Team Ninja (part ofKoei Tecmo) have been working on a little game for some time now by the name of Rise Of The Ronin. This adventure sees you playing as a Ronin samurai, doing all sorts of probably-not-period-accurate combat and traversal.
Last year, I played their newest release,Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. It was one of many games I didn’t get around to finishing, but what I played, I loved! And with Rise Of The Ronin now on the horizon, I have to say that when I watched the most recent trailer from Sony’s 2024State Of Play, I felt a sudden urge to remember to go back and finish Wo Long.
Because I felt little to nothing about Ronin.
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Crab Grapples
The trailer opens with the camera swaying over a town until settling over the protagonist, and as the protagonist walks through said town I had instant flashbacks to my time inAssassin’s Creed: Black Flag; fun times don’t get me wrong, but also good times from a game that felt “of the era”, the kind of experience that if I wanted to relive, I wouldreplay. It felt promised something I’d already played before and couldn’t shake the feeling I’d be better off replaying a game I’d already bought years ago. Even after the grappling rope sent him to a rooftop, my feelings didn’t change.
Once he flies through the air on a glider, my feelings shifted, but only in that they remind me of previous grapply-centric games likeJust Cause 3andMarvel’s Spider-Man 2. There’s nothing particularly new or spectacular here, just mechanics that recall things that already came before.
It all blends together into something that looks derivative, a mishmash of older ideas from too many other games that leaves Rise Of The Ronin with little personality of its own as far as this trailer showed.
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Combat Up To Interpretation
Combat was also showcased during State Of Play. The idea was to show off how many options you’ll have in tackling your foes, be it head-on or sneakily. One sneaky method was crouching behind an enemy, then grappling them down, and stabbing. Only your stealthy endeavours don’t get rewarded with a kill. Instead, the enemy loses a decent chunk of health, which just doesn’t feel like a satisfying pay-off.
All I can see is a game with too many different directions to have its own sticking points.
This is a problem I’ve had in other games with stealth, as it can sometimes be tacked on instead of truly implemented. Basically, stealth kills shouldkill, or at least provide ahugeadvantage to a player using them, like in Souls-likes . What I saw here instead was a minor reward for using stealth, that didn’t look like it justified the effort of sneaking around.
There were a lot of flourishes in the head-on combat showcased, slashes that did barely any damage until a meter was filled, allowing a killing blow that once again didn’t always kill the enemy. This all feels like the game wants to juggle several ways to engage in combat without making any method better than the other, which completely misses the point for me. Going back to Wo Long, the main idea was to counter against enemy attacks, and as that was the secret to winning, it was easy to master and manipulate. When nothing is better than anything else, I don’t see anything to master.
Throw in improvised weapons such as a flamethrower, and all I can see is a game with too many different directions to have its own sticking points. I see a game with everything in it, and I’d much rather have a game that sticks to a few basic ideas and nails them, instead of a game that feels like a scattershot mix.
Because even if that ‘everything’ contains things that I love, it leaves the product looking unfocused. It looks samey, it looks overdone, and it ultimately looks bland.
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