Nioh 2’s Story “Will Nicely Link up to the Beginning of Nioh 1”

Though its promising players improvements over its predecessor in more ways than one, when it comes to its story, Nioh 2 is moving backward, serving as a predecessor to the first game. Speaking recently in an interview with Push Square, the game’s general producer Yosuke Hayashi talked about why Team Ninja decided to go down that route.

According to Hayashi, since the developers initially didn’t think they’d be making a sequel to Nioh, they wrote the first game to be a self-contained story, with a conclusive ending. Owing to that, and the fact that they wanted to set the game in a more interesting period – that being the first half of the Sengoku era – they decided to make Nioh 2 a prequel. Hayashi also added that the game shares some connections with Nioh 1, and that Nioh 2’s ending will tie into the first game’s story nicely.

“When we made Nioh 1, we weren’t thinking about making a sequel so we concluded the story of William there,” said Hayashi. “We used the second half of the Sengoku era, so the era finished in Nioh 1. After that, things calmed down, the world was more peaceful so it wasn’t going to be interesting to use that part of history in the game.

“And so we looked at the first half [of the Sengoku era] and it’s actually the most popular period in history — it has more popular Samurais and some of them were in Nioh 1 as well so you might be familiar with some of them. You will see some connections and the story will nicely link up to the beginning of Nioh 1 so we did it that way around this time.”

Nioh 2 is due out on PS4 on March 13. According to the developers, it will have about the same amount of content as the first game. Read more on that through here.