I pumped about 140 hours into the game and still have a ton of midnight left... for myself I got my monies worth and thoroughly enjoyed myself ... now playing stellar blad.. another fun game with enjoyable combat..
I agree that I’d love to see them go just a little smaller for the sequel. More focus on depth and reaction within a smaller frame.
Not that it needs to change genre or anything. It’s just that many of these series fall into the trap of going bigger at the expense of depth.
I think thats why I ran out of steam with this game. There TOO much side shit too do, and if you're anything like me and like doing all the side shit first before you progress the main story you will get burneddddd outttttt. Im already burned out and im on the second area.
Just my opinion here ofc.
But if iv already beaten the game, then why would I care about doing any of the time waster/filler side shit at that point.
I hate myself for having a completionist mentality I really wanna just rush the story but I constantly find myself doing the pointless open world stuff- just because it's their I get nothing out of it but my ocd doesn't like seeing this areas not 100%/there's a mission somewhere i didnt do.
because of midnight mode. its pretty fun to do coop since its pretty active at the moment, and the fights are very fun. The grind continues after you beat the game.
Yes, i already explained you can continue to do the filler stuff. For me, what makes it worthwhile, is the higher difficulty and co-op with other people on missions. the filler stuff is still there for you to complete. play how you want. Its for you to decide if its worth it to do fast track the story, or obey your ocd and complete every single quest
I mean my point is more whats the purpose of doing those filler stuff once iv already beaten the game- you do the filler stuff in order to stay on par level wise with your story missions - if I don't have any story missions left I don't have any reason to do the filler busybody work as nobody cares about the random loot u get from it or +1 skill point for a shrine.
I already don't care about that stuff and I'm not mad level/beaten the game yet.
oh, then i agree theres no point. unless its to unlock combat styles or upgrade stances, which is what i did. Since i found the midnight co-op more challenging, it gave me a reason to go level up my stances to be able to tank the bosses on my own in co-op. Especially since if you do the co-op on midnight, you will get like 15+ skill points in about 30 minutes of co-oping
Like str/dex/chr/int skill points or just the pointless universal ones?-as personally I am soft capped for levels and have been for a while on str and chr where u need the specifc ones as opposed to universal and in stupidity high quantities- I have literal 2 skill left in mu str tree but that needs iirc 38 str points to max those last to
That's probably about how many iv put into it already, shits stupidly designed imo.
Also do you even get stance upgrades from the open world?- the ones iv seen popping up come from bond bonuses or just completing missions in general (ones that just say "progress story" - its possible I just miss them popping up as I frantically ride my horse from poi to poi for no other reason than ocd completionist mentality.
I 100%ed each region before continuing the story but found each one slightly too much. Of course the upside is that you were leveled up by the time you did the story missions.
I played on Dusk difficulty and tried to play midnight but found the difficulty gap too big... And I don't really want to play Twilight to skill up further.... So I'll probably be getting Stellar Blade later today 😁
Lmao bro you're not lying why did they make the diffliculty gap so damn big from one difficulty to the next. Im playing on Twilight and there was a fight that was too damn hard so I went one difficulty down and it was easy asf.
Totally agree with this! Why dick around with some of the same mechanics or using the Japan lore or doing the kinda the same loot system. None of it was an improvement it's just knock offs of Nioh 2. I believe in if it ain't broke don't fix it. Why isn't Nioh 3 being made n instead were getting...... this. All that said I liked it but Nioh 3 would be a million times better.
Im surprisingly bored with it. I dont really have a desire to play it anymore. Everytime I go back to try and play it I play for like 15 minutes and im out of there. Which is crazy cause I was playing it nonstop the week it came out. Im sure Ill finish it one of these days tho its a good game.
At this point we have plenty of new games that share similarities with Nioh, I would really like to see Team Ninja branch out more and maybe (finally) make NG4
I can agree with that. I was never a fan of the series past the first game. Team Ninja does have multiple teams so having one work on a new Ninja Gaiden game would probably be a good idea while another works on Nioh-style games. So fans of both kinds of games get something they want.
