Koei Tecmo updates two of the great jewels of PS4 for the new generation with a remastering with hardly any news.
Nioh is, without a doubt, one of the best sagas that this generation has left us, which is already giving its last blows, an achievement that has been achieved with just two games. Team Ninja took many years of development and several reboots of the project to find the right key , but it cannot be denied that the final result lived up to expectations, leaving us with an action-role-playing adventure that, despite Taking elements and ideas from many different places, he offered us something very special and with his own personality. A long, hilarious and brutally challenging adventure that never stopped improving thanks to its free expansions and updates, which added to its exquisite combat system and its interesting setting in which the historical facts of feudal Japan were mixed with the myths of the country, ended up leaving us fully satisfied.
Its sequel would not arrive until last year, a very continuous second part that did not hesitate to recycle many elements of its predecessor, but which knew how to improve the fantastic base of the original in every possible and imaginable way : more polished battles, more spectacular bosses and better designed, a better balanced difficulty, more interesting maps, a better told story, a character editor with which to create our ideal yokai hunter and a rounder loot system, to name just a few examples.
Now, Koei Tecmo has wanted to remaster both games to take advantage of the technical possibilities of PlayStation 5 , although as we will see, the word “remastering” comes very large to the work that has been done here, with a conversion whose major ( and unique) appeal lies in two new video modes and your use of DualSense.
Two great games, a remastering that is not so much
Thus, Nioh Remastered: The Complete Edition and Nioh 2 Remastered: The Complete Edition offer us two essential games for fans of the genre along with all their downloadable content and updates , which will ensure hours and hours of adventure, action, fun and yes, much suffering and countless deaths.
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In them our objective will be none other than to overcome a series of levels while we face all kinds of enemies, we explore, collect huge amounts of pieces of equipment, level up and develop the skills of our hero to adjust his style of play to our tastes and needs. The battles are very agile, they have tons of possibilities (each weapon is handled in a different way and we have several positions that change their combos and behavior) and, in general, the experience of fighting in any of these titles is unmatched, making it clear that behind them are those responsible for Ninja Gaiden .
Many bosses and enemies await you to take down.
The contents that both received after their original releases are not bad either, adding more mechanics, possibilities, weapons, difficulty levels, main and secondary missions and, of course, new enemies and bosses that will make things very difficult for us. If you ask us, we liked the DLC of the first Nioh more than those of the sequel, but in both cases they add up, add value and give us the perfect excuse to continue playing .
The daytime settings in open environments still don’t look quite good in this remastering, so they are not spared some popping or shadows that behave somewhat strangely.
Now, what exactly does this remastering offer us? Well basically the possibility of playing at 4K and 60 fps or at a rate of 120 images per second sacrificing resolution . It may seem little (and it is), since we have not detected improvements in practically any of its graphic elements and it still maintains very ugly and crappy details, such as the behavior of the shadows at daytime levels or textures that are not up to par, But we are not going to fool you: playing either of these two games at 120 fps is a real pleasure .
Considering the precision that his fights require and how agile and frantic they are, watching him move with this level of fluidity is an enormously rewarding experience at the controls and a very difficult to describe experience for yourself. Of course, we do not want to miss the 4K Mode, since in it image quality is impeccable and it maintains 60 images per second at all times , so in the end, betting on one video mode or another will be a matter of taste personal. Choose one or the other, we assure you that you will get it right. The negative note is that we have detected a small bug visual that sometimes causes strange reflections to appear very occasionally, something that has happened to us when we have alternated several times between its different modes (for this, it is necessary to exit the game, as it can only be done from the main menu)
We liked the use of the DualSense game more than we expected. You will feel in your hands every blow you make.
Another improvement to highlight is in loading times, which are virtually non-existent and do not even reach a second . They were already short on PS4, but here you will not have time or take your eyes off the screen before the load is complete, regardless of whether you load a game after starting the game or prepare to go on a mission.
We also do not want to forget to mention how much we liked the way it uses the haptic feedback of the DualSense to transmit almost everything we see on the screen, from the weight of a gigantic door when we open it to the shocks of the sword and the locks we make. The sensations it gets are very convincing and help enhance the experience like few PS5 games have achieved to this day. And watch out for the use you give to adaptive triggers when using ranged weapons , especially bows.
It goes without saying that the downloadable content of both games will not be accessible until the end of each campaign, as it follows them and offers the toughest challenges in the entire series.
Last but not least, it should be noted that if you already have Nioh 2 for PS4 you can update it for free to its corresponding PS5 remastering along with all the downloadable content you have , something that is always appreciated, especially when Upgrades included in the new generation are not enough to justify checking out again (unfortunately and inexplicably, this offer does not apply to the first delivery). In addition, both games allow us to import our gamesAlthough the system for doing this is somewhat tedious, forcing us to install the PS4 version to, from the main menu and with its latest update, upload our save files to the cloud. After that, just start the PS5 edition and download them.
A PC port that still has things to polish
Koei Tecmo Games is also launching Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition on February 5 , a collection of all the original game and all content from Nioh 2 for PC via Steam . This compatible version includes support for ultra-wide monitors, the ability to play at 120 fps and other tweaks and improvements.
We have been able to test version 1.0.0 of the title before the launch patch and on our computer with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics, i7-7700K processor, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and an SSD we have been able to play at 1440p resolution with the graphics options to maximum and fluctuation between 85 and 120 fps . The strange thing is that despite the fact that with two performance programs this rate of images per second was marked in view, it seemed to us that the game was going at a lower rate , as if it were not as fluid as it should go for those fps and the refresh rate of our 144Hz monitor, something we hope they fixwith the launch patch. We have also sometimes encountered a strange bug that made the pointer of our mouse stay fixed in the center of the screen covering part of the image and when moving the camera with the mouse certain vibrations were produced as if the game did not read well the movement of the peripheral, something that did not happen when we moved it with the right stick of our controller.
This pre-release version features NVIDIA Highlights , an exclusive NVIDIA graphics technology that allows us to automatically save game highlights clips for easy sharing later. With the launch patch will arrive , according to the study, the DLSS 2.0 texture smoothing system and the mapping of the keyboard and mouse controls since, although you can play with these peripherals in the version that we have tested, the “icons “from the controller of the PlayStation consoles.
The PC port includes interesting improvements although it still has some things to polish with its release patch.
Conclusions
We have said it several times throughout this analysis, but Nioh and Nioh 2 are two great games that you should give a chance to as soon as you are looking for an intense, challenging experience, with a multitude of content and possibilities and well designed, either in PS4, PS5 or PC. Of course, the remastering work that has been done for the new Sony console seems very fair, adding only two new video modes and compatibility with the DualSense to take advantage of its functions, missing the opportunity to make somewhat more profound graphic improvements . Regardless, it’s undeniable that it looks, moves, and plays better on PS5. It is more of an optimization patch than a remastering as such, but if you want to get back into action or discover these gems for the first time, here you will find the ideal excuse to go hunting for yokais.
