Nioh

Nioh is a 2017 action RPG developed by Team Ninja and published by Koei Tecmo (with Sony handling the PlayStation release worldwide), released February 7, 2017 for PlayStation 4 and later that year for PC as the Complete Edition. It holds a Metacritic score of 88 — still the series’ critical high-water mark — and sold over three million copies, establishing the first non-FromSoftware Soulslike to be treated as a genuine peer of the games that inspired it rather than an imitation.

It also has one of the strangest origin stories in the genre: the project was announced in 2004, for PlayStation 3, based on an unfinished screenplay by Akira Kurosawa — and spent twelve years being restarted, rebuilt, and passed between teams before Team Ninja’s version finally shipped.

Technical Specifications

Twelve Years in the Forge

The project began life in 2004 as Oni, a PS3 launch-window ambition built on a screenplay Akira Kurosawa left unfinished at his death, developed under Koei with son Hisao Kurosawa’s involvement. It missed the PS3 era entirely — restarted repeatedly, at one point reworked as a more traditional action game, and finally handed to Team Ninja, who rebuilt it around the emerging Souls formula their own Ninja Gaiden pedigree was ideally suited to sharpen. Public alpha and beta demos in 2016 collected hundreds of thousands of player surveys that reshaped the difficulty and systems before launch — an unusually open process that Team Ninja has credited for the final game’s balance.

William, the Irish Samurai

The story is loosely anchored to a real person: William Adams, the English navigator who became the first Western samurai — reimagined here as a blond Irish ghost-hunter chasing a sorcerer to Sengoku-era Japan on the eve of Sekigahara. Guardian spirits, historical warlords (Hattori Hanzo and Tokugawa Ieyasu among them), and a countryside overrun by yokai — demons drawn from Japanese folklore — give the game its identity: real history braided with mythology, a mix the series never abandoned.

Ki Pulse and the Loot Question

Team Ninja’s contribution to the Soulslike vocabulary is rhythm. The Ki Pulse — a timed button press after attacking that instantly refunds spent stamina — turns resource management into an active skill, and three switchable stances (high, mid, low) per weapon multiply every moveset. Layered over it is a Diablo-style randomized loot system, drowning players in gear drops — the series’ most divisive trait, adored by build-crafters and merely tolerated by players who preferred FromSoftware’s curated approach. The combination — faster than Dark Souls, deeper mechanically than almost anything in the genre — is what reviewers meant when they called Nioh the first Soulslike that felt like a rival rather than a tribute.

Reception and Editions

Critics landed at 88 — praise for the combat’s depth and the yokai bestiary, criticism concentrated on level reuse and loot bloat — and the game passed three million copies. Three DLC campaigns (Dragon of the North, Defiant Honor, Bloodshed’s End) extended the story through the siege of Osaka, and every current version — Steam’s Complete Edition, the PS5 Remastered release with 4K/120fps options — includes all of them by default. The sequel, Nioh 2, arrived in 2020 as a prequel; the series’ reinvention, Nioh 3, followed in 2026.

Where to Play It Today

Nioh: Complete Edition is on Steam (frequently discounted deeply), and PlayStation offers both the PS4 original and the PS5 Remastered – The Complete Edition, also bundled with its sequel in The Nioh Collection. All versions include the three DLC expansions; co-op remains active.