Rise of the Ronin Review - More Assassin's Creed than Nioh

what is happening y'all Cowboy here and welcome to my review of Rise of the Ronin now initially this is a game that I was quite excited for the idea of Team ninja bringing the depth of combat that they're usually known for into an open world was a very exciting prospect and unfortunately after playing it for roughly 25 hours I've come to the conclusion that this game has more in common with Assassin's Creed than it does with Neo unfortunately it just completely failed to grasp me and I don't think it would go too far as to describe it as we have ghost of tsushima at home so with that in mind in this review I'm going to be talking about all the areas where I feel unfortunately the game just fell flat um there's something to enjoy here I mean I think some people end up having fun with this but this was very much not the game for me uh and either way let's jump into why and the first thing I want to talk about is going to be combat because when I think team ninja I don't think graphics or story I think combat I think neo2 wo long stranger repair I I think about the in-depth combat in those games and what Drew me into them and that is the first big point where I have a problem with this game now the combat is fairly simple now uh to to go in depth into this we just press square and that's going to do our full combo our combo will change up if we pick a different stance but we're still just pressing Square that's it just press square do the combo uh besides that each stance will have a charge move like that's a charge move that's a charge move that's a charge move and we have advanced moves so we just move forward a little bit and this is just like a little Gap closer uh jumping attacks are just a plunge we don't have sprinting attacks and besides that we have like our bow uh you know our our range to stuff and we can throw out the grappling hook now on top of that our stances also have little specials little martial arts for example in this stance I have a little wind storm I have this thing which does extra damage if enemies are blocking this stance is leveled up so I even have a aerial thing on it if I go to a different stance I have like a discount EI strike and then I have this which is like a a Dodge and attack and then in my other stance I have this little somersault and then a thing that blocks attacks and then does some damage to key and so on a surface level it seems like whoa hey hang on what's wrong with this we got all these stances there's a lot going on here with the combat and it unfortunately boils down to the stance system system and how it functions so we have three style types Jin ten and Chi now there's more stances than just those three in fact if I go over tun nochi you can see that I have two two different 10 stances here uh but all the stances are classified into those three categories now Jin is going to be effective against lightweight weapons like Sabers and ineffective against heavy weapons like adachi 10 is going to be effective against medium weapons like Katana and ineffective against uh lightweight weapons like the Savers and then lastly we have Chi and this is meant for fighting against heavy weapons like odachi and ineffective against normal weapons like katanas and so we have a rock paper scissors type system with all of the weapons and you can actually see this when you're targeting enemies if I can get close enough to where I can Target one let's see think you're hostile there we go you can see how I have arrows this is neutral negative Advantage positive advantage and you want to use the correct stance because using the correct stance means you're going to be doing bonus key damage and that is going to be the main gist of combat is damaging enemies to then hurt their key and so what you end up happening is you have a combat Loop where essentially I'm going to be spamming my attack and then I'm going to end up doing a martial art and then at that point the enemy is probably just going to hyper armor and slap me through my stuff at which point I need to defend and get off a deflect until I panic them at which point their health is like surrounded in a red Aura and then I continue the combo again uh until I get a critical hit and so that is the gist of the combat uh it's pretty straightforward it's pretty simple you're not really stance dancing or anything like that uh besides that we have you know the the standard stuff that you would come to expect from Neo like sniping people for head shot and stealth is actually pretty strong here uh which you know hence the Assassin's Creed comparison you can do quite a lot with stealthing um you know we're just going to go through and try to try to stealth this Camp here real fast here after I stealth kill a guy I get like a brief window where I can stealth kill other enemies for a split second and of course I could just run away I could run out wait for them to lose aggro and then re-enter combat and try to stealth again so very uh you know very kind of freedom of approach to taking down the base but let me get to where I have like one enemy I'm fighting instead of multiple so with this guy I'm going to switch to the right stance now I have