Nioh 2 is an extremely well-made entry in the soulslike genre that I personally can't recommend. An otherwise great game that collapses under the weight of its systems management.
Mechanically, Nioh 2 is fairly strong, though I take umbrage with the title's parry windows. In the age of wireless controllers and HDMI gaming, just-frame or even 3-frame parry windows aren't sufficient anymore. It would be fine if Nioh 2 were running off RAM and a CRT, but not with the amount of input lag baked into today's standard hardware. You have a dizzying array of combat options available to you, and experience is gained through weapon or skill use.
Many skills are only available or useful against human targets, which make up the vast minority of targets, making me question the inclusion of the skills in the first place.
I have no good things to say about the human bosses. They cheat on a level that isn't remotely fun or fair, (such as infinite ammo and stamina) at least the Yokai have rules.
Ki (Stamina) starvation, rather than enemy difficulty will be your number 1 cause of death, doubly so if you don't have the OCD to hit ki pulse after every. single. combo. Honestly the Ki system alone is enough to make me recommend "Rise of the Ronin", Team Ninja's more recent, friendlier offering, instead.
The overall narrative is fine, you play as one half of a mythologised Toyotomi Hideyoshi, helping out Oda Nobunaga and the other notable names of the Sengoku Jidai as he works to unify Japan. The issue I have is the same as nearly other soulslike: the world doesn't make any practical sense. Humans should be extinct in the world of Nioh. The yokai hunters are all dead, there's no indication of the existence of a society to feed Nobunaga or his armies, and there's not a stitch of architecture that isn't rotted, frozen, or on fire. Unifying Japan seems like it should be a much lower priority than say, the gatekeepers of Jigoku running literally roughshod through the countryside murdering people. Re-using levels for side content is fine, but making me play through the same flavor of misery factory 3 times is too many, either make a new level or cut the dross.
The final straw was the sheer amount of systemic management in the game. Once the game opens up past the tutorial zone, you're likely to spend as much or more time in management screens as the actual game itself. Beyond loot being largely meaningless once you find a setup you like, there's something like 3 or 4 different vendors to hock the crap you don't want, and going through 200 entries on a controller bites. Onmyo Magic, Ninjutsu, and regular consumables all have to fit inside the 8 (7 in practical terms, as the "Estus Flask" takes up a slot) quick item slots, severely limiting your in-fight tactical options. Guardian Spirit magic is also a thing, but it's a Destiny-style economy: extremely inefficient resource generation with "you get to use your Super exactly once" mission design. The gleaming towers of exciting Japanese fairy tale combat crumble due to the high-test fuel of unchecked tactical possibility. Each individual mechanic is fine on its own, but the limitations of the UX and the controller force you to specialize when the game really wants you to interact with everything all the time.
