Complaining about artificial difficulty in a souls game should be illegal. That's like getting mad that your curry is spicy. Unless you think three monsters in a two-monster closet, run up the stairs and jump off three times, is a tightly choreographed battle.
Nah. At least in my mind, it's the distinction between "it's difficult because you lack the knowledge, experience, and mechanical skills" and "it's difficult because the game requires you to do this one specific thing in this one specific way".
Hino-enma falls under the latter in my book because her fight
entirely orients around you doing two things: staying at long range and dodging sideways until she uses one of her moves that isn't an unpunishable stun, and carrying a full stack of acupuncture needles to spam when you mess up a dodge while doing that. I went back and ran her a couple more times--the first playthrough I relied solely on prediction dodging and proper spacing in close combat, which is in retrospect the sole reason it took more than one try.
The second time I used blocks in the good ol' turtle-behind-the-100-absorption standard that I detest. Fight was dead simple, most of her dangerous attacks are nullified, all you have to do is run away and side-dodge when she uses the ranged stun and charge.
The third time I used acupuncture needles. Fight was trivial, didn't have to heal once. I was also better at dodging the stuns, it's worth noting, but I only got hit one time vs. three in my original first attempt. As an aside, I really take issue with Nioh's approach to items. Consumable-only healing is shit. My two locked weapons have heal on-hit and heal on-kill because fuck that noise I'll just slaughter revenants instead. It's also bad design to make consumables affect success that strongly IMO. They should be an
option that can help, not an EZ-mode win button. Same deal with ranged weapons, a lot of missions seem to have strong enemies stuck on different Z-levels where you can snipe-cheese them with impunity... made easier by the incredibly strong gunpowder weapons. Which I use anyways because they'll make my revenant more of a pain in the ass for other players.
The fourth time, I summoned. The fight was a joke. Neither of us ever got hit, and her AI was apparently completely broken because she spent the whole fight switching aggro and missing the 2 and 3-hit combos. I think she only pulled out the ranged stun once, the spin kick twice, and never went airborne at all.
Just IMO ofc, but the best Souls bosses are the ones that beat the stuffing out of you to varying degrees when you first fight them (depending on your general familiarity with core game mechanics, usually) and gradually become "easier" in your perception as you learn their moves, ranges, behavior, &c. Not the ones that just have arbitrary bullshit that forces you to use obscure and narrow approaches to the fight.
Artificial difficulty isn't bad because it makes fights unfairly hard, it's bad because it makes fights gimmick battles that usually become trivial once you figure out the gimmick or an effective cheese method. High Lord Wolnir is incredibly emblematic of this problem: watch blind playthroughs of DaS III. When people get to that fight, one of two things happens: they figure out the bracelets fairly quickly (either by being a tiny bit perceptive or by accidentally hitting them) and the fight turns into a joke, or they
don't figure out the bracelets and the fight is intensely frustrating.
It's binary and arbitrary in a type of game that revolves around tying difficulty to gradual improvements in player skill.
Nioh possesses that same sort of development of the player in lieu of development of the statblock, but the low skill ceiling of a lot of the content (at least from what I've seen thus far) and the fact that it
also has more traditional RPG gear outscaling hurts it. That's pretty much Nioh in a nutshell, they got a lot right, but they missed the mark on some of the core concepts that made Souls games satisfying.
For that matter, the lack of invasions also hurts. I dipped back into DaS III to make sure I wasn't being unfair in the comparison. Decided to check out the Ringed City since I hadn't actually run it yet. Got invaded about three minutes in, and fought the red on that tiny little courtyard right after the first angel. I was rusty as shit, but they were using a kinda gimmicky demon fist build, so it evened out. The fight lasted for about four minutes and I eventually scraped out a win when I baited him into trying to parry with a 1H R1 and swapped back into a full 2H UGS combo... and my heart was racing. That four minute fight was a bigger rush than anything I've had from Nioh, that tension and fear that comes with fighting a thinking, human opponent, and even the residual awareness that another invader might show up at any time.
Instead, I get almost exclusively deaths of the "What? What kind of bullshit was that?" variety rather than the "Shit, I deserved that," that I've come to expect from Souls.
Long story short: Nioh's not bad. The stance system is a lot of fun. I love having a game that has a proper range of spear attacks and spears that aren't garbage or reskinned staves/axes. I'm enjoying it quite a bit in its own right. But as a competitor to Souls, it really missed the mark. I might have been more charitable if it had launched in 2012 or 2013 and was comparing it to DeS or the DaS PC port, but for a game less than a year old, that launched post-DaS III and post-bludsouls (not to mention post-slashy souls), it just feels like Team Ninja wasn't really paying attention to the core aspects of
why Souls is so well-loved when they tried to capture that essence.
Also, the parrying has a terrible animation, is incredibly unintuitive to use, and is locked behind a skill tree. A game that encourages you to block-cheese, gives everyone automatic perfect absorption blocks, and makes parrying wonky and awkward can suck it. :V