Great artists steal, so the old maxim goes. But can choosing to steal from ever-more-ambitious projects push those imitators to similarly expanded heights? When your whole deal is copying off of someone else’s paper, is there room to doodle something genuinely new and cool in the margins? The recently available alpha demo for Nioh 3 suggests it might be possible.
Team Ninja’s Nioh games have always been cheerfully shameless in their aims: Extract the combat genius of From Software’s Dark Souls—with its emphasis on anticipation, timing, pressure, and crafting diverse fighting builds—while leaving all the older franchise’s esoteric weirdness in the garbage. The two previous Nioh games had no illusions about their role as junk food, or that they were supposedly dropping players into fully realized worlds; every haphazardly placed wall, broken bridge, and stage select screen pretty much screamed “You’re in a video game level!” (Often remixing spaces and fights to tweak challenge, and give the games’ shockingly robust combat system space in which to do its work.) It’s part of what I love about them, especially the much-improved Nioh 2: I’m not always looking to play through a somber meditation on despair and futility set in the ashes of a dying world, where every enemy has been placed with care to communicate a melancholy grandeur; sometimes I just need to kill my way through a castle full of weird little bad guys, who are placed there because, fuck it, an evil castle needs a full complement of weird little guys to staff it.
It was in this spirit that I tackled the new demo for Nioh 3—and came away genuinely surprised. The game puts an interesting foot forward in the first place, showcasing a new system in which you can switch between a slower “Samurai Mode,” where your defenses are higher and your hits are stronger, and a much more fleet Ninja Mode. (Suggesting that Team Ninja’s cribsheet may have expanded to incorporate Assassin’s Creed: Shadows into its list of reference points.) The rhythm of switching between the two forms adds a neat twist to the series’ stance-based combat, forcing players to think about whether they want to take a target head-on as the Samurai, or angle for lucrative backstabs as the Ninja. (It also allows less of the game’s dropped loot to go straight in the trash compactor the way it did in previous games, since you’re functionally kitting out two characters at once.) As I played through the demo’s first level, I assumed I was seeing Nioh 3‘s big conceptual swing, and was nodding along happily as I killed my way through its usual mix of human enemies and monsters drawn from Japanese mythology.
Then I beat that first level, was presented with an expansive vista I was expected to now start running through, and discovered someone at Team Ninja had also been playing a whole lot of Elden Ring.
The addition of an open world (much smaller than Elden Ring‘s, but still far more open than a typical level) into Nioh 3 could have been disastrous. Open worlds, by their very nature, give up some of the control and craft that comes from more bespoke level generation, and the Nioh games weren’t exactly drowning in that kind of craft in the first place. But as I poked at the multi-hour chunk of game world the demo offered up, I was shocked to find that Team Ninja had, essentially, managed to Nioh-ify the experience of exploring this kind of massive landscape, to build a bold new frontier out of simple gaming carbs. The ruined version of feudal Japan I ran through with my nameless, largely anonymous Samurai/Ninja dude may not have felt melancholy or lonely—hard to, when you’re packed with this many little incidents and fights—but it was full of fun stuff to do that itched my compulsive gamer itch. The whole thing clicked for me in full when I stumbled into my first base, with bad guys patrolling in their sad little bad guy routes, just waiting for me to come cut them down and steadily dismantle their whole zone. I realized Nioh 3 was ripping off Elden Ring, yes, but also copying gleefully from Far Cry (or the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed).
Pretty quickly, my worries went from, “Oh fuck, this is going to be a mess” to “Oh fuck, I’m going to play way too much of this when the game actually comes out.” As someone who’s not immune to the allure of a map full of little tasks—especially when those tasks are tied to, and empower, combat that flows this smoothly—I can already tell the game is going to get compulsive for me. Filling out a full region and being rewarded with both stat boosts and info about where extra items are hiding amidst the burnt-out villages already has a hold on me. (It’s one of those games where I had to actively fight the urge to go play it instead of writing this; I should probably consider it a blessing that the alpha demo will be expiring before this column publishes.) Nioh 3 isn’t innovating, at least in a platonic sense of the word. But by making a really compulsive and accessible version of a game as ambitious as Elden Ring, it’s definitely achieved a higher level of stealing; I can’t wait to have it suck me in in full when the full game arrives some time early next year.
