Nioh: Pulsing Ki Like It's 1600

Well, finally through to NG+. Pretty good game really, my only real complaints are the slightly smaller pool of enemies and the pretty painful(imo) reuse of some of the late game bosses as “regular” enemies past a certain point.

I’m looking at you, room where you fight 2 fiends and 3 Kelley Clones at once.

I liked it though, I’m excited to see what all this DLC’s gonna be.

Second region spoilers:

That centipede boss was such massive trash. It wasn’t even difficult to fight, it was just tedious and annoying. I swear, if it becomes a regular enemy, I’m gonna lose it.

You’re safe. You’re never going to see it again. Well, unless you do that mission on NG+.

Oh man Boss number three was crazy fun to fight.

Now I got another adorable dog on my side.

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There are more dogs to come. They are all good dogs.

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They’re good dogs William.

BF’s still stuck on the Nue. He skipped the side missions and I convinced him to at least get Mizuchi cause that destroyed him when I used it.

Nue is nasty. I can finally destroy him reliably, but I’m on NG+ and have a bunch of magic and can land Discord really easily and just stunlock him to death. He owned me repeatedly the first time I fought him.

I have some issues with the lightning attacks but that’s due to me not paying attention to when he’s screaming.

Water destroys him though and waters status effect is really powerful.

Yeah, what I do to him these days is buff my weapon with water, stick the water status effect, then use a Guardian Spirit Talisman with a fire spirit like Enko or Suzaku equipped for instant burning (and, therefore, instant Discord). Then you just mash quick attack and stunlock him to death.

Oh yeah, also, related tip: the Guardian Spirit Talisman is fantastic. It summons your currently-equipped guardian spirit to do a special attack (the same one it does when you press triangle+circle while Living Weapon is active) and most of them are really useful. Daiba-Washi causes a tornado around you that knocks down any human enemy for an easy critical strike, for example, while Mizuchi dashes forward and knocks things back. Its damage scales with Spirit, not Magic, and most of the spirits are great at instantly sticking their elemental status effect, too.

(Do we consider guardian spirit names spoilers in this thread? I’ll spoiler them out if so, since one of them is definitely late-game. EDIT: Got it, spoilering.)

Yeah, I’d appreciate non-starter guardian names in spoilers.

I just figured to spoiler them since I keep looking up the folklore whenever I see a new name pop up.

Seconding that Guardian Spirit Talismans are fantastic and you should grab them even if you intend to go all physical.

Found out that even if you don’t have a stealth attack animation for Yokai you still do sneak damage if you get behind them unnoticed and do a heavy attack. It’ll do the attack but not the full animation and a good amount of damage.

Also I am upset that bowing to the kappa isn’t doing anything.

Another late-game tip: if you use katanas, get the Sword of Execution mystic art the moment it’s available. I went for the “spend less Ki with a sword equipped” one instead and that was a big, fat waste of skill points. I barely noticed it.

Sword of Execution, though? Well, for one thing, you should already be doing everything you can to hit enemies in the back whenever possible, especially bosses. Sword of Execution seems to double the damage you do from behind on top of the boost you’re already getting. I went from doing 750-800 damage per swing from behind to 1500-1600 from behind. It’s insane. If I tag an NG+ boss with a Weakness Talisman, hit them with Discord (which we’ve established is pretty easy with a weapon buff + a guardian spirit of a different element and the Guardian Spirit Talisman), and then buff myself with Carnage, I can reliably do like 6000 damage per swing from behind. Even on NG+, that just makes things melt.

That said, the Weakness + Carnage + Discord thing is good advice from the moment you have access to the necessary talismans. Discord is hard to apply if you’re relying on weapon buffs but really easy with the Guardian Spirit Talisman, and when any boss is Discorded, you can stunlock them with light attacks just by mashing square. People talk about how the Sloth Talisman breaks the game, but that shit is amateur hour compared to this. It can help to Sloth the boss first just to give yourself extra breathing room to apply the necessary debuffs, but it’s not really necessary.

(If you’re worried about the defense debuff the Carnage Talisman puts on you, well, it does make you take double damage. If you do the Discord thing right you shouldn’t get hit anyway, but if you want to play it safer, use the ninjutsu Power Pill instead. It’s a weaker attack buff but doesn’t have any associated debuff.)

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I just reached the part where you travel to another region. This game seems to be at least four times as long as I thought now.

The game so far is a lot less punishing than I would have expected judging from beta and alpha reactions. Guess they toned it down a good deal.

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It’s fairly close to the beta version, as far as I can tell - just with a new weapon type added, some skills moved around and a few less enemies in the initial village level.

And I’m in the third area at the moment - I’m assuming there are six, going by Kodama count. Definitely a lot to this game.

They’re adding William to the upcoming Koei Tecmo mash-up “Musou Stars”:

PREPARE TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE

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If you’re curious, there are a total of six regions. It is a really long game. And there’s an NG+ that changes things up and has an entirely new tier of gear. And you can go back and forth between NG and NG+ at any time.

I don’t know if they really toned it down from the alpha/beta or not. It felt easier to me, but I’m coming from having played every Souls game and Bloodborne and all of the Nioh demos, so I came in already knowing how it all worked. The late game definitely has its share of challenges, though weirdly enough I think all of the hardest bosses are in the first region.

The optional boss-only sub-mission in region 1 took me almost an hour. Hardest fight in the game so far…

I think that’s probably about how long he took me in the demo weekend before the game released. I beat him pretty quickly in the full game, but that’s just because I already knew how to fight him.

There are definitely more fights that are challenging in the same way as that one, but I think having gone through that really helps you know how to approach that kind of fight, so none of the others are quite as hard (at least, in my experience).

Wait, no, I take that back, there’s at least one really tough boss past the first region.

So far the boss I’ve had the most trouble with is Umi-Bozu, but I think the instant-death falls in his arena killed me more than he did. Also I didn’t realise until fighting him in Twilight that using the bonfires to empower your weapons is what lets him spawn in a second wave of buddies.