u/AenwynTheComment

So, after completing the game 100% (haven't done Midnight yet), I will say that there's plenty of good and bad in this game for me personally. Is it as bad as people make it out to be? No, I think it's a lot better actually. But is it as good as Nioh for me (personal opinion)? Well...

The combat is as always, excellent from Team Ninja, and the flow of it is really good, however some things in this one I found to be a bit awkward, such as the different counterspark windows (yes, this can be countered by countersparking with only one and then doing combos with multiple stances, I still don't like how they did it however). I found the meta to be a bit narrower than Nioh or Wo Long IMO, and the build variety is very shallow compared to it, you do get a lot of movesets to play with however it's just that not all of the moves will be equally as useful. To be fair, this is an issue in Nioh and Wo Long as well. Some other minor annoyances were how enemies can combo you when you're out of ki, tbh I just wish they did more damage instead of making me watch an unskippable cutscenes in the middle of combat, however I have this complaint with many games so I won't hold it against Ronin specifically.
For builds like a I already mentioned, this game isn't worth playing it for those alone, Nioh and even Wo Long was many times better in that regard. The combat itself can be kind of build like like I said, but I do wish this game had more build variety with the armor/weapons, on top of also adding more different and unique looking sets.

The side activities in this game were actually really fun, honestly 10/10 idea, they weren't overused, and all the firearms, archery and glider training events were very fun to master. Speaking of which, I liked the horse mechanic however I did find the horse to a bit janky, and I thought the glider was a great idea for traversal in the world along with grappling hook.

For enemies and bosses. Their movesets are in fact really good, however enemy variety in this game is absolutely atrocious. By far the worst out of Team Ninja's games, even worse than Wo Long somehow. In terms of visuals, they all generally look the same and the movesets do start to become very similar after a while, even when there's some variation. The bosses are much more varied than the enemies which is good, however they lack different styles of attacks often like you would see in other games, such as AOEs or something cool to make them visually distinct. Yes, some of the bosses are very anime and they were fun to fight, but I found too many to be too samey yet again. The dojo is an amazing idea and the best thing this game has imo for the combat. Nioh and Wo Long would really have benefited from something like the dojo in Ronin in my opinion.

The visuals are as usual very Team Ninjaey if you will, however I like their style and I think it looks good. In fact many of the environments or NPCs in my opinion in this game look fantastic. The problem however is yet again, everything is far too samey after playing this game for 200 hours. Too many enemies look the same, too many building and too much of the environment is all the same. This wasn't an issue for me in the 1st 100 hours but after a while this game started to get really tedious to me to explore which I never had an issue with in Nioh 3. By far one of the worst parts of this game to me wasn't the exploration in of itself, but the fact that the open world was so samey in this game, so many locations that always just looked the same and so many enemies that were the same. Thank god there's a trick you can do later in the game to make it snow permanently, or rain permanently as that really improved my enjoyment of just looking at something different for once. I think Ronin would of benefited from supernatural elements heavily yes, but even if you're against that, I think more environment and enemy variety even if making it more "grounded" would've been way better. More snow, more wind, more rain, maybe some cool island or mountain sections more. Anything to break up the pace of the same exploration for so many hours.

Character creation is just like with all the other Team Ninja titles, extremely good and one of the best in gaming. Except in this game you can make 2 characters so that's even better. 10/10 as always, only thing lacking is more crazy slider options.

The sound design in this game is great in general like with their other games, but I found the music to be... incredibly lacking personally compared to Nioh or Wo Long. Maybe that's just me but I couldn't think of any memorable music from this game at all really.

The story... oof. Honestly, I'm one of the people who actually likes Nioh and Wo Long's story, and Stranger of Paradise as well, and the story in this game was just absolutely terrible. Their voice acting even in English was great (and of course in Japanese), but the story is not realistic at all and doesn't make any sense at all either. You will betray everyone in the story many times regardless of what you choose and still you will be forgiven every time as if nothing ever happened. The power of friendship I guess... also the two opposing factions go from hating each other to loving each other randomly as well, it's all a complete mess. The main story choices felt useless and it was hilarious seeing how nobody in this game seemed to care at all about them, not really. Also fighting the same bosses 20 times in the main story sure got old real fast... Looking at you, 10th Aritomo and Ito fight in a row. The only good part of the story was the voice acting and some character storylines, but if you're going into this expecting the main story to make any sense... well, it's just utter nonsense lol

