At first glance, Rise of the Ronin may seem like Japan’s answer to 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima, and while there are definitely numerous comparisons to draw between the two, Team Ninja’s odyssey through mid-19th-century Japan stands firm as its own beast, overdelivering on its promise of the first open-world title from the studio, occasionally detrimentally.
Rise of the Ronin weaves the tale of the “Blade Twins” (whose gender and appearance you can customize), siblings orphaned by war and raised by the Bladesmith, the skilled leader of a resistance group known as the Veiled Edge that seeks to overthrow the shogunate. The prologue chapter follows the twins in 1853, now fully grown and masterful samurai in their own right, tasked by the Bladesmith to assassinate Commodore Matthew Perry, who is arriving on one of the first trade ships from America since Japan re-opened its borders.
While the game initially allows you to switch between the twins at will, events transpire that separate them, with the surviving twin (of your choosing) becoming the main playable character. Five years pass, and here the story begins in earnest with the player character venturing out across greater Japan in search of their lost twin.
Rise of the Ronin takes place in three key locations: Yokohama, Edo, and Kyoto, each with its own open-world maps filled with abundant quests and activities. These ventures have varying levels of significance, featuring everything from rescuing cats from the tops of pagodas or taking photographs of vast, gorgeous scenery in nature to excising captive villages from wayward gangs and assisting bystanders with their urgent problems. It’s all very charming and manages to stop just short of mere busywork for its own sake.
However, you can have too much of a good thing, and Rise of the Ronin overdoes the amount of content it feeds you across its various maps, which can put a damper on both the story and overall pacing, particularly towards the end of the second act and going into the third. True, you can choose not to engage with any of this content, but the game tends to force you into it. Furthermore, some of Rise of the Ronin’s finest missions and moments come from the side content, so you’d be wise not to skip much of it.
As for the story itself, Rise of the Ronin does a fantastic job creating a snapshot of 19th-century Japan, with a wonderful command of detail and nuance in its setting and themes. However, it often throws tons of detail at you at once, with names and political factions. To combat this, you can view ‘Related Entries’ at any point during cutscenes or dialogue, which takes you to the relevant information in the game’s codex to review and gain context for everything you’re seeing. It’s incredibly useful, and I consulted it frequently throughout the game’s story, particularly when major political movements happened in the plot (a frequent occurrence).
When it comes to your created character’s agency in the plot, it’s much less impressive. While yes, you can build a rapport and even a romance with various characters along the way, your ability to alter the story significantly with your choices is minimal, at least until the third act.
At a key interval in Rise of the Ronin‘s first act, it makes you choose a side between the Pro-Shogunate and Anti-Shotgunate factions, denoting whether you support Japan’s decision to open its borders to the world or keep it isolationist as before, respectively. Your initial impression of this decision is that it drastically alters story events moving forward. However, as the game goes on, you quickly find that it’s largely inconsequential and only becomes relevant in the third act.
To a degree, I understand, as Rise of the Ronin takes great pains to be as historically accurate as possible, within reason and with some creative liberties along the way. However, with the emphasis the game places on choosing between the two factions, it is disappointing how trivial it ultimately is.
Performance-wise, Rise of the Ronin leaves a lot to be desired. Currently, it’s a PS5-exclusive title, so one would expect it to run well given that there’s only one platform to focus their efforts on. However, that’s largely untrue here. They give you three graphics modes (Graphics, Performance, and Ray-Tracing), but none of them are truly perfect when it comes to either fidelity or performance.
Framerate-wise, it holds in the high 50s and up to 60 most of the time on Performance mode. However, when you’re running around in major towns, it can dip much lower, and quite frequently at that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a dealbreaker, at least for me, but if you’re prone to bother about that sort of thing, Rise of the Ronin‘s occasional framerate dips may set your teeth on edge.
The aspects of this game that I can praise unconditionally are its sound design, score, and voice acting. Surprisingly, the score itself is composed by Inon Zur, who is most notable for being Bethesda’s Fallout and Starfield composer. Sonically, it’s quite understated much of the time and isn’t as grand and sweeping as Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi’s score for Ghost of Tsushima, for instance, but its major themes, particularly the track “Veiled Edges,” which plays in the gear menu, are always incredible to listen to.
Voice acting in Rise of the Ronin is great overall, particularly Shunsuke Takeuchi’s performance as Ryoma Sakamoto, who provides much of the levity in the story but does an excellent emotional turn in the more serious moments of the character’s journey. While I played the game with Japanese voices and was not disappointed in the slightest, I have heard differently about the English voice acting, skewering much more negatively. Your experience may differ, but I can say that playing with Japanese voices provides a much more consistent experience as far as the quality of the performances.
Sound design is also good, particularly during exploration of the big towns and villages and how it plays into combat. In combat, parrying (or “Counterspark,” as the game calls it) gets rewarded by a satisfying sound of steel clashing to denote your success, followed by an equally satisfying rush of wind as your sword swings to land a critical hit on an enemy.
Combat is (of course) a big draw in Rise of the Ronin, given that it’s Team Ninja’s specialty, and I’m happy to say that it does not disappoint. It takes a lot of cues from soulslikes, particularly Nioh 1 and Nioh 2, in how it’s fast-paced, prioritizes parrying, has many weapon types, and encourages you to use different stances for your weapons depending on certain enemy types. It’s much more accessible and forgiving than those games, however, and could serve as a great taster for the larger Soulslike subgenre, to a certain extent.
Rise of the Ronin has a lot of freedom in dealing with enemy encounters, from picking off enemies with bows and rifles from a distance to sneaking through an area and cutting enemies down under cover of darkness or rushing in for a full assault with swords and bombs. This, combined with decent enemy variety throughout, ensures that the combat never becomes antiquated throughout your 30-plus-hour journey.
What can put many people off is how this title handles gear with its convoluted inventory system. While the game does its best to provide you with quality-of-life features in its options to circumvent the more tedious aspects of inventory management, such as auto-sell and auto-disassemble parameters that you can set, it’s quite common in this game to find a weapon you’re really comfortable with, upgrade it sufficiently, and then find a much better weapon not long after that.
That could be manageable enough, if it wasn’t that Rise of the Ronin suffers from uneven difficulty, with the biggest spikes associated with the game’s many major boss battles. True, there are three difficulty levels (Dusk [Easy], Dawn [Normal], and Twilight [Hard]) to contend with, but these spikes exist even on the easiest difficulty and provide a sudden large jump in challenge, even if the Dusk setting makes it a lot more manageable.
This ties back into the gear system because even if you find one weapon that you’re happy with and commit to upgrading it and doing your best to ignore other potentially better weapons, it still may not be enough to contend with the game’s challenging boss fights.
Overall, Rise of the Ronin is assuredly a case of the pros outweighing the cons, but the cons can be tough to brush aside when they arise. For its first major open-world action game, Team Ninja has done a fantastic job here, and the amount of quality-of-life additions present that many similar games add after launch with patches is truly commendable. Having an abundance of fast-travel points and the ability to sprint in and out of combat without draining your stamina, for instance, may seem trivial but they make all the difference.
The story, and particularly your character’s role in it, may disappoint, especially with how robust the customization systems are in this game. However, as a time capsule of 19th-century Japan and all its key historical players, it’s truly fascinating to witness, even if your choices in how events play out lean toward the trivial.
Whether Rise of the Ronin becomes a franchise or exists to speak for itself as a standalone action-adventure, Team Ninja has done a fine job in creating one of 2024’s truly underappreciated titles.
