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For all the people on Windows 7 about to refund the game, here's how to run Nioh 2 on Windows 7.


1.) Install all essential AND optional Windows 7 updates
1a.) Hit Windows Key, type "Windows Update" and install all updates

2.) Get the latest available DirectX11 for Windows 7
2a.) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36805
2b.) Restart your computer

3.) Run Nioh 2 as administrator
3a.) Steam Library -> Nioh 2 -> Properties -> Browse Local Files
3b.) Nioh 2 Properties -> Compatiblity -> Check Run as Administrator

4.) Trick Nioh 2 into running on Directx11
4a.) Go to X:\Windows\System32
4b.) Find xinput1_3.dll
4c.) Copy and paste said xinput1_3.dll
4d.) Rename the copy to "xinput1_4.dll

5.) Play Nioh 2 on Windows 7

I bought this game on release in 2017 hated it, and refunded it.
I bought it again in 2020 - and it's the best game I ever played.


WTF Why?
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I grew up on Ninja Gaiden and Dynasty Warriors 3 & 4, and later on Samurai Warriors. Heck, 12 year old me dressed up as a Ninja for Carnival/Halloween and knew the entire history of the chinese 3 kingdom era and the waring states era of japan by heart. Of course, Ninja Gaiden had been my first game on XBox, and to this day it's in my Top 3 of best games ever produced. I loved the difficulty of it. I loved the lightning fast, skill based, fluid combat. I loved the seemingly impossible to beat bosses. I loved the progression system, and the variety of weapons available.

I learned about Nioh back in 2017, when I was having a flash of nostalgia, and was looking up Team Ninja to see if they had released any new games. And indeed they did - just a few days prior. I got myself Nioh, and hopped into the game..... and it was really not what I expected. The enemies in the first map were super slow. Their attacks seemed very poorly telegraphed and dealt a million damage for what looked like a guy stumbling rather than attack. You had like two different combos. There were really only bastard swords and spears. Everything was slow. I hated it. Immediately refunded it.

Then I played through dark souls and developed a whole new understanding of pace and difficulty. Decided to give Nioh a try again and immediately fell in love with it.


General:
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Nioh, like any souls game - is made for people who do not enjoy having their hand held - but instead want to figure out a game by themselves. Part of dark souls charm was not providing any tutorial for people. You are not introduced to the game with what is a metaphorical Green Hill Zone. You dont get to have time to familiarize yourself with game mechanics step by step before you need them. You are forced to either find creative ways to deal with an enemy through the various tools you have, or simply overcome it by sheer skill. It's this swim or sink mentality, coupled with a severe lack of information about the game online that has people develop very unique playstyles step by step. You discover a solution to a problem, and when faced with another problem try to find a solution very close to the last one. In that vain, you might end up entirely relying on Magic buffs to boost your combat stats to get through the game. You might utilitze items and magic to inflict elemental damage and debuffs. You might rely on stealth kills, muting your footsteps, going invisible and throwing smoke bombs. You might lay traps, throw stones and lure the enemy into said trap to execute them. You might throw a plethora of bombs and shuriken, fire bows, guns and cannons to kill the enemy from afar. You might exclusively use your melee weapons to dance around the enemy, dodge and chip at them. You might try and hit weak spots with slow weapons and deal massive damage with precise strikes. You might choose not to use any weapon and rely on killing your enemy with their own weapon.

It's all up to you - and it's all very much viable for your first and second playthrough. But with every playthrough, you are faced with new challenges. Suddenly that thing you did deals very little damage. Suddenly the enemy is a lot faster and doesnt give you enough time to do that one thing you did. Suddenly an enemy is immune to that element, or cannot be knocked down anymore. Suddenly, you cant just trade damage like that anymore. Suddenly, they do this new move that always gets you. Suddenly you need to adapt and find a new way of building your character or approaching an enemy. Suddenly you need to invest into this specific stat to make sure your previous strat still works out.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is absolutely done by design - and the very essence of Nioh.


Combat:
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The combat is absolutely the best combat I have ever seen in any game. And it needs to be, in order to make it so the absolute mountain of mechanics, abilities, skills, traits and interactions at your disposal can be freely combined and integrated into what is the core melee gameplay.

