Rise of the Ronin’s Open World Is Fine, But its Battles Seem To Forget the Fundamentals
Going into my hands-on preview of Team Ninja’s latest creation, Rise of the Ronin, I had two main topics on my mind. The first was curiosity and mild concern regarding the studio’s freshman attempt at crafting an open world. From the blood-soaked corridors of Ninja Gaiden to their recent soulslikes, their bread and butter has been tightly crafted, level-based romps. Because of this, I thought the make-or-break element of this experience would be how it handled exploration.
My other major preconceived notion was that even if this element didn’t pan out, its honed sword duels would likely pick up the slack. While Team Ninja has had plenty of ups and downs over the last three decades, their highs are transcendent, and from Ninja Gaiden Black to Nioh, they’ve crafted some of the best action games in recent memory. But after playing through the first few hours of their latest, I was slightly stunned to find my worries should have been reversed. My main beef is as follows: for a game almost entirely based around deflecting blows, its parry doesn’t feel very good.
But to start with the premise, Rise of the Ronin is an open world action game set during the Bakumatsu period in 19th-century Japan, a time of political upheaval that led to the Meiji Restoration and the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. You play as a pair of Blade Twins, members in a clan of anti-Shogunate assassins called the Veiled Edge. After losing a fight and becoming separated from your twin, you head to Yokohama in search of them, becoming involved in the ongoing political movement in the process.
Frankly, this is a historically charged setting, so much so that Sony decided not to release the game in South Korea. In a behind-the-scenes video, Fumihiko Yasuda, the game’s director, talked about how the historical figure Shōin Yoshida would be featured in the story and compared him to Socrates. Much of the Korean audience was outraged by this comparison because Yoshida advocated for Japan to invade the region, something that would eventually come to pass decades later in a brutal occupation. Seemingly in response to the backlash, Sony removed the game from the Korean PlayStation Store and deleted promotional videos from the region’s PlayStation YouTube page while claiming they never intended to release the game in that country in the first place.
As for how the Bakumatsu is depicted here, it’s hard to tell how things will land without seeing the full picture. So far, events are laid out with the pop history sensibilities of something akin to Assassin’s Creed, introducing us to key movers and shakers like Sakamoto Ryōma with an exaggerated flair that simplifies things in the way most fictionalized portrayals of history do. At one point, there’s a dramatic boss fight against Matthew Perry, the American naval officer who led the imperialistic expedition that forced Japan into an unwanted trade agreement, and he quotes Moby Dick amidst the backdrop of a swirling sea storm. That part is pretty cool. However, besides this highlight and some of Sakamoto’s banter, the dialogue often felt dry, which wasn’t helped by the protagonist being a player-created character with little personality of their own.
After a linear first hour or two where you receive training at the Veiled Edge base and then attempt to assassinate Perry, you’re finally delivered into the open world and take in the sight of an expansive countryside. From here, all the expected accouterments of this style of game are at your disposal: you can quickly traverse by riding your horse, discover sidequests, unlock fast travel points, find crafting materials that can be used to create consumables, and more.
Refreshingly though, it doesn’t seem to strictly follow the “Ubisoft checklist” found in most open world games these days, meaning exploration doesn’t boil down to finding a tower that automatically fills in the overworld. Instead, the map gains detail as you raise your “Bond” with an area by defeating bandits or helping people you stumble across, revealing hidden nooks and crannies as you spend time with the space. On the spectrum of Assassin’s Creed to Breath of the Wild, it felt moderately more in the latter’s direction so far, and the grappling hook and glider helped make exploring this space relatively fun. While I didn’t have enough time to tell if the objectives you find will remain novel over this presumably lengthy journey, things seem solid overall.
That said, if I have a big misgivings here, it’s that moving through these expanses felt choppy even while using performance mode, which is a pretty big deal considering most of this experience will likely take place in the outdoors. Hopefully, the announced day one patch will address this. The second problem is that the writing and objectives around the sidequests I saw were quite bland, and the first one I received was a fetch quest involving finding herbs, which was about as exciting as that sounds.
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