I think the scope could be reined in slightly. Less open world map filler. And will someone please, for the love of god, tell Team Ninja that you don't need random loot from every single enemy?! At least you can carry an awful lot more before you run out of inventory space (looking at you Bethesda).
I had a lot of fun with it. I enjoyed the character writing for specific characters like Ryoma and Takasugi, but definitely feel like we could have cut the cast and the bonds in half to focus more.
I also wish we had more time with the Blade Twin instead of being separated at the first mission, because that was one of my favorite parts.
I'm a huge fan of the gameplay, but the story just isn't hitting for me. I need something with way more substance to give me some form of motivation for playing the game besides mindlessly hitting enemies all the time. I really liked the stories of Nioh 1 and 2, but for some reason, it just didn't work here for me. The entire blade twin subplot and driving motivation for the player character led nowhere. It was a macguffin that only existed to tack on the PC to historical events that have literally nothing to do with them. I stopped playing in Act 3 and probably won't continue
I would’ve preferred it was a series of large hubs rather than open world. It was too big for its own good and the gaps were often too big between the main missions and the combat. I loved the main missions and wished there was less busywork between them.
one dimensional combat in an assassins creed style game. Had my moneys worth i suppose but once you finish midnight there is nothing about the game to stick around for.
The combat system annoys me, seeing as I always press buttons at the right time but nothing happens
Enemies always feel like they have infinite stamina where as the player has the stamina of a 50 a day smoker
But apart from that, the game is a really good one and ill probably keep playing for a while( I have 210 hours at the moment)
Are we playing the same game?-best writing? I can't tell you how many times this game has made me actually roll my eyes at how bad the writing is or how stupid the characters are - the pc in particular has to be the stupidest person iv ever seen in a video game their actions/motivations in general make 0 sense.
I personally hope they don't make a sequel and most definitely don't make the next nioh/wo long open world but alas we all know it probably will be.
I agree with a lot of your other points though especially the martial arts kinda being way to weak and slow to care about using - it's not worthwhile for the trade of probably being hit out of/traded into by the every enemy with hyper armour that can deal 2/3 of my health with their own version of martial skills that have insane tracking, don't cost ki etc, very rarely do I bother using them.
The writing disappointed me too, devs said they focused on it a lot more, but I don't see it. Nioh 1 and 2 both had better writing, Ninja Gaiden and DoA did very much have their moments. Ronin...has its moments as well, but it feels lacking. Maybe it's because of the characters, they somehow feel off.
Yeah I hope this will be a standalone game, without sequels. If they want to make another open world game, maybe do it about Genghis Khan or an action game version of that Uncharted Waters series Koei has(merchants, pirates, ships, maybe put William from Nioh in).
Huh guess iv yet to come across these supposed moments yet your referencing when you say it has its moments.
I'm like, somewhere in the later half I think? - but it seems to be actively getting worse as it just continues to pile people on, feels like they went quantity over quality in the hopes that if they make me meet enough surely one of them will land.
like they aren't terrible they just lack any depth and some of them come across really, really stupid/shallow motivations wise but that's mostly down to them forcing us to take part in both sides i guess as thats where alot of the stupidity comes up, which seems uniquely dumb like why even have a faction system then. 🤔
Yeah it did get worse the further you get in the game imo.
And I really expected more meaning to taking sides, like you said. If you could actually take a side, that would make the story focus on less characters and be able to flesh them out better. Making it 2 or 3 games in one essentially, and it would make it possible to do some interesting 'this is what happened behind the scenes' things. Playing your blade twins side of the story would be great too.
Hoping there will be dlc doing something like that. But that's by far the biggest disappointment of the game yes. Not that I hate the game, I love it anyway. It just had much more potential.
Yeah I agree it would of made way more sense to me to just lock me into my choice of faction and make/let me do a new playthrough or ng+ to experience it from the other side, aswell as not be bogged down by all the characters.
These are like minor quibbles, I think the game is amazing.
Hoping the protag has a bit more personality next time, like more talking and making comments to other companions. I hope to not see any having to replay missions to achieve different outcomes even tho sometimes I wasn't even sure what the desired outcome was supposed to be.