So after doing everything in the main game, every bond, every romance, every mission, all the exploration, everything in the dojo, what do I think? I think this game is good, but it was also very mid in many ways that Nioh or Wo Long was much better for me. I know some people prefer this game and that's okay by me, but I simply couldn't tolerate the lack of variety in so many areas after a while of playing. The dojo itself is amazing, best thing in the game by far for me and it's nice to just come back and replay it every once in a while, but I do not personally like the grounded aesthetic this game was going for, and I think it suffered for it. I see myself replaying the dojo or some Midnight stuff occasionally, however the entire game again 100%? No. I'll do it in Nioh 3 but this game was really tedious and I think it's best if you're getting tired of it to just ignore a lot of the side content and focus on the main story and dojo and Midnight difficulty, and some of the more important character bonds and romances, alongside some fun side activities. Way too much of other stuff was too repetitive and mind numbingly boring to be replayable for me. Oh, and I also plan on modding the game more as well, but that's more of a personal thing lol

Also the performance... jesus christ, the performance of this game on PC, and especially Linux for me is absolutely atrocious. By far their worst game performance wise, and while I liked the visuals, I do not think they're worthy of the insanely large game size or the absolutely terrible performance that I had to spend a long time fixing to even be able to play at 60 FPS and not 30 with lag. And I have a good PC, it's just the game that can't run well at all most of the time on Linux, and even Windows apparently struggles much more than console. So if you prefer controller and console it might be worth going for that over the PC version, although the PC version is the only one with mods, some of which I even made myself.

So yeah, that's just my honest opinion after doing everything but Midnight stuff so far, I know some of you may disagree, but I hope I at least made some good points. I like the game more than most games still, don't get me wrong, but it didn't quite reach the peak that is Nioh 2 and Nioh 3 for me.

I often notice everywhere online people only mention how you need to play every soulslike game with a controller, and that keyboard and mouse is beyond terrible, but as somebody that has never used a controller in their life basically, I find that that couldn't be farther from the truth. I've played many soulslikes, casually and done challenges in them as well, and honestly, most of the time unless the PC port went wrong somewhere horribly (looking at you Wo Long at release with a mouse deadzone), the controls are usually pretty great.

It takes some getting used to in the beginning if you've never played a soulslike before with keyboard and mouse, but I found that after a while it's very usable and competitive. It even allows for great aiming and turning the camera when not locked on with your mouse. The only issue is that your character can only move in 8 directions instead of 360 degrees with keyboard, but I hardly found that to be a problem in soulslikes, more in bullet hells I'd say.

So most of this post is just me saying that if you're more comfortable with keyboard, you shouldn't be afraid of trying it instead of controller. Obviously in the end you should always use what you do better with, but for me personally having played so many games and gotten so good at them just with keyboard and mouse, I know I would be much worse with a controller from the few times I tried it in my life. I'd say in these games it's always more about what you're comfortable with rather than any specific controls unless your setup is truly something very weird. Also another I've noticed is in some games like Nioh 3 where you can rebind items/spells and gestures to like 20 different buttons, keyboard is much more useful than controller if you're using all of them (I know this probably doesn't apply to most of you, it did to me though lol). On top of aiming ranged weapons being easier with mouse.

Since I use linux the performance is terrible there (still better than Rise of the Ronin though), this mod enables framegen dlss for most pcs from what i can see (which is especially good on linux since fsr crashes the game, but it should also work on windows).
https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/738?tab=description

Also, if you have any flickering or visual bugs with the framegen DLSS (in any game, but in this case nioh 3 specifically), this mod alongside that one helps fix it https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/1282

NOTE: I am sorry if this breaks rule 13, I wasn't sure, but this is just to fix the game as it should've worked out of the box. Team Ninja just makes terrible PC ports, especially on Linux. If anyone has an issue with this post breaking the rules I will remove it.

Started using a Suiki soul core around midway through dream of the wise after beating Saito Toshimitsu. Now I'm into the abyss and crushing it.

She gives, nigh invulnerability to grabs and interrupts, good damage resist/evasion, great movement, excellent ability to jump in and out of combat, she absolutely SHREDS people who have low/no ki for health and for enemies with ki she drains their ki fast, she provides instant water, she is an excellent cost, and finally her passives to give extra anima upon saturation combo with her already great soul core ability.

The ONLY downside is that if you don't stop her she will burn your entire anima gauge and she of course cannot apply saturation to enemies that are immune (but she still can shred them with damage).