Nioh 2: The ten hardest bosses and tips to beat them

Minamoto No Yoshitsune

The legendary military commander of the Minamoto clan deserves the number one seat for the hardest boss in the game. It’s no surprise that yet another wielder of the Sohayamaru has several tricks up their sleeve. What makes him so difficult is that he’s another humanoid boss who has the ability to turn the battlefield into a dark realm.

He can also cast the purity status effect on your character, so you might want to avoid any sort of light green energy attacks that he has, especially the lower his health gets. Yoshitsune can also cast an ability where projectiles are deflected, so when he plays his flute, refrain from casting any types of jutsus at him. When he pulls out the Sohayamaru, just be ready for his blade waves for the slashes he throws out.

This boss fight seems like he’s a stronger Saika, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. When he goes into his airborne and perched stances on the fence (or lamp post, depending on which mission you fight him in), be ready to dodge his barrage of energy sword attacks. The most frequent ones he uses is the one that rains in a straight line toward you, another where energy blades rain all around him, and another is when he summons about six homing ones.

When he does stand atop some kind of unbreakable object, try closing in on him and hitting him with hard-hitting vertical attacks or alternatively ranged attacks from a hand cannon to reduce his ki to zero. Doing so will drop him from his position and open him up for a finisher move. It’ll temporarily remove his curse status. There are other moves where he bounces around in a very quick pogo-stick looking animation, raining blades down in his path.

If I’m being honest, I’ve only been able to beat him up to Dream of the Wise when my level was just high enough as the recommended mission level. Even then, he posed such a threat to me that I had to bust out the extra meds. What worked for me was to only really approach him when he summoned his straight sword rain attacks and when he approached me for close combat. He has several burst attacks but they happen so fast that even my reflexes aren’t enough to exactly get him. They’ll definitely help in reducing his ki.

Pro tip: using the switchglaive’s low stance move, Whirling Blade, can actually deflect Yoshitsune’s homing energy blades.