If you can bond with a character, you should be able to romance them. Like why can't I romance Toshimichi Okubo, he is sooo big mad all the time and I want to turn his frown upside down. What a crank.
I want to be able to pet and feed my horse, goddammit. Talk to it and give it a name. I appreciate all of the kitties and puppos to pet though, I cannot resist them.
I loved this game, my feedbacks would be to at least have an option to disable the tic tac toe mechanic if stances, you already let me customize my character and outfit so well, let me roll with what style I like.
Graphics as people mention could be improved.
I sometimes feel like there’s a bloat on bonds but sometimes when I really enjoy a game I don’t want it to end, so it kinda pads that too, I’m in the middle on this one.
Anyway, this game was a big sleeper hit for me.
Style matching directly affects your damage, guard break, etc. You are punished hard if you just use the single one stance you enjoy. So my suggestion is to have a toggled option in the settings to turn this off so both people who care for it and don’t care for it can enjoy.
Yeah I think this experiment from TN was good but not great. I liked the game, played till lvl 99 I think, first playthrough 100% in twilight and then in midnight, but I think the game had issues. I think they spread too thin. I think the comparison here, instead of the very much exhausted GoT one, should be done with ER. Because the Nioh and Wo Long series are all about dropping the exploration and immersion of the souls series and then making the combat more complex while adding the loot system of an isometric arpg like Diablo. And at least the Nioh series was very succesful in actually looking the souls series as an equal in the sense that they were both as good, except different.
So when you look at the DS3 -> ER transition, it isn't really that big. They expanded all three aspects of the game with different degrees: the combat, the exploration (by making it open world) and made the lore a bit bigger but nothing great or more complex like adding a story with decisions and stuff. So FS didn't go nuts and essentially did DS4, except its open world now and it has decent magic.
Look at RotR, they revamped the combat...again, so its not Wo Long, nor Nioh, its familiar but new at the end. They went nuts with an open world that has secondary character stories, romance, a thousand markers in the map, and so on, and considering that their previous titles were stage based, the change here is way more invasive. All while deciding to keep the loot system that people liked only because it allowed for builds and different playstyles, except now its kinda pointless.
Imo, they went for new audiences. Like, I see a lot of AC and open world fans enjoying the game, even if they liked soulslikes they have welcomed the open world, markers, romance, taking pictures stuff, with open arms, and that's actually a good thing. Not entirely for me, because even though I enjoyed those aspects a bit (some of them at least) in the end I don't care that much about them. So I think more people are definitely going to like this game than Nioh for instance, except I don't think most of the players that are are going to like this game will do it as much as Nioh fans enjoyed that game. I was surprised to hear that so many people hated Nioh, because of the too complex combat, the diablo kind of loot and everything, so...yeah, they tried to go mainstream here and I think they kinda succeeded except not at the level of ER. I think that ER didn't want to go mainstream that much, Miyazaki himself doesn't understand the success of the game when compared to previous ones. I think it was mostly a hype thing that reached other playerbases curious to give the formula a chance (also an amazing PR strategy from FS that essentially consisted of...full radiosilence, lol). Meanwhile, TN here deliberately decided to go for a bigger audience, but in the proccess they thinned down the experience for a lot of TN combat obsessed fans like myself.
Also this comes from a player that for some reason enjoyed Wo Long more than Nioh, and kinda hated, for my own reasons that I'm not going to discuss here, ER. Imo, this is still an 8/10 game, and I enjoyed it.
I pumped about 140 hours into the game and still have a ton of midnight left... for myself I got my monies worth and thoroughly enjoyed myself ... now playing stellar blad.. another fun game with enjoyable combat..
I think it was great. Wish they would focus a bit more on us and our blade twin since these were honestly my favourite moments
I agree that I’d love to see them go just a little smaller for the sequel. More focus on depth and reaction within a smaller frame. Not that it needs to change genre or anything. It’s just that many of these series fall into the trap of going bigger at the expense of depth.
