Thank you, Team Ninja for your honesty, I have cancelled my pre-order for Nioh

Unlimited wants, limited resources.  That’s my story.  I have to set a budget for every video game that I buy.  I can’t afford everything.  Sometimes a game comes along that I didn’t plan for, forcing me to choose between that game and another for which I’ve set money aside.  I had three games pre-ordered, all set to release within the next 5 weeks:  Nioh, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk and Ghost Recon Wildlands.  Goodbye, Nioh.  Maybe next time.  I was truly looking forward to Nioh.  I believe I was up for the challenge.  I’ve beaten Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, and though a lot are saying that Nioh might be harder, I was determined to persevere and “git gud.”  Until I watched some guy’s play through on YouTube.  At around 2 hours, 45 minutes of the video, he fought against some sort of boss and died over, and over, and over, and over again.  Anyone who has played a souls game is quite familiar with this dynamic.  You die, you learn, you get a little better and last longer on your next try, then you die again, rinse and repeat until you finally win.  The cool thing about Nioh is that the load times are 1,000% faster than any Souls title, plus the checkpoint system seems to be more forgiving.  In the video I watched, the guy respawned in like 5 seconds, at a checkpoint that’s a few steps away from the boss fight.  Loved it.  Still, how quickly the guy died every time, really bothered me.  It wasn’t like this player sucked or was a total noob to the genre.  You can tell by the way he moves and how he picks his shots that he’s got the experience.  It didn’t seem to matter.  This boss would wreck him in a matter of seconds and it was hard to tell what the guy was doing wrong.  Basically Nioh took the trial and error concept the Souls series is known for, and cranked it up to the point where it is no longer a matter of skill, but of sheer luck.  I stopped watching the video before the player was able to overcome this enemy, I’m guessing that he eventually did, but what I saw was more than enough to convince me that Team Ninja went for cheapness, as I had suspected.  Unfair enemies with unavoidable one-hit kills that you can only beat when the game essentially “glitches”and accidentally gives you the opening that it was never programmed to have in the first place.  No thanks.  But I do thank Team Ninja for their boldness to let players try out Nioh one last time to see if it’s the game for them.  Maybe Team Ninja made a mistake, maybe they got a little too arrogant for their own good, or maybe it was all in good faith that they gave players an opportunity to make an intelligent decision on whether or not they should purchase Nioh.  I won’t be buying Nioh at this time.  I’m sure down the road I will, but not on February 7 when it comes out.  I am looking forward to getting my hack and slash fix when Berserk: The Band of the Hawk comes out a mere 2 weeks later, on February 21.  In the meantime, I’ll be playing some more of this: