Rise of the Ronin Review [IGN]

Rise of the Ronin is set in mid-19th century Japan, around the time of the Boshin War that resulted in the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate following the forced reopening of Japan. Amid that historical setting, you follow the fictional tale of two children that survived the massacre of their village by Shogunate forces, who are then raised as assassins. Your Blade Twins are kind of a blank slate, letting you customize the pair in a robust character creator and then sending you on a mission to sneak aboard the Black Ships from America and assassinate Commodore Matthew Perry (no relation). It’s a compelling opening that quickly establishes the kind of game Rise of the Ronin is and doesn’t waste time getting you right into the action.

The story gets much grander than that, of course. You’ll meet historical figures, join a pro or anti-Shogunate faction, and make tough decisions that help shape Japan’s future during one of the most interesting eras of its history, though certain things happen regardless of your choices. On a surface level, at least, this story deals with thought-provoking themes – nationalism, xenophobia, colonialism, confronting new technology that is rapidly making a way of life obsolete – and if you have a fondness for the period it’s fun to pal around with the fictional versions of Genzui Kusaka and Sakamoto Ryoma. (Imagine if your political activists and revolutionaries were also samurai, and you’re on the right path.) At the same time, Ronin’s story is the video game equivalent of a fun popcorn movie you see in a theater and then never think about again: enjoyable while you’re watching it, yet something you start to forget the finer details of the moment the lights come back on several dozen hours later.

Actual missions are a bit more memorable, and these play out in one of two ways: as encounters you enter and complete seamlessly on the world map, or as standalone missions a la Ninja Gaiden or Nioh, where your protagonist and a pair of followers (who you can switch to at any time) take on a unique objective, like breaking a friend out of prison or assassinating a government official. The latter allows for either single-player with AI teammates or co-op, as two friends can join up as your allies. I much preferred these to the more standard and mostly unremarkable open-world tasks, and being able to play them with friends is a fantastic addition, even if it’s not always clear if you’ll be playing a solo mission or one you can co-op until you start it. The solo missions aren’t quite as fun, though they have their moments: maybe you’re infiltrating an inn and stealing a letter for a friend, which is good, or maybe it’s taking pictures of people conspiring in the pleasure district, which is less good. My main complaint here is that I wish the two modes weren’t so intertwined – it’s a bummer to be playing with a friend and do a one-off mission, only to then have to do a couple more by yourself before you can play together again.

But even when some missions are not as exciting as others, Rise of the Ronin is at its best when you’re clashing swords. Few action game developers working today make combat as satisfying as Team Ninja, and in that regard, Rise of the Ronin is another feather in a cap with an already ravishing plume.

The closest comparison to how it all works is Team Ninja’s own Nioh, which is one of the best games in the Soulslike subgenre not made by FromSoft, and Rise of the Ronin builds on that foundation, especially in terms of flexibility. Sure, you can wield a katana like a traditional samurai, but you can also use the quick and flashy paired swords, the massive, high-damage odachi Western saber, the oh-god-please-stay-away-from-me spear, and a lot more. I like almost all of them, but my go-to quickly became the double whammy of the oxtail sword and the greatsword, which allowed me to live out my Michelle-Yoeh-in-Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon and Siegfried-from-SoulCalibur fantasies simultaneously.

Each weapon type comes with several fighting styles, all with their own special techniques. Styles follow a kind of rock, paper, scissors balancing structure (with a couple exceptions), so picking the right option to beat whatever your opponent is doing will help you out considerably. The downside of this system is that some weapons benefit from it more than others. The katana, for instance, has eight combat styles to choose from (you can see what’s available before you unlock it) including one that’s based on Ryu Hayabusa’s moveset in Ninja Gaiden – Izuna Drop and all. Other choices, like the paired swords, odachi, or my beloved oxtail sword, however, might only have three or four, which means much less variety if you’re fond of those weapons. What’s there is great, mind you; I just wish everyone could have access to something as cool as an Izuna Drop during their playthrough.

Swinging at enemies and blocking attacks takes Ki, so you’ll have to manage your offense and defense lest you have your own Ki worn down and you’re opened up to free hits. The quickest way to take someone down is to choose a combat style that beats theirs and wear down their Ki until they’re staggered and cowering, and from there you can land a Critical Hit that deals tons of damage. Throw in secondary weapons like bows, guns, smoke bombs, and even a flamethrower, and Rise of the Ronin gives you a lot of freedom in combat. Just as importantly, it manages to look and feel good while doing it, especially if you dismember your opponent with a Critical Hit as a grand finale.

True to this type of game’s reputation for unforgiving difficulty, enemies are aggressive and deadly; and even a regular, run-of-the-mill dude can send you packing. If they do, you’ll respawn at the last bonfire… I mean Site of Grace… I mean Veiled Edge Banner you interacted with, minus the Karma you’ve gained from defeating enemies, with a Vendetta against the enemy that killed you. If you slay them – or even land a Critical Hit – you’ll get your Karma back, creating a high-stakes duel against a worthy opponent. It’s a nice change of pace from the traditional Soulslike system where you just pick things up off the ground.

It’s that easy, and in the cases of some of the bosses, that hard. Without spoiling anything, yes, the boss fights are fantastic and difficult, in true Team Ninja style. They move fast, force you to learn their attacks, and reward you for using advanced mechanics (more on those in a second). You can just dodge and punish as you would in most Soulslike boss fights, but you’ll be missing out.

