Nioh 2 is weird. It's probably the most punishing of the Souls games, it's very easy to get one shot or obliterated by mistakes, but it's also the easiest to cheese of the Souls games -- due to stuff like Yokai abilities and the loot system. So it's simultaneously super punishing but also very cheesable to get past any challenge.
Yeah, that's this game's greatest strength but also perhaps its biggest weakness. The possibilities it gives you to create builds are...staggering. Mind-melting. That gives the game a lot of replayability and also makes it very unique. It's probably a contender for best combat system in any action game, period and on top of that it swims in complexity and systems at every level. But the downside of that is that it is possible to become so ridiculously powerful on so many fronts that the combat system and difficulty can get watered down into triviality.
That's the opposite of something like Sekiro, which sometimes I suspect was created almost as a response to Nioh in some way, because it's a game that completely strips any form of customizability in order to strive for the most tightly tuned gameplay possible. So Sekiro has a very consistent difficulty curve because the designers always know what the upper bound of character progression at every point in the game is, but replayability suffers as a result.
In Nioh 1, like I suspect many others, I experienced steep difficulty at the beginning, partly because of the normal process of learning a complex game, but also because how relatively underpowered your character is at the beginning. But because of the severe stats inflation, the second part of the game was trivially easy and therefore, unmemorable.
I wanted to avoid that in Nioh 2 to so I decided to cap my character's level at 50 until I finished the game, and I think that helped my enjoyment of the game immensely. At times it was supremely difficult (Hi Ryomen Sukuna who killed me 78 times; and I lost count of how many times I got one-shotted by fucking Skeleton Warriors) but it also forced me to really learn every boss inside out. It was very gratifying and it makes me wonder what this game would look like if it had a more restrained approach towards player builds and relied more in the player mastering its sublime mechanics.
While grinding for the weapon mastery trophies, it's hard to overstate how complex, satisfying and rewarding this game is to play. Each weapon is a world of its own and the skill tree and available moves for each weapon is probably 2x of what you find in entire other games; It's an endless well of options and play styles and I think that a lot of players simply don't delve deep enough into mastering a weapon and stuff like Ki Flux simply because it's easier to build a character that can one shot everything.
Dphex mentioned that he thought that this game was hard to learn but easy to master, and I respectfully disagree; this game, at least mechanically, is very hard to master. Just look at what XHL Gladiator or
GwyndolinCinder can do with it; I certainly can't do that and I have played almost 300 hours total of this game. It's easy to
break the game and overpower it, but the skill ceiling, the upper bound of what the player can do as he (and not the player character) becomes better is super high, probably second only to stuff like fighting games.
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