Though it has a somewhat steep combat learning curve and some dated open-world ideas, Rise of the Ronin does a great job of rewarding your time in its world.
By Phil Hornshaw on March 21, 2024 at 4:00AM PDT
If someone tells me a game takes several hours to “get good,” my immediate feeling is that I will never play that game. Who has hours to waste waiting for the good part of anything when there are so many other games to play? But my opinion of Rise of the Ronin changed drastically over the course of my 50 hours of playtime–in the first five or 10 hours, I didn’t really like it. By the end, I was planning to dive back in to clear out side quests and replay key moments to see how the story might change. It’s a game that takes its time getting good, but once it finds its footing in samurai-sword duels and character-focused missions, your investment pays off.
The thing that turned the tide for me is the way Rise of the Ronin focuses on telling small, character-driven stories that weave together into a large, history-shaping narrative. The entire game is built on its “Bond” system, where doing side quests big and small builds your relationships with everyone, from the different provinces of Ronin’s massive open-world Japan, to the many characters you meet throughout the course of the game.
Although the Bond system in Rise of the Ronin isn’t dramatically different from other games where you build faction reputation, free map segments, or increase character relationship stats, the emphasis on those aspects is a reflection of Team Ninja’s approach to the game. Your personal engagement in everything Rise of the Ronin has to offer is its strength, and the reason to overcome the initial learning curve and less significant opening hours.
The game assigns you the role of a samurai, trained since childhood with another fighter to be an invincible sword-fighting duo for a group known as the Veiled Edge. During the 1860s, with Japan opening up to foreign powers such as the United States and England, political tension arises. During a mission to kill a powerful American, your “blade twin” sacrifices themselves so you can escape. The Veiled Edge is soon destroyed for revolting against the Japanese shogunate, leaving you as a solitary warrior, a ronin, without a clan. However, there are rumors that your blade twin survived. What follows is an exciting journey full of politics, intrigue, and adventure.
Essentially, without a clan to serve, many people want your help, which you offer in exchange for information to locate your blade twin. The main gameplay in Rise of the Ronin involves stealth assassination of enemies and duelling. The combat bears a resemblance to games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Ghost of Tsushima, focusing on the right timing to parry enemies and using various fighting styles to counterattack. The fights are fast-paced and chaotic, but can also be frustrating due to a mix of strange controls and opponents who frequently unleash powerful attacks.
Every fighter you encounter has a health bar and a Ki gauge, equivalent to a stamina meter. Ki fuels every attack, dodge, and block, and if you are hit while blocking with no Ki, you become vulnerable for a few seconds. Your aim in every fight, particularly with tougher enemies, is to disrupt their rhythm and drain their Ki by attacking and parrying. Once their Ki is depleted, most standard enemies can be executed, while more formidable foes and bosses sustain significant damage, but regain their Ki for another round. While this might seem typical given the number of Souls-like games and similar swordplay styles, Rise of the Ronin offers a unique take that took me some time to master and appreciate.
The key elements of sword fights comprise of powerful Martial attacks and Countersparks, which provide parry moves with distinction. Rise of the Ronin, quite like Sekiro, aims at parrying enemy attacks until they are destabilized. Countersparks can seem unusual initially, as they’re not mere parries, but quick, limited-range attacks with their own propulsion. Incorrect timing on a parry more often than not results in a hit being exchanged between the opponent and you. In certain scenarios, a counterspark can move you beyond the opponent, leading to an odd rhythm in your fight motions that necessitates adjustment.
The combat approach in Rise of the Ronin takes a bit from Souls-like combat where opponents can sometimes resist your assaults with their own attack animations. Recognizing when to strike and when to withhold becomes critical. The goal of the game is to promote quick and aggressive fights. Therefore, if certain attacks are countered, it will destabilize the opponent, providing a short window for a counter strike. This creates a unique rhythm where you can counter most of an enemy’s combo chain without gaining any benefit. Truly beneficial parrying happens only with the final or strongest attack in the chain. The key strategy should be to safely deflect a series of attacks and counter only the last move.
This requirement makes Countersparks a bit counter-intuitive as the longing to parry has to be strategically curbed. At times, even if you parry several moves in a row skillfully, you may end up being penalized for it. While on other occasions, simply continuously pressing the button against a robust opponent may reward you. Largely, you’ll find yourself attempting to understand the perfect timing to parry while fending off quick, unrelenting strikes in the initial battles against any tough adversary. Gradually, understanding the dynamics of Rise of the Ronin and its enemies’ behaviour patterns, you’ll get a hang of it. Despite the extra motion and timing being in discordance with similar games, it doesn’t make the parry system bad. It just requires you to unlearn a few things for better acclimatization.
There are enemy Martial attacks that are marked by a red glow, indicating they can’t be merely blocked like regular attacks. So, the need is either to elude them by timely dodging or to knock them down by perfectly timed counterspark for tremendous Ki damage. You also have Martial attacks at your disposal, but they are not unblockable like the enemy ones and require additional Ki to execute.
Martial attacks are neat enhancements to your tactical arsenal, but they contribute to a steep learning curve and early game frustration when used by opponents in Rise of the Ronin. Encounters tend to be extremely rapid. Frequently, an onslaught of attacks comes your way, draining your Ki energy, then a powerful Martial attack shatters your defense causing further damage. Mishaps can be punishing and hard to recover from.
The brutal rhythm of combat in the early stages can be a grind—especially with significant difficulty spikes in certain boss fights. For a game that spans over 50 hours with a similar fight marking every mission’s conclusion, remaining stuck on one boss can be tiresome. The game’s saving grace? The ability to tweak the difficulty level. Lower it temporarily to traverse challenging obstacles, then heighten the difficulty when you’re over the obstacle.