The best parts of Rise of the Ronin’s combat systems are the things unique to it. The real trick to dispatching foes is Counterspark, which works as an attack that also deflects your opponent’s attacks, staggers them, and opens them up for counterattacks. The more advantageous your style is against theirs, the longer you open an enemy up for punishment, which makes picking the right style and weapon even more essential. Sometimes, you can stagger an opponent off a single Counterspark. Other times, you’ll have to Counterspark an entire attack chain in succession to put them on their heels. Countersparking is risky because the window to deflect an attack feels relatively small and you’re wide open if you miss, but the potential reward is huge. You can even use it to deflect unblockable attacks or block arrows and even gunshots, potentially lighting your weapon on fire for a greater advantage.

Add in a grappling rope that you can use to slingshot yourself around the environment, pull enemies to you, or throw objects – as well as abilities like Violent Gale or Blade Flash, which allow you to change style mid-combo and clean the blood off your blade after an attack to restore Ki, respectively – and some other mechanics I don’t want to spoil, and Rise of the Ronin has a lot of depth. Bear in mind, you’re expected to mine all of it if you want to succeed. Some of the fights in this game are very, very difficult, but that’s where the magic happens. I went through the classic stages of feeling most bosses were unfair and impossible, to feeling they were beatable if I played carefully and got lucky, to demolishing them (or barely scraping by) once I learned their patterns. It’s an exhilarating feeling, and it never gets old.

Growing my own skill and understanding is the biggest thrill, but I’m also fond of Rise of the Ronin’s leveling system. Each of the primary stats – Strength, Dexterity, Charm, and Intellect – comes with its own skill tree, and putting points into one also boosts the stats associated with it. If I level up my Speechcraft: Liar ability in the Charm tree, I also get a stat increase in Charm, which makes my weapons that scale with that stat better. It’s a great system that rewards you for choosing how you want to play both in and out of combat, and I hope other RPGs will learn from it in the future.

I also like the way side quests increase your character bonds with the people you meet, rewarding you with additional conversations, upgrades to any combat styles associated with that character, and weapons, gear, and items. And then there’s the Longhouse, your home away from home where you can chat with your friends, redo your character’s appearance at any time, change your weapons and armor to look like any you’ve acquired, respec your skill points, decorate, and a lot more.

Later on, you also get the ability to go back in time via a book called the Testament of Souls and redo missions from earlier in the story, make new choices that can alter the present, complete missions you might have skipped, and finish up any stuff on the map you may have missed. It’s genuinely one of the best systems I’ve ever seen in a game like this because you can advance the story (which takes place over several years and across several different maps) without worrying that you’ve missed something by crossing a point of no return, and it’s cool that you can see what happens if you let a certain character live or side with a different faction. Rise of the Ronin is full of tons of thoughtful little quality-of-life features like that, including color-coded conversation options that let you know when something will move that dialogue along or just give you more information; a glossary of characters, the battle system, and the world; and a tracker for just about every system you can interact with.

Plus, you can see your friend’s characters and pilgrim dogs out wandering the world, challenge their avatars to battles, or aid them in combat if you see them getting harassed by bandits. It’s a nice touch that makes it feel like your friends’ characters exist in this world even when you’re not playing with them directly, and it makes random world events more interesting.

I just wish everything else worked as well as these systems do.

Where Rise of the Ronin falls apart is in just how much of everything there is. The entire package feels as overstuffed as its loot-piñatas enemies, who are always dropping mostly useless gear. It’s to the point where if you’re not constantly in your menus getting rid of it, you’re likely to end up holding several hundred weapons, armor pieces, and items by the end of a few missions. It’s a common problem in Team Ninja Soulslikes, and here it’s just as overwhelming. This is alleviated somewhat by letting you upgrade items you like and disassembling ones you don’t for parts, but it doesn’t work well enough to hold back the avalanche of largely pointless stuff that’s constantly thrown at you.

It wouldn’t be such a pain if the items were interesting in any way, but the vast majority are junk. When I get a new oxtail sword, I’m not getting a new moveset, just stat modifiers – and some of them don’t even matter. Why would I ever take extra damage at night over extra damage all the time, or take reduced fall damage in a game where you rarely ever fall? Stuff like set bonuses that boost several things at once are fine, but a lot of it feels like numbers going up for the sake of numbers going up, not because wading through hundreds of junk items and occasionally upgrading one or pulling a specific stat off of it and transferring it to another weapon feels good.

Even the side activities are poisoned by the loot overdose. To be very clear, I love finding cats because you get a cute little scene with them, and interacting with the pilgrim dogs, who I would gladly die for, is adorable on its own. I like the photography missions, getting skill points for finding shrines, the shooting gallery minigame, visiting real-life landmarks, and even developing new technology with inventor Igashaichi Iizuka. It’s not that any of these things are bad, per se, but when the “reward” is even more loot or filling up another reputation meter, I just wasn’t interested after a while. All of these things distract from the most fun part of Rise of the Ronin: the missions with the other characters (or your friends) and the combat. The more Rise of the Ronin forced me into a menu to manage a bunch of garbage I didn’t want, the more I actively started to resent it for keeping me away from the good stuff.

To be fair, these tasks are optional – unless you need to build stats or bond with characters before a tough mission, which then make them feel necessary – but they all seem tedious next to using your grappling hook to scale a rooftop and assassinate someone or scaling a tower with your buddies and whooshing into a walled prison on your glider. I would have much rather seen more meaningful additions like that instead of just throwing more “cross of the icons on the map” stuff to get you… wait for it… more loot. And then you look at the map and realize how much of it there is, and it’s exhausting.

All of it leads to the feeling that Team Ninja may have been so focused on checking the boxes of what every other modern, open-world RPG has that it didn’t think of what the game it was making needed, and that’s a shame. Under the mountain of loot, bloat, and clutter, Rise of the Ronin is a good game with a cool setting and a great combat system. A more focused version of it could have been something that truly stands out among Soulslikes. Instead, I was left pining for what might have been.