I must admit, I spent a long time waiting for a good and proper Samurai game, and now I am spoilt for choice. It feels like just recently there was a release of Ghost of Tsushima which still looks and plays amazing. In 2024, Ubisoft plans to release Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and this spring, Team Ninja launched Rise of the Ronin — an open-world epic set in the Bakumatsu era. The games just keep on coming!
The setting is fascinating: it was a time of significant political and social upheaval in Japan when the Western powers started affecting the politics of the formerly secluded country. The new title allows you to choose a side. Should Japan open up to the world? It’s for you to decide.
Did we need yet another Samurai game? Well, why not? The era is admittedly attractive, and Tsushima did not feature big cities or some of the places one might expect from a game about Samurai. Rise of the Ronin “fixes” that: it’s a massive title (the game map trumps Tsushima) that tells a story spliced with historical facts.
In a lot of ways (too many ways, maybe) it’s a Ubisoft title. You get your massive map, your endless icons and historical figures. It’s a painfully familiar formula, especially since the aforementioned Sucker Punch title was hardly any different. But to me, that game was also extremely easy — and I am, admittedly, not that good at games (comes with the territory, one might say). Ronin has no such problem since it’s what the kids call a soulslike. Which might be a bummer to some, and good news to others.
As a person tired both of open world titles and Souls-inspired video games, I perhaps was not the best person to try it out, but then again, I had to give the Rise of the Ronin a chance.
It did impress me in a lot of ways, even if some comparisons did hurt it. Let’s be honest here: the lacklustre reception it got has a lot to do with its prolonged time of development. If there were no eerily similar games, Ronin would have gotten much better reviews. Alas.
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In my opinion, it looks gorgeous, but it lacks the polish and cinematic touch of Tsushima. It also plays great, but in some ways, it can’t rival Nioh’s tight controls. So in my view, the best thing to do is to forget those games exist. How is Rise of the Ronin really?
In my professional opinion, it’s good. How’s that for a verdict? Rise of the Ronin is a perfectly serviceable open-world title in the sea of open-world titles. There’s almost nothing it does that can be called original or unique, but if we make an effort to forget all the other games, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Team Ninja came up with a beautiful representation of Japan, with ancient temples, red and yellow leaves and cities bursting with life. As you stroll down the entertainment district, a talkative and inebriated friend by your side, you start feeling more and more like you belong. It’s a world that feels lived in, and there’s a lot to explore.
It’s hard to recommend the games that do a lot right but never do them better than the others. Rise of Ronin allows for different playstyles and offers quite a bit of variety when it comes to weapons and fight stances, even if the combat system itself is quite simplistic, relying on just a single button to attack. You strike, you parry and you roll away from your opponent — that’s about it. As usual, timing is everything, as well as learning the patterns. It takes patience and dedication, but I find the combat here rewarding, especially when I mix swordplay with gunplay. It’s fairly gory, too: your enemies’ limbs fly in all directions while blood spatters every surface. And there are difficulty settings, which are very welcome.
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Team Ninja knows how to make a nice-feeling game and to me, Ronin feels and controls great. There are some persisting issues with frame rate though: for an exclusive PS5 title, I expected better optimisation. While the game never glitched for me, the somewhat inconstant frames were an unpleasant surprise. That’s especially weird since the game does not push the console in any obvious way: while it does look nice, it’s nowhere near the graphical juggernaut like, say, Forbidden West. And yet it has some obvious problems in certain areas, especially when there are NPCs around.
At the end of my journey, I look at Rise of the Ronin with appreciation, but I understand those who were let down by the experience. It’s unfortunate that it offers so little in the way of innovation. It has too few ideas of its own which will lead to it being largely forgotten in the future.
Verdict
It’s fair to say that Rise of Ronin did not set the world on fire. Still, it’s a damn good open-world game that offers tens of hours of solid gameplay in a fantastic setting. But at the end of the day, it’s yet another game that followed the current trends a little too closely, losing its unique character in the process.