NOTE: The hours played displayed do not reflect my experience, I played it on a different platform first and bought it on Steam for a pending co-op playthrough.
This game is great. For the right kind of player, I'd even say it's amazing, but even if you're not the ideal target audience, it's still really solid.
At its core gameplay, it's somewhere inbetween Dark Souls and a more traditional action game, it's got multiple effective defensive options (which already puts it ahead of the Team Ninja games that followed it) and your offensive options are highly varied in an entertaining and creative way by virtue of implementing Final Fantasy classes and their gimmicks to an action game.
The controls are a bit difficult to get used to, especially the more intricate inputs with special active abilities and trying to use that to any deeper effect, as many of the abilities require a pretty good sense of combat flow to use them effectively (such as spending an MP bar to recover all your stamina being very difficult to mix in as part of your comboes) and even in spite of me having beaten the post-game DLCs (although never going into the super crazy tier deeper post-game dungeon afterwards) I never even learned how to use the weird class-swap mid-combo attacks which allegedly are one of the best ways to gain max MP on certain builds, but that only speaks volumes about the versatlity of build making in this game.
That's the key, though - this game will be at its peak quality in terms of showing off its intricate RPG elements only once you get to the build making part which is decisively in the post-game. If you're not into farming and optimizing equipment for potentially degenerate results, you won't see the best part of this game, and I highly recommend AGAINST buying the DLCs if that's the case, as their entire appeal is allowing this post-game optimization to come to full fruition. If you're on the edge because you feel like you may enjoy it but you're worried if you will have enough time for it, fret not, though - farming up a build that's effective and potentially degenerate and can clear the post-game content all the way up to the last DLC only takes up to around 15-20 hours if you're efficient with it. Nothing even close to me having spent 100+ hours to get through all of the intricate postgame of Nioh 2.
Nonetheless, even if you're gonna ignore the deeper RPG elements of build-crafting optimization, I would still recommend playing this game without DLCs to any fan of action RPGs, as the baseline gameplay is still fun, albeit not super complex (if we were to draw comparisons for complexity, the combat for the most part resembles something like Dark Souls more than it does Nioh, or maybe even at parts something like Code Vein with some special abilities and how they're designed). Some of the boss fights are... infuriating, but really, that's par for the course for the genre. The biggest annoyance for the most part were the companions, although I have to admit the combat encounters in this game were better balanced around having them than most games of this style which feature non-controllable NPC companions, as they didn't just completely distract the bosses to the point of the fights becoming completely free, and the normal enemies were plentiful enough in the levels that you often appreciated the help. I know for sure you can disable having them around in the post-game, although I'm not 100% sure if you can for the main game until that point.
Besides, if you find the gameplay to be tolerable enough to engage with the game at all, you'll probably feel compelled to play it to the end anyway, just because the main protagonist is just THAT damn good.
