Yeah for the multiple enemies. Mechanically, it feels really claustrophobic. The camera zooms in too much, and the enemies are always rushing like nuts. I have nut been able to pull off 1 v 3 without some cheesing yet.
I've killed a few groups of 3+ with an axe (because they can't stun you out of the animation) but it feels pretty dumb. The combat stops feeling skillful and just feels like dumb luck with higher enemy numbers. The more enemies on screen the less reliably can you read their actions and make judgments based on stamina bars etc. As you say, it ends up being safer just to cheese... especially when cheesing enemies isn't difficult. Just run back till they stop chasing you then re-agro the last one that starts walking back and you can fight one on one... repeat until dead, it just isn't much fun.
In contrast, games like Ninja Gaiden much better supported large scale combat. It's a different game, of course, but it felt hard yet featured the mechanics to make those large scale fights managable, and in turn, it didn'nt need to feature means to circumvent the difficulty either. Ultimately, making Ninja Gaiden a much better game that was harder, for the right reasons.
Dark Souls also supported larger scales fights better, ironically, because most of the enemies grouped together tend to be different types of enemies. So the interplay between different attack patterns provided you with different windows of opportunity from one enemy to another. For instance, it might be 1 vs 3 on Souls, but I know I can rush the archer first. If I rush an archer on Nioh, he pulls out a sword, with which he has equal efficacy as his sword-wielding comrades. Then you're fighting multiple enemies who are all trying to get into the exact same range using the exact same path finding to fight you, sometimes they even seem to mirror each others actions. It just creates a lot of overlap where they cover each others vulnerabilities very naturally.
Ultimately I feel that Nioh is punishing, but just like Souls most of the difficulty is circumvent-able. It's overly focused on punishment rather than designing a game around mechanical difficulty and forcing tight execution. I think that's a shame...
I also don't think a quick time event being added to the sword gameplay saves the experience. It's a neat addition but it hardly changes anything. It makes the game marginally more execution heavy, but I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I think one of the reasons for Soul's popularity is its 'easy to play tough to master' fundamnetals, because at a basic level Souls is a very very simple game. Nioh feels over-complicated and personally I feel that the Ki Pulse mechanic is very superficial.
It's ironic that it features aspects like that, which 'add depth to the combat' but then it doesn't feature as tight hitboxes and hurtboxes as Souls, and the attacks follow entirely pre-set animations. You can't control the trajectory of a blow with the camera (like you can on Souls). In many regards it's really primitive by comparison, and I really do not feel that a quick time event integrated to the stamina system escapes those issues.
