Rise of the Ronin is developed and published by KOEI TECMO Games (originally developed by Team Ninja for the PlayStation 5)—PC review written by Robert with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Set in the Bakumatsu-era in Japan, Rise of the Ronin follows the path of a Veiled Edge, a unique paired swordsmen's technique where you play one half of a pair of sword-slinging ronin called Blade Twins. Set on a quest to find your Blade Twin after a mission goes awry, you will embark on a journey that will take you on a journey through 19th-century Yokohama, Edo, and Kyoto. Boasting 8k resolution support, ultrawide resolutions, 120 frames per second, and ray tracing support amongst a littany of upgrades, Rise of the Ronin is sure to bring any modern gaming rig to its knees. Enjoyable, if soulless at times, Rise of the Ronin struggles with defining its identity while scaling back some of the difficulty and excitement found in Team Ninja's flagship franchise, Nioh.
Performance & Graphics
Graphically there are a few standout moments where I had to pause a minute and just take in the surroundings, but for an open world experience in a post Ghost of Tsushima-world, Rise of the Ronin's three major areas feel relatively bland. While they are open, airy, and have plenty of checklist-y items to keep you busy, there is a distinct lack of cinematic quality to the presentation of its areas. It may be that I've been spoiled by the quality of other more experienced open world studios, but there are beautiful vistas throughout Rise of the Ronin that Team Ninja just doesn't show/present to you. Mind you, Rise of the Ronin isn't a bad looking game, not by a long shot; it's a phenomenal attempt by a studio that typically sticks to more curated, narrow maps in their games. The downside is that it really shows that they aren't experienced in the cinematic approach to open world games, almost as if there's an identity crisis happening within Ronin. I say that because the presentation of areas/levels feels like it would be at home in a more concise game (like Nioh 2) rather than in an open world experience.
Performance is going to be where I saw the biggest variation in quality. While there was a day one patch that addressed some of the following issues, I found that on my well-endowed gaming rig, there were still times where running through the three major hub sections would bring my game to its knees. I'm running Rise of the Ronin on a Ryzen 9 5900x, Radeon 7900 XTX, 64 GB of RAM, and off of an M.2 NVMe drive using the "standard" graphics setting, and there were points where the movement was so sluggish that it was almost as if I was running through Jell-O or pudding. Even though my machine should be able to adequately run Rise of the Ronin at 1440p, I was quite taken aback at how poorly it would run. This coming from Nioh and Nioh 2 which were very well-optimized, though in fairness they were originally launched as multi-platform titles as opposed to a console port (as is Rise of the Ronin).
Frustratingly, the performance didn't affect just the framerate, as there is plenty of pop-in (with enemies even popping in on top of you) and input lag. What's worse is that the controller charms that are supposed to show up based on whether you were using a PlayStation controller or an Xbox controller would never be properly set. For example, by default all of the glyphs throughout the game are default set for the X, O, Triangle, and Square and they'll stay that way even if you're using an Xbox controller. However, if you press a button on the Xbox controller, the in-game glyphs will change to the Xbox's A, B, X, and Y charms. It's frustrating and confusing, and even worse, at the time of this article's writing, you couldn't even use keyboard and mouse even though there are glyphs/charms that show things like the Tab or Spacebar as inputs, even though pressing those does nothing. This was a major bummer for me as I was hoping to use my keyboard and mouse to take pictures using the robust photo mode ... unfortunately without the keyboard and mouse working in game, that was a fruitless endeavor as I just couldn't get comfortable in photo mode with the controller.
Gameplay & Mechanics
Rise of the Ronin was a bit of a shock for me with regard to its combat. Coming from the studio behind the bewitchingly-fast and often-unforgiving combat found in Nioh/Nioh 2, I was a bit taken aback with how straightforward combat in Rise of the Ronin is. While fairly simple up front, combat never quite feels as deep and enriching as Team Ninja's other titles, there are some saving graces to combat. For one, as is typical for Team Ninja, there are a whole slew of weapons for you to choose from. From your katana or dual swords to odachi or polearms, longbows and rifles to pistols and shurikens, there's something here for everyone. I myself am a sucker for spears so I was thrilled to see spears as a weapon type that's actually fun to play.
