OT: Still playing Nioh 2, and it's fine. I find I enjoy the sidekick/ally character they give you right away. Tochikiro I think is the spelling of his name. At first he's just presented as a stereotypical money-grubbing opportunist, who hooks up with you, because he needs protection from yokai while he tries to obtain spirit stones, which are highly valuable to people. But when you actually progress more with the story, it's apparently more than that. Your first encounter with him, he helps you by holding a stone to your face, to stop you from freaking out and going into a dark rage, due to your yokai nature. It's not explained WHY you are suddenly acting like that, being corrupted, but he shows up and stops the frenzy moment. His spirit ally is a monkey, and he basically just points you around the world, looking for ways to make money. No big deal, whatever. BUUUT, then you come to a mission in a forest, and an enemy there, is a spirit animal, that has also been corrupted. You fight him, but instead of killing it, Tochikiro shows up, shoves you out of the way, and does the same thing to the creature as he did to you at the start of the game. Purifying the spirit of it's corruption, and returning it to being a regular, but very powerful, spirit. The other character walks up and is like "the fuk is this?" and Tochikiro proudly smiles, and gestures, saying "Victory! The Tochikiro way!! With nobody having to die!" And then it's basically just a neat moment of the two groups, agreeing to help each other to accomplish the goal, which, just so happens, to be lucrative for Tochikiro! And I just loved that. What was first presented as just someone being opportunistic, turned out to genuinely be someone who doesn't want to fight, and would be more than happy for everyone to get along, and if he CAN accomplish it that way, he will. This is reinforced by his spirit animal, who's unique trait it passes on to you if you have him set as your Guardian Spirit, is to apply the Purity effect to your enemies. So even the mechanics of his ally, backup the story element of his background, being one of purification of enemies, and not killing them. The majority of the various traits he provides you, aren't even combat based. They give you a strong chance to recover all your souls upon respawn at a shrine, they let you spot locations to find souls (which is also the currency in the game to an extent, valuable resource at least) on your map (because you know, he's after wealth). So I like that. It's a nice blending of mechanics and narrative for that character, and it genuinely made me like him a lot more. I stopped seeing him as just a greedy opportunist.
I still don't know what I'm fucking doing on the meta level with the narrative, as it's very disjointed. Spirits are going bad, or maybe always were bad, but only some of them, and some humans are being bad and violent, so lots of conflict, both spiritual and mundane. And I'm the one to go fight it all. They name drop a person or two that seem to be commonly used in these historical mythologies, but the context is very minimal, so if you don't know the stories about them, it's mostly just a semi-familiar name.