Do not be fooled however - although you've got a lot of freedom in how you want to fight - and although you got a lot of tools to deal with whatever opponent comes around - you are very, very easily punished. Not only by the enemy, but also through environmental factors like terrain.


Online Play:
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Online play is for the most part limited to coop. You can offer a cup at a shrine to have random people spawn into your world and help you out. Or you can get into a lobby with a friend and start missions from there. You can actualy play with up to two other players. Good news is, that even if you get stuck and are on the brink of giving up, you can summon another player who can help you complete the mission. Bad news is, most enemies and bosses can be mowed down and stun locked by two guys up until you get to the highest difficulty. Visitors who are way higher level than you do not get scaled down in terms of damage hence tend to 1hit almost everything. They get rewarded well, since they get special items for crafting and the souls they gain are scaled well, so there's an incentive to queue up to help other players, even if you are way overleveled for the mission you are helping with. That's a good thing. But it also means that you dont get to enjoy the game as it is meant to be, if you summon for a visitor. On lower difficulties, you might just end up just lagging behind and picking up items and gold behind the guy rather than play the game. This is not an issue if you at higher difficulties, if you queue with a friend, or get the occasional visitor that plays more of a supportive role. The abyss, is scaled to #of players, so you have to fight 2-3 bosses at the same time, if you summon for a Visitor.

While there are some PVP aspects wherein you can queue up for a 1v1 or a 2v2, it's very hard to find a match. Nioh is also fundamentaly not really made for PVP.


Story:
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I dont think most people really understand what the Story is supposed to be. It's certainly not the Arc of your Character. Your character is just the vessel to guide you through the locations in the game. Heck the dude is an absolute nobody, has no personality and even towards the very end of the game, when asked, doesnt have the slightest clue why the actual ♥♥♥♥ he's going through all the events in the game. That's because William/Anjin, the dude you are playing, is just a vessel for the game's progression through the world.

The real story of Nioh is the setting. The very much real history behind the characters that appear throughout the game. The ancient shinto rites, believes, folklore, and culture that is seen everywhere in the game. The story of Feudal Japan is told through both explicit and implicit means. The cutscenes are aestaticaly pleasing and do well both in introducing historical characters, their ambitions, believes and standings, as well as delivering the feudal japanese vibe Nioh is set in and introducing you to folk lore. The environment tells many a story. The enemies all have ties to folklore. The weapons, armors and items have descriptions that further introduce you to happenings, folklore and history of japan. Heck, you are even taught about Japan's geography, their most important temples, mountains, cities and sights, as well as their current and former prefectures, how japans political system evolved and came to be. The game is essentialy a course on japanese history, folklore and culture. THAT is the story of Nioh.

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I recommend Nioh to anyone who likes difficult games. 10/10

I played the original back on PS1. I played the emulated PS1 Version on PC. I played the 2013 PC version. And I played this version.

Graphics:
Worse than the community made mods for the 2013 version... although it was made by a professional studio, and not by complete amateurs. Why would you pay 20€ for a worse version by professionals, than a 0€ version by amateurs..? The biggest joke here, is that playing the remake on 720p or lower makes it look and feel better than on higher ones. Simply because the upscaling on 80% of assets is done so freakishly poorly, that it hurts your eyes. As far as I can tell, the did nothing in terms of shading, except increase the contrast and lower the exposure a bit.

Cheats:
Let me be real here. None of these "Cheats" are new. Anyone who can use cheat engine can come up with that in a matter of about 5 minutes. Heck - if you were to be able to use google, you could even download tables for cheat engine that allow you to change pretty much any aspect of the game you want dynamicaly. And it's free - wow!

Controller Support:
I wont praise Square on implementing this. It's a necessity when porting a game from classic consoles over. If you dont do it right, you done goofed. If you do it right, you passed.... and they didnt do it right on porting it over in 2013. I will not praise you on taking 6 years to fix it. Guess what - the community had a way around it in 2013. And that was an amateur software that allowed you to use your controller regardless of whether a specific game had controller support or not. Or you could use the steam link, and assign keyboard keys to buttons on your controller, and pretend to use a keyboard. Congratulations to Square, a professional studio, for not figuring out how to implement proper controller support, and updating the 2013 with that for 6 years.

