The enormous Nioh 3 demo has impressed me in multiple ways so far, and one of the nicest additions to the Soulslike formula comes in the form of a tiny little button in the level-up menu: with no fuss, you can instantly use enough banked XP items to reach the threshold for your next level.
I can't say with total certainty that this is the first Soulslike to ever add this feature, but I live in this genre and it's the first time I've ever seen it. And boy is it nice. It's like when Lies of P helped normalize colored numbers that indicate you have enough XP to level up, or the ability to instantly reclaim XP loss in boss fights without dancing around the arena at the start of the fight.
Picture this. You're 50 hours into Elden Ring, or Lies of P, or whatever it is. You go to level up at a checkpoint. You need 52,000 Soul-thingies and you have 42,000. Ordinarily, you'd have to exit the menu, open your inventory, navigate to the consumable items that grant Soul-thingies, and manually use enough of them to get an extra 10,000. At last, you can get your precious level.
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Nioh 3 cuts all of that out, and as someone who religiously holds onto consumable Soul-thingies specifically to top up when I'm very close to a level, I find it absolutely lovely.
In Nioh 3, your level up nouns are these: break Spirit Stones to get enough Amrita to level up. In the level up menu itself, there's a button for "Use Spirit Stone." In this sub-menu is an option to "Use amount required for Level Up" alongside "Use all Spirit Stones in possession." The former is objectively the way to go; in our earlier hypothetical, the game would automatically use 10,000 Amrita worth of Soul Stones. Bam, one level coming right up, and with no overflow Amrita put at risk on your next death.
This sounds like a tiny addition, and it is, but I've played a zillion Soulslikes and I've done a lot of mental arithmetic while wrangling inventory screens. I absolutely love this change. This is it, folks. I want this in every Soulslike now, and when we inevitably don't get it in all of them, I'm going to be missing Nioh 3.
Nioh 3 might come to Xbox for the first time in the nearly 10-year-old franchise as a flashy new trailer confirms 6 months of PS5 exclusivity.
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