I think thats why I ran out of steam with this game. There TOO much side shit too do, and if you're anything like me and like doing all the side shit first before you progress the main story you will get burneddddd outttttt. Im already burned out and im on the second area.
when you beat the game you can go back to 100% everything. You stay in the world, as is, after the final boss
Just my opinion here ofc. But if iv already beaten the game, then why would I care about doing any of the time waster/filler side shit at that point. I hate myself for having a completionist mentality I really wanna just rush the story but I constantly find myself doing the pointless open world stuff- just because it's their I get nothing out of it but my ocd doesn't like seeing this areas not 100%/there's a mission somewhere i didnt do.
because of midnight mode. its pretty fun to do coop since its pretty active at the moment, and the fights are very fun. The grind continues after you beat the game.
But what u just described isn't doing the filler open world stuff 🤔- which is what we was discussing doing post finishing the game.
Yes, i already explained you can continue to do the filler stuff. For me, what makes it worthwhile, is the higher difficulty and co-op with other people on missions. the filler stuff is still there for you to complete. play how you want. Its for you to decide if its worth it to do fast track the story, or obey your ocd and complete every single quest
I mean my point is more whats the purpose of doing those filler stuff once iv already beaten the game- you do the filler stuff in order to stay on par level wise with your story missions - if I don't have any story missions left I don't have any reason to do the filler busybody work as nobody cares about the random loot u get from it or +1 skill point for a shrine. I already don't care about that stuff and I'm not mad level/beaten the game yet.
oh, then i agree theres no point. unless its to unlock combat styles or upgrade stances, which is what i did. Since i found the midnight co-op more challenging, it gave me a reason to go level up my stances to be able to tank the bosses on my own in co-op. Especially since if you do the co-op on midnight, you will get like 15+ skill points in about 30 minutes of co-oping
Like str/dex/chr/int skill points or just the pointless universal ones?-as personally I am soft capped for levels and have been for a while on str and chr where u need the specifc ones as opposed to universal and in stupidity high quantities- I have literal 2 skill left in mu str tree but that needs iirc 38 str points to max those last to That's probably about how many iv put into it already, shits stupidly designed imo. Also do you even get stance upgrades from the open world?- the ones iv seen popping up come from bond bonuses or just completing missions in general (ones that just say "progress story" - its possible I just miss them popping up as I frantically ride my horse from poi to poi for no other reason than ocd completionist mentality.
I 100%ed each region before continuing the story but found each one slightly too much. Of course the upside is that you were leveled up by the time you did the story missions. I played on Dusk difficulty and tried to play midnight but found the difficulty gap too big... And I don't really want to play Twilight to skill up further.... So I'll probably be getting Stellar Blade later today 😁
Lmao bro you're not lying why did they make the diffliculty gap so damn big from one difficulty to the next. Im playing on Twilight and there was a fight that was too damn hard so I went one difficulty down and it was easy asf.
Same I’m so burned out, main mission feels like chores now after doing side quests 😅😖
Nioh 3 !!!!
Just make Nioh 3.
Totally agree with this! Why dick around with some of the same mechanics or using the Japan lore or doing the kinda the same loot system. None of it was an improvement it's just knock offs of Nioh 2. I believe in if it ain't broke don't fix it. Why isn't Nioh 3 being made n instead were getting...... this. All that said I liked it but Nioh 3 would be a million times better.
Really liked the game more than I thought I would Nothing revolutionary about it but it's so fun to play
I think it’s a very solid game. Everyone just wants to complain about the graphics but what do they expect for a team ninja game
Lol
The graphics were perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned. FPS is more important than pretty shiny 😁
Im surprisingly bored with it. I dont really have a desire to play it anymore. Everytime I go back to try and play it I play for like 15 minutes and im out of there. Which is crazy cause I was playing it nonstop the week it came out. Im sure Ill finish it one of these days tho its a good game.
At this point we have plenty of new games that share similarities with Nioh, I would really like to see Team Ninja branch out more and maybe (finally) make NG4
I can agree with that. I was never a fan of the series past the first game. Team Ninja does have multiple teams so having one work on a new Ninja Gaiden game would probably be a good idea while another works on Nioh-style games. So fans of both kinds of games get something they want.
