The moment Nioh 3 was revealed as Team Ninja’s next project, it immediately jumped to the top of my most anticipated games of 2026. That excitement was dampened somewhat when the studio revealed the game’s “open field” level design. I am very much over open-world games, but I was particularly worried that we were about to get the Nioh version of Rise of the Ronin – which, really, was itself Nioh-lite in an open world.
Team Ninja’s post-Nioh games haven’t lacked in interesting ideas, and Ronin was no different, but it also squandered much of its potential on what ended up being the game design equivalent of thinking your inflatable pool skills can transfer to Olympic swimming.
Nioh 3 feels like it was made with clear awareness of that baggage. It wastes no time demonstrating that it’s still a Nioh game at its core, just one that wants to venture beyond what the structure of those games has allowed – though only on its own terms.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Nioh 3’s open world is its headline feature. But the way it’s built doesn’t call much attention to that, so it was easy for me to forget that I was, technically, playing an open-world game. The team’s decision to call it “open field” rather than “open world” is telling, and it comes across as a conscious show of restraint.
The world of Nioh 3 is several large maps, each made up of smaller regions. A region is really a bundle of the sort of curated levels found in every Nioh game, just with multiple routes of ingress and egress. This, of course, opens up different gameplay opportunities of its own. Roads and other distractions serve as the connective tissue holding those traditionally-designed levels and dungeons together, existing to subtly push you towards the next thing.
It’s a more practical, to-the-point approach to that style of open-world design that eliminates the minutes-long treads through vacant landscapes so many of those games just can’t find a good use for.
You surprisingly do not get any sort of mount to traverse Nioh 3’s world, though you do get a – sometimes comical – supersprint that kicks in when you hit the road. I once again cannot help but admire the restraint. For a mount to make sense, that dead space between interesting bits of content would need to be far larger, which, of course, players are promptly going to skip as son as fast travel is unlocked.
Nioh 3’s approach offers an alternative, and it asks for a bit of trust on your part that it won’t waste your time. Fast travel exists, but I only used it to mop up after having already explored each region.
The real standout here is the ability to switch between two combat styles at any moment: Ninja, and Samurai. You’re playing as two characters simultaneously, curating gear and weapons for each, and maintaining two builds. As a result, a lot of the Ninjutsu, throwables and some Onmyo-like spells have moved to the Ninja, which is one way Nioh 3 has made that part of it more accessible. Anyone familiar with the earlier games knows that those powerful abilities were typically clunky to use in the heat of battle.
Most of your time will be spent as the Samurai, but the freedom to switch between the two at the press of a button gives you the incentive to explore how each of them could excel (or struggle) in any given situation.
The most admirable thing about Nioh 3 is how it builds on years of Nioh and post-Nioh games, picking which mechanics and core features to bring forward, which to evolve, and refining everything so it makes sense within the game’s world.
Stranger of Paradise’s gear auto-equip feature is here, and much better implemented. It works just as you’d expect; automatically-equipping the best gear and weapons for the job for you. It’s malleable enough that you can toggle it off and on, which you might find yourself doing, depending on the quality of loot you get and how bothered you are about taking 10 minutes to sort through two inventories. It even lets you target weight classes, so you never have to suddenly find yourself fat-rolling in the middle of a boss fight.
My favourite mechanic in Nioh 3 comes from Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, which remains one of the studio’s most interesting experiments in recent memory. Elden Ring changed open-world game design forever, so action RPGs that came after needed to learn from FromSoft’s masterpiece. Fallen Dynasty, however, was a traditional, level-based game, so borrowing ideas was out of the question.
What Fallen Dynasty did instead, however, was offer players a very compelling incentive to explore its world, that, crucially, needed to exist in a game with linear levels. The system boiled down to gradually growing players’ power the more parts of its levels they explore.
Nioh 3’s world is much larger by comparison, but Team Ninja found a brilliant way of evolving the feature. Each region on the map is assigned an exploration rating, which rises the more of the various activities you partake in. Your incentive to do so is two-fold. First, each level you gain boosts how informative the map itself becomes. It starts off blank, then grows to show a layer of roads and major towns, before it marks down the location of every collectible.
Climbing through those levels also comes with a set of bonuses to combat, which apply to your character universally. In fact, there’s a combined rating that pushed me to max out each region to get the whole map’s bonus.
You could draw a line from each one of those back to the games they originate from, but playing this game and witnessing how much they meaningfully ameliorate the experience compared to past Nioh games is the real win here.
Nioh 3, of course, evolves its own series’ mechanics, recontextualising them in some instances. The Burst Counter is no longer tied to your choice of Guardian Spirit, but is instead assigned to the style-switching button. This achieves two goals. One, it trains you to regularly flip between the two – a major feature of this sequel, but it also makes pulling off a Burst Counter easier, which means more players are more likely to use it.
Making the game more accessible without compromising the core experience is a goal Team Ninja clearly had when developing Nioh 3. Where Ronin’s approach had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Nioh 3’s instead sands off some unnecessarily sharp edges to encourage players to engage with the more fun parts of what remains a mechanically dense action RPG.
Sometimes that comes in the form of deflects being easier to pull off (and more rewarding), and other times it manifests in more complex ways that will take veterans some time to appreciate.
One aspect that has unfortunately not evolved is the game’s narrative. The structure of the whole thing is the only interesting part about it, and it almost succeeds at distracting you from just how underwhelming it is.
This is a time-travelling story that unfolds over four eras of Japan. Your created protagonist is something of a time cop (time warrior?) who travels to each era to rid it of the evil of those dreaded Spirit Stones. By law, every conflict in a Nioh game must always come back to Spirit Stones.
Clever though it may be, that trick can’t mask how outdated and unsubstantial it is. This is still a silly tale involving historical characters; no more than an excuse to ally with/fight Figures You Know. You have to admire Team Ninja’s commitment to using the same narrative mould with every Nioh game, just slotting in era-appropriate characters and events.
Three games in, I know better than to expect much from that side of the Nioh games, but I was happy to at least have an exciting wrapper. Splitting the campaign into multiple eras is also a nice and convenient excuse to have multiple open-world maps, which is another way the trek through time remains fresh.
Nioh 3 isn’t without frustrating moments. Bosses will still kill you in two hits; platforming rules will occasionally confuse you; and there’s plenty of PS3-era level design ethos Team Ninja just can’t seem to get rid of. The PC version runs fine, but I expect people with the upper range of GPUs to grouse about not being able to lock it to 120fps, the occasional stutters when spinning the camera, and some crashes when multiple monitors are present.
None of that detracts from how tremendous of an action game this is. That it continues to deliver the series’ renowned satisfying combat, mechanical depth, and build variety while evolving and building on the past is a none-trivial triumph.
I find it difficult to ask more from Nioh 3. It’s a game that proudly announces its goals at the outset, and trusts the player to discover how well it’s going to nail every one them over the course of its 45+ hour runtime. It is the confident result of shaking up Nioh’s near decade-old formula that’s only outshone by Team Ninja’s steady hand in crafting it.
Reviewed on PC, code provided by publisher.