Conclusion:
♥♥♥♥ off Square. This is not a remaster. This is a poorly done mod that was rushed out in the middle of development. Or so it looks to be. I'd refund if I could. DO NOT BUY THIS.

Comparisons:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/09/03/final-fantasy-8-remastered-pc-graphics/#more-725349

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46eE-ue39po

One of the best games in the Hack & Slash Genre I've played so far. Both conceptually and mechanically demanding at higher levels, but also very easy and fun to get into. Whether you just like to play it casually for a few hours here and there, or whether you want to become an absolute god - there's a difficulty for you. In fact, the difficulty scales so incredibly well that that the game, although entirely PVM right now, is still challenging, no matter how good you get.

Mechanically and conceptually, the game is exactly as complex as you want it to be. There are countless nuances to micro and macro positioning, movement, melee combat, animations, builds etc. Whether you want to play at a level where that matters is entirely up to you.

In terms of balance - there's almost nothing that's bad enough to be unusable - and almost nothing incredibly overpowered. It would be a stretch to say that there's a meta game you need to abide to.

8/10 would recommend

I've played DW 3 and 4 when I was a kid and have sparingly played a few of the newer installments. Almost always got a good month of enjoyment out of the games. What I expected was another overhaul of the classic games with a few new additions - essentialy what KT always used to deliver for the franchise.

What I got instead was a lot of confusion about what this game wants to be. KT seems to be just as confused about whether it wants to be a free to play game that earns money through cosmetics and DLC, or a fully fleshed out game with a fixed price tag.

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Monetization:

Usually free to play games have all the content potentially available right away. You essentially consume the game, start loving it, and then retroactively spend money on ingame features. What makes a free to play game successful is the amount of engagement it generates through actually being a game people enjoy investing their time - and as a consequence of that - their money into. Of course having a community around a game also helps keep players engaged in a free to play game - extending the lifetime of the game. Overall engagement means a steady influx of money. That's how free to play works. Some of the games noted are more predatory in nature, and some (read: a few) get it just right and give the player the feeling that they are being catered to by the developer. That's also where the whole idea of offering a service with frequent updates and patches with new additions came from originally... before most of the perversions that have been created in recent years emerged.

In any case, KT doesn't understand free to play. DW 9 fails to generate any engagement. Further, they give you this barely functional mess of a free to play game they dare call a "trial". They lock about 95% of the content behind a paywall and dangle it in front of you. They also make it so you cannot find or earn any weapons or equipments besides the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ base weapon you get, on top of denying you the joy of seeing your character grow with all the time you invest in the game. They just throw you into the game at lvl 18 and at some point lock you out of leveling any higher. In that sense, it truely is a trial - in that you cannot possibly progress your character or their gear any further than their starting gear. They essentialy derive you from achieving any sense of accomplishment or progress - keeping you from wanting to invest any more time or money into their game. This - ladies and gentlemen does not work as a monetization model for a game.

This was when I realized that there was no possible way to aquire the entire base game they used to deliver in the past without heavily investing into DLC. Since I was curious about what the actual game might be like - instead of just the trial, I decided to buy a single DLC worth 3€ to try and get a feel for the game without all the stupid restrictions.

To my horror, the download for the DLC was only 48 bytes.... While the trial was 40 GB. After investigating further, I found out that any DLC you download is exactly 4 Bytes big. It's a text file in Unicode, just 4 characters, likely containing an unlock key to the already existing content in the trial. This means that not only did they completely fail at monetizing the game - they also already had the entire game done, then artificially cut 95% of the content and resell it to you in 159 pieces supposedly worth 580€. This ladies and gentlemen, is a classic DLC scam. ♥♥♥♥ off KT.

Still - I was looking forward to getting a feel for the game after purchasing DLC to try and see if the game that felt so much like an RPG, rather than a classic hack and slash - would be actually worthwhile to put any time or money into... To my horror I realized that my "trial" hadn't become a full game. I was still bared from making any progress... and the 2 characters I had purchased also counted towards my "3 trial tickets". Meaning that I still did not own the characters I bought with real money.

