The relationship between siblings can be fraught enough when it’s your younger brother always trying to copy your dinner choices at a restaurant, and you can imagine how Tokugawa Takechiyo feels when his brother (who just so happens to be his parents’ favourite anyway) decides to usurp his rule and transform the country into a yokai-infested hellscape? And now, in Nioh 3, he’s got to travel through time and fix it all? Ugh. Little brothers are so annoying!
There’s been a great deal of evolution throughout the Nioh series, this PlayStation console exclusive being one of the first to embrace Asian and specifically Japanese culture and mythology within the Soulsbourne style. Nioh 3 brings two significant new changes to the table, first with the addition of a Ninja playstyle alongside the traditional Samurai style, and second with a more open world structure – Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo refer to this more as Open Field, a term borrowed from their musou games.
I absolutely love the switch to Ninja style combat. Samurai style remains and it is as structured and technical as ever, encouraging you to use fighting stances for low, medium and high weapon positioning, to always time your Ki burst to trigger stamina regen, and to block and counter, whittling away at your opponent’s Ki to leave them in a weakened state. A new addition is the Arts Gauge, giving you a powered up Arts Proficiency state to dish out much greater damage and Martial Arts consecutively.
Ninja, though, plays to my generally preferred approach of excessive dodging. There’s still plenty of technical play here, but it’s much more intentionally hit and run. You strike, and then dodge away or try to time a Mist in order to evade an enemy attack, leaving a shadowy figure as your Ninjutsu and Arts Gauges are quickly replenished. Instead of stances, you have Ninjutsu techniques, such as a throwable shuriken, while there’s also a Footstool Jump that you can perform to leap over an enemy, stagger them and strike from behind.
I’ve no doubt that people will prefer one style of play or the other, but here’s the thing: you can use both! Style shifting lets you effortlessly swap back and forth between Samurai and Ninja forms, loadouts and even visuals in a flash, and do so in the middle of battle. This can be great for using the Samurai to drain an enemy’s Ki and then the Ninja to deal a rapid flurry of follow up attacks. You’re actively encouraged and forced to do so by the otherwise unblockable Burst Attacks that some enemies will unleash. As they glow red to signal the attack, you can shift style with the right timing to perform a Burst Break and cancel their attack, dish out retaliatory damage and switch your form to the other.
Once you layer the Guardian Spirit skills from returning and new spirits to this series, there’s a ton of depths to the combat system to master in the moment. There’s common controls throughout, of course, but you’ll need to be switching approaches from moment-to-moment as you switch, and the need to use the style shift to counter Burst Attacks required manual thought during my hands on time. I’m sure it will become more natural and instinctive over time.
These shifting sands also apply to the layered approach to how this world is now constructed and the challenges that you’ll face off against. The open field approach gives broader levels to explore, taking you to multiple time periods and different regions. The ruined, transformed realm of Kyoto in the Bakumatsu period was less of a “go anywhere, do anything” world, and more a wide maze of paths to follow and routes to unlock. That still compares favourable to the more rigid structure of the previous games, and means that there’s more secrets to uncover here and things to do, and you do get a sense of freedom from traversing rooftops and seeking out the various collectable and cute Yokai, or zipping along the Spirit Veins that are magical streams to leap from one area to the next.
I rather enjoyed finding enemy bases here to capture, tackling the seven or eight idling enemies with a stealthy approach – in one instance reaching a cannon that let me blast a few chumps hanging around by a fire – and there’s also tougher enemies at key Crucible Spikes that are blocking paths and want clearing.
The goal in each open field is really to reach the Crucible at its centre, whisking you away to an even more twisted realm to battle through to the final boss and purify the region. The challenge here is ramped up, the yokai that you face having been buffed to deal increased damage, and you’re afflicted by Life Corrosion that you need to dispel by defeating enemies. Oh, and during battle (and especially within the Crucible), some yokai can be temporarily empowered by the Dark Realm, surrounded by red flowers and made even more dangerous for a period of time. The one real positive is that your Guardian Spirits are also buffed, letting you activate Living Artifacts more often to combine your powers with theirs.
There’s a ton of customisation options that we didn’t really get to dig into a great deal. The character creator returns, now with both Samurai and Ninja looks for you to define, but delving into the skill trees, you now have separate trees for the two styles. Creating your loadouts and having that fast switching means you effectively have four weapon sets to swap back and forth between, and that makes picking where to apply your points when levelling up a bit more crucial. Thankfully, this screen clearly indicates which traits affect which weapons. Beyond that, you’re able to swap moves in and out of the Samurai stances’ different attack weights and the Ninja more generally, and truly create a blended fighting style of your own. Oh, and the Onmyo box now has a Yin and Yang position, where you can create summoning seals in addition to Onmyo magic items from Soul Cores.
Ultimately, I really enjoyed my time with Nioh 3 – OK, so we were definitely overpowered for this preview event, and that helped when it was a morning gaming session, but even so! I think that fans will need to understand what Team Ninja means by open field, as opposed to this being open world, but I could happily have explored in different directions and found more corners of the map, if I weren’t pushing to reach the finish line in good time. I also think that there’s a risk of overcomplicating the layered concepts and controls to the point that they might lose a little meaning, but it’s undeniably fun to switch back and forth between Samurai and Ninja, or just stick with the faster, nippier Ninja in general. No doubt, this is one for fans of the series and the wider genre to pay attention to when it launches in February 2026.
