Nioh may be unfortunately a bad console port with performance issues if you don't have a good computer ( check the
NiohResolution patch rendering scale option to help in that case) but it's a very good and annoyingly addictive game.
And similarly to all those soul like, it's hard but it feels like Nioh is actually harder than the other games in its genre as there's lot of location in which you're ambushed by surprise and end with lots of enemies around , etc.
Basically you're dying a -very- lot (fortunately thanks to the shrine system you don't lose loot/items/progress, and even have a chance to get back to your corpse to take back the XP you hadn't yet spent).
So by not giving up, you'll eventually manage to overcome ridiculously impossible odds by having leveled up a lot and found better and better stuff and gained lot of bonus to improve your various stats, understand that Nioh rewards grinding.
The prologue had some amazing gothic oppressive atmosphere, unfortunately most of the game features are locked, so in the prologue there's then no need to gring because there's no point of trying because you can't even level up in that prologue, basically you're just trying to reach the boss and kill its 2 forms in order to clear it and move to the actual game (prologue is hard, it's Nioh after all).
Then you move to Japan for some reason and start to notice on cutscene that your NotGeralt character not having his beard anymore has a pointy jaw bigger than Jay Leno's , and while it's "to each his own" , i find the environment unfortunately lost completely the gothic oppressive atmosphere for some countryside one.
Anyways, the game is still good despite it run like crap for me (amazing how it can lag much more in a closed prison cell with 1 guard in Nioh than in any open world game with lots of structure and AI around) , despite it has difficult mouse&keyboard controls (especially as being a bad console port all the hints ingame are ignoring the keys you have bound and are using and will only display the important gameplay reminders/hints about xbox/ps controller buttons) .
And so addictive than despite the negatives i still play it :/
Then i finally managed, after hundred of deaths, to reach the boss of the 1st Japan mission, the guy that is in the burning boat near the burning village.
And oh boy, that ugly whatshisname big demon throwing his steel balls (no pun intended) killed my character a lot, until i finally managed to kill that thing, basically i learned to only use medium stance (because it had much better dodge roll than higher stance , and do more damage than low stance) and keep my superweaponguardianspiritmagicthingy only when the boss is roughly at half life (so the super stuff does not run out before i killed that monster) as if i run out before i usually make something stupid and get destroyed.
It also helps to get enough ninjutsu and magic to learn the weakness amulet (that you can throw to the boss to lower his armor) and the power pills (that increase your damage), temporary help but good enough to get the boss at half health a lot quicker than without those items.
Oh and despite full heavy armor feels attractive due to protection stat (though you die a lot anyways in Nioh) , i also learned that you need all the stamina you can to hit a few times then roll out of threat range, so do not wear anything that will get your weight to 70% or more as you move into another agility tier and will then start to eat tons of ki for any simple attack and dodge, leaving you open for retaliation a lot (and ki regenerate slower the more weight you have).
Destroying that big ugly felt like an achievement in life
After that more of the game feature finally unlock (world map, dojo and etc..)