This was when, after 5 hours of playtime, and about 2 hours of trying to find out how I could possibly play the regular base game without purchasing an entire Season Pass of 60€ - I realized there is no way to play the entire game without spending at least 60€ on DLC.

Listen KT. This is not how you make games. You either make a full game and deliver that... maybe sell some actual additional content on the side... or you make a fully functional base game that has people engaged and profit off said engagement through various additional cosmetic or otherwise new content. What you are doing is not only incredibly scummy, it's also just a really bad way of monetizing your games.

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Technical:


-It's incredibly poorly optimized. There are more NPCs on the map than there have ever been, and the map is bigger than ever.... causing the entire thing to frequently run on 5 fps.. all while having textures with really low resolution. Models are super bad as well. "Round" shields in your cutscenes are actually straight up hexagonal. That's some 2003 ♥♥♥♥ right there.

- Enemy spawns don't work. I've played the game for about 5 hours and have already encountered problems with about 150 wolves spawning. They were glitching around like crazy. All the wolves were getting bounced around so much by the other wolves that the entire wolf pack became a buggy, shaking ball of death that moves erratically and immediately kills you upon so much as touching you. Other times there's about 80 defense/assault/engineer captains you have to kill to take over a single castle or base. Sometimes they spawn infinitely and do not allow you to progress any further.

- The combat system is also unengaging, boring and broken. Your moves are still tied to your FPS... like games used to in the Diablo 2 era... which was in the year 2000. 19 years ago. This means you hit faster the more fps you have and slower the less fps you have... while enemies attack regardless of fps. That means that your poor optimization of the game also severely impacts how well you can do in combat. If your FPS randomly decide to drop, you will almost assuredly die. Simply because your character starts to move in slow motion while enemy units are unaffected by the fps drop. This also means that you become an invincible god at really high fps.

- Let's not even talk about whether the changes in the combat system are good or bad... because it doesn't matter... because there's this one move where you rapidly tap R1 + A and get into this really OP cycle of high damage knockdowns with no cooldown that also has invincibility frames throughout the entire animation. Once you figure that out, all other forms of combat become obsolete.

- Also: The bow doesn't work. Not implementing raw mouse input and making it so that I now need to aim my bow accurately at a fast moving tigers head at about 2500 dpi instead of my usual 600 was truely the work of a genius. The sort of genius that can magically remember every detail of everything he ever heard, but needs to be fed, changed and have his arse wiped by other people because his brain tumor also causes him to be severly mentaly handicapped. Like - you cannot even adjust your camera speed or mouse sensitivity without exiting the game. And even if you do turn it down to the absolute minimum, you are still operating at around 1300 dpi. Also very fun if you are playing on a controller. 100% Impossible to hit anything ever, because a tiny little nudge of the stick will make you spin by 180 degrees. Good luck hitting that headshot on one of the 10 tigers running at you, with 12 arrows in your quiver and that sweet -90% damage reduction to anything but the bow. ♥♥♥♥ that.

1/10 do not waste your time or money. ♥♥♥♥ off KT

This is not a videogame. This is a drinking game. Make sure to gift it to your friends - and have em all down shots any time they die.

Little Timmy grew up looking at all the fancy cars passing by. He didnt like General Motors or BMW much, but he loved this one type of car called TES. On his 18th birthday he bought himself a 5900$ car - the TES 5. He loved his car to bits - drove it for almost 10 years and got to know a lot of people who love the car just as much as he does. In fact, there's a whole community that formed around this amazing car shortly after it came out. The community loved the car so much, that - although mostly amateurs - they started to work on the car themselves - shoring up weaknesses and improving on the already great features. They all freely shared their knowledge and expertise among their community to further improve the car. Together they created almost 57.000 custom parts for the car and sucessfully shipped 1.200.000.000.000 parts to the people who loved driving the car - all for free. Any customization you could immagine already existed readily available free of charge - simply because of the great community behind it.

One day Timmy's uncle, who'd been in Nam for the past 10 years comes home from duty. Timmy excitedly tells him all about his car and the community behind it. Timmy's uncle, amazed by what he had been told - offered to help. You see, the uncle knew a thing or two about cars, since he'd been in charge of building and maintaining quite a few cars in his bataillon. He offered to take in every single car of the type for free maintainance - wash it and polish it before returning it to the rightful owner.

