Round 1: Which has a better combat system?
With a stamina management system in place, players have to be extremely careful not to spam their attacks too much, lest they get caught off-guard and stuck in an enemy’s stun-lock combo. Both games handle the mechanic rather differently. In Dark Souls, simply expending all of your stamina will still allow you to move your character around, but you won’t be able to sprint until the bar has completely refilled.
Nioh is a little more unforgiving in this regard. Wasting all of your stamina and getting hit by an enemy will cause William to get staggered. However, the introduction of the Ki Pulse mechanic allows players to regain bits of stamina by hitting R1 at the right time, letting them chain long strings of attacks together.
While the Dark Souls games usually encourage players to approach combat a bit more defensively, Nioh allows players to go to town on their foes, as long as they can put their deadly combos together. One could argue that Nioh disappoints a little by only having five main weapon classes, but the game also offers three different weapon stances that changes your move set quite a bit. Nioh’s combat system is extremely deep, and you’ll need to unlock samurai skills with each weapon class before you can truly master it.
With Dark Souls, players get access to a very wide variety of weapons, but the combo potential here simply isn’t on the same level as Nioh. The fighting in Dark Souls is also a lot easier to get a hang of than in Nioh, but that ends up resulting in a combat system that feels rather shallow in comparison. Dark Souls III did shake things up a little with the brand new weapon arts, but those were limited by the amount of FP your character had, and FP itself was tied to a stat that you had to level up individually.
Winner: Nioh takes this one. Despite having only five weapon classes, just mastering one class will take a considerable amount of time. There are so many intricacies in Nioh’s combat system and, combined with the Ki Pulse mechanic, this allows for some seriously flashy and stylish combos in the game.
