Nioh 3 / Pragmata / Monster Hunter Stories 3 [INITIAL VIBE]
Rhianne Ward
Hello! It's been a good while since I wrote something for Initial Vibe. Initially, it's a category that served as my way of getting thoughts out of my head for extremely long games like Xenoblade or Metaphor. However, I've tried writing in this manner a few times since then, and found that all it often did was cause me to subconsciously treat the covered game as “completed”, even if I had another few dozen hours left. I'm hoping to avoid this going forward.
As such, a better fit for this format of first impression, in my mind, would be mini-reviews of demos and beats/playtests. I did this with the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, and that feels like a fairer assessment of the potential of a game, rather than speaking with authority on titles I haven't even finished yet. This distinction might only make sense to me, and if that is the case, I apologise for wasting your time here.
In short, the Initial Vibe segment of this blog will henceforth be for talking about demos and betas exclusively. Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about some upcoming video games!
Nioh 3
Time played: 8 hours
This may come across as a controversial take, but I think Nioh 2 is potentially the greatest action game ever made. No other game makes me feel the rush of a fight, and the magic of locking in at clutch moments, like that game did. Developer Team Ninja are, of course, no strangers to action. The modern Ninja Gaiden series was immensely formative during the PS3/XBOX 360 era of games, and Dead or Alive, diabolical jiggle physics aside, is a deeply loved fighting game franchise for a reason. They are matched only by peak era Platinum Games in action game prowess.
Nioh was a fresh take on their typical formula, in that it was a response to the popularity of the Souls series of games by From Software. The original title implemented many of the subgenre staples: stamina management, checkpointing, limited health items, respawning enemies, and, naturally, soul-crushingly hard boss fights. A layperson might consider the series a cynical appeal to a growing market, and I suppose that's not untrue, but I'd argue that what granted the Nioh such lasting success was that special Team Ninja sauce. And no, I don't mean massive cleavage.
The Nioh games are at once recognisable to the average soulslike enjoyer, but different in small ways that define its identity. Nioh has a Ki system – a way of speeding up your stamina regeneration after each weapon swing, provided you trigger it each time. The input is easy – a simple button press – but the effect is enormous. It causes you to be mindful of your inputs, careful not to button mash or panic roll away. It grants the player a moment to collect themself and regain control of the fight for a split second. Take a breath, in a sense. It's such a tiny thing, but so important to the flow of the game, and the player's ability to enter a zen state during battle.
Furthermore, Nioh possesses an arguably infamous loot system. You will be picking up and discarding weapons, armour and talismans every few minutes, and a lot of time will be dedicated to menu navigation and inventory management. When I describe it that way, it doesn't exactly sound fun, and to be honest, it isn't! It's probably my least favourite part of these games. In saying that, there is a certain effect that happens when you're scrolling through your mountains of gear. Nioh is an oftentimes heart-pounding and relentless experience, where even small slip-ups against nothing enemies can spell your doom. Equipment diving like this honestly works as a way of forcing the player to stop for a moment and relax, engage in some mindless busywork, then return to the fight reinvigorated. It's a pretty crucial piece of the pacing puzzle, to the point where I can't really imagine any one of these games without it. Stuff shuffling might not be my idea of a good time, but it is important.
Now, at this point, you might be wondering when I'm going to start talking about Nioh 3 and the truth is that I already have. All of these games, for better or worse, are pretty much the same on a basic mechanical level. Nioh 3 is a sequel in the truest sense, building on the previous entry in ways that are mostly small and sometimes experimental, but ultimately, the core of the thing remains unaltered. I'm fine with this, since Nioh 2 is, as I said earlier, the best action game ever made, but the changes made in Nioh 3 are still worth talking about, I think.
For one, if Nioh was Team Ninja doing Dark Souls, then Nioh 3 was almost certainly born from the influence of Elden Ring. The game is an open world, with the occasional extended dungeons which fall more in line with the level design ethos of Nioh’s past. An open world means – you guessed it – checklists of things to do, enemy camps, collectibles to find, mini bosses scattered around, and a few questlines to follow. Pretty much the standard that video games have been running with for over a decade now. Nioh 3 is at an inherent advantage, in that it is a Nioh game and therefore the most fun a girl can have with a Playstation 5 controller on a Saturday night.