However, Timmy's uncle was not a nice man at all. Nam had changed him. He had become greedy and spiteful. The naive community had no clue however, and gladly took him up on his seeminly generous offer. They were all asked to pay another 5900$ for the maintainance, wash and polish. When they all got their cars back, they could only stare in horror, as he had modified every single car in a way that made almost all the 57.000 modifications they had developed completely incompatible. All the fruits of love, labour and dedication they produced for their favorite car in the last 10 years was essentialy useless now.

Timmy's uncle, being the great businessman he is, had a solution for that too - he'd only charge the community 200$-500$ for any new modification, or port of a prior modification. He also forced every single place that still sold to shut down, so anyone who'd buy the car in the future wouldnt have access to any of the 57.000 modifications, and instead would buy inferior, overpriced modifications from him.

That uncle's name? Bethesda.

(I own oldrim with all DLC on both console and PC. Put 500+ hours into my first character back when it came out on console. That's 500 hours of Vanilla gameplay. I have another 200 hours on Vanilla console and another 200 on PC with mods. I dont fasttravel and can navigate the map without having to look at the map or road signs.)

Take my word for it. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

A few days ago someone asked me whether they should buy a console. I can confidently say that anyone who gets a console nowadays is a straight up moron - and I've been a console gamer for more years than I've been a PC gamer.
As long as steamlink exists theres no need to ever get a console really. Steamlink not only enables you to play any game as thought you were on console (without the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hardware limitations - without the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monthly fees for online gaming - without the inability to use mods and customize your game etc.). Like - most PS and XBOX games are also released on PC - and even if they are console exclusive - theres always "Playstation Now". There's no reason to ever get a console as long as steamlink exists.

The controller sofware ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. THIS IS WHAT MAKES STEAMLINK AMAZING.

Not only can you use any controller you want without having to fiddle with a bunch of drivers that dont end up working consistently anyway.... you also get to customize every single thing you can immagine about the way you input controls.

There are no limitations, even if the game is completely incompatible with controllers, you can create a workaround with steamlink anyway. Say, I want to play Skyrim Special Edition with mods with a controller. If you wanna go deep with mods, you need both a script extender and a mod organzer. That means you are using a third party mod organizer to launch a third party Script Extender that launches the actual games launcher, which then launches the game itself. Did I mention that the game itself has an artificial limitation that keeps you from using two input devices? Meaning you can only use a keyboard+mouse OR a controller. If you use one, the other one isnt recognized. Oh and steam doesnt actualy "get" that you are launching a game and would like to use a controller. Dead end right? You are forced to use a keyboard right?

Nah. Just use your steamlink software to create your own controller configuration and remote control your keyboard with your controler. Bind WASD to an artificial 8-AXIS Joystick setting - bind your mouse movements to your right stick, and any inputs in the game's config to the button you desire. You dont have enough buttons to support all the keybindings for PC? Well - good thing we can create action sets right? Just press down your right Joystick to switch between sets. Voila, now you can use all the bindings. Oh - so the Pointer speed is fine for ingame actions but too fast for the menu? Well - just doublebind Start button to both open the menu and switch to another action set with a slower mouse pointer. Oh - pausing the game to browse your favorites and switch spells isnt immersive enough? Well - bind hotkeys to sets of favorites, create an action set for your favorites and press 2 Buttons to dynamicaly switch spells without having to pause the game.


Best piece of Hardware I ever bought. 10/10 would bang.

Could be a very good MMORPG. Impressive visuals and very cool character customization. Combat feels very badass as well. Seems top noth up until you talk to your first NPC.

Pretty sure every single NPC in this game has at least 3 chromosomes.

The NPCs and the weird black thing you constantly have to talk to really take you out of the game. This is when you start realising how ♥♥♥♥ the thing really is. Anything but your character looks like ass. Anything outside of your moves is boring and lazily done. Quests are uninspiring and involve a lot of autowalking from A to B.

Game has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of potential, but ultimately falls flat.

♥♥♥♥♥ game you are gonna have lots of fun with - if played with unsuspecting friends on a private server.
The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of the game has a certain charm to it. Garanteed to crack you and your friends up.

Singleplayer not recommended.