Nier or Nioh?

[Genon]

So I have $100+ to burn due to my relatives liking to give me money for Chanukah instead of single products. I'm looking for an awesome third-person hack and slash in a similar vein to Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, or Dark Souls. Two games have caught my interest right now: Nier: Automata and Nioh: Complete Edition, both at similar price points. I love Nioh's awesome feudal Japanese aesthetic, but I've been informed it's got even more horror-game DNA than Bloodborne, and I'm kind of a coward. Nier's excellent story and reputation have gotten my interest piqued, but its drab worlds and tendency to make everything various shades of brown turns me off a bit. So which one do you recommend?

Oh, and feel free to take a third option and suggest something else entirely. Neither game is on sale on the PC right now from what I can tell and I'm not sure if I want to drop $50+ in one sitting, plus there's no guarantee either one will see a price drop.

 

[Daniel Estacado]

Well I'm not sure how the PC port of NIOH is, but I have heard that Nier's port has issues.

 

[Aliya]

Nier is a very good game, but it's buggy.
If you will have left over money after the purchase, I would recommend buying Hollow Knight.

 

[Guessmyname]

Seconding Hollow Knight.

I've only played Nier personally; can confirm it's story is memorable but combat is a little lackluster. It's not bad but it doesn't do anything particularly interesting and it has a number of difficulty issues ('Hard' and 'Very Hard' are each kind of unplayable tier difficulty, whilst Normal is laughably easy to snap in half using plugin chips). Also uses a very ill-advised levelling up system, such that enemies <~10 levels are pathetic and >~10 are stone walls with masses of hp. There's also some issues with the port and the endgame being unpolished (Route C is absolutely the best part of the story, but it's also obviously where they started running out of budget...). They didn't have a lot of money and it kind of shows in places; like it could have done with a little more development and tweaking time.
Not sure where the 'drab levels' came from though, Nier Automata is pretty colourful. Maybe you're thinking of the previous one? Story is hard to talk about beyond 'it's good' because the major strength of it is its ability to surprise you.

Nioh I'm given to understand has a pretty simple and lackluster story, especially by comparison to above, but the combat mechanics are 'Dark Souls-ey'. How the levels stack up by comparison and how explorable the gameworld is /shrug

Hollow Knight is a 2d metroidvania in the Soulsgame mould in terms of exploration in a decaying world. It has a story that's interesting to pick apart with some neat little twists you have to uncover personally instead of being handed to you at x point in the plot as in a linear narrative and the combat manages to be both simple and challenging. It's also pretty as heck like holy shit I am envious of their environment artists.

 

[Mutton]

So Nier: Automata is a much better game than Ni-oh; the combat is way more cuhrazy-lite than Ni-Oh's take on Dark Souls, but literally everything else is so far ahead of it in terms of characters, plot, music, world building, making me cry when I hear the soundtrack, so on and so forth.

Ni-Oh is way less of a horror game than Bloodborne, definitely back around Dark Souls' dark fantasy levels. Nier's actually got a pretty colorful world, lots of greens

 

[Ford Prefect]

Ni-oh is good, Nier: Automata was one of the best games of the year, and this was gaming's best year in ... maybe ever? I mean, wow, 2017 was crazy.

 

[Guessmyname]

Yeah, for all I pointed out its faults, I loved Automata. Pretty much started playing it, couldn't stop.

I mean, I'll probably get Nioh eventually because it's closest I'll ever see to a Bloodborne PC port ([INARTICULATE SCREECHING NOISES]) but yeah, Automata is absolutely worth the time.