That being said, I couldn't help but feel a slight disappointment while working my way through the map. The content on offer isn't bad, by any means. It's great. It's Nioh! I just struggled to feel the inspiration here. There's a minimap and quest markers and ways to remove the fog of war cloaking the map revealing EVEN MORE things to do, and it all felt a little bit rote. It was the same issue I came into with Team Ninja’s 2024 release, Rise of the Ronin. It all feels a little too safe and unnecessary when Nioh was already so rock solid in what it did before.
I felt this especially with the story dungeon leading into the final boss of the demo. All of a sudden, I was back in an old Nioh level, and the magic just returned to the experience. Level design tight as a drum, unreal attention to interconnectivity, optional challenge fights blended seamlessly into the experience as incentives for further exploration… The whole thing just felt like coming home in the best way possible. I couldn't believe the game had been hiding this from me for 7 hours straight.
But again, I must reiterate that despite my critiques, Nioh 3 is still astonishingly good. Even the open world stuff is great as a baseline, because you get to fight people in a Nioh game, i.e. the closest thing to godhood a mortal can achieve. There are other changes, like the samurai/shinobi mode split, which partitions out the equipment to be more organisable, while providing more room for the player to try new builds they wouldn't otherwise consider. There's also the delightfully incomprehensible story which will only ever make sense to James and no other human being on this planet, but I love nonetheless. It's just a rip-roaring good time all around, and I cannot wait to play more of it, hopefully soon since it's now out!
Pragmata
Time Played: 30 minutes
I feel like every single year, there's at least one Capcom game that arrests my attention. Last year it was Monster Hunter Wilds, and the year before was Dragon's Dogma 2’s time in the spotlight. Keep rolling back the years, and there's Street Fighter 6 and any one of the recent Resident Evil releases. The company is on a roll, and seemingly one of the only teams in the triple-AAA space willing to take risks and embrace weird ideas. A smaller release I loved was Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and you can see that game's DNA in the gameplay trailers of the upcoming Onimusha reboot.
Pragmata appears closer in scope to Kunitsu-Gami, with a smaller-than-average price tag and an emphasis on gameplay experimentation. It's an over-the-shoulder shooter, much like the Resi games, but implements a hacking minigame, a tile puzzle of sorts, seamlessly into combat which is required before you are able to deal any damage. The hacking is carried out by the little girl hitching a ride on your back through the entire game, and the intent, presumably, is to create a certain level of codependency between the protagonist and his child companion, through gameplay mechanics. It's a cool concept, and quite intuitive when you get your hands on the game itself.
I did have the thought that the game might be inundated with sterile space station corridors, but the recent State of Play trailer showed the protagonists exploring through a city environment, so that gives me hope. Of course, the demo is incredibly short, so space station is all you get for the brief time you spend here. First time around, I beat it in around 16 minutes, and a second run through I netted in just 12. I'd imagine that a big part of the final game's replayability will come down to challenge runs and final grades, much like the Resident Evil titles, which I think would suit a linear experience like this nicely.
Ultimately, I don't have an awful lot to say about a game I only spent half an hour playing. Who knew?! Though, if the aim of this demo was to make me feel more inclined to give the full release a shot, then I'd say it worked. I'm at least a little more interested in a game I was already interested in, so congratulations Pragmata, you got me!
Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection
Time Played: 3.5 hours
2025 was the Year of the Monster for me. For the first time in my life, I actually got hooked on a Monster Hunter game. I saw the light. A large part of that was probably due to my being out of a job from April onwards, I'll admit. Who could have expected that I, a deeply unemployed person, would fall for the Unemployed People game? But yeah, Monster Hunter Wilds is incredible.
However, by extension, I've become eager to engage with any and all new Monster Hunter deposited into my food trough. Thus, entirely against my will, I am compelled to give a shit about the Monster Hunter Stories series. The third entry, Twisted Reflection, comes out in March, but Capcom very kindly put out a pretty chunky demo to enjoy. I wasn't sure what to expect exactly; just that it looked to be a more kid-friendly, cartoonish alternative to the mainline entries. While I can't say the world or narrative of Wilds necessarily grabbed me in a way that made it essential to experience a story-focused spin-off, I continue to be entranced by Wilds’ endless charm and visual identity. As such, I can't say I'm uninterested in such a prospect.