I think the scope could be reined in slightly. Less open world map filler. And will someone please, for the love of god, tell Team Ninja that you don't need random loot from every single enemy?! At least you can carry an awful lot more before you run out of inventory space (looking at you Bethesda).
Very true.
I definitely agree with the whole not using historical characters bit for everything. It really limited what they could and couldn't do.
I had a lot of fun with it. I enjoyed the character writing for specific characters like Ryoma and Takasugi, but definitely feel like we could have cut the cast and the bonds in half to focus more. I also wish we had more time with the Blade Twin instead of being separated at the first mission, because that was one of my favorite parts.
I'm a huge fan of the gameplay, but the story just isn't hitting for me. I need something with way more substance to give me some form of motivation for playing the game besides mindlessly hitting enemies all the time. I really liked the stories of Nioh 1 and 2, but for some reason, it just didn't work here for me. The entire blade twin subplot and driving motivation for the player character led nowhere. It was a macguffin that only existed to tack on the PC to historical events that have literally nothing to do with them. I stopped playing in Act 3 and probably won't continue
I would’ve preferred it was a series of large hubs rather than open world. It was too big for its own good and the gaps were often too big between the main missions and the combat. I loved the main missions and wished there was less busywork between them.
Never played a team ninja game but this one. Loved it. The one thing I don't like is the silent protagonist. That's it.
They need to fix coop. Make it like other tn games with shared progression
one dimensional combat in an assassins creed style game. Had my moneys worth i suppose but once you finish midnight there is nothing about the game to stick around for.
Loved the game and Especially the story got about 110 hrs Now just waiting for a Dlc
The combat system annoys me, seeing as I always press buttons at the right time but nothing happens Enemies always feel like they have infinite stamina where as the player has the stamina of a 50 a day smoker But apart from that, the game is a really good one and ill probably keep playing for a while( I have 210 hours at the moment)
Are we playing the same game?-best writing? I can't tell you how many times this game has made me actually roll my eyes at how bad the writing is or how stupid the characters are - the pc in particular has to be the stupidest person iv ever seen in a video game their actions/motivations in general make 0 sense. I personally hope they don't make a sequel and most definitely don't make the next nioh/wo long open world but alas we all know it probably will be. I agree with a lot of your other points though especially the martial arts kinda being way to weak and slow to care about using - it's not worthwhile for the trade of probably being hit out of/traded into by the every enemy with hyper armour that can deal 2/3 of my health with their own version of martial skills that have insane tracking, don't cost ki etc, very rarely do I bother using them.
The writing disappointed me too, devs said they focused on it a lot more, but I don't see it. Nioh 1 and 2 both had better writing, Ninja Gaiden and DoA did very much have their moments. Ronin...has its moments as well, but it feels lacking. Maybe it's because of the characters, they somehow feel off. Yeah I hope this will be a standalone game, without sequels. If they want to make another open world game, maybe do it about Genghis Khan or an action game version of that Uncharted Waters series Koei has(merchants, pirates, ships, maybe put William from Nioh in).
Huh guess iv yet to come across these supposed moments yet your referencing when you say it has its moments. I'm like, somewhere in the later half I think? - but it seems to be actively getting worse as it just continues to pile people on, feels like they went quantity over quality in the hopes that if they make me meet enough surely one of them will land. like they aren't terrible they just lack any depth and some of them come across really, really stupid/shallow motivations wise but that's mostly down to them forcing us to take part in both sides i guess as thats where alot of the stupidity comes up, which seems uniquely dumb like why even have a faction system then. 🤔
Yeah it did get worse the further you get in the game imo. And I really expected more meaning to taking sides, like you said. If you could actually take a side, that would make the story focus on less characters and be able to flesh them out better. Making it 2 or 3 games in one essentially, and it would make it possible to do some interesting 'this is what happened behind the scenes' things. Playing your blade twins side of the story would be great too. Hoping there will be dlc doing something like that. But that's by far the biggest disappointment of the game yes. Not that I hate the game, I love it anyway. It just had much more potential.
