Are you a gamer who has an interest in playing a Souls-Type game but have avoided trying one for fear of getting your virtual ass handed to you over and over, leading to you rage quitting and questioning why you play games to begin with? I’ve been there. But what if I told you that playing and beating a Souls-Type game is not the impossible task that you may have been led to believe it is? Join me as I share my experiences and gameplay footage of the many boss battles I fought my way through in Nioh; you might even learn a thing or two, like how to properly beat some of these bosses after seeing them smack me around a bit. Welcome to Nioh Respawn: Blade of the Noob, and enjoy yourselves.
Boss #43: Sanada Yukimura
Now we come to the main final boss of the Defiant Honor DLC, Sanada Yukimura. Despite how Sarutobi Sasuke pretty much schooled me before this fight, I wasn’t too concerned with Sanada Yukimura. I knew right away he was going to be similar to Date Masamune: a tough human warrior with two Guardian Spirits that grant him with exceptional abilities. Now, I wasn’t expecting to beat this guy in one attempt, no sir. But I was dead set on beating him in no more than five attempts, and I was NOT going to let him destroy me almost ten times like his damn ninja servant did. I would keep my cool, study his Living Weapon-enhanced moves, and strike when he was open, just like with Date Masamune. Behold my first attempt against Sanada Yukimura.
Okay, so my first attempt wasn’t too great, but I lasted longer here than I did in my first attempts against Date Masamune and Sarutobi Sasuke. Furthermore, I had already seen most of what Sanada Yukimura could do in just that first encounter, and as I figured, this guy relies largely on his Living Weapon abilities (one of them even lets him fly around, what a cheap asshole). Knowing most of his tricks, I was largely prepared for him in my second attempt. I actually ended up bringing him down to around 20% of his health on my second attempt, but I got sloppy (as I often do when I’m about to kill a big boss) and he managed to kill me with a strong attack. But that failure only served to bolster my resolve, and I fought him one more time. You can watch this third (and final) attempt in the video below.
Boss #44: Date Clan
Although I had beaten the final boss of the Defiant Honor DLC, there was still one more challenge left before I could fully beat the DLC. And this challenge is what I like to call a “nightmare scenario”. This isn’t an extra tough boss. This isn’t even another two-on-one boss battle. This is an entirely new example of the unnecessarily frustrating bullshit that Team Ninja is capable of, and in this case they’re making us fight multiple bosses back to back. Well, to be fair, there was another mission like this one added into the main Nioh game as free DLC (which I completely forgot to record), and this particular mission had me fighting Ogress, Joro-Gumo, Hino-enma, and Hundred Eyes back to back. I actually beat that mission in just two attempts; sorry I can’t prove it, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, this mission that I’m discussing is very similar…..only MUCH more difficult. You’ll see why once you watch my first attempt.
Uh-huh. After defeating Katakura Shigenaga (again) with a few of his samurai underlings popping up to help him, I then had to fight against my favorite f@#king boss: Date Shigezane. AND for some reason he had reverted back to his demon centipede form. Even if I could defeat him, I knew I would have to fight Date Masamune immediately after that, so yeah, I’m basically fighting the whole Date clan on my own. I truly think the guys at Team Ninja would have made a killing as interrogators, the sadistic type that torture spies and informants to get secrets out of them, because they sure as hell know how to make gamers suffer. This was an encounter in which sloppiness of any kind would not be tolerated since Date Shigezane and Date Masamune are both capable of killing me with just one or two well timed attacks. Took me several attempts to make it past Date Shigezane, but then Date Masamune ended up one-shotting me with that damn “dashing stab attack” of his while he had his Living Weapon active. In the end, it actually only took me somewhere around five or so attempts before I reached the point in the video below.
Even though I was eventually victorious after a relatively small number of attempts, this was still an exercise in frustration. I mean seriously, first I fight a boss being helped by regular enemies, then I immediately fight two of the toughest bosses in the entire game back to back, one of them being the boss I hate most above all others. This also set a dangerous precedent, one I wouldn’t put past Team Ninja for a second. In the mission where I first fought Sanada Yukimura, there were nine strong warriors, mini-bosses in a sense, that I had to defeat first. Together with Sarutobi Sasuke, these warriors form the group known as the Ten Braves. Now that I had finished fighting the Date clan at the end of the Defiant Honor DLC, I was foreseeing having to fight the entire Sanada clan, namely the Ten Braves (including Sarutobi Sasuke) followed immediately by Sanada Yukimura, at some point in the final DLC, Bloodshed’s End. I could feel it in my bones. Even if the scenario wouldn’t end up exactly as I had predicted, I just knew they would include some kind of mission where I had to fight a bunch of those bastards back to back. Still, part of me was hoping that I was wrong.
Boss #45: Sanada Yukimura
We have now reached the first boss of the Bloodshed’s End DLC, and it’s good old Sanada Yukimura again. Even though I knew this guy’s moveset inside and out, I was afraid I had gotten rusty since at this point I had finished a two-month long play session of Middle-earth: Shadow of War before Bloodshed’s End became available. Well, without further ado, let’s see how I did against my red-clad opponent in this rematch.
Turns out I wasn’t so rusty after all. I hadn’t beaten a boss on my first attempt since I first battled Katakura Shigenaga in the Dragon of the North DLC, so this was a nice change of pace. I was especially surprised to win this fight in one go given that nasty little surprise where f@#king Sarutobi Sasuke showed up towards the end when Sanada Yukimura was close to being defeated. Nice try, you bastards! Fighting Sanada Yukimura again also had me thinking that I was less likely to face the true nightmare scenario of fighting the entire Sanada clan later on in this DLC. I could only hope against hope that such a scenario would not come to pass.
Well, the Defiant Honor DLC, while rather short overall, was pretty intense with that damn mission where I fight the Date Clan, not to mention the surprisingly tough encounter with Sarutobi Sasuke. But now as I begin the Bloodshed’s End DLC, I manage to defeat the first boss on my first attempt, which is pretty damn cool. I still had this feeling though that I was in for a world of hurt in the later missions of the final DLC. Join us next week to see if I’m as lucky with the next batch of boss fights as I was with the first one in this final DLC.