Posts Tagged ‘Team Ninja’

RPS Feature New Testaments

Nioh brings a ballet of breathtaking violence

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New Testaments is a new monthly column in which Amr Al-Aaser presents an overlooked modern game and explicates its best ideas.

Nioh is the kind of game that this column exists for. On release it quickly saw itself buried beneath the comparisons to Dark Souls, praised for the ways it imitated the series, and criticised for its failings in repeating From Software’s successes. But while Nioh clearly follows in the precedent set for the genre by Dark Souls, it does so in the same way something like Monolith’s BLOOD follows Doom: with a clear lineage, but with very different aims and aesthetic goals.

Nothing illustrates this difference in attitude more than the ki pulse.
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Dead or Alive 6 will tone down the wobbly bits, half-heartedly

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It’s hard to separate fighting game Dead or Alive from its masturbatory fantasy aesthetic, but for the sixth outing, game director Yohei Shimbori says Team Ninja is trying to do just that. Sort of. Maybe. If the fans are OK with it. Maybe it will be worse! Read the rest of this entry »

Nioh 2 announced, though not yet confirmed for PC

Koei Tecmo have announced a sequel to 2017’s neat-o action-RPG Nioh, imaginatively named Nioh 2. So far it’s only confirmed for PlayStation 4, but I wouldn’t worry too much: the original wasn’t even announced for PC until it had been out on PS4 for months. A PC release for this too would seem likely. Hopefully. The game you might’ve heard described as “Dark Souls but samurai” is a good’un, our dearly-departed Adam (RPS in peace) would tell you. Here, watch Nioh 2’s announcement trailer below. Read the rest of this entry »

Dead or Alive 6 will live (or possibly die) in Early 2019

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Dead or Alive 6 was announced today, following up the last iteration which was unleashed way back in 2012. The new title has an expanded roster, a debut trailer that we’ve got embedded below, and plenty of electricity shooting out of hands and/or out of the floor and/or the electrified wires of the battleground boundaries that keep your fighters contained. Team Ninja has also worked to tone down the hilariously overly sexualized character designs that the series has become synonymous with. Yes, the boob physics have taken a backseat to fighting in a fighting game, and I can already feel the dark parts of the internet boiling with rage.

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Nioh PC gets belated mouse and keyboard support

Nioh is a peculiar beast in that we consider it to possess “one of the finest combat systems ever put on a screen”, but at the same time its lack of keyboard and mouse support makes it a bit of a black sheep in the PC family. Dark Souls comparisons have been inevitable for Nioh, not only because of its steely try’n’die fantasy swordplay, but also because Dark Souls too originally launched on PC in a rather compromised state. Fortunately, official fixes for Nioh have been a whole lot quicker to arrive – it’s about to support the PC’s oldest inputs after all.
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RPS Feature Soulsful

Wot I Think: Nioh – Complete Edition

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Describing a game as X meets Dark Souls is a sure way to invite mockery and contempt. It’s lazy critical short-hand, people will say, and they’re often correct. Well, prepare to mock. But only a little.

I promise I’m not being lazy when I say that Nioh is Dark Souls meets Sengoku period Japan though, and to prove it I’m going to use that short-hand as a starting point rather than an end-point. Fortunately, where Nioh differs from Dark Souls is far more interesting than where the two games overlap.

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Nioh’s PC launch trailer is dense with demons & praise

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While the release of Team Ninja’s samurai Souls-like Nioh is still a couple days off yet (due this Tuesday, November 7th), the PC launch trailer hopes to impress upon you that the game was very well received by the press on consoles, as dense with effusive praise as it is with angry demons.

It might read a little like that overly enthusiastic Batman: Arkham City GOTY box, but having played a fair chunk of it on PS4, I can’t can’t say they’re wrong.

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Souls-like samurai RPG Nioh coming to PC in November

My PS4 is basically a machine for playing off-brand Dark Souls games*. The best of them is Bloodborne, which is a goth-horror masterpiece that came out of the studio that created Souls, From Software. I dearly hope to see it on PC one day. The other is not a From original but rather something of a Fromage. Its name is Nioh [official site] and it’s a splendid hack, slash and shoot ’em up that takes the Souls formula of learning and advancing through repetition, and throws in ludicrous amounts of randomly generated loot and gorgeously horrific nightmares plucked from Japanese folklore. I adore it, so news that it is coming to Steam next month is extremely pleasing.

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Free Version Of Dead Or Alive 5 Out Next Week

If you missed out on playing Dead or Alive 5 Last Round [official site] because you didn’t feel like paying full price for a fighter you’d probably play a few minutes and forget about, sorry about that. You still have to pay full price if you want to play the full game on Steam, but if you’d still rather not, soon you’ll be able to opt for a cut-down free-to-play version to quell that fighting spirit that’s welling up deep within you.

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Wacky, A Bit Wonky: Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round Released

I admire how much Dead or Alive embraces its silliness. The fighting game series might be known for its terrifying unreal simulation of breasts, but that’s unfair to the many other oddities in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round [official site]: geishas fighting roughnecks, huge amounts of zany clothing and costumes, tiger maulings, a colossal Buddha statue coming alive to deck pugilists, and so on.

DoA5LR came out on PC today, though bafflingly it’s launching without online multiplayer. That’s due to be patched in after about 3 months. That’s a bit too silly, even for me.

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Costumed Fighting: Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round PC-Bound

Sure, why not?

I am glad to see more fighting games come to PC, and especially one where you can have a lady dressed as Sexy Sherlock Holmes kick a member of a Whitesnake cover band off a roof. Publishers Tecmo Koei have announced a PC port of DoA 5 Last Round, Team Ninja’s next zany person-puncher. It’s the third main version of DoA 5, expanded in the same way that Capcom revamp Street Fighter, and the first shinied up for those there new consoles.

Given that this is the series’ proper PC debut (a free-to-play DoA ran from 2008-2010), it’s odd that it’s being hamstrung: it’ll be missing online modes at launch. But look, I wasn’t kidding about Sexy Sherlock. Watch a few bouts:

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