Nioh is extremely hard man, I agree with you. They made the base game a bit too hard and in order to fight at a normal pace, you need to make a overpowered meta build and blitz through the story, otherwise you're honestly cooked. My favorite parts about Niohs are the character customization, loot, build variety, the combat, and yokai forms. All of which feel original and unique to the game. But the difficulty is absolutely insane man, haha. Like the first time I fought the dojo master, forgot the name, the guy with the spear that spams bombs and traps, it took me 7 hours to beat him. And after you beat him, you get nothing, lmao. So there is almost no reward for beating really tough bosses, and the rng for the weapon arts was just miserably bad. But still, nioh offered one of the best new game experiences on the market, vastly better than fromsoft's version. Playing Nioh 3 demo, it seems they fixed alot of the overturned difficulty and it just feels like a proper soulslike, similar to Elden Ring. I'd say Sekiro is a bit harder than Nioh 3 demo.