In March last year, m’colleague Eduardo reviewed the original PS5 release of Rise of the Ronin from Team Ninja, finding it to be an interesting merger of Ubisoft-style open world and Soulslike combat. The critical reception was somewhat mixed overall, which had an over the top plot and excellent combat, but hamstrung by a preponderance of open-world bloat. Now a year later, we have the PC release, which sadly does have a number of technical problems on release. For long-time fans of Team Ninja’s titles who don’t have a PS5, they should certainly enjoy all that Rise of the Ronin has to offer, but others may want to wait for a few more patches before diving in.
Rise of the Ronin is set in late Edo period Japan, during the Bakumatsu; the last years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The shogunate had governed Japan for the last 250 years with an isolationist foreign policy which banned all foreigners from the country as well as a strict class system, which did lead to a period of relative peace, but also stagnation.
You play as a Blade Twin; one of two siblings who can be whatever gender you’d prefer, who are raised by the Veiled Edge anti-shogunate group to fight against their government. The game opens in memorable style with you and your sibling being tasked to assassinate Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy, who famously arrived in Japan in 1853 and forcibly ended Japanese isolationism. Naturally you fail (Perry didn’t die in real life and the plot broadly follows real history), with your sibling sacrificing themselves so you can escape. However, when the Shogunate forces come to destroy the Veiled Edge enclave, you realize your Blade Twin has survived, and so you embark on a quest to search for them.
The plot is very freewheeling and goes in a number of directions but is generally told fairly well, although some of the writing can be a bit simplistic. Cutscenes look great though and I was particularly impressed by how well my player-created character blended in with the other characters, not looking wildly out of place (although if your tastes desire, you can make your Blade Twin look like a pink-haired goth). There are also a wide number of side missions you can pick up across the open world, some minor and some which are a bit more involved.
While most of the game takes place across a number of large open world maps which you can explore, the moment to moment gameplay you’ll be undertaking during your travels has more similarities to Dark Souls and Elden Ring than it does to Assassin’s Creed or even Ghost of Tsushima. The combat is third-person action through and through with stylish sword flourishes, blocking and parrying. There are also a variety of boss fights against foes which certainly wouldn’t have felt that out of place in Elden Ring, even though this game is nominally set within the real world. There are even bonfires/Veiled Edge banners, which act as checkpoints and also recharging and fast travel stations, which will also reset enemies you’ve previously cleared out in the surrounding area.
The counterspark concept is a key facet of the combat, allowing you to both parry and attack simultaneously, but using it when not parrying can leave you open to an attack yourself. If performed successfully it can lower your opponent’s stamina (Ki) and leave them open to a flurry of follow-up moves, or a heavy attack. Although you can play with a keyboard the game reminds you it was designed for a controller, and it worked fine with my old Xbox 360 controller. As someone who is not naturally a fan of Soulslike combat it was quite a significant learning curve even on easy difficulty, but I’m given to understand that fans consider it a good implementation of the style, taking much inspiration from Team Ninja’s previous games such as Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
The open world sadly takes a lot of the wrong lessons from history, instead opting for an Assassin’s Creed Unity bevvy of busywork, with a map festooned full of icons. A lot of the side content feels like repeatable filler, although thankfully the main missions and some major side missions taking place in bespoke environments, which feel a lot more substantial. A few of these side objectives can be fun, such as petting cats, but others feel relatively meaningless. There’s a huge tech tree filled with perk unlocks as well as a metric tonne of loot; indeed the game throws so many swords, polearms and other weapons at you that managing it feels quite laborious.
Technically the game isn’t great at the moment; a day one patch is reportedly planned for release which may address some of these issues, but I regularly encountered inconsistent performance while playing, even with DLSS or FSR enabled and setting everything to medium. Rise of the Ronin is certainly a pretty game overall but it’s certainly not best in class particularly with some of its textures, and the framerate seems very prone to large spikes of frame dips, even in relatively empty locations. Likewise I encountered a nasty issue once which randomly reduced the framerate to literally single digits, something which persisted on my PC even after force-quitting the game, requiring a full restart to resolve.
After a few patches, hopefully Rise of the Ronin will be in a better state than it is presently. It feels like a rather odd game, in some ways very modern with its stylish, dynamic combat and core gameplay which accurately mimics and in sometimes betters the Soulsborne games. In other regards, it feels very old-fashioned thanks to its reliance on old school Ubisoft style open-world busywork and cluttered loot grind, which almost feels out of place for the kind of game it’s trying to be. One thing is for sure; it is unique in its field, with nothing quite like Rise of the Ronin.