stance advantage and alls I really need to do now is just attack and try to not get killed by his claws I hate the claw guys I can never hit the timing on their paries can see the hyper armor is pretty aggressive and how it works I can use my special which just takes a while to build up and it'll put your blade on fire and it'll give you infinite key for the duration but enemies can still just hyper armor through it so unfortunately it it uh you know it doesn't feel like a very strong like this is my ultimate you know cuz I get it up and I'm like infinite key fire Katana and then this thing just doesn't care anyway for a more normal enemy I'm whiffing the [ __ ] out of my paries right now so that is a panic now that he's panicked I can go in like I said eventually he's just going to get hyper armor and I got to get parry's until I lower that bar take a chunk of his health and then the cycle repeats uh basic enemies you're only going to have to hit once stronger enemies you're going to have to do this twice for but so you have almost like a back and forth with the combat where you know you're you're just trying to to get the enemy to open up so that you can get that critical and on a surface level it almost seems similar to to seiro in the sense that it's you know per pericentric combat we're looking to get off a Parry on enemies so we can open them up but I feel like the combat flow here just isn't very good and I'm going to attack I'm going to do my thing there we go that's a basic enemy end up taking him down very quick and you can definitely see the the Neo inspiration in some of these animations as we're fighting but some of the enemies the combat flow just doesn't really work work that well I think because of how because of the fact that they just get hyper armor constantly when you uh bottom out somebody's somebody's key you can Chuck them with the the grappling hook if you want instead of an execute roughly does about the same damage uh we also have something similar to key pulsing you can see a gauge over there on the right I can tap R1 after attacking and that will throw the blood that is on my blade off and then I can you can see it builds up in combat and that'll get me back some of my key so you can Parry any time so even if I mid attack combo and the enemy decides that he wants to attack if I have quick enough reaction I could hit the button and interrupt their attack even if they decide they're going to hyper armor through me see I think we have like one more guy here yeah but you know the combat just doesn't grasp me the way that their other titles have I think it's just it's very much you know oh I pick my stance and then I it's all about can I get the Parry off if I can't get the Parry [Music] off [Music] there we go we got them and after you beat a camp you know time advances and we now have it uh but so that's kind of the the gist of the combat you know you have a a rock paper scissor type system and then a a little bit of a a tug in war where you're tug in war tug tug of war where you're trying to you know work down the key while also trying to protect your own key and working your key pulsing and it you know it it seems like there's some depth there but I feel like this is just a downgrade from wo long even where wo long at least I had the spirit gauge and I was looking at how can I you know am I going to weave in magic or do I want to weave in a strong attack to expend all that Spirit or weave in martial arts or what am I going to do here it's just you know I attack enemy to get down key I get CR critical I do it again and this issue is only exacerbated on higher difficulties uh on normal the the stronger enemies will take two the basic enemies will take one on hard they'll take like three and bosses you're going to have to do this this back and forth uh four to five times which ends up being kind of just more tedious than fun like right now you're seeing we're playing on normal uh but it just ends up being this back and forth of like okay it's my turn to deflect okay now I get to do a critical oh okay you're going to attack a bunch okay now get to do a critical and it just doesn't feel that engaging to me compared to the combat in their own previous titles uh moving on from the combat talking a little bit about the open world and the Assassin's Creed comparison this is what I would like to describe as a checklist RPG and what I mean by this is quite literally we get checklists uh as we do stuff in zones hey look there's two more veiled Edge banners and I did my public order there's two fugitives I can find uh Landmark a shrine two cats and four treasure chests and if I do all of that I'm going to get a strength point and personally I just don't really Vibe with that um you know I'm okay with with some markers on the map you know we we obviously had this in rebirth and I ended up going through all the stuff there and trying to figure it out but there's something about the way it's presented here where it's just like a literal checklist that I'm going down that just doesn't really mesh that well with me I guess um you know I think part of it is the fact that the the exploration in the world and the way it works so as you're going through like I just