I only began to value the combat mechanism’s intricate elements later. This includes timing Countersparks, and adaptability in styles once new skills are learnt. When an enemy appears, an icon displays next to their name indicating their potency and whether their fighting style is superior or inferior to yours. The option to switch styles and utilize right strategies against different enemies eventually made fights click, evolving into nail-biting, intense duels that leave you feeling like a master swordsman.
Utilizing your allies proves beneficial against robust enemies. While you traverse the open world solo, most major story missions or side quests are instanced levels where you have companion AI backing you up, echoing the Twin Blade concept. You can interchange between characters seamlessly. The characters have their unique styles and moves to learn and exploit. The ability to rapidly switch positions, disrupt the enemy’s guard and exploit their diverted attention turns Rise of the Ronin’s combats into intense, controlled chaos—most of the times.
What makes fighting challenging in Rise of the Ronin is the control scheme, which appears complex and far from intuitive. Blocking is managed by holding the left bumper, parrying is associated with the triangle button. The difference between your defensive moves demands specific mind training: Hold the button for a certain type of attack, tap another for a different one, and combine them as well. It can be confusing and requires time to adapt to this particular methodology.
This applies to the swapping controls as well, demanding various bumper hold combinations along with control stick movements or d-pad presses. Shifting among loadout items like healing tablets and status-eradicating salves is performed while holding the left bumper, as well as chatting between characters. Holding the right bumper lets you switch your primary weapons, sub-weapons (like pistols, bows, and rifles), and fight styles. Again, carrying all these highly specific controls in one’s mind is quite a task, and it’s hard to remember while some adversary with a blade is cutting at your face. It took me a while before these controls became second nature.
The twin blade storyline isn’t that gripping, and while it’s supposed to motivate your character, it doesn’t occupy much screen time. However, Rise of the Ronin really takes off as your investigation leads you to form alliance with different people, who either back the current shogunate or believe the nation needs a new government. As the story progresses, these individuals evolve into distinct factions asking for your assistance, and you can choose to support them.
Regardless, it leads to an open-world framework that is rather generic. The open-world content of Rise of the Ronin seems to align with games from the 2010s, with monotonous tasks that appear randomly, collectibles to run after, and side missions to complete that often involve eliminating random villains.
The more minor activities you do and collectibles you find in each of the small provinces in an area, the higher your bond with that location, which unlocks various minor bonuses. Later, completing these same activities will increase or decrease a faction’s hold on that location, which can have a bearing on story missions as you take them on–although that exact effect is somewhat opaque, especially because you change allegiances multiple times through the course of the story. Generally, though, the open-world activities of Rise of the Ronin are somewhat uninspired. It’s not particularly engaging to clear out yet another group of five bandits, two of which are mini-boss-like “formidable opponents,” to lower a faction’s hold on a province, but Rise of the Ronin will give you a ton of these activities to knock down, alongside small side missions and random activities like muggings. It’s a lot of stuff that seems like filler content in a game that’s already brimming with things to do.
Story missions and side quests are more interesting and involved, although they also get repetitive. Most of these put you into a level where you infiltrate a location, sneak around assassinating rank-and-file soldiers, get seen and fight some guys, and then defeat a boss. These missions suffer in part because Rise of the Ronin’s stealth is a bit undercooked. It can be unreliable, with enemies sometimes spotting you from far off with little issue, and other times being totally oblivious as you fight pitched, protracted battles with their friends 10 feet behind them.
Missions always end with excellent, challenging boss fights, though, and once you get good at Rise of the Ronin’s dueling system, every fight becomes a combat puzzle mixing twitch-reactions and strategic responses that continually make them exciting. Stealth breaks up the fighting just enough to help mission pacing, while rewarding you for analyzing the environment and planning your approach, even if it’ll sometimes annoy you by failing at key moments. Stealth is more a nice-to-have addition than essential to the formula.
The best of Rise of the Ronin’s levels are its Bond missions. You’ll meet a ton of samurai and join many of them in missions as allies, creating ongoing relationships. You can then enhance your friendship with those folks by completing side missions that flesh out their stories and engaging in conversations or giving them gifts. Building stronger Bonds unlocks new fighting styles as well as passive bonuses when you bring them on missions, but the most interesting part is the way each character’s individual stories expand across missions and add to the overall narrative. The characters are all well-drawn, dealing with their own principles and motivations, and their stories are worth experiencing on their own.
Having personal ties to all these characters makes the overall story a lot deeper. Rise of the Ronin tells a fictionalized version of the historical end of the shogunate and the samurai lifestyle in the 1860s, with the characters and events you’re involved with eventually pushing Japan toward civil war, and your own beliefs and relationships influencing you to switch sides numerous times. Consequently, a character you may have brought as an ally on one mission might be a boss you have to face in another, and your connection to all Rise of the Ronin’s characters significantly increases the narrative stakes and lends a deeper personal significance to it.
Although Rise of the Ronin has certain aspects which may cause frustration or require some patience to fully comprehend, and weaker elements like some open-world design that feels a bit antiquated or some recurring level design, it excels at engaging you in the unfolding events and the individuals involved. Bond missions are particularly remarkable, and a blend of personal stakes and large-scale politics keeps the historical narrative captivating all the way. As you play Rise of the Ronin longer, you interact with more characters and learn more about its combat and its world, which enhances the experience.
Despite some potential flaws, finishing Rise of the Ronin leaves you with more to explore, and even after spending 50 hours, you yearn to return and uncover what you may have missed and attempt to alter history. The sections of the game that work effectively outweigh its weaker elements. Although it takes some time to acclimatize to Rise of the Ronin’s combat system, its speed, complexity, and intensity contribute to some truly spectacular battles which are always delightful to win. Rise of the Ronin is a game that requires some commitment to enjoy fully, but it’s a commitment worth taking.
