The honest truth is a lot of people got stonewalled at Hino-Enma (bat bitch) on Nioh 1, basically because you had to figure out a way to mitigate her paralysis attacks, overlevel madly to take the hits, or simply never make a mistake. Its a harsh game, way more so than any of the Souls' games.
Long term in that game Way Of The Wise was a massive uptick in difficulty, and naturally Way Of The Nioh and the Abyss were even more difficult. The latter especially so because you couldn't even co-op past the challenge as going in more than solo added extra bosses to the crucible encounters.
A key thing to bear in mind when discussing Nioh 1 is that playing the Vanilla original release, and the complete edition are very different experiences. Originally there were no level/stat caps per game-cycle so you could basically grind until you were God-tier, however as the add-ons were introduced caps were instituted to prevent this forcing the player to beat each successive difficulty cycle within preset limitations. On top of this nearly every cheese-build got nerfed (no infinite Yokai shift, no shurikens for obscene damage etc.) forcing the player to really figure out the mechanics.
In truth I think this kinda got away from TN slightly and they ended up making the difficulty a bit too much for a lot of players, and with Nioh 2 they stated upfront that their goal was to make it spicy but not too unpalatable.
So yeah, Nioh 2 for the most part is a lot less taxing. That being said they've have added high challenge content outside of the main campaign path, so although getting through to Dream Of The Nioh is substantially easier, if you start dabbling with the side-stuff its still going to tax you hard. I'm talking about things like Picture Scroll battles and the Underworld and Depths.
Obviously quite how tough you are going to find the going is heavily dependant upon how well you know the game's many systems and mechanics. But even then, you'll likely find yourself thinking about changing stuff up at times because most builds and strats have a limited life-span.
Personally I like that with a good build and a maxed lvl 750 char I can face-roll Dream Of The Nioh and feel madly powerful, but then get to level 6 in the depths and feel like a worthless scrub because the difficulty is so jacked!
And as I believe the final patch is yet to roll-out alongside the release of the PS5/PC versions, its entirely possible that the ultimate challenges are yet to be added.
Its always been a bit of a shame that despite both games having a pretty active community, and lots of info on YT and Reddit and the like, you have to be aware that an awful lot of the ideal "meta" builds simply no longer work effectively.
