Rise of the Rōnin review — the fighting is fun but its world is overstuffed

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Japanese culture often involves the quest for perfection. We’ve seen the apprentice sushi chef who must practise preparing rice for years before being allowed even to touch fish and the blacksmith who “folds” steel over a flame to remove impurities for a flawless blade. The best open-world samurai games too have pursued excellence: 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima was supremely beautiful, its story told with cinematic flair, while 2019’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice had a brilliant combat system, as challenging as it was rewarding. Rise of the Rōnin, a new addition to the canon by Team Ninja, creator of the Nioh and Ninja Gaiden series, tries to do too much and, as a result, falls far short of perfection.

The set-up is strong: the game takes place in the Bakumatsu period of Japan, the moment in the mid-19th century when the country resumed contact with the outside world after more than two centuries of isolation. In your first mission, your upstart samurai and their partner or “Blade Twin” set out on a mission to investigate the Black Ships bringing Americans to Japanese shores, culminating in a gory fight with Commodore Perry, one of many historical figures reanimated for the game. In that battle you become separated from your Blade Twin and then — worse still — return home to find your village ransacked and your community massacred. The only thing to do is to set out alone as a wandering ronin, seeking your missing partner and becoming deeply embroiled in the political intrigue of the day.

Team Ninja has never before made a game of this scale, and it shows. The large open world seems promising at first. You’re quickly given a range of fun tools to help you navigate the environment: you can zip through forests and cities using a grappling hook, glider and horse. There’s a real joy to this dynamic flexibility of movement. However, the game falls prey to the open-world busywork most associated with games by Assassin’s Creed developer Ubisoft. A map overstuffed with icons beckons you to engage in repetitive tasks such as banishing bandits from villages, finding shrines, collecting resources and even chasing down stray cats. The game offers an enormous amount of things to do, but vanishingly little of it is interesting.

This might not be an issue if Rise of the Rōnin looked the part, but while the game carries all the visuals you’d expect from a Japan-set game, from autumn leaves to cherry blossom, kimonos to katanas, it lacks a distinctive aesthetic style and is rendered in dull, ugly graphics that look a decade old. The storytelling also seems from a different era. Rather than telling the story of a nation at a crossroads in its history, the dozens of characters you meet leave little impression due to stiff writing and hammy voice acting. If Ghost of Tsushima evoked Kurosawa, Rise of the Rōnin is straight-to-video schlock.

Team Ninja’s previous games have excelled in combat, and this is also Rōnin’s saving grace. Battles are tense and rhythmic, demanding that you learn the blocking and parrying systems rather than just rushing in waving your sword. There is a huge array of weapons to choose from and an enjoyable sense that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously — severed heads go flying after you land a finishing move and your blade catches fire when you deflect an oncoming arrow with perfect timing. But it’s not enough to carry a game with so much bloat and so little refinement. This samurai adventure could have used a few more years in training.

★★★☆☆

Out now on PlayStation 5