Nioh: Complete Edition

The pitch

Nioh drops William Adams -- based loosely on the real historical figure, an English sailor who became the first Western samurai -- into a supernatural version of Sengoku-era Japan, hunting a kidnapped alchemist and a mysterious substance called Amrita through a war-torn landscape crawling with Yokai, demons drawn from Japanese folklore. Mechanically, it's a third-person action RPG built on the Souls formula's bones -- stamina management, punishing enemies, bonfire-style shrines, recoverable currency dropped on death -- with Team Ninja's own combat DNA from the Ninja Gaiden series layered heavily on top. Every weapon type has three stances, trading speed for power, and a timed "Ki Pulse" mechanic rewards precise stamina recovery at the end of every exchange, giving combat a rhythm distinct from anything FromSoftware has built.

It released for PS4 on 7 February 2017; the PC version arrived later that year, on 7 November 2017, as the Complete Edition, bundling all three of the game's story DLC expansions into a single package from day one on that platform. Both releases came as full launches, with no Early Access period on either.

Where almost nobody disagrees: the combat

Read enough Nioh reviews, and one thing survives every disagreement about the rest of the game: the combat is exceptional. Reviewers who otherwise pan the loot system, the level design or the difficulty balance still, with striking consistency, open or close with some version of "the combat is the best part of this game." The stance system gives every weapon type real tactical range -- High stance for damage against staggered enemies, Low stance for speed and evasion, Mid as the flexible middle ground -- and the Ki Pulse timing window rewards precise play in a way several reviewers say has no real equivalent in Dark Souls or Bloodborne. One long-time player, describing over 300 hours across console and PC, calls it simply the deepest and most flexible combat system among third-person action games they've played. It's rare for a review corpus this large and this divided to agree on anything as completely as it agrees on this.

Where the disagreement lives: everything wrapped around it

The negative sample -- and a fair number of otherwise-positive reviews with real reservations -- converges on a different, more structural set of complaints, and they've stayed remarkably consistent from 2017 through 2026. The most frequently repeated is the loot system: Nioh drops gear constantly, at a rate several reviewers describe as overwhelming rather than exciting, with the overwhelming majority of drops representing marginal numeric upgrades rather than meaningful finds. "You will get the best armor and weapons and be over level 100 by endgame and will somehow feel even weaker than you were," reads one particularly frustrated 2024 review, describing a sense that raw numbers rather than skill increasingly define whether an encounter is winnable. Several reviewers connect this directly to difficulty complaints on the game's higher post-campaign tiers, describing damage-sponge enemies and stat walls that feel less like the escalating, telegraphed challenge Souls games are known for and more like a grind gate.

The second consistent complaint concerns structure: Nioh is built from discrete, replayable missions rather than one continuous, interconnected world, and a meaningful number of Souls veterans say that costs the game the sense of a real, explorable place that FromSoftware's level design is famous for. One of the most widely-read reviews in the sample makes the comparison explicit and corrective rather than dismissive: "this is NOT a Soulslike... this is more akin to Ninja Gaiden meets Diablo," going on to describe the loot-and-missions structure as closer to an action RPG grind than a slow, deliberate Souls campaign. That reframing shows up independently across many reviews, which suggests it's less a complaint about quality and more a genuinely useful correction to what the marketing and surface-level comparisons imply.

The achievement curve backs up how hard this actually is

Global achievement completion supports the review corpus's central tension well. Early milestones -- completing the first mission, reaching a base character level, first use of the game's hot spring rest system -- sit at 50-75%, reasonable numbers for any long action RPG's opening hours. From there the curve falls steadily and then drops sharply for DLC-specific and challenge-run achievements, several sitting at 3-4%. The platinum-equivalent full-completion achievement sits at just 2.6%, one of the lowest completion rates covered in this review's lane -- a concrete number behind the review corpus's repeated description of a game that demands real, sustained commitment to see through to full completion, on top of the difficulty complaints layered on top of that.

Value

At NZ$71.49 with no discount active at the time of checking, the Complete Edition represents a genuinely large amount of content for the price: the full base campaign plus all three story DLC expansions, multiple New Game Plus difficulty tiers with escalating challenge and rewards, and online co-op and PvP that reviewers describe as still functional and populated years after launch. For players who click with the combat system, hour-for-hour value is strong; for players who bounce off the loot-management and mission-structure complaints documented above, the campaign's length can work against it rather than for it.

Verdict

Nioh is a genuine case of a game whose best element and its most divisive elements sit right next to each other rather than separated across different systems. The combat -- stances, Ki Pulse, weapon variety -- is close to universally praised, including by reviewers who otherwise recommend against the game. The loot flood, the more linear mission structure and the stat-driven difficulty spikes on higher tiers are just as consistently the reasons a real share of players, including committed Souls veterans, pull back from a full recommendation. Go in with the right comparison in mind -- Ninja Gaiden's combat depth wrapped in a Diablo-style loot grind, not a Dark Souls clone set in Japan -- and the gap between Nioh's reputation and what it actually delivers mostly closes.