While I tried out every weapon in the game, I gravitated towards the spear and katana and enjoyed them the most. In an attempt to add an additional layer of complexity to combat, every melee weapon has numerous Styles that you will learn throughout the course of the game. As you become more proficient at combat (not very difficult as combat is extremely approachable), switching between the various combat styles for your equipped weapon will be second-nature. In time I began to play around with combat stances and weapons and found that the most enjoyable combat was using wooden weapons (much weaker and they don't kill bad guys, just incapacitate them) and playing entirely defensively. There's quite a bit of forgiveness at times in combat, which is nice because of the magnetic bad guys (the magnetism is strong ... and annoying as hell) but after 30-40 hours of it, combat can become pretty stale.
Combat isn't the only thing that had me scratching my head in its simplicity... Rise of the Ronin has an identity issue. I couldn't help but feel that Team Ninja took a look at some of the more popular titles of the last ten years, took what made them special, then copied those features into their own game. While I don't think that it's bad to take inspiration from other titles, in fact, more studios should do it, but there's this feeling of wanting something more, something unique to Rise of the Ronin and it just doesn't materialize. Take for example, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and how it popularized a hang glider as a means of transportation... It's as if Team Ninja saw that and said, "we need that in our game, irrespective of whether it's useful or not" (hint, it's not). It feels like Rise of the Ronin is an amalgamation of features from other games, but has no soul. A homunculus, if you will. Combat, exploration, RPG leveling mechanics, open world checklisting, item crafting, the absolutely asinine amounts of loot you'll get, etc. all feel like they are in the game because they're simply supposed to be, not because they should be. Removing the silly glider, improving the horse-based locomotion (it's straight out of the early days of Witcher 3), tightening up combat, and making loot more manageable would have been preferred over some of the nonsensical additions. I have 1.5 playthroughs of Rise of the Ronin as of the writing of this article and I could do without the majority of features (I have never, ever needed to craft items ... why craft when you can buy them for a pittance?) in favor of a more concise and curated gaming experience.
Story & Pacing
Continuing on with its relatively soulless existence, Rise of the Ronin's story, while paced wonderfully, feels empty and without heart. Sure, there is some motivation for the story beats and pacing is actually pretty solid between it's three acts (not including the prologue/tutorial). Set upon your journey by the Bladesmith, the leading member of the Veiled Edge society of ninjas and ronin that your character belongs to, you're tasked with finding your Blade Twin, thought to be lost in the prologue/tutorial mission of the game. Unfortunately the story is about as interesting as a piece of dry toast at times and was only moved along because of the checklist-like nature of the open world.
Moving from one point of interest to the next on the world map was the primary driving force behind each of the story's various acts. Falling into the Ubisoft Trap is pretty simple in Rise of the Ronin and has about as much depth as a modern-day Ubisoft title. That's not to say that the entirety of Rise of the Ronin is bad; there's some solid intrigue spread throughout the game in the form of the Anti-Shogunate and Pro-Shogunate decisions that you'll be able to make. I found that the most engaging part of the story was making choices that I wasn't sold on (such as some of the anti-shogunate choices), but because they were putting me outside of my typical roleplaying comfort zone, I found them if not memorable, then enjoyable. Taka's entire existence as a Geisha and her role in the story is one that I found myself being invested in... maybe it's because I have a romanticized view of the geisha, but still, it was enjoyable. Other characters are less interesting, some even eye-rollingly bad at times (characters just sweeping horrific actions under the rug as a "bygones be bygones" was pretty stupid, in my opinion).
Rise of the Ronin is an interesting beast of a title that I'm not entirely sure how to classify. Contrary to popular belief, it's less Ghost of Tsushima and more like Horizon Zero Dawn. In talking with others here at Chalgyr's Game Room the best way I could describe it is, "To me it feels like Team Ninja took a look at The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Origins, Grand Theft Auto V, and Red Dead Redemption, and took what made them technically good games, and technically replicated those things ... but did so without bothering to bring any of their normal weird polish / approach to games," and I stand by those comments. Rise of the Ronin isn't bad, per se, but it is meandering and soulless at times and combine the lack of heart with the simplistic combat and the best that I can say about Rise of the Ronin is, "it's safe." The combat has been dialed back compared to their other titles, the story at times is meandering and unfocused, and the performance is all over the place on a well-powered gaming machine. Is it bad? No, but it's not the quality that I've come to expect from Team Ninja...
Score: 6 out of 10
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