Nioh – Shrines, Weapons, Amrita

Playing through the Nioh Beta Demo you will encounter Amrita, shrines and a multitude of weapons. This article covers the significance of these things and how best to use them to help you make it through the demo in one piece. If you’ve played any of the Dark Souls games, you should be able to quickly and easily grasp how best to utilize these aspects of the game, but even for the Dark Souls veterans, there are some differences that need to be addressed.

Shrines

Think of the shrines you come across in Nioh like you would a save point in most other games. While Nioh auto-saves frequently, stopping at a shrine is very similar to interacting with a bonfire in Dark Souls. It replenishes your health and stamina (Ki), but it also respawns almost all of the enemies in the area. There are a few enemies that never respawn, but a vast majority of the enemies in the demo will respawn every time you stop at a shrine.

Unlike Dark Souls, shrines are where you level up your character. In order to level up your character stats, you need Amrita (see below). This is essentially the currency of Nioh and allows you to level up various aspects of your character, including health, stamina, resistances and more.

If you’ve gone awhile without seeing a shrine, chances are you either missed one or there’s a shrine coming up very soon. For example, if you go up the hill in the first part of the demo and go all the way to the right instead of going through the wooden gate, you’ll come to a ladder that creates a shortcut to the shrine at the very start of the game. A lot of people have been missing this shortcut.

Amrita

If you’ve played Dark Souls games, Amrita are basically the Nioh equivalent of souls. As you kill enemies you obtain Amrita, which you can then use to level up your character when you reach a shrine. You can also find Amrita by destroying boxes and other objects scattered around the environment. It’s always a good idea to destroy anything and everything to make sure you don’t miss items or Amrita.

When you kill an enemy, it’s important to run over their dead body to make sure you’ve collected everything. While Amrita is automatically absorbed by your character, you may miss other items that can be difficult to see.

Weapons, Armor and Durability

Many other games like Nioh allow you to upgrade to new weapons and armor at various points throughout the game. Even in Dark Souls you may come across a large number of weapons and armor as you play. The difference with Nioh is that you should treat weapons and armor like disposable items. In the demo you get a ton of weapon and armor drops from enemies and from item corpses.

All of the gear you find has a limited durability and will break sooner rather than later. Don’t get too attacked to a specific weapon or gear that looks good on your character. Armor tends to last longer than weapons, but you’ll be changing all of it multiple times throughout a level. If you like a certain type of weapon, say katanas over spears, don’t worry because you’ll generally find enough of each weapon type to last you for an entire area.

There are items that repair you weapons and items that repair your armor, but these are few and far between and only worth it if the stats are significantly better than anything else in your inventory. More often than not this isn’t the case and you should switch to a new weapon or piece of armor as soon as you get the notification that it has low durability and won’t be as effective.

While you may have a preference on the type of weapon you use (axes attack slower but inflict more damage), you should switch your weapon based on the weapon your enemy is using. If your enemy is using a spear and attacking rapidly, you don’t want to use a slow axe against them. Instead, switch to a faster weapon like a katana so you can better engage the foe. You can still beat enemies with a slower weapon, but it’s much easier to kills these foes if you change your weapon.

Head over to our combat tips to help you make it through the Nioh Beta Demo for more tips and advice!