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It’s easy to make comparisons between Rise of the Ronin and other games similarly focused on tough combat encounters with bosses. The game shares some pretty fundamental DNA with games like Dark Souls, some style influences reminiscent of Sekiro, and an open world that at times invoked similar feelings to playing a game like Elden Ring, albeit on a more controlled scale.
However, the thing that most sets Rise of the Ronin apart from those comparisons, at least from what I’ve thus far seen, is the way that the game treats cooperation not only as a mechanical tool, but a narrative element to explore.
Where many of its contemporaries treat feeling alone and isolated as core to the genre, Rise of the Ronin leans into the idea that you’re stronger when fighting with someone by your side.
Rise of the Ronin is an open world action combat game releasing March 22nd 2024. Set in 19th Century Japan, the game centres around the story of a pair of warriors called Blade Twins, trained to act as two halves of one whole.
Having played roughly the first two hours of the game in single player this past week, it is this focus on cooperative combat, both narratively and mechanically, that has most defined my experience while playing.
While playing in single player, you’ll often find yourself in control of multiple potential characters. This initially starts with you creating two player characters to act as the main protagonists of the adventure, but will later include NPCs met out in the game’s open world who can be recruited to join your adventure during missions leading to tough boss fights.
Any characters you’re currently not controlling can be swapped to in real time, with those not under your active control becoming AI companions capable of damaging enemies, creating distractions, or reviving downed teammates at the expense of a healing item, the game’s equivalent of an Estus Flask.
This switching between characters has a surprising number of uses, though not necessarily the ones I would have expected. Generally it seems that bosses will prioritise the character you’re in control of during single player, meaning that switching to avoid enemy aggression often doesn’t last very long. However, if a boss is committed already to a lengthy attack combo, switching characters might allow you a moment to take control and strike from behind for example while the boss is already committed to attacking one target.
Additionally, each character is able to be equipped with two weapons at a time, allowing for a wide spread of potential weapon types to be available to you if you’re tackling a mission as a party. This becomes important as you progress, as certain weapon types have advantages and disadvantages in certain matchups, making switching characters and switching between their weapons at times an important part of harder fights.
One thing that I really appreciated is that, once you’ve made it through the game’s fairly robust character creation, you’re able to choose your combat class from an informed position, rather than just based on gut instinct. After you’ve selected a starting class, with its associated weapon proficiencies, you’re given a chance to try out the game’s suite of basic weapon types, in order to confirm that you actually enjoy playing using the weapon types you’ve specialised towards. This ability to reselect class after having a chance to go hands on with weapon types really helps to avoid a sense of regret, and was something I thought was particularly notable.
While I’ve not had a huge amount of time so far with Rise of the Ronin, I did want to talk a little bit about its open world experience. While I made brief reference early in this preview to Elden Ring, I think it’s important to set expectations when making that kind of comparison.
Once you get past Rise of the Ronin’s fairly linear introduction, you are set loose into a fairly open world to explore. While there are fairly obvious plot objectives signposted, and a clear order so far to progression, the game left a decent amount of freedom within that experience.
I don’t get the same sense that you’re going to be stumbling upon full-on boss battles in the middle of a big open field, completely by accident, but there is a degree of availability to pick something that looks interesting and just sort of head toward it.
The open world is dotted with villages which have been taken over by bandits, which can be retaken via a combination of stealth and traditional combat. By sneaking up on them, many enemies they can be killed in a single stealth attack, quietly, not drawing attention. The game is pretty good about making it clear visually which enemies this will work on, and which ones will still need a little bit of fighting.
While alerting an enemy and entering regular combat will draw the attention of some nearby enemies, it feels like there’s a much smaller range of enemies that get alerted here than in many other titles that offer stealth approaches to encounters. In practice I found this meant that a failed stealth encounter usually only led to me fighting two or three enemies at once, a pretty manageable number comparatively, allowing me to return to attempting a stealth approach, and not just making the whole mission a wash in that regard.
Liberating these villages tended to make NPCs available to interact with, often leading to sidequests, which when completed did things like opening up access to shops.
Beyond the challenging combat, the comparisons to series’ like Dark Souls are fairly easy to spot. There are flags to raise which function like bonfires, an Estus Flask equivalent, and a resource that’s dropped upon death which can be recollected, but could be lost forever if you die again. The final of these comparisons is perhaps the one however that varies the most from its contemporaries, and is most important to elaborate on.
When killed in Rise of the Ronin, players drop Karma, a resource which, like XP, can be used to eventually earn character level ups. This dropped karma is held by the enemy that killed you, creating something called a Vendetta. If you can kill that enemy before dying again, that resource is regained.
While I can’t go into too much depth currently, I did want to finish by running through some of the settings options offered by Rise of the Ronin, as well as some design choices which might help disabled players from an accessibility perspective.
First and foremost, in single player, you can pause Rise of the Ronin. You can hit the pause button, and the game stops, and there’s no negative consequences. That alone feels worth acknowledging within this particular genre.
Beyond that, Rise of the Ronin features an adjustable HUD, UI elements that can be toggled between three common colourblindness focused profiles, and the game has three difficulty modes which can be switched between at any time during a playthrough. Rise of the Ronin also supports swapping between a number of controller mapping presets, swapping stick functions, reducing the length of time needed for button holds to register, the ability to turn button holds into toggles, auto lock on, aim assist and auto aiming support, automatic melee combos, and the ability to automate options like contextual crouching and item pickups.
Now, I’m not done with the settings but I want to be quickly clear, I can’t show you screenshots of the settings menu, or footage of the settings menu, and as such I’m rattling through this fairly quickly. I’ll go into more depth on this when I do my review and I can show you these things in action.
The game also offers subtitles with speaker names, subtitle size alteration, subtitle backgrounds, and sound effect captions. Players can reduce the dynamic range of audio, making volume more consistent, as well as tweaking a bunch of motion sickness focused settings such as motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, vignetting, and noise filter visuals.
The game also features an accessibility menu, which collects some of these settings particularly aimed at disabled users into a single section.
While I’ve not had enough time with the game so far to test how all these settings work in practice, or to test how they function with the game’s co-op mode, I did want to take some time to highlight their existence. I can so far say that the game’s difficulty customisation mechanics and ability to pause are particularly reassuring to see implemented, and in conjunction with being able to use AI characters to revive myself if I fell in combat, I’ve been really pleased with this game’s balance between being challenging and offering tools to help overcome that challenge.
Rise of the Ronin is a game it’s hard not to compare to its contemporaries, but so far the decision to lean into solidarity rather than isolation has given the gameplay and the narrative a tone of their own. I’m looking forward to being able to go hands-on with the game’s co-op content soon, as that feels like it’s where Rise of the Ronin truly has the most potential to shine and set itself apart.
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