Brutal boss battler Nioh 3’s first major post-release patch has arrived today, February 13th. Among its array of tweaks is a “partial” fix for a pretty serious issue – it sometimes being impossible for your character to down any healing elixirs in battle.

It’s not difficult to imagine such an occurrence being a source of serious frustration in Nioh, far, wherever you are, but if you had any doubts Sherif from our network mates VG247 has personally testified as much in pointing out the fix. I’d have asked our very own Jeremy to get double verification on this, however, knowing that the game pushed him to the point that he put a hole in his desk while playing it for review, I’ve decided to spare him the displeasure of having to recall any points when his healing abilities might have gone AWOL.

Beyond that and a bunch of other fixes – some of which are for specific bugs affecting bosses like Takasugi Shinsaku, Minamoto no Yoritomo, and Kajiwara Kagetoki – Koei Tecmo have made some broader adjustments to the game with this patch, version 1.03.01. They’ve “greatly increased the Health of enemies in the Training Ground Battle Scroll and made it possible to pray at the shrine during battle” and “made changes so a backup copy of save data will be automatically generated when the player loads save data”.

Personally, my favourite not from the patch is this one: “Fixed an issue where if the player selected 11, 32, 33, or 43 under Base Hair in Character Creation, they would be able to select 14 under “Hair – Back of Head (Top)” even if the hair was floating above the head.” Begone, misbehaving trims.

Despite the toll it took on his furniture, Jeremy opted to give Nioh 3 a bestest best. “Wonky performance aside, Nioh 3 is excellent,” he wrote. It’s not as elegant and practiced as FromSoftware’s efforts, and I daresay that the creativity present in recent Chinese soulslikes like Black Myth: Wukong isn’t matched here either. But it still warrants a Bestest Best, because what this game does do is deftly borrow from modern titles in a variety of genres, mingling their flavours into one delicate Miso soup. There’s a word in Okinawan – chanpurū – which means to mix together. That’s what Nioh 3 is – a chanpurū of influences that manages to entertain in a wonderful fashion. Even if you’re biased against samurai like I am, it’s still worth your while to fire this one up, tackle the Crucible, and cuddle a Chijiko or three.”