NIOH 3

Are you team ninja or samurai?

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When we spoke to Nioh director Fumihiko Yasuda in E358 it was to mark a new era for Team Ninja, which also meant the conclusion of the Nioh story after two games.

Yet it would have been premature to retire a series that has, to date, sold eight million copies worldwide, as well as being the worthiest rival to FromSoftware's particular breed of hardcore action RPG.

Speaking to us now as general producer of Nioh 3, Yasuda clarifies that the series was never really gone for good. In fact, he says, by the time Nioh 2 was released, a lot of the new recruits at Team Ninja – people who had just graduated from university – were drawn to the company because of Nioh, because they wanted to be part of developing the next game in the series. With that much enthusiasm to call on, it wouldn’t have made sense to let them down.

While the first two games were made consecutively and released three years apart, the longer gestation period for this latest iteration, as well as work on different games in between, such as Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, has allowed time for newer ideas to emerge. This was apparent to those who played the time-limited alpha demo this summer; within the first 15 minutes, familiar bouts against human and yokai enemies in tight spaces gave way to a reveal that paid homage to Breath Of The Wild’s majestic opening, the camera pulling back for them to gaze upon a wide open world.

It seems a natural evolution following last year’s Rise Of The Ronin, but also in the wake of a certain FromSoftware game. Indeed, there’s a careful distinction as Nioh 3 actually has ‘open field’ maps, the plural an important detail to denote the game’s world isn’t seamless. It even covers different time periods: while the alpha demo was set during Japan’s 16th-century Sengoku period, like its predecessors, protagonist Tokugawa Takechiyo hails from the later Edo period, and the latest build we play has another