Have you heard the word ‘masocore‘ before? It’s a portmanteau of ‘masochist’ and ‘hardcore’, and it’s what Team Ninja used to describe the first few games in the Nioh franchise. In an interview a long time ago, Yosuke Hayashi (general producer at Team Ninja) told me that the team working on the Nioh games never really wanted to make them ‘Soulslikes’, and thought that ‘masocore’ suited the developer’s vision slightly better.
“We weren’t trying to make a game in this genre to begin with, but when we played the original Dark Souls, we were really inspired,” Hayashi told me back in 2020. “Team Ninja is famous for difficult action games, but it wasn’t our primary intention to make a difficult game. It was more about detecting the tension of samurai games – and the genre that worked for that, for us, happened to be ‘masocore’.”
Now, on the eve of the launch of Nioh 3, I had the chance to chat to Masaki Fujita, game director of the third game in the hardcore action-RPG series. I was curious about the evolution of Team Ninja’s experience in the genre, and if its approach to difficulty had changed at all when it came to Nioh, especially after working on Rise of the Ronin, a new Ninja Gaiden, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Final Fantasy: Stranger of Paradise in the interim.
For context, there is a long-running – and often quite exhausting – discourse around difficulty in action-RPGs. Should games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring have difficulty options? Would it make the titles more accessible for players? Would it compromise the feeling of achievement that even Hidetaka Miyazaki believes lies at the core of the experience? Would the entire genre be as beloved, as infamous, as popular, if it wasn’t for its relationship with brutal difficulty?
“We’ve never considered adding difficulty settings to the Nioh series,” Fujita tells me when I askew whether the challenge level in these games is non-negotiable for Team Ninja. “The value of clearing the game is something that is unifying, and since Nioh 3 has even more variations on strategies to clear the game compared to previous games in the series, our approach is not to change the difficulty setting when you can’t clear it.”
This is actually a sentiment echoed by ‘father of the genre’, Miyazaki. The Dark Souls boss is on the record as saying you don’t need to be ‘particularly skilled’ to play Sark Souls games: you just need to know how to adapt, how to pick up a new spell, a different weapon, a new way of thinking, if bashing your Moonlight Greatsword against a boss over and over again isn’t yielding any success for you.
The same is true in Nioh – and (after pumping 80 hours into it) especially Nioh 3: there are so many tools at your disposal now, with magic, ninjutsu, summons, Guardian Spirit skills and more being made more available and easier to use, that any roadblock you come up against can be chipped away at… if you know how to re-spec and re-evaluate. In my review, I mentioned it’s the easiest title in the series so far, and that’s partly because of the ‘Elden Ring effect’; if something is proving too tough, you can simply wander out into the open field, check off more side missions, and come back later. The level scaling is pretty intense in Nioh 3, and you’ll soon find even five or so levels can make an eye-watering difference.
“The enjoyment and sense of accomplishment of being able to figure out on your own how to overcome a situation is what we see as one of the best parts of this series,” concludes Fujita. Personally, I think that feels more apparent in Nioh 3 than in any other game in the series, precisely because Team Ninja gives you so much freedom in choosing how to tackle the various gatekeepers and difficulty spikes. I think the formula is more potent here than in any other Team Ninja game, period. Nioh or not.
Nioh 3 launches for PlayStation 5 and PC on 6th February, 2026.
