.”

When difficulties reared their head in my playthrough, only some of them were due to the designs of the bosses themselves. Eventually, Nioh 3 does start to pull out the standard tricks to add difficulty to encounters—two-phase boss fights, attacks that need to be perfectly dodged—but if you’re a player who doesn’t intend to do many side quests, it’s more likely that the threat will simply be honest-to-God numbers. By the end of my playthrough, I was nearly 30 levels below what the game recommended. This meant I died in one to three hits from basically everything and while that generated a lot of excitement, it came about not because of intricate boss design or sudden gameplay shifts that shook my playstyle. It was just statistics.

For some players, Nioh 3’s strangely managed difficulty curve might prove a true disappointment. If you’re someone who comes to these games for the grand boss battles, I’m sorry to say that many of them will not live up to your expectations. If you’re a more casual player, I expect you will hit a strange mid- to endgame spike that hampers your momentum.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

In the moments where players do encounter one of Nioh 3’s more demanding sections, it offers the extra-help features which have now become characteristic for the series. Chief among these is an ability to spend easily farmable materials to summon the ghosts of other player characters. These non-player-controlled shades bring an extra set of hands into boss fights or else help clear out obstacles as you progress through levels. They’re not the smartest companions but they can be very helpful. If somehow that’s not enough, you can spend your trinkets at a checkpoint shrine to summon an actual player into your game to help you instead. Nioh 3 is best played without too much extra assistance and barring a few moments, such help isn’t necessary. 

Some of this may sound really dire, especially in light of the fact that, again, I think this is The Best Feeling Action Game Series Ever. Nioh 3 is both one of the most fun games I’ve played when considering the moment-to-moment gameplay, and also one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever played when it comes to structure, pace, and especially narrative.

Whoever wrote this game’s story has quite possibly never read a story in their life and it’s entirely possible that they’ve never spoken to another living human being. The initial leap back to the time of Tokugawa and those fateful Sengoku battlefields is familiar enough and the time-traveling concept creates interesting possibilities to expand the scope of the story beyond what the series usually offers. Without spoiling what that means specifically, this adventure truly ends up going in surprising directions. The problem is that they forgot to write characters or give players a reason to care about anything that is happening throughout the narrative.

Complaining about the story in a Nioh game can feel a bit like complaining about a free T-shirt you got at a rock concert. Who cares? You weren’t even here for that shit anyway. I would normally agree if not for the fact that Nioh 2 managed, in spite of some clumsiness, to have a compelling story thanks to a well-written buddy relationship between the player character and their charismatic pal Tokichiro. Humble beginnings grew into a tragic epic that connected to the original game. Not high art but fun stuff! It was the best kind of pulp storytelling.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

Nioh 3’s story, such as it can be said to exist, is a mostly flat affair that lacks a lot of the vigor of previous games. The core cast is smaller, opting to avoid the previous games’ cavalcade of historical cameos, but they are incredibly underwritten. Some of this is a matter of structure since you can get more nuance and character beats through side questing, but it is more honest to say that Nioh 3 doesn’t really have a story. It has a collection of zones and maps bridged together with the thinnest of connections, and while the game’s large scale may please players looking for the most bang for their buck, it drags out the tale far longer than is welcome.

By the time I had confronted the Great Evil Demon Guy for the third time only for a cutscene to play in which I was teleported away by someone saying “Actually, this next section of the game is where you will finally defeat the Great Evil Demon Guy,” I made a wrathful gurgle touched with a ferocity I did not think my heart could hold. The stage was set, the story had somewhat found itself and led us to a climax. This was it. Just kidding! Demon’s in another castle! Not only that but the bad guys are going to try the exact same plan you prevented multiple times before!



The frustrating part of Nioh 3’s inability to fashion a compellingly paced narrative comes from a sense of wasted potential. That annoying shift away from what I thought would be the climax was immediately followed by some of the coolest stuff in the game. Taking a leap that I’d hoped the series would make for years (which I will again not spoil here), I suddenly felt like I was playing a Nioh game again! They could do it all along! The levels were replete with interesting gimmicks, the combat continued to flow, and to my amazement I was finally encountering cool characters.



This is the fundamental core of Nioh 3. It manages to take huge structural risks and the result is that what could be an amazing epic feels more like a variety of half-written story pitches stitched together by an ape with a nail gun. I have never played a more inconsistent game within this genre, both in terms of narrative focus and difficulty curve. And yet in spite of that dissonance, which dominates hours and hours of a game that doesn’t know when enough is enough, the high points are genuinely magnificent. When it’s good, you will be hooting and hollering.

Team Ninja / Koei Tecmo Games

Even so, in the worst moments of the game I was neither frustrated by hardcore boss fights nor annoyed at the ways in which the open world eventually contracted. Instead, Nioh 3’s most dire moments did something I rarely encounter when reviewing games: they simply bored me.



All of this to say that the challenge of Nioh 3 is rarely found within a boss fight arena. The true challenge of Nioh 3 is one of endurance. In overstaying the welcome and failing to craft compelling reasons to push forward and explore the world or see this story through to the end, it ultimately demands a great deal of trust from the player. Grant it that trust and you will, from time to time, be treated with genre-defining quality. And yet in spite of these highs, I would not fault anyone who poured dozens of hours into this game only to experience another time-direspecting rug pull for deciding to not only shut the game off but never boot it up again in their life.

I’ve spent a lot of time stressing the negatives of Nioh 3 but it should be reiterated again and again that if you are looking for furious action that forces you to constantly make interesting decisions in the middle of a fight, this is the game for you. No one does it quite like Team Ninja. Other games might have more evocative worlds and more realized characters. They might offer more difficult bosses to tackle. And yet after nearly a decade of reviewing these games and many others within this genre, I mean it when I say nothing else plays like Nioh.

Nioh 3 also does something that established franchises, especially today, sometimes seem allergic to: it takes risky swings to switch up a beloved formula. In the moments where everything aligns and the shift to a more expansive, exploration-focused experience fires on all cylinders—creating surprising stories and unique victories—it’s not hard to imagine how successive games could build on these changes and continue to offer further excitement.

In my review of Nioh 2, I said that the game’s genre was one in which “you are with swords what Mozart was with music,” and that’s never been more true than in Nioh 3. You’re not always engaging in this deadly dance and the downtime between movements can feel interminable, but once the chips are down you probably won’t care. You will dash and parry, sneak and backstab. And it will feel so good that you’ll eagerly push through all the extra bullshit  to your next battle.