Nioh 3 Is the Biggest, Sharpest Soulslike Team Ninja Has Ever Made

Combat remains the reason to be here, and it is spectacular. The core loop of managing your Ki (stamina), timing a Ki Pulse to recover it, and switching weapon stances to match a threat is intact and as demanding as ever, but the addition of the Ninja style transforms how you approach a fight. Samurai style rewards grounded, deliberate, stance-based aggression; Ninja style is about speed, air mobility, and hit-and-run pressure. Swapping between them freely, mid-combo, is where Nioh 3 finds a new ceiling of expression, and mastering the transition is enormously satisfying.

The structure is the big change. Instead of the series' traditional string of discrete, self-contained missions, Nioh 3 opens up into explorable fields dotted with shrines, side objectives, hidden yokai, and optional challenges. It gives the loot-driven progression, still a firehose of weapons and armour with sprawling stat systems, more space to sprawl, and it makes the moment-to-moment rhythm less punishing than the older games' wall-to-wall intensity.

That openness is also the main critique. The linear Nioh games were relentlessly focused, and some of that laser intensity is diluted when the same combat is spread across larger, occasionally repetitive fields with reused enemy encounters and the usual open-world busywork. The story, a historical-fantasy tale following the samurai Musashi against a demon-choked Japan, is functional connective tissue more than a draw. But these are quibbles against a combat system that is, top to bottom, the best in Team Ninja's catalogue, and a game generous enough to let you engage with its ferocious depth at your own pace.

Nioh 3 is easily the best-looking game in the series, and the shift to open fields gives it vistas the linear entries never had room for: mist-wreathed valleys, blood-red skies over ruined villages, and shrine-dotted hills that make the dark-fantasy vision of feudal Japan feel genuinely expansive. The yokai design remains a highlight, grotesque and inventive, each demon a puzzle of tells and openings as much as a spectacle.

The animation is where the craft really shows. Both the Samurai and Ninja styles are rendered with the weight, snap, and readability that this kind of high-difficulty combat lives and dies on, and the transitions between them look as good as they feel. Boss encounters in particular are visual set-pieces, enormous demons whose attacks you learn to read frame by frame.

The audio matches the ambition, with taiko-driven combat music that swells into the big fights and a sound design that makes every parry, stagger, and finisher land with real force. It is a confident, cohesive presentation that finally gives the series' excellent combat a world scaled to match it.