Rise of the Ronin: A New Adventure by Team Ninja
Team Ninja continues to impress with Rise of the Ronin, showcasing their ability to expand their audience with new intellectual properties and collaborations. While keeping series like Dead or Alive alive, they have also introduced new franchises like Nioh and Wo Long, combining the intense combat of Ninja Gaiden with modern Action RPG design.
Embracing New Concepts in Action RPGs
With NiOh and Wo Long, Team Ninja explores the “masocore” genre, combining challenging combat with Action RPG elements. Rise of the Ronin takes this a step further by introducing open-world gameplay, catering to a wider audience while still maintaining the essence of their previous titles.
Storyline and Gameplay
Rise of the Ronin continues the legacy of Nioh and Wo Long, offering a samurai fantasy set in a tumultuous period in Japan’s history. The game allows players to customize their Ronin character and explore three large areas, each with its own unique challenges and missions. Choices made throughout the game affect the storyline and create branching narratives, adding depth to the overall experience.
Unleash Your Inner Samurai
Combat in Rise of the Ronin is inspired by the success of Nioh, featuring a variety of martial arts styles, weapon options, and combat mechanics. While the game may not reach the extreme difficulty of its predecessors, it still offers a challenging and engaging gameplay experience for fans of the Team Ninja franchise. Players can adjust the difficulty level to suit their preferences, making it accessible to a wider range of players.
One of the biggest novelties, created due to the open world and the greater human factor in the narrative, is the stealth element, which gains a strong positive weight in the combat experience. If you want to eliminate as much as possible the violent choreographies that test your reflexes, you can choose to be stealthy and try to eliminate unsuspecting opponents with a single blow. Considering the protagonist’s origin, you are even encouraged to bet on this mechanic, which helped me immensely, even with the strong bandits who are a kind of mini-boss.
“… an electrifying combat, in which enemies attack you mercilessly and your reflexes are tested.” Watch on Youtube
Familiar Open World
Rise of the Ronin is a blend of various open world experiences you already know with Team Ninja’s combat. The developer doesn’t hide that Ronin is an evolution of what started with Nioh, refined in Nioh 2, and branched out in Wo Long (where they introduced the focus on the Parry mechanic), so get ready for a familiar experience if you already know Team Ninja’s games. Furthermore, it becomes even more familiar because, devoid of experience in this open design, it is easily noticeable that they were inspired by the most popular action-adventure martial arts games in an open world.
To level up and earn better equipment, to face the main and bond missions (with the best rewards), you are encouraged to explore the three open zones loaded with extra activities. The desire to explore arises naturally and intuitively, especially because many areas don’t initially show icons, only after you perform some task there and increase your bond with the area do the icons start to appear.
Activating a fast travel point, finding a lost cat, praying at a temple, eliminating a zone controlled by bandits, taking pictures as requested by the photographer, eliminating wanted bandits, completing Bond missions (these allow you to improve the bond with a character and eventually start a romance) or side missions (the most basic and quick ones) are the activities found by Team Ninja to keep you entertained in this 19th-century Japan.
You can easily feel like you are in a Nioh in an open world, in which Team Ninja drew inspiration from Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima to populate it with tasks, but the size of the map, the speed and fluidity of the gameplay, the glider and the horse, together with the electrifying combat, never made me feel tired while playing it. Furthermore, it is fun to explore this Japan thanks to how iconic locations are used to capture your eyes and encourage you to play just a little more or to go to another interesting place.
Post-Conclusion and Cooperative
Rise of the Ronin is an almost perfect crossover of what you saw in Ninja Gaiden, Nioh, and Wo Long games with an open world, something that will be noticeable even in how Team Ninja planned the gameplay cycle after the credits roll. This is where you will have a greater incentive for cooperative play and a new difficulty, with the possibility of obtaining equipment of a new and superior quality. It is very similar to what was done in the Nioh and Wo Long games.
Besides suggesting that there will be expansions with more story, Team Ninja now presents you with the possibility of obtaining Midnight (red) weapons and equipment. You can repeat all missions, even to make different decisions, with these higher-quality weapons and equipment serving as an incentive, not to mention that the increased difficulty of the bosses is another incentive for cooperative play.
Team Ninja recommends playing with the help of other humans as they are challenges of a much higher difficulty and designed for their biggest fans. They are for those who want to play action titles as a true test of their reflexes. Additionally, the maps display criminals of a higher level, above level 60, 70, and even 80, much higher than what you find after finishing the story in Normal mode.
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Graphic Quality and AI
Team Ninja utilized its Katana Engine, the same engine used in Nioh and Wo Long, for Rise of the Ronin. However, by utilizing the latest version of their engine, they were able to explore a more open design, a departure from their previous games. This marks the first time Team Ninja has applied the Katana engine to an open-world game, resulting in a highly satisfactory graphic quality.
The game achieves numerous Kodak moments, showcasing visual poetry with the help of lighting and the aesthetic reminiscent of 19th-century Japan. Despite some texture repetition and streaming issues in the scenery, Rise of the Ronin manages to captivate players with its visual effects. However, the excessive repetition of enemies, at times facing several identical ones, does hinder immersion.
On a technical level, the major issue lies in artificial intelligence. Problems with player detection, such as nearby characters failing to react when witnessing a killing or reacting inappropriately in other situations, as well as limitations in enemy pursuit areas and a quick return to a calm state when the player is still nearby, are prevalent. The over-repetition of bosses, enemies, and artificial intelligence pose significant challenges in Rise of the Ronin and may negatively impact player immersion over time.
With Rise of the Ronin, Team Ninja expertly showcases their prowess in intense combat scenarios while making adjustments to cater to a wider audience. The open-world design, stealth attacks even on bosses, and difficulty adjustments contribute to a captivating experience that demands quick reflexes. While the game’s strengths, such as historical inspiration and diverse zones to explore, outweigh its weaknesses, the lack of experience in this design from the developer is apparent.
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