Nioh 3 Review

Nioh has always had the best hands in the genre and the worst inventory screen, and the third entry changes exactly one of those. The addition is style switching: samurai stances on one shoulder, a faster ninja moveset on the other, swapped mid combo without dropping your ki pulse timing. It sounds like a toggle and plays like two games braided together, and the ceiling it opens is absurd once you stop treating the styles as separate loadouts and start using one to cover the other's recovery frames.

The Crossroads areas are the other change, trading mission select for wide semi open maps with side objectives, which gives the yokai encounters room to breathe but thins the density that made the older levels so sharp. Takechiyo is a blank protagonist inside a story that assumes you already care about Sengoku politics it never bothers to explain. And the loot is still ridiculous, hundreds of drops an hour, most of it noise, a rarity system that turns every rest at a shrine into spreadsheet work. Play it for the combat, which is close to unmatched, and treat everything else as tax.