Nioh 3, in a lot of ways, builds off of Team Ninja’s work from their previous title, Rise of the Ronin. The experience blends the traditional experience that the studio has become known for, such as tight stages with brutally fast combat. Whereas Nioh 2 felt more like an extension of the first game, there are a lot of ideas at play in the third game that feel like a return to form. It seems that everything that came between in the 5-year gap served only as a refinement for what was to come in the series. This is juxtaposed, however, by ideas that make Nioh 3 almost unrecognizable. This was great if you’re a newcomer to the series, but if you’re returning, it takes some getting used to, and the debate of just how efficiently it all works together.
Starting off, it should be noted that this is an Alpha gameplay demo. The game is slated for 2026, and Team Ninja is usually good at hitting their announced release windows. While the game will feature a customizable character, which is going to get weird (for reasons that will be explained), it wasn’t functioning in the demo. This is just as well, as a player can usually spend an hour here, but on occasion, Team Ninja has let players skip the introduction on release by having the demo carry over. That is not the case here. During my playthrough, there were a lot of bugs and glitches, with enemies clipping through the floor or not dying despite being sent off the edge of the stage. In another case, the character model of the Protagonist began spamming out. Playing on a PlayStation 5 Pro, the cutscenes were incredibly choppy, with gameplay being relatively smooth, which hopefully bodes well for release. There is a lot here that needs fixing or polishing, but that’s the point of an Alpha Demo.
Here is why the character customizer is weird. Nioh 3 serves as a midquel to the franchise as a whole, with the demo being set in 1973. The player will take the role of Tokugawa Takechiyo, as they refer to it. This is a combination of his birth name and later name as shogun, but the implication here is that players will be taking the role of the unifier Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Edo period. For fans of the series, you might remember William Adams, who was historically based on the Tokugawa clan and was rewarded with Samurai status for it, spent a lot of time with a decidedly more historically accurate version of the character during the first game. There was a significant twist in the second game where your customized character was part of a duo named Hideyoshi Toyotomi, so perhaps the main character is only using the name, but it should be interesting to see when the game releases. This being said, I will probably make my hair pink in the game so history be damned. The fact that the character has already been established in the universe does lead to some questions, though.
The biggest change and most impactful to gameplay is the class swap mechanic. Your character can use a samurai class, which plays pretty identically to the Nioh games of the past, as well as a Ninja class that is faster but takes more damage. This can be swapped easily by pressing the R2 button and replacing the yokai burst of the previous game, making a well-placed swap while enemy attacks with a red glow, a stun that gives you some free attacks, and a big blow to the enemy’s ki. What drastically changes the structure of the franchise is dividing weapons and abilities you would be otherwise familiar with between them. As somebody who mains a Kusarigama, this is now a ninja weapon that no longer has stances and feels slightly faster than it had, but not as strong. The samurai class has stances for its weapons like the katana or odachi, but these are now abilities you need to unlock as part of the weapon skill tree, which honestly served to make unlocks feel more pronounced, alongside the new abilities you unlock.
The ninja class allows for ninja tools and magic, making it a more versatile class with range, despite both having access to a long-range weapon. One of the prominent twists on the Nioh brought to souls-likes, the ki pulse that allows a well-placed button push to restore your ki, is locked to the samurai class. Ninja has something in its place, a slight dodge, but therein lies the crux of the issue with this mechanic. Fighting a boss or a harder enemy, you will have to use this swap burst a lot, and depending on how fast or hard they hit, I found myself swapping out of the one stance for the other, usually in favor of my ki pulse ability, far too often, which broke the flow of combat often. There are new strategies that are present with access to these swaps that I’m sure evolve as the game progresses, and require some time, but too often, a disadvantage favors swapping to samurai over ninja, with the ninja feeling like a combination of every support ability that just never feels as competent as the traditional experience that the game still feels built for.