So, coming out the other side of what was essentially the full game's prologue, how does it stack up? Well, it's a turn-based RPG, which wasn't quite what I had expected. Monster Hunter being such a combat-centric experience, I was expecting a more simplified version of those mechanics, but that wasn't true of Stories 3 in a number of ways. For one, of course, turn-based, but there's also a surprising complexity and borderline obtuseness to the way combat works here that took a little getting used to.
In typical RPG fashion, enemies are weak to varying damage types, like fire or lightning. However, if your goal is to break body parts like in the mainline games, then your priority is actually which weapon you decide to use, delivering either slashing, blunt or piercing damage. You're also going to want to keep in mind each weapon’s special ability, like charging up the greatsword or setting up a series of notes with the hunting horn, but that's more of a long-term concern. While all of this is happening, you also need to keep in mind the attack style system, which essentially works like rock-paper-scissors and determines your victory or defeat in head-to-head clashes. In rock-paper-scissors fashion, the outcome of these events is basically down to luck, as while you can change your attack style with each new turn, so can your enemy. Battles, even some of the easier ones, turn into multilayered plate juggling routines, where more often than not resulting in me bumbling my way through situations while my AI ally carried me. In a sense, it's all a shockingly accurate recreation of the Monster Hunter combat experience.
It doesn't help that the tutorial is pretty bad at easing the player into these concepts. The game throws a lot of this stuff at you in quick succession, and explains like it's sick of going over this shit again. Understanding most of these systems was a result of trial and error. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if I turn out to be way off the mark on how this shit works. That being said, once I did get a grasp of how this game ticks, I started to really appreciate what it's doing.
Like I said earlier, the way combat in Stories 3 feels is quite similar to the emotional experience of getting into Monster Hunter. In Wilds, I didn't really start playing optimally until I was well into the post-game. Before that, I was staggering my way around arenas, toppling dragons and demons by slim margins, never quite comprehending their movesets or conducting strategies. It wasn't until much later, faced with seemingly insurmountable opponents like the arc-tempered variants and the title update monsters – Seregios, Mizutsune, and Lagiacrus – that I was required to understand what the hell I was even doing, and all of a sudden, the game’s petals unfurled before me, and its beauty manifested. While I doubt Monster Hunter Stories 3 will have the same kind of profound impact on me, I'm willing to trust in the depth of its myriad systems.
Now, I suppose I should talk about the story part of Stories. It's a tale of kingdoms on the brink of war, and the plucky band of JRPG protagonists who will try their darnedest to stop the bloodshed. I tend to enjoy grand political narratives like this. What can I say, I was spoiled by Fire Emblem: Three Houses and now I have an appetite for it. I like that the player character is a princess or prince, and experiencing the tension between their passion – researching monsters – and their father's expectations of them as a royal. There's also some history regarding their absent mother that complicates their perceived authority, but their dad, the king, is determined to make it all work. A neighbouring nation, plagued by famine, seeks to violate an ancient agreement and invade northern lands in search of resources to uplift their people from destitution, but our kingdom is hesitant to do so. The friction there is pretty compelling, and I'm curious to see where it goes.
One plot thread that I wasn't terribly fond of was the princess of that neighbouring kingdom who chooses to stay behind, essentially offering herself up as a hostage, as a symbol of trust that current conditions will not escalate into outright war. Some of the player's friends don't trust her right away, given her position as a royal and a political pawn, and wonder about her true intentions. That setup is good, and I like that she basically offers to do all this herself, in spite of her queen mother's wishes, granting her agency and characterising her as the kind of well-meaning wildcard that these fraught circumstances might just need. That being said, I found that the initial tension between her and the player character resolves much too quickly. It might be a matter of efficiency, since the story needs to propel forward eventually, but they go from distrustful to complete understanding and empathy in the space of maybe one and a half conversations, and that struck me as weak writing. It makes me wonder about the quality of the storytelling going forward, ultimately.
I did like this snippet of Monster Hunter Stories 3 though! It truly took the full 210 minutes to appreciate what it was doing and enjoy it, but we got there eventually. I'm keen to try out the full release when it arrives. However, whether or not I can withstand a full JRPG-length playthrough remains to be seen.
And that's a wrap on this edition of Initial Vibe! I hope you found my ramblings interesting. If you're curious about trying these games yourself, I played all of these demos on my PS5, though I believe they're all available on Steam as well, and the latter two titles are also available on Switch 2.
I've got a couple more demos waiting in the wings, so I'll likely be returning to this series sooner rather than later. Hopefully I'll see you then!