Apropos the Nioh 2 rec, do you have any tips or recommendations for newcomers to it?
This is NOT a Soulsborne. Don't treat it as such. It plays similarly in some aspects, especially during the early game, but it comes with big differences: Active skills are aplenty and allow you make a "moveset" of sorts, kind of like Godhand, just not that robust (since each weapon has three different base, fixed movesets).
Your first playthrough will be radically different from every other playthrough, or "Dream Of". You play Soulsborne-like the first playthrough. You play a character action game on subsequent playthroughs.
Your first playthrough is just fucking around trying new things. You can respect relatively freely eventually, and even then, don't worry because you can't really fuck up your build, there's no such thing as building in the first playthrough, just play.
Getting like 30 Dex and 30 Magic to be able to use a myriad of Ninjutsu and Onmyo Magic is recommended. You're not a Ninja build or Onmyo build for it, any build uses this, because there's no builds until way later in the Dreams Of, there's playstyles first and foremost.
Nioh 2 is an aggressive game. Use your Burst Counter, make your openings by force when you can, go hog wild on openings if you can't, but in general, remember aggression is the name of the game.
If you find a cheese, use it. Enemies are designed strong but with the game systems in mind. If an enemy is susceptible to poison, poison will FUCK it up. If an enemy is susceptible to Paralysis, which really straight up just freezes you in place, get Paralyzing.
If you inflict two Elements on an enemy at once (Burn and Saturated, Shocked and Corrupted, etc), they additionally become afflicted with Confused. Confused enemies take 50% extra damage while Confusion is active. It's insanely high damage and extremely important on subsequent Dreams of past the first one, but it'll definitely be amazing in your first playthrough as well if you can leverage it.
Swords are basic bitch weapons and good to get the feeling of the game, but really, just try anything that catches your eye.
Use Ki Pulse and stance changes. Don't complain that the game is hard if you're not willing to interact with its systems.
High stance is your offensive, high damage stance that doesn't bounce off block but it has a shit dodge. Medium stance is your all-purpose stance with good tools all around and the best defensive tools like parries and counters, with a good dodge (quickstep into roll). Low stance is your non-committal, safe, quick, very low damage, high hit amount stance that's good at building up status effects and has the best dodging tools with two quicksteps.
Straight up use your resources. Don't save stuff For Later, just use the damn things, you'll get a bunch again anyways.