It's easy to draw comparisons between FromSoftware's Souls series and Team Ninja's latest, Nioh. The games are brutally hard, killing players with reckless abandon; players must survive until the next checkpoint (bonfire/shrine) to keep experience points (souls/armita); spamming buttons in combat won't get you anywhere; and you're always fighting screen-filling bosses that require pattern memorization to defeat. In short, calling Nioh a Souls clone makes sense! But I think that's too simplistic. What happened is that Souls invented a genre.
I've often called the Souls games my version of Call of Duty or Madden, as I'd happily play a new Souls game every year. That said, even though I enjoyed Dark Souls 3, it felt tired. That's not the case with Nioh, a game that uses the foundational elements of the Souls games and ventures off to do its own thing. There's a fine line between inspiration and stealing, but Niohdoesn't pretend Souls doesn't exist. Instead, it hops on its shoulders and asks "what's next?"
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