Both of these classes also use different armor and gear sets, meaning that you only have one weapon per class rather than the swapability, with your secondary being tied to whichever class you favor least. This puts way more emphasis on wandering menus as, when you get gear, it could fit into the samurai or ninja class, and you could end up wandering two sets of seven options to give yourself the best gear in both categories. Nioh has always been weird with menus, feeling like you never need to go into them, but then when you do, you will spend way more time than you want in them, and here it feels like they went in the wrong direction. In addition, each class has its own guardian and individual buffs, creating more management.
Combat will also see some changes as the game added a jump mechanic that allows for both traversal and combat, giving you access to aerial combat or assassinations. This embarrassingly took me most time to get used to, hitting the jump button rather than the dodge. Combat will still be the fast-paced mix of playing back and bursting in that players have come to expect, but once you get the hang of the jump, it actually adds a lot, with Ninjas being able to low combos into aerial ones with ease.
The other drastic swap to the formula is the fact that the game has an open world, something that they had stated years ago they would like to add, before it started seeming like Rise of the Ronin was the answer to that. In a lot of ways, that was the precursor, as the area you get to explore is on a small scale, similar to the bite-sized areas of their last release, smaller even. This brings much of the gameplay of the previous franchises into a structure of exploration. For instance, one map objective is hunting down yokai that appear from black mist. This was a common occurrence in previous games, usually acting as a formidable foe blocking your way. Once defeated, they don’t respawn. Here, they are much tougher enemies but are less in your way; in fact, for most, you have to go out of your way to find them.
Similar collectables like the Kodama also make appearances here, with new ones like camps that have enemies to defeat in them. The demo map has about 3 smaller areas to explore within its map, each containing these collectables individually, with area levels that grow as you complete tasks in them. There are missions you complete, but in the case of the demo, you are treated to a linear first stage before unlocking the first open world, with the next mission simply being at the other side, another linear stage to complete. There might be a shift to this formula later, maybe characters will give you missions as you explore areas later on. It is unclear just how long you spend in any given area, so this location could be fu,n bite-sized romps that act as stages, just slightly bigger, or this area could have to carry a lot of narrative. I will not say I don’t miss the tight linear nature of the previous games, though, but I will need to wait till the main game to see how much I like this.
There was plenty of getting lost on the map, though, putting off the main mission. This area is set in the Japanese countryside, with a few villages that have been destroyed, leading up to a hellscape you can see from the other side of the map. The game also adds side quests in the form of myths that are easy to complete but give you an excuse to farm experience. What I was pleasantly surprised by was stumbling on a village, and clearing out the enemies wandering within will often drop keys or items that can unlock buildings for you with great loot, meaning exploration is king. This is also beneficial, as many stats are actually improved by clearing tasks on the map or finding lootable textbooks.
When you are done exploring, you can head to the end to learn about another new feature in the game, called the crusible. Mini crusibles appear on the map, serving as challenging arena fights against waves of yokai that appear and attack you. Completing these is usually worth the risk. The bigger versions of these, in actuality, bear little resemblance to the smaller ones. In actuality, these play very similarly to a Nioh stage, long and winding, till you reach a boss you can expect will wreck you. Given the new format changes, I would argue this stage felt too long. There are elements introduced, such as taking damage corrodes your health bar, which gives these a Nioh 3 twist, but it also leaves some questions as to how Nioh 3 will be paced. In this stage, a glowing red temple of doom represents the starting point of this, which feels like an oppressive force over the map. Given the previous game’s abilities to bring you to a diverse set of regions across Japan, I am hoping this representation doesn’t denote much of the game’s representation, with the trailer also making this feel like it will crop up a lot.
Overall, like every Team Ninja game that came before, I think I am going to like Nioh 3, even if all of the changes didn’t completely sell me at this point. This is a long demo, taking me around 10 hours to complete, and that was after I got bored of exploring and just wanted to move forward, leaving a lot of this unfinished. That is to say that we got a lot of game here, and this isn’t even a microcosm of what is coming when the game finally releases in early 2026. I highly recommend you jump into this demo to get ahead of the changes, with the demo available until June 18th. Team Ninja is also developing Ninja Gaiden 4 with developer Platinum Games, giving us a lot to look forward to from the studio.
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