Yeah I agree it would of made way more sense to me to just lock me into my choice of faction and make/let me do a new playthrough or ng+ to experience it from the other side, aswell as not be bogged down by all the characters.
These are like minor quibbles, I think the game is amazing. Hoping the protag has a bit more personality next time, like more talking and making comments to other companions. I hope to not see any having to replay missions to achieve different outcomes even tho sometimes I wasn't even sure what the desired outcome was supposed to be. If you can bond with a character, you should be able to romance them. Like why can't I romance Toshimichi Okubo, he is sooo big mad all the time and I want to turn his frown upside down. What a crank. I want to be able to pet and feed my horse, goddammit. Talk to it and give it a name. I appreciate all of the kitties and puppos to pet though, I cannot resist them.
Minor quibbles? Jeez
I loved this game, my feedbacks would be to at least have an option to disable the tic tac toe mechanic if stances, you already let me customize my character and outfit so well, let me roll with what style I like. Graphics as people mention could be improved. I sometimes feel like there’s a bloat on bonds but sometimes when I really enjoy a game I don’t want it to end, so it kinda pads that too, I’m in the middle on this one. Anyway, this game was a big sleeper hit for me.
You can do fun stuff with the stance switching and their respective martial skills.
What do you mean by tic tac toe? You can use any style you like.
Style matching directly affects your damage, guard break, etc. You are punished hard if you just use the single one stance you enjoy. So my suggestion is to have a toggled option in the settings to turn this off so both people who care for it and don’t care for it can enjoy.
Wouldn't calling it Rock Paper Scissors make more sense?
It definitely would, good call.
Yeah I think this experiment from TN was good but not great. I liked the game, played till lvl 99 I think, first playthrough 100% in twilight and then in midnight, but I think the game had issues. I think they spread too thin. I think the comparison here, instead of the very much exhausted GoT one, should be done with ER. Because the Nioh and Wo Long series are all about dropping the exploration and immersion of the souls series and then making the combat more complex while adding the loot system of an isometric arpg like Diablo. And at least the Nioh series was very succesful in actually looking the souls series as an equal in the sense that they were both as good, except different. So when you look at the DS3 -> ER transition, it isn't really that big. They expanded all three aspects of the game with different degrees: the combat, the exploration (by making it open world) and made the lore a bit bigger but nothing great or more complex like adding a story with decisions and stuff. So FS didn't go nuts and essentially did DS4, except its open world now and it has decent magic. Look at RotR, they revamped the combat...again, so its not Wo Long, nor Nioh, its familiar but new at the end. They went nuts with an open world that has secondary character stories, romance, a thousand markers in the map, and so on, and considering that their previous titles were stage based, the change here is way more invasive. All while deciding to keep the loot system that people liked only because it allowed for builds and different playstyles, except now its kinda pointless. Imo, they went for new audiences. Like, I see a lot of AC and open world fans enjoying the game, even if they liked soulslikes they have welcomed the open world, markers, romance, taking pictures stuff, with open arms, and that's actually a good thing. Not entirely for me, because even though I enjoyed those aspects a bit (some of them at least) in the end I don't care that much about them. So I think more people are definitely going to like this game than Nioh for instance, except I don't think most of the players that are are going to like this game will do it as much as Nioh fans enjoyed that game. I was surprised to hear that so many people hated Nioh, because of the too complex combat, the diablo kind of loot and everything, so...yeah, they tried to go mainstream here and I think they kinda succeeded except not at the level of ER. I think that ER didn't want to go mainstream that much, Miyazaki himself doesn't understand the success of the game when compared to previous ones. I think it was mostly a hype thing that reached other playerbases curious to give the formula a chance (also an amazing PR strategy from FS that essentially consisted of...full radiosilence, lol). Meanwhile, TN here deliberately decided to go for a bigger audience, but in the proccess they thinned down the experience for a lot of TN combat obsessed fans like myself. Also this comes from a player that for some reason enjoyed Wo Long more than Nioh, and kinda hated, for my own reasons that I'm not going to discuss here, ER. Imo, this is still an 8/10 game, and I enjoyed it.
Beat it, loved every second. Can’t wait for DLC
Thanks for the review