Hmm. I still don't understand the relationship between your stamina bar and stance change, and I doubt I've got the dexterity to knock out the combo with stance changes anyway.
I'm all about the high stance patient counter, expect it'll get me nowhere in the game proper.
When you've done a move, your stamina bar turns white. If you stance change, you instantly regain that stamina, otherwise any other input will see it disappear. You can use that to get more attacks out of your stamina bar, the easiest way being switching down from heavy, to mid, to light during a combo.
Yeha. Seems you can just press R1 at the end of a combo to regain the stamina too, but I prefer switching stance. Nice to know there is the option though.
Just started playing this, christ it's tough. Is there a way to turn off the revenants? There seems to be a glowing red corpse every 10 yards and it's annoying.
Never played Dark Souls or anything like it, so apologies for the simpleton questions, but do enemies not stay dead in this? Or are they revived by praying at a shine? I mopped up five or six opponents, wandered around a bit (thought the shrine might save progress?), then they were all back in their original positions.
They're revived by the shrine, which will save progress too, but with these games autosaving tends to occur frequently in the background.
You progress by getting competent at facing enemies and also unlocking short cuts* that allow you to bypass areas of the game. Nioh is very tough and pretty stingy with the short cuts though. It is harder than Souls or Bloodborne.
*shortcut spoiler
Spoiler:
In the first area you can find a short cut by continuing up the middle path when you are presented with a garden on the left and a small encampment on the right. If you continue up and explore the cliff paths around there, you will find a few tough enemies that drop good loop, and eventually a ladder that loops back to the beginning
Cheers. I sort of get it, I think. The combat is satisfying as it's so tense - the Ninja Gaiden thing about the simplest of foes having the ability to catch you off guard, which was never really true, is certainly the case here. So aside from short cuts, are you effectively starting afresh with each death, or do you retain loot/character levels? One last question: what's the deal with the wolf you leave on the spot where you fall, I assume the aim is to get back to it each time? Didn't think I'd like this sort of thing, but there's a chance.
You retain all your loot and your levels. The wolf (which you can change at the shrine) is your Guardian Spirit. It serves two purposes: when it's fully charged (icon by the health bar) you can press triangle and circle to do a tempest attack, and also it marks your grave. If you reach it without dying all the amritta (exp) you earned on your last death are collected. If you die, they disappear and a new grave is made. Health potions are the same - they're up on the dpad and you have 3, which refill on death or accessing a shrine.
In the menu there is an equipment screen you can sort your equipment. Bigger numbers are better.
It, and the shrines, and the graves (but without the ability to summon an NPC to fight) are taken wholeheartedly from the Souls series. It's basically the central mechanic of progression.
Even though I didn't really get anywhere last night, it's fair to say that this has wormed its way under my skin based on the combat alone. I guess this is how these games (what are they called anyway? Dark Souls like doesn't cut it if the basics are being copied and pasted elsewhere) get their claws into you.
No, not really. But it scratches an itch. I used to really enjoy Onimusha back in the day, and I like games about Samurai that have interesting combat, like Way of the Samurai. That said, it's got a lot of issues. Combat is on the wrong side of difficult, and they could do with tweaking it a little.
The Diablo style item drops are fine by me, but the need to make it so that you aren't always getting 100 pieces of armour, and so that it's easier to get repairs or upgrades to bits of gear. Burning through twenty hats in a level feels stupid, especially when it sees you ditch a cool purple with lots of cool buffs for a white weapon just because its raw damage is really high.
Certain enemies also like to do grabs that pop right through their stagger state and through your hurtbox which isn't a huge amount of fun to deal with.
Hopefully the full game ends up being a bit more tweaked, but if you like Onimusha, combat with a lot of depth, and something that's sadistically challenging, then I imagine there will be a lot to like. It's rare that a game makes fighting an armoured soldier and two militia feel like it can go either way, which is something special.
I like a seemingly impossible challenge. It's something Souls and the good Ninja Gaidens have in common actually. Start a section, get instantly owned, think it's impossible, then keep trying different approaches until something gives and you feel really clever.