did this I just did this public order thing here by doing that it's unveiled some more stuff on the map so like I can see hey over here is a bounty that I can go get and as you do stuff on the map more activities will unveil themselves so it's kind of like a like the checklist just keeps growing like hey here's more stuff that you didn't know and I think part of the problem with that is like on one hand yeah it shows you where everything is at on the other doesn't really encourage you to just organically explore the world and discover this stuff like any Zone any Zone that I go to um I'm going to go like let's say I was going to go up up here I would oh okay I can't see anything in this Zone first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hit the public order that's going to unveil some stuff then I'm going to grab my veiled edges so I have fast travel that's going to unveil some stuff and then I'm going to finish doing that zone and it's not so much the existence of a checklist it's that even the approach you take to the open world very much is go down the checklist you know and just the way it's presented here doesn't work and I know it's it's sounds shitty cuz even even in uh even in rebirth you know first thing I would do in rebirth is I would I would find the towers to unveil the map to figure out what I wanted to do but even then I felt I don't know it just felt better just the way it flows here does not really feel that good um talking more to the Assassin's Creed comparison I will say stealth in the game does feel pretty good good if you're you're the the type of player that likes to play these games mainly through stealth you can until you get discovered you can stealth the majority of the content which I'll do after I kill this guy like that was just me pressing square a bunch tapping R1 occasionally and that was it that was that was the combat but so uh in terms of the open world activities too they they feel more like I am oh great didn't didn't get it uh they feel more like um just collectible type stuff too versus like particularly engaging stuff uh talking a little bit about them and what we're doing like so if I pull up the marker here pull up the area though let me go here uh so public orders are just what I'm doing you like tackle the stuff the fugitives just mean there's like a boss in the area sometimes you get a style from him the cat you walk up and and touch the cat the landmark you visit the landmark the shrine you walk up to the shrine and get a skill point the treasure chest you walk up and collect a treasure it's it's very much like collecting it's just collecting stuff versus the emphasis on actual like engaging activities so ultimately I I just didn't really enjoy the the open world activities I mean and I know it's almost an unfair comparison to look at ghost of shishima because that's a first uh you know first party Sony IP you know but they're they're both open world Samurai games they both have a very similar Vibe and I think part of it is when I played ghost the way that the way that ghost presented the exploration in the world it felt very organic and how I would run around and you know I would like see a fox off in my peripheral vision and then I'm like oh I want to follow this fox whereas here I do a camp and then it's like okay what do I want to do oh there's a cat okay I'll mark it and I'll auto run and I'll get the cat done and yeah I could also just run over there and and do the cat I don't have to auto run but just the the approach in general I found to not be as enjoyable uh there's also some like weird open world Collision stuff like you know it feels very much like I should be able to jump on this boat to get on that roof but I can't so there's just some some uh I guess we could call it goofy collision at times uh in terms of other stuff with the open world it is a Souls light this is something I've had a lot of people asking about and what I mean by this is you have two different bars which you can see right now in the top right we have General experience and we have Karma uh karma is dropped on death General experience is not right now this enemy I think this is the guy with the Vendetta but if I get a critical on this guy I'll earn back the karma that I dropped on death so I'm just kind of pounding away it's going to kill me again probably the rifle executes are pretty fun um but yeah just the the open world didn't really grasp me with the activities offered here um which talking about the story a little bit while we continue to fight that's an area that was actually quite surprising to me because I was really excited about the idea of exploring Ido era Japan and characters like takasugi and katsura you know I'm a big big Gintama fan I was like you know I want to see how these characters are portrayed I want to learn more about him uh and unfortunately even the story didn't even really grasp me which you know I didn't really have high expectations because it's team ninja and they're not really known for story but I think a big part of it is the way the game approaches the story feels fairly non-committal and what I mean by this is we would like have a showdown with somebody and then you know Not only would the