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.

However, my biggest issue with the game thus far ended up being the thing I most expected to relish— its fights. On its face, its action seems like a solid riff on FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Attacks come out quickly, dodging feels responsive, and there are a bundle of unique mechanics. The main novelty is that you can switch between allies who employ different fighting styles, which you’ll want to do because each style has a rock-paper-scissors matchup against opposing weapon types.

For instance, Sakamoto Ryōma’s Chi fighting style causes foes with heavy weapons to stagger more quickly, meaning you should switch to him whenever an odachi-welding adversary appears. When wielding different weapons, you’ll find that each have particular special attacks that can be unlocked as you gain proficiency with that particular tool. Overall, things are designed to create a tough-as-nails gauntlet that forces you to fully engage with its intricacies, which, in an ideal world, would set up for engaging, rewarding battles. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been my experience so far.

As mentioned, this game’s combat system is heavily inspired by Sekiro. For instance, you and your enemies have a meter that wears down as attacks are blocked (in this case, called Ki), which leads to big damage when broken. The primary way to quickly break an opponent’s comes from using parries (called Countersparks), which protect your own Ki while diminishing your opponent’s. The central issue is that, at least through the first few hours, the parries feel far too finicky and unforgiving. The main reason they don’t feel right is because instead of being performed by precisely hitting the guard button, they’re done through a dedicated type of attack. While you can do a Counterspark immediately after blocking, if you do it too early, this will result in a big sword stroke where you’re left wide open to get walloped after the fact.

Sekiro is hard. It forces you to rhythmically bat away a flurry of blows, constantly at risk as you perform a carefully choreographed dance of death. Even its small fry can leave you face down in the dirt, and the first time you challenge a new boss, victory can feel borderline impossible. All that said, performing a single successful deflection is actually quite easy. To put it into numbers, the parry comes out in a single frame (a sixtieth of a second) and has a maximum of 30 active frames (half a second), which is a dramatically larger window than most other games’ implementation of this maneuver. Most critically, if you mess up by doing it too early, you’ll just get a regular block instead, which drains your posture but generally doesn’t lead to taking damage (unless you’re on a subsequent playthrough where you rejected Kuro’s Charm, in which case, I salute you). That game is demanding, but the leniency and lack of risk around going for a deflection grants the means to overcome this challenge, letting you string together a dazzling sequence of parries that makes you forget that a good chunk of the time, you’re just mashing L1 and hoping for the best (although you are penalized for doing this with a smaller parry window).

By contrast, whenever you go for a Counterspark in Rise of the Ronin, it feels like a gamble. It would be fine if the game was more balanced around this risk/reward factor, but instead, you’re encouraged to parry frequently, as if you sit there and block, your Ki will get drained and you’ll be left defenseless. Foes constantly throw out unblockable attacks that require either a parry or outright evasion, but the dodge’s range isn’t the best, and I’m not sure if it even has invincibility like in Dark Souls. Everything about enemy encounters encourages parrying, but when you try to, it is very easy to end up off-beat, ineffectually swinging your sword like a hapless goober instead of embodying the unstoppable assassin you’re supposed to be.

I don’t need Rise of the Ronin to be on Sekiro’s level, which, depending on how I’m feeling that day, I might chalk up as the single best action game ever made. But I would like it to at least reach the competency of their previous effort, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. That one’s battles came much closer to matching its point of inspiration, in large part because its parry, which doubled as a dodge, felt much less risky than what’s here.

To be fair, I only had a couple of hours with the game, and this brand of masocore experience generally rewards dedicated effort. As I was repeatedly reduced to a fine red paste by a club-wielding mini-boss at the end of the preview, I eventually internalized their moveset and began playing the game as designed. Instead of attempting to Counterspark everything, I would only go for them on the final move in a combo or when a big obvious red strike was coming my way. I got better at doing this for regular adversaries as well, usually only parrying after seeing a big windup. But unfortunately, due to how fast many enemy attacks are and how frequently your guard will get broken if you take this methodical approach, combat ends up feeling awkward, less a graceful dance on the razor’s edge, and more a clumsy slobber knocker.

It should be noted that, unlike FromSofware’s output, this one rightly features adjustable difficulty settings. For some, knocking things down to an easier configuration will help alleviate these problems so they can enjoy exploring the open world. But for me personally, I’m interested in this kind of experience for the challenge, and it’s a fatal flaw that bumping down the difficulty feels like the best way to circumvent these issues.

Once again, I’ll couch these criticisms with some important caveats: I only had a few hours with the game, and there is an upcoming day-one patch that might solve a few of these problems. Rise of the Ronin’s open world has the potential to be less bloated and tedious than what’s found in many other examples of the form, and hopefully, its performance issues will be sorted out before release. The game is packed full of progression systems, sports a seemingly vast backdrop, and lets you freely traverse via steed, grappling hook, and paraglider. But, at least so far, its action is simply not clicking for me, almost entirely because I don’t like how the parry feels. Sometimes, a single grave flaw can cause an entire experience to miss the mark, and I’m concerned that may be the case for Team Ninja’s latest effort.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.