After you’ve made your way back through the waterwheel village, you’ll find your two friends scrapping in the forest clearing where you beat the Kamaitachi. This battle is absolutely nuts. It’s tough fighting two enemies at the best of times, but two bosses at the same time puts you under relentless pressure. Lucky for you, there’s at least friendly fire for your two foes - despite them dropping their differences instantly to come and kick your teeth in. They’re also both human-style enemies like Saito Yoshitatsu, and thus are easier to stagger than full Yokai.
Nioh 2 - How to beat The Shiftling’s Wise Judgement Hachisuka Koroku and Shibata Katsuie fight
Below is a video of my successful run on my first blind playthrough of Nioh 2. It shows the general strategy I employed to make it out alive.
As soon as you drop down into the arena, there’s a brief grace period where you can throw Ninjutsu tools at the two bosses before they aggro onto you.
But once they start coming, they don’t stop coming. The biggest difficulty of this fight is squeezing in hits between the unrelenting amount of pressure.
What’s more, the crazy range of Koroku’s Kusarigama is controller-breaking stuff. I’d recommend using a high-damage, low hit weapon to maximise the hits you do get off. Or you can go with the quickest set-up you’ve got.
Hachisuka Koroku is the main problem, and the best strategy is to use him to take out Shibata Katsuie for you.
Back off from both of them constantly, and they’ll rush towards you. I do this because of the crazy Kusarigama range - if you square up you’ll get pinged.
As you can see in the video above, many of Koroku’s moves have a lot of splash damage. If you keep Katsuie charging towards you, he’ll get caught up in a lot of the attacks.
This also baits them into throwing out some impotent combos, so keep alert to when they both finish an attack at the same time - these are rare opportunities to retaliate with sweeping combos of your own.
Katsuie’s only real dangerous attack is where he throws his axe in the air - keep backing off to dodge it.
Once Katsuie is down, it’s time to more proactively go after Koroku.
I found most success not bothering to Burst Counter the move where he jumps into the air and throws his Kusarigama. Just let him do the attack, stay well back then hit him with your long weapon as he lands. Repeat this while also giving the rest of his attacks a wide berth and you will eventually prevail.
There are a couple of things to pay special attention to when fighting Koroku. First is that his black-and-white unblockable attack is absolute hair-tearing, controller-breaking, curse-baiting garbage. This is another reason to constantly backpedal and cheese his attack pattern.
If you get caught in that move, you’ll most likely get spanked in one hit.
Secondly, you need to air to hit his front with attacks. The hard Kappa shell on his back protects from melee damage.
If you Sloth Talisman magic, when you’ve isolated him on his own is a good time to use it for some free hits.
Here’s our list of Nioh 2 boss guides!
For more on Nioh 2, here’s our page on Guardian Spirits and Soul Cores, as well as the best weapons we’ve seen so far.