boss Escape but like afterwards it's just like oh well hey actually we're we're friends now or hey we we escaped but it turns out that uh you know he actually just had a difference of opinion you should go hear him out and do a quest for him and so it didn't feel like a lot of the choices I was making in the world really mattered which is weird cuz the game even has a feature that you unlock where you can go back and replay story sections to pick different outcomes but like majority of the time people weren't really dying or there weren't serious consequences is in the story anyway so uh you know I'm not even really sure the the the existence of that feature why it's even necessary um but I think a big part of it is just them them you know grounding this more in realism like nobody plays the Neo games for story but like I actually kind of enjoy the story in neo2 and here it's just you know it's it's very grounded it's very realistic and I think it it lost part of the team ninja charm because of that uh talking about the visuals a little bit and you know I think we need to be clear here typically nobody is playing Team ninja games for the visuals you know we play these games for the combat U but regardless I think it's worth mentioning in general I I just don't think the visuals look that good here even just as we're running right here and and kind of looking out at the like looking out in the distance I mean the amount of popping going on is pretty [ __ ] egregious and I'm typically not somebody that ever talks about popping but the way like trees are appearing and then the Shadows are are appearing it doesn't look good and I think a big part of it is looking at their other titles looking at Neo looking at wo long looking even at stranger Paradise I think those being more fantasy involved I think the art was a lot better and I think this being more grounded in reality it takes away a little bit of that flare and everything you know everything is this is just real Japan this is real Japan look at real Japan and instead I think the Style just ends up having a rather flat look and frankly I think a look that isn't comparable for a PS5 exclusive you know like those of you that watch the channel know I'm not a graphics snob I play [ __ ] 2D indie games all the time I don't give a [ __ ] about Graphics but you know when you're going to Market something as you know this is the next big PS5 open world Samurai game and we're seeing textures that look like their PS3 era in some cases and hopping and shadowing like look at the water man it just it frankly it doesn't look good I just don't think it looks good um and I mentioned it in the preview video but the horse riding also does not look good at all uh let me let me pick something far out and we'll we'll ride our horse over there the the horse at times the horse straight up the horse looks like somebody shoved a stick through its [ __ ] and it's just pushing the horse in a Direction like the way the legs kick back I don't I don't know what's going on with the horse the way the head just Bobs it just it looks very mechanical and I think that that also isn't helping the case of the visuals here uh the horse auto run is kind of a blessing and a curse because you know on one hand it's going to get me to the next checkpoint on my map even faster on the other it's also going to discourage more organic exploration cuz why would I want to run there when I can just tell my horse to to bring me uh it is kind of fun running it through town it'll just trample people cuz the the AI is a little goofy at times oh they jumped out of the way we almost had a trample there uh but yeah I mean the the visuals in general they they don't elicit feeling of like wow this is beautiful um talking about audio I think audio design was Top Notch here I think honestly the audio was probably the best portion of this game uh the clang when you get off to flex is very good uh the sound of you know uh the music beats that pick up like very on on point for what I'd expect from Team ninja like unironically the the music and audio design is probably the best part of this game to me because a lot of other areas just feel like they fell short and I I think that's kind of ultimately the problem with the game you know everything you're seeing right now all of this footage this is all based on uh this is performance mode which like I mean that kind kind of Poppin happening on performance mode that's that's [ __ ] rough man um but as I played this game I think one of the the big thoughts I couldn't help but having is honestly I don't know who this game was created for because you have combat that is you know very simplified compared to what fans of Team Ninja's previous titles are known for so they're going to be a little bit disappointed at the same time you have a skill tree in items that are basically pulled out of Neo that your more casual fans aren't going to want you know we have we have the the neol loot here you know oh hey I got 7.4% solo attempt defense and 6.6% key recovery when I counter spark bro casuals don't give a [ __ ] about this if I asked my neighbor who like plays Assassin's Creed games if if he cared about this he would be like what's that what does it