Nioh 3 — Review

Score: 8.9/10

Team Ninja once said there wouldn't be a third Nioh. Six years after the second, here it is anyway — and it arrives as the clearest argument yet that the studio has spent the last decade quietly building toward something specific.

Nioh 3 isn't a sequel made out of obligation. It's the point where a run of experiments — Wo Long, Rise of the Ronin, Stranger of Paradise — finally consolidates into a single, confident package. The lessons from all of them are visible here, and so is the ambition to stop chasing FromSoftware and start setting terms of its own.

A Studio That Learned From Its Misses

It's worth naming what those lessons actually were, because Nioh 3 is unusually legible as a corrective. Rise of the Ronin reached for a vast open world that its combat design never really needed, and the scale diluted what made the fighting good. Wo Long had excellent core mechanics undercut by level design that fell off sharply past a certain point. Both now read as ambitious experiments — worthwhile, but incomplete.

What's impressive here is that Team Ninja hasn't retreated from those ideas so much as recalibrated them. The open spaces return, but sized to serve encounters rather than fill a map. The mechanical experimentation returns, but with the level design finally holding up its end across the full runtime. Studios usually take one lesson from a misstep; this feels like a studio that took all of them.

Two Fighters in One

The headline change isn't the world. It's you. At any point, a single button swaps between Samurai and Ninja styles, and the two function as effectively separate characters — distinct skill trees, distinct weapons, distinct rhythms.

Samurai style is the Nioh you know: three stances, Ki Pulse timing, heavy and deliberate and deeply technical. Ninja style is faster, more mobile, simpler on the surface but built for aggression, with ninjutsu techniques and a movement profile that lets you flow around encounters rather than through them. Certain weapons are exclusive to one style, which means your build is genuinely two builds working in tandem.

What makes this more than a novelty is that the game encourages constant switching mid-fight. You can break certain major attacks by swapping at the right moment, meaning style selection becomes a live combat decision rather than a loadout preference. It's the deepest and most responsive combat system the studio has produced, and it plausibly rivals dedicated character-action franchises rather than just competing within the soulslike space.

The Ninja Gaiden influence is worn openly. The series has always nodded to it — the Hayabusa lineage, the Izuna Drop — but giving the player a full ninja moveset makes the debt explicit and the result genuinely exciting, arriving at a moment when Ninja Gaiden itself is enjoying a real renaissance.

The Learning Curve Is Steep — and Better Taught

For a genre that traditionally throws you in and lets you drown, Nioh 3 opens with a surprisingly thorough tutorial section that sets up the story and properly introduces both styles before the difficulty asserts itself. It's an uncommon courtesy in a masocore game, and a smart one: the dual-style system carries enough complexity that arriving at the first serious boss without understanding it would be genuinely punishing rather than productively difficult.

That doesn't mean the game goes easy. The three-stance system, Ki Pulse timing, and weapon skill trees all remain as demanding as ever, and the ceiling on mastery is extremely high. But the on-ramp is more considered, which matters more than usual given how much more system there is to absorb this time.

Open Fields, Not Open World

Team Ninja has been careful not to call this open-world, and that restraint is correct. What Nioh 3 offers instead is a set of large, explorable field maps threaded between the series' traditional structure — enemy bases to conquer, side bosses tucked away, loot stashed for players who wander.

It works because the fields serve the combat rather than diluting it. Fast travel between shrines keeps friction low, friendly yokai give the spaces personality, and the time-hopping premise means each region presents a visually distinct version of Japan. Getting ambushed by something enormous in a field you thought was safe is exactly the tension the series does well, and the open spaces give it room to happen organically.

Crucially, difficulty hasn't been softened — you've just been given more options. For the first time, if a fight is going badly, you can leave, explore elsewhere, come back stronger. The parallel to how Elden Ring evolved Dark Souls is obvious and earned: brutal encounters remain brutal, but walls become detours rather than dead ends.

Bosses and Encounter Design

Boss design remains the series' signature strength, and it's sharper here than ever. Yokai encounters are staged with real theatricality, and the dual-style system means most of them support multiple viable approaches rather than a single correct rhythm — you can grind one down with patient samurai stance work or dance around it in ninja style, and both feel like legitimate answers rather than one being the intended path.

The side bosses scattered through the field maps deserve mention too. Many pull directly from Nioh 2, which could have read as recycling, but repositioned as optional field encounters they function as an appealing greatest-hits layer for returning players and a genuine difficulty gradient for newcomers.

Depth Enough for Two Games

The volume of content here is genuinely excessive in the best way. Loot systems remain deep to the point of intimidating — this is still a game where you'll spend real time in menus comparing affixes — and the field maps hide enough optional content that a completionist run stretches well past what most games in this genre offer.

The build variety that results is where the game's long tail lives. Because Samurai and Ninja styles each carry their own weapons, skills, and armour considerations, character building becomes a question of how the two halves complement each other rather than which single specialization to commit to. It's the kind of system that sustains a dedicated theorycrafting community, and it's clearly designed to.

Visually it's a real step up too — a proper current-generation release rather than a remastered port, with the environmental variety of the time-hopping structure giving the art team plenty to work with. Moving between eras of Japan across the campaign keeps the game from settling into a single visual register the way its predecessors sometimes did.

Where It Slips

The story is serviceable and no more — the time-travelling premise is a functional excuse to visit different eras and fight demons, and it's predictable throughout. More pressingly, PC optimization at launch was rough, with significant stuttering and frame drops reported even on capable hardware.

The Verdict

Nioh 3 is Team Ninja at the top of its game. The dual-style system is the studio's best mechanical idea in years, the open fields add variety without compromising the brutal encounter design the series is built on, and the sheer volume of content borders on unreasonable for a single release.

A thin story and messy PC launch keep it from perfection. But this is the strongest entry in the series, the culmination of a decade of iteration, and comfortably the benchmark for soulslike games not made by FromSoftware.