Rise of the Ronin - Review

I blame Assassin’s Creed for making me love games that take place in real world locations, that are also set within a historical time period. While that first game was a solid foundation, the follow ups only got better and now Rise of the Ronin is taking that same style of approach. There is a clear amount of inspiration from a few other series, so the question to be asked, does Ronin rise above, or is it something that clearly needed a master to lead the way?

There are two main stories that take place throughout the game, one of them will be the same for everyone, the other will play out differently, depending on the choices you make along the way. The story for all, is you are one half of a duo known as Blade Twins and the end result of a mission together, has your twin sacrifice themselves, in order to allow you to escape and partially complete the mission. Given that you are twins, your character decides to leave the hidden village where they grew up and venture out to try and find your twin, even though most folks around you, believe them to be dead. While your goal is noble, there are clear indicators that the other members of your village refuse to let you and you need to fight your way out. Across the games main narrative, there are a few times when you encounter your twin, and while fighting ensures, it won’t come to a head until the end of the other storyline.

The second storyline is actually the more interesting and richer one, as you have a chance to sway the impacts of the Meiji Restoration. This is a real life event that took place and the characters you meet within it are part of that event as well, from Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Sakamoto Ryōma. There are two sides to the story, one is the Pro-Shogunate side and the other is the Anti-Shogunate, each have their own reasons for fighting for their beliefs. Throughout the story you will get a chance to meet with folks on both sides, some of them are going to be background characters at first, but might evolve into more later and some are super important characters right from the start, like Sakamoto Ryōma. Given the number of times where you can side with either and the choices you make will impact how some events play out, I can’t describe the story in depth. All I can say is that towards the end, while I did feel like it was dragging itself out a bit, the overall ending was satisfying.

I will say though, that the 38 hours of time I put into the game, almost all of that was exclusively story focused, I did clear out the Yokohama region of most of its side quests, but beyond that, it was all story, all the time. Because the story was so character focused and the number of characters that you meet just keeps growing, the games inclusion of an encyclopaedia of characters and locations, was a very welcome addition. There were a few times when I would head to a location to begin a story mission, only to see someone new standing there and I was asking myself in the real world, who they were, only to have them ask me that in the game. Once you have met someone for the first time, they get a listing and the more you interact with them, the larger their part becomes. This encyclopaedia gave me a lot of context to the events later on, especially when new groups of enemies and allies appear quite a lot.

As far as gameplay goes, there is a lot of good and some weird, but let us begin with the good. There is no way of saying it in any other manner, but the game takes a lot of inspiration from Assassin’s Creed, from the screeching of eagles to the towers with perches on them. Thankfully, you don’t need to climb towers or other such nonsense, in fact the game lacks height for the most part. There are three main areas, Yokohama, Edo and Kyoto, with Edo being the largest. Each area contains prefectures within and within each of those areas are a number of side missions, gang hangouts, picture zones and beyond. Scattered around each area, sometimes within gang hangouts are banners, these act as resupply points for you, but also allow for fast travel. While I did spend a good amount of time clearing out Yokohama, in Edo and Kyoto, I only did what was needed for story reasons, as there are a lot of places to discover. Something that is quite helpful is that during a story mission, you will be given a horse whistle, which lets you summon in your faithful steed to ride at any point; however you can also set a destination on the map and they will take you there, letting you enjoy the scenery. Beyond story missions, which tend to restrict your movement to an immediate area, there is almost no restrictions on where you can go, and no matter which direction, there is usually something to discover.

When it comes to combat, the game doesn’t take any inspiration from Assassin’s Creed, but rather has a healthy dose of Nioh, which given it’s the same developer makes sense. There are three main factors to your combat experience, the first is movement, standing still will leave you open to attacks from all sides. The second is your Ki, this is what lets you attack, defend and even move and then finally your buffs. Early on combat is mostly done one on one, especially if you don’t alert any other nearby enemies, but in the latter parts of the game, you can have multiple opponents attacking you at once. Enemies can do basic attacks, but then can also launch stronger ones and if you don’t defend properly they can dish out serious damage. While you have a block move, the best option is to parry all the attacks that an enemy throws at you. Do enough of these, or hit them enough with your own attacks and you will deplete their Ki, which staggers them and leaves them unable to move or defend for a few moments. That might sound great, but the exact same can happen to you, and if you have no Ki, you can get walloped on. While blocking attacks is easy, parrying them is better for you, but each enemy you encounter, more so the bosses, have different timings for their attacks and learning them is important. Most of my deaths in boss fights came from messing up the timings, but once I learnt them, I was right to push on through.

All combat is done via one of four weapons, you have two main weapons and two sub-weapons, with the mains being swords, Ōdachi and the like and your subs being guns, bows and even shuriken’s. During the character creation stage, you can pick the weapon type that you want to be proficient in, this gives you a boost with that type, but you can just use any weapon you want. However, the more you use a weapon in fights, the more your proficiency goes up with it, which in turn unlocks new moves and even attack styles. That means swapping out weapons all the time is not a great idea, which it won’t hurt you, it won’t help either. The special attacks you can unleash also use Ki, the better you are with a weapon the lower the cost can be, so it’s a good idea to stick with just a few. Your sub-weapons are a different beast, there are ammo counts to each, be it bullets or arrows and learning when to make use of them is important, as while a gun might one shot an enemy, the noise will draw others to you. There is a lot more to combat, especially once you start spending skill points and finding a style that suits your own way of playing, ensuring it will be a fun challenge of its own.

For all the good and fun above, there is some weird we need to address, namely the mission options. Before any main story missions, you will get a screen where you can take a moment to rework your equipment, or select an ally to join you in the mission. The problem that I had is the game is always forcing you to take an ally, unless a mission requires you to go solo, however you don’t have to go in as a pair. Don’t get me wrong there are benefits to doing so, but given my character was more aligned to assassin than warrior, running around with someone else shadowing me seemed wrong. The game has options you can enable to make basic gameplay mechanics smoother, but there is nothing to stop you from being anchored with some character at random and its weird. If you do run around with someone, then you are basically getting a second life for combat encounters. When solo if you fall in battle its game over, or at least you reload at the last checkpoint, but with a partner when you fall, the game swaps to them and you keep the fight going. You can swap to them at any time, but I rarely did, unless it was due to my falling in battle.

Outside of combat, you can grow your bond with those that fight alongside you and other characters that you meet. Growing the bond can be done by giving bribes, I mean gifts or by undertaking missions for them and even just having a chat. Of course, not helping them out or selecting a wrong choice in a conversation can lead to them not liking you as much or at worst, losing trust in you. As the bond levels up, you can unlock new moves for those who follow you into battle and for those that don’t they can unlock special items for you. I spent a bit of time with a few folks early on, but when one of them was brutally slain, it made me question if it was worth the effort. There is a chance that replaying the game means that person might survive, or I could lead them to a different death, its hard to judge. Honestly there is so much to the gameplay, that I could easily spend another 1000 words talking about it, the game is just brimming with things to do and while that is a good thing, I wish some of the attention was given to the visuals.

On the surface Rise of the Ronin looks great, characters are detailed and unique, at least not counting the NPCs and the world itself looks wonderful. The first time I walked the streets of Yokohama, I was impressed, but when I was in Kyoto, I was blown away. Such is the attention to detail in the game, I came out of a temple that was used by a group as its base, only to get severe Déjà vu. Turns out when I was in Kyoto in December, I visited that exact temple, I even took a lot of photos and while its different compared to a game version based on the place 160 years ago, it resonated with me as a real place. When I had to run across a battlefield that was being shot up by French soldiers, there were trenches and craters that made it feel dangerous, the cannons helped that as well. Plus the amount of times in conversations I got lost in the faces of those folks I was talking to was insane.

The problem is that the game has issues in all three of its visual modes, performance, graphics or ray tracing and let’s start with that last one. I opted to use this mode first, as I wanted the game to look as good as it possibly could and honestly it did look great. The problem is that any time I was not inside a building, the game struggled to load in the assets of the world and the draw distance was not great. So I swapped to the graphics mode, figuring that if any mode is going to load things in right, it would be this and I was wrong. For whatever reason, it was even worse, the detail was drawn in quite a bit closer than before, with trees and grass being the biggest offenders. Given that I was 0 for 2 at this point, I assumed that the Performance mode was going to be the one that worked and it did not. It had the same issues, but now with a frame rate limit applied, so in the end I went back to graphics with no frame rate limit on the performance and just dealt with it. While the main characters look great, there were a lot of stiff animations in the NPCs which seemed weird, there was one particular character that loved to run around with a box on a stick, likely a Hikyaku and whenever they had to turn in their run, it was a 90 degree turn each time.

On the audio side of things, I don’t have any complaints. First up the games music was incredible, from the grand scores in pivotal moments, to the near silent score when sneaking around. Even running through the country side resulted in some fascinating scores being played. The voice acting was the star for me though, both the Japanese and English options. I started the game in English, but after a few hours, I swapped to Japanese and got about 20 hours in with that. Swapping back to the English felt weird for a bit, not only hearing a different voice out of familiar characters, but the game actually had a slightly different script. In Japanese movies, animes and games, a lot of honourifics are used, like Sensei or adding Kun to the end of someone’s name. The same would happen here, Ryoma is a great example, in English he is called Ryoma as that is his first name, however when playing with the Japanese audio, he is Sakamoto-kun. Perhaps the greatest touch to the games audio, apart from the English, American or French characters, when playing in English, all of the actors that are playing Japanese characters are Asian and speaking with the accented English. I honestly wasn’t expect it, but it made it feel more authentic with its inclusion.

Rise of the Ronin is a fantastic game, from its epic story to its side missions, there is a lot going on. Perhaps the weakest point is your personal Blade Twin saga, as it never pops up all that often. The games combat requires a lot of focus to learn, but once you do, each encounter can be rewarding once you take down all the enemies. The game has a lot of technical issues that mar the otherwise gorgeous visuals and with luck they will get fixed soon, even if they don’t its still worth playing. While there is a lot of influence from a number of other titles here, Rise of the Ronin manages to carve out its own niche and delivers a game filled with interesting characters, and stunning locales, combining to make a game that is just so damn fun.