Nioh 2 is full of giant bull spiders, horse men with big swords, and more, but it’s also got a lot of cats. Like a lot of cats. It’s got enough felines to start feeling fishy, especially when looking at the game as a whole and reading the plain text and deep subtext hidden within. These little and literal furballs in Nioh 2 have taken over the game and made it not only a pro-cat propaganda Soulslike, but an anti-dog one as well.
First off, the Nioh 2 cats, called Scampusses, are readily available in the game and can give you buffs as they roll around your feet. You can pet them after you find them, which is easy because they purr quite loudly when you are nearby.
A furred ball of lies
While it seems nice and comforting in a hellish game where everything tries to impale you, this is not an accurate representation of actual cats. Actual cats would easily trip you if they did this — as they often do — and the game only mentions this in the Scampuss’ brief description in the gallery. Team Ninja is bending the truth here since no feline is that careful while scurrying around at your feet. The main character in Nioh 2 is a nimble warrior, but no one is nimble enough to safely walk around a cat without tripping and swearing.
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There’s even a late-game side mission where you are tasked with saving a character’s cats from monsters because, of course, this is a very important job to do when demons are trying to split Japan in half. Nioh 2 even goes the extra mile in painting them as victims as their in-game description says they “were once babies or young children who suffered untimely deaths, and thus rub themselves against strangers in search of their mother’s warmth.” This is, again, not true since the only time cats seek warmth is when they lie in the sun or when they beg for food, the latter of which is fleeting at best.
Slandering the good boys and girls
Being pro cat is one thing, but Nioh 2 goes out of its way to be anti-dog as well. Dogs, the superior animal, are not represented well in the game. The only actual canines alert surrounding enemies to your presence and are all covered in god damn knives that they throw at you with alarming precision. No matter how many times you try and politely get asked to leave dog training school, dogs won’t learn how to throw a knife. The inaccuracy toward cats is loving and soft where the inaccurate depiction of dogs is full of bloodlust and memories being permanently banned from the PetCo in Rancho Cucamonga.
You cannot pet the dog. You have to kill the dog, which is awful and shows how little Team Ninja wanted to faithfully represent its house pets. This even goes back to Ninja Gaiden 2, where it had a similar enemy, showing the studio’s long anti-dog history. It’s even worse here as Nioh 2 has even blinded the dogs this time around and put even more sharp objects on them. You can’t really see their mental anguish as clearly, but you can tell how they’ve been brainwashed into enjoying cold-blooded murder, much like the Nazi dogs in Wolfenstein. What do the cats enjoy in Nioh 2? Innocent purring and tumbling around.
Nioh 2 uses real Japanese historical figures but obviously uses no actual politics — much like Metal Gear Solid — but this is a strict political stance that smears our furry best friends (but not our best friends who are furries). Dogs are scientifically superior and do not deserve this kind of dishonesty. They are the goodest boys and girls, which is something the game tries to label to cats with even though they are the direct opposite. The developer has hinted at its pro-cat beliefs in the past, but Nioh 2 shows that the studio should truly be called “Team Cat” instead of Team Ninja.
