@Seymour47: The Lego film was still a giant commercial for Lego (even if we ignored all merchandising directly tied to the film itself, the film was obviously intended to boost the brand's bottom line, in general). The producers and film makers just know that to give their commercial its most potential for success they need to make it as mass appealing as possible, and the basic blueprint for that (using the effective application of well known tropes and cliches and other standard marketing psychology tactics) has been around for decades (Disney, Pixar, all children's programming with subtle or not so subtle adult themes, the Lego video games, etc).

The point I'm getting at is that all of these kinds of films can be both blatant cash grabs in the form of glorified ad campaigns/ commercials and at the same time easily be made to seem well produced and as having legitimate mass appeal. In almost all of these cases, the target audiences for this kind of crap have already been well sampled and tested before they green light anything.

The stamina gauge gimmick looks really ridiculous. The way they have it now I guess we're supposed to just accept that our character can go from one moment being able to easily and effortlessly execute these essentially super human maneuvers or just a series of standard attack movements that don't even look all that laborious to pull off, but then the second his stamina bar is depleted after a few swings/ moves, he suddenly turns into someone weaker than the most frail old man in existence who can't even move his body an inch to save his life (literally).

This wouldn't even make sense if our character was supposed to be a regular average Joe human with no battle experience at all. I mean, in our own non video game reality, anyone who can easily swing a sword or a heavy implement one time, can do it dozens and dozens of times and still not be left totally immobile when they eventually become too exhausted to actually perform another complete attack movement , which makes it all the more absurd when we're supposed to be playing as some super samurai in this game.

I realize that they need some major player handicapping element to keep up with the 'hardcore' gameplay reputation which Team Ninja is known for and to be able to achieve a warranted modern comparison to the Souls games (Souls games which, unlike what the guys in the video so poorly and wrongly explained at 4:21- 4:31 as offering a sense of challenge based more on the bosses and the moves the enemies do, are actually almost totally dependent on intentionally restrictive mechanics, as well, such as fairly sloppy hit detection and phantom hit boxes, input lag and severely inhibiting wind-up and follow-through delay sequences for attack and defense animations, camera issues, a poor lock on feature and intentionally clumsy controls, in general, etc etc).

Ninja Gaiden as a franchise (one of my favorites, despite my love/ hate relationship with it), achieved most of its 'hardcore' reputation by offering games with a rapid pace of combat, throwing a large number of fast moving aggressively attacking enemies with competent AI (at least on Master Ninja) at you at once. But, it would have been nowhere near as difficult as it was perceived to be by most players if not for its own intentionally handicapping game design elements, namely its restrictive/ wonky/ inefficient camera system which all of the enemy attack pattern programming was based off of (what could and couldn't be seen on screen determined when/ how they'd attack in most cases) and which the entire directional based moveset for Ryu was based off of (meaning 'just center the camera!', as so many apologists used to argue, wasn't nearly enough to address most of the most prominent shortcomings the camera system had.)

Nioh is so far looking like a straight up Dark Souls ripoff in all the worst ways (again, much like what FromSoftware is also largely guilty of doing - Team Ninja is putting this wannabe 'hardcore' designation way ahead of any sort of ground breaking, intelligent or, most importantly - fun - game design initiatives, which I'm starting to doubt Hayashi is even capable of at this point). Team Ninja is using most of the same simplistic player handicapping tricks that the Souls games use, the main difference being only that Nioh (at least for now and from what these guys say in the video) is using them in a more unbalanced manner (damage allotment/ stamina stupidity, etc ) which makes it more unforgiving (it's just a matter of the difficulty curve being off, like the guy mentioned in the video).

I assume the programmers are finding it extra challenging to achieve the sense of difficulty they're after while still giving us a control layout and combat mechanics at least somewhat similar in functionality to what we got in the Ninja Gaiden games (controls and combat mechanics which were much more fluid and in depth than what was offered in the Souls games, so, unless they go full ripoff and abandon all aspects of the Team Ninja combat system in favor of the Souls style button layout and combat, I bet this is why they've had to put something like the dumb stamina feature in place as a desperate attempt at achieving something close to the type of challenge/ combat feeling the Souls games offer ).

So far, I'm seeing the same lackluster Team Ninja basic movement animations (the Souls games already destroy this game in that department, this game's character animations seem to offer no sense of weight/ inertia to their movements/ armor, etc), extremely shoddy environmental graphics/ detail (and I'm going to assume we can expect the same crappy Team Ninja level design in general, too - rife with invisible walls and horrible level barrier implementation and no sense of creativity whatsoever).

Looks like we can expect the same extremely unrealistic/ unintuitive collision detection issues, too (for example, invincibility frames aside, I highly doubt they'll fix things like that boss's giant ball and chain clipping right through us, as seen around 4:00, as we fight him by adding collision detection to it, like they should... the Souls games also made these same mistakes for the sake of simplicity in design/ testing over being consistent with their game's own internal logic).

I feel like, at best, all they can do with Nioh with the content I've seen up to now is provide another Souls-esque game that falls well short of the mark that the Souls franchise reached with it's sense of a unique style/ atmosphere and lore. The problem is, because it's such an obvious ripoff, and because it seems to carry over most, if not all, of the same problems and game design ineptitude issues of previous Team Ninja action titles sharing a similar look/ style, it will almost surely fail in setting itself apart from the Souls games in any significant way.

Some of you born in the 80's to early 90's might remember that they already had a franchise tie-in back in 1993 with Street Fighter 2 getting its own sub-line in the 3/4" GI Joe action figure toy line ( http://www.yojoe.com/action/93/ scroll down to the Street Fighter section).

The two franchises actually share a lot in common and have many parallels with the character types.

I was a big fan of both franchises as a kid, so I enjoyed finally being able to make toy matches like:

Sagat vs Destro, Sagat vs Golobulus,

Ryu vs Snake Eyes, Ryu vs Storm Shadow,

Ken or Ryu vs Quick Kick, Ken vs Firefly,

Bison vs Serpentor, Bison vs Cobra commander,

Blanka vs Recondo, Blanka vs Zartan

Chun Li vs Baroness/ Jinx/ Lady Jaye or Scarlett,

Balrog (Mike Bison) vs Roadblock, Balrog vs Big Boa,

Guile vs Mercer, Guile vs Sgt Slaughter (I remember I always had Guile beat him like it was a joke), Guile vs Zartan, Guile vs Duke/ Dusty/ Falcon/ Flint/ Gung Ho/ Low Light/ Shipwreck etc,

Vega (Balrog) vs Nemesis Enforcer, Vega vs Pythona.

Zangief vs Taurus, Zangief vs Nemesis Enforcer,

And many others. I always wanted them to add the SF Alpha characters to the toy line so I could use Akuma in the match-ups. Even though I was a fan of GI Joe way before Street Fighter, I tended to give the SF characters a heavy advantage in each match-up not involving Snake Eyes or Storm Shadow.