Stalking American ships and assassinating a small army of foreign navies is a powerful way to start any game. You are a hybrid of ninja and samurai, trained and honed to become a deadly weapon directed at the disruptive forces that undermine your nation’s autonomy. As you hunt down your Admiral target, switching between your customized protagonist and their “blood brother” Blade Twins, the stakes in Rise of the Ronin are clear from the start.
This is a critical moment for Japan. The country stands on the brink of revolution, and the sunset of the samurai era is about to set. You are a relic, the last vestige of a culture that was forced to adapt or die. In many ways, this theme mimics Team Ninja’s stance in preparing for the release of Rise of Ronin. As with all compromises, there are pros and cons to the outcome.
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I love Nioh games. In fact, I love them. I think they’re solid underdogs who could well compete for FromSoft’s action RPG crown. The shortcomings of Nioh, Nioh 2, and Wolong are offset by tense, thrilling combat that packs so much into the experience. The swordplay is so good, what if the levels kind of suck? So what if a boss fight is so extraordinary that enemies are reused in an uninspired remix? The game gives more than they take and I commend them for that.
Ronin dilutes a lot of the typical combat with a watered-down open world that reminds me more of Far Cry’s derivative formula than something like Ghost of Tsushima or Elden Ring Something more exciting. Yes, that gorgeous, responsive combat is still the star of the show, but for every jingle of katana combat you experience, there’s a set of eye-rolling icons to clear. The tempo has fallen behind and the tempo has suffered. Even in the first few hours of the game, I would groan when I arrived at a new section of the map and saw the 0/28 completion mark on the map.
I recently heard the term “icon gatekeepers” (apparently coined by iGamesNews’s friend Steve Burns). It refers to the act of “tidying up” a map, systematically clearing out “go here, do this” nonsense to open new doors to more exciting prospects. It perfectly sums up the cycle in Rise of Ronin. The main storyline – which is usually broken down into focused missions in a closed map environment like a Nioh level – is great; there are mini-combat puzzles and a final boss to test your mettle. Well paced, engaging and entertaining.
But the padding between them is annoying at the beginning of the game. You’re underpowered and need to swap out our gear after every encounter to keep up with your companions’ accelerating stats, and hunting down rogue warriors or mobile gangs of bandits feels like a hectic job. It lacks the punch and power of Nioh or Wolong’s opening crawl.
At least Team Ninja’s sense of playfulness is still there – sneaking up on cats to pet them and sniffing out buried treasure always gets that serotonin buzz going – but hook up with all the other open-world little ones. Selection was done by rote. I’ve done this before in Ubisoft or Warner Bros. games (and honestly, it’s usually better implemented in those games). I don’t want to do that here, in a game where combat is so much fun, I’d always rather fight.
My impression is that things will get better as the world opens up and the tutorial areas give way to Japan’s vast urban areas and beautiful coastal areas. Once I’m done with all my side jobs and nodding my way through a thousand text popups telling me how to ride a horse to deliver some groceries to a merchant, I’m sure the core flow will stabilize and I can focus on the dojo, the fighting , one-on-one samurai duels, this is what the game marketing sells to me.
It doesn’t feel like Rise of the Ronin is borrowing from Elden Ring – the perfect implementation of an open-world setting in a hardcore action RPG – but more like Team Ninja is looking to the West; in Ubisoft, BioWare, Avalanche. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, it just doesn’t quite fit with the Team Ninja way of doing things. Rise of Ronin shines with its concise, focused missions, but it gets lost in the open fields and sparsely populated villages of the open world.
Perhaps this is a comment on the inherent solitary nature of the ronin, a metaphor for the lonely journey of the self-taught samurai. It just feels like, in these open minutes, the tough, dogged attitude that characterized Team Ninja’s past efforts has taken a step back.
“Rise of Ronin” will be released on PS5 on March 22. This preview is based on the first 120 minutes of the game, written via PS5 code provided by the publisher.
