Rise of the Ronin Preview: A Slow Start With High Potential

Rise of the Ronin's opening couple of hours leave quite a bit to be desired. Generally speaking, I believe this is true for most video game releases nowadays as the opening sections of many titles don't do enough to grab your attention right away. Despite getting off to a slow start, though, the more time I've put into Team Ninja's Rise of the Ronin, the more I've started to believe that there's potential for this upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive to be quite good. 

As you would surely expect, the first hour or so of Rise of the Ronin centers heavily around tutorials. After you make your own custom character's look and opt into one of a handful of combat archetypes, you're then introduced to some of the weaponry that can be utilized. Outside of using a basic katana, your Ronin can also wield dual katanas, a spear, an Otachi, or a Naginata, to name a few. Once you determine what you'd like to use upfront, you're then tossed into the game's opening mission that sees you infiltrating a boat at sea to kill its captain. 

Combat in Rise of the Ronin operates in such a way that you can constantly mix up your playstyle. While the aforementioned weapons that you can select from will be your primary tools, you can also use stealth to sneak up behind foes and take them out before they know you're there. Surprisingly, guns are also a pretty big element and can be used to take down combatants from afar, or at the very least deal some chip damage. This variety is very much welcome as it makes room for quite a bit of experimentation, but my lingering fear is that it will leave Rise of the Ronin as a jack of all trades rather than offering up any gameplay styles that excel in one prominent way.

My fear on this front is found more directly with the melee combat, which I've found to be a bit sluggish and obtuse so far. Sword strikes don't feel snappy and the parry mechanic is hard to time in the way that the game asks of you. I'm not sure if these early gripes that I have will begin to diminish as I unlock more skills or become more familiar with its intricacies. Still, Rise of the Ronin's sword combat hasn't immediately enraptured me in the same way that similar titles like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Ghost of Tsushima did. 

Arguably the biggest element of Rise of the Ronin is its vast, open world. This aspect of the game is something that I've still barely scratched the surface of, though, as much of what I've played to this point has been linear. In the final minutes of my preview, I began to see more of this open-world and how it might match up to other games in the genre. My hope is that Team Ninja's first major foray into this open-world space introduces some unique ideas rather than merely trying to mirror what has already been seen from others over the past decade. If this ends up being an open-world game purely for the sake of being an open-world game, I'm going to be left disappointed. 

In regard to the narrative of Rise of the Ronin, I also don't have many notable takeaways for the time being. The first hours of the game simply set the stage for the quest your character will be on to exact revenge and restore order to Japan. One thing that has stood out in this area, though, is that there are some colorful characters that I did not expect to find given Rise of the Ronin's grim opening. This is something that I'm hoping to see more of in the hours ahead as unique, fun characters are often more interesting to me than a good throughline story is. 

It feels like I've still barely been able to get a glimpse of what Rise of the Ronin has to offer. Other than beginning to get a grasp on its combat and story, there's still so much to Team Ninja's latest release that I have yet to see. To that end, I don't have strong feelings one way or another with Rise of the Ronin just yet and I continue to hope that the game will pick up more steam as I continue to explore its world. 

Rise of the Ronin is set to launch later this month on March 22, exclusively for PlayStation 5. Be sure to stay tuned to our upcoming coverage here on ComicBook.com as we'll have a full review of the game to share with you prior to release.