Jared’s Top Ten Games of This Horrible, Godforsaken Year

7. Nioh

Since nobody in Japan wanted to give us a Dark Souls sequel, or a Bloodborne 2 like we all fucking want, Team Ninja delivered on a very tight and succinct refinement of the Blood Souls sub-genre. Now excuse me while I vomit for using that phrase because there is nothing better at the moment. Same goes for walking simulators, like come on Internet, use your powers for good and give us a better name for these things I talk about incessantly.

Instead of trying to replicate the Dark Souls oeuvre, the inter-connected world, the gothic theme and setting, the confusing and intricate lore, Nioh simply opts to do one thing better than the Souls games: combat. And boy does it really make those other games look somewhat archaic in comparison. Nioh takes every single facet of Souls fights and improves them, from the way you spend and re-earn stamina, to the display of the opponent’s health and stamina, to the way you are incentivized to switch weapons mid-combo, and even the multiple stances used to create a rock paper scissors element to every encounter, it’s breathtaking and spellbinding to get good at that game. You can try and fly through it, and you feel like a badass, but sometimes you are ground into dust and have to conquer the game, and that makes you feel not only accomplished but like you dodged a bullet.

Controlling Nioh is how I want future From Software games to be like, which they can’t and won’t, and I accept that. I also want the guns of Nioh to be how you shoot in Bloodborne, but that is also an impossibility. So while more studios take a crack at topping the king, they better diverge in more directions either narratively or mechanically. Hopefully the competition to make the next Souls-killer is something developers are up to the challenge of, because so far it’s Nioh and anything Miyazaki is hiding from us at the moment.

It’s also very fun to say out loud. Nioh. Ni-oh. Nee Ho. Knee Ho!