Rise of the Ronin Review

For as expansive as their missions and environments have been, Team Ninja hasn’t devised an entirely open-world adventure. That is, until Rise of the Ronin, their latest masocore adventure. Rise of the Ronin treads a lot of new ground while taking place solely in a relatively grounded story based upon the Bakumatsu Period of Japan.

Rise of the Ronin opens with players making not one but two characters intrinsically intertwined together as Blade Twins when together or Veiled Edge solo. Team Ninja’s character creation remains a high point of their recent adventures, such as Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and there’s the wide gamut of bishonen character designs to absolute atrocities. As much fun as you might have to make two characters this time around, it might not necessarily be the wisest of investments. After a brief set of tutorials and fights to get a grasp of the action, the first real mission that the players undertake is sneaking aboard one of the infamous Black Ships helmed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. It’s during this mission that players are forced to make a critical decision: kill one of your two characters and venture forth as the remaining champion.

Your surviving Ronin will be by your side throughout the entire adventure in Rise of the Ronin. Along the way, players will be tertiary to several crucial events that reformed Japan from the isolationist period that kept borders closed from the Western world for more than two hundred years prior. Largely the story takes note of famous key moments that formed the basis of the Bakumatsu Period from 1853 until 1868. If you’ve played Like a Dragon: Ishin! or watched period pieces centered around the Shinsengumi, chances are you at least have some familiarity with Sakamoto Ryoma or the late Shoin Yoshida.

While Rise of the Ronin tries to stay grounded without the supernatural and mythological beasts from Wo Long or Nioh, the tale is still removed from reality in many aspects. Major events that formed after Shoin Yoshida’s death and the growing fissures between those who support the Tokugawa Shogunate and oppose opening the borders to Western influence form the basis of Rise of the Ronin but it’s still full of choices to players, or at least the illusion of choice.

Rise of the Ronin presents itself as a tale where players will be forced to choose whether to ally themselves with the pro-Shogunate or anti-Shogunate forces, but in reality, those choices don’t truly matter when it comes to the story that Team Ninja and Fumihiko Yasuda wish to tell. Players are given handy green and purple popups that show which action a given side mission might give faction renown for, but it largely doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the story. While there are a couple of turning points that are delineated in the timeline, players will largely play through the same story as a neutral party. For my main playthrough, I tried to support the existing Tokugawa Shogunate whenever possible but would still find myself taking part in missions both fighting alongside and against the Wolves of Mibu and other influential parties of the era. Players that want to see the full story can certainly jump back to prior missions via a mechanic at your rest house known as the Testament of the Soul, but those that skip replaying prior missions and only keep working towards the future will still have just a satisfying conclusion.

If the promise of deliberate choices having a direct impact on the narrative of Rise of the Ronin wasn’t enough to let players down, the open world certainly might. Set across three distinct moments in time and three separate periods of 1850s and 1860s Japan, Rise of the Ronin has an ambitious map size that invokes thoughts of Yasuda’s Elden Ring moment. However, as players will quickly find out as they hop onto a horse for the first time and go where the wind takes them, the open world boils down to little more than the typical AAA junk that’s padded games for years. Points of interest, from treasure chests and bandit camps, litter each discrete district of Yokohama and the other regions of Rise of the Ronin. Outside these bullet points on the map are wide expanses that are pretty but only interesting on the surface level. Random encounters pop up from time to time to break down the monotony of riding from one corner of the open world to the other but there’s rarely a sense of discovery or wonder to Rise of the Ronin’s open world with how the game lays out any of the hundreds of points of interest.

The map to Rise of the Ronin is broken up into districts, each with its own checklist of collectibles, from cats to collect for one of the local geisha to fugitives to hunt down. Just exploring an area or doing regular mission content will increase the bond level in each district and reveal another layer of collectibles in that region. As much as I’d like to say that there isn’t any Ubisoft-style tower climbing in Rise of the Ronin, you’ll still have to do a fair bit of vertical traversal to unlock fast travel points throughout the land. Completing a given district will reward the Veileg Edge player with a handy perk, such as skill points or loot used to craft/upgrade gear, so there’s regularly an incentive to do so, but with how loot functions in Rise of the Ronin, it largely feels like taking the extra time for a full completion is rarely worth it.

A problem that first appeared in Nioh and subsequent masocore games (including one of my personal favorite games of 2022, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin) is in the randomized loot that will clutter and plague players’ inventories from the get-go. Rather than having bespoke or even the occasional rare and unique piece of gear, every weapon, armor, and accessory is randomly generated with a variety of stats and passive perks based on its rarity. In games like this, it’s rarely worth investing in a single piece of gear and spending resources to upgrade it to keep pace with the player’s level because soon enough, players will find a katana that’s numerically superior in every way including a higher roll for the passive perks (do look forward to juggling through hundreds of rifles that have seemingly infinite permutations on an extra 0.7% chance to pierce through helmets).

As with prior games, set pieces in Rise of the Ronin appear on a variety of gear and do have enough of an impact on benefiting a particular playstyle but I largely gravitated towards the Fortune’s Favorite armor set whenever possible if only for the set bonuses for a massive luck bonus and increase drop rates for more gear. It’s a good thing Team Ninja had the foresight to provide players with 2,000 inventory slots right off the bat because I easily filled that to the max and then accidentally locked all of my gear when meaning to dismantle it all for raw materials, forcing me to figure out how to navigate the sorting systems to unlock and undo my work just so I could clear up the space again.

Team Ninja’s Masocore action games have notoriously featured difficulty modes that ramp up in infamy, both in the sheer challenge and introducing new rarities and types of loot to uncover. Rise of the Ronin offers this with an unlockable Midnight mode that yields Masterwork gear once the main story is complete for the first time. However, Team Ninja has also worked in the opposite direction and included easier difficulty levels for those who want to explore the story and engage less with the difficult Souls-y combat. On its lowest difficulty level, Dawn, players can practically walk through the story just by mashing square and triangle with the heaviest weapon they can find with little challenge. However, the challenging melee combat is where Rise of the Ronin truly shines.

As hard as I’ve been on Rise of the Ronin and its open-world trappings, it’s in part because of how much I enjoyed the tight mission design of Nioh and Stranger of Paradise. Levels felt hand-crafted and individually unique from one another in a way that Rise of the Ronin loses with its translation into the open world. It isn’t until the final dozen missions that missions start to evolve with multiple paths, locked and shortcut doors, and enclosed spaces that make players want to play like a stealthy ninja instead of just climbing onto the highest building possible and assassinating enemies from afar by way of grappling hook or bow.

Rise of the Ronin’s swordplay builds off of the stance system first introduced in Nioh. Each of the ten weapon types comes with a variety of stances (with katana being the staple, this one comes with far more stance options than any other weapon type) that fit into the high/mid/low stances that counter other weapon types. A graphical blue/red arrow provides an immediate indication of whether one stance is effective over another against the enemy’s weapon type.

Each stance comes with a variety of special moves and counters unique to that type with a fourth ability slot that can be unlocked when the bond with the stance’s owner is maxed out (either bring the user along as an NPC ally on a mission or spend time with them at the longhouse giving them gifts of American beer or chocolates). The stances provide a bit of versatility above and beyond Nioh’s system and I felt like the same weapon could behave drastically differently depending on which stance my Veiled Edge was in at the time. Those who explore and find a secret dojo might even be rewarded with the Hayabusa-Ryu Shinobi style which has a secret ability to Izuna Drop enemies that have had their stamina and poise broken.

Effective swordplay relies heavily on Ki management to keep on one’s feet as having the stance broken can result in the player being cut down in a single hit if they’re not prepared. Players can block weapons like they’re playing Dark Souls but Rise of the Ronin pushes players to instead get the feel for countering attacks. To help restore Ki, Rise of the Ronin evolves the Ki Pulse system from Nioh with a new Blade Flash system. Tapping the R1 button immediately after finishing an attack will force the player to clear the blood from their blade in a quick swipe. When the weapon is clean, players will recover little more than whatever their natural Ki regeneration stat is at. However, as players land successive blows on the enemy and their weapon bloodies over time, pulling off a Blade Flash will instantly restore a hefty chunk of Ki, letting players brace for an incoming attack or press the advantage and continue their combo further.

The triangle button is dedicated solely for Countersparks, the flashy timed counterattacks that let the player counter the enemy’s attack and deal higher Ki damage. Attacks that glow red can only be mitigated with a perfect counterspark and most bosses that use this will unleash a combo of regular attacks into a vicious attack, so players will need to get the hang of using the counterspark on an entire combo in a single go. It can take some major trial and error to get a flow for the countering system, as many enemies will feint or hold their attacks longer than the player might expect, but that delicate dance is the high point of Rise of the Ronin’s combat when players can master the system.

All in all, Rise of the Ronin is a fantastic period piece trapped within the confines of a vapid open world. The switch from discrete missions to an open-world environment loses much in the translation and while players will find Rise of the Ronin to be some of Team Ninja’s best action combat to date, it’s the moments between encounters that truly make this adventure feel like a relic of the past.

Review code provided by the publisher.

Rise of the Ronin

Rise of the Ronin struggles to find its identity in ways that hinder what would otherwise be one of Team Ninja’s finest works. A compelling story told against the backdrop of the 1850s Bakumatsu Period is instead overshadowed by a vapid and uninspired open-world setting and a narrative that rarely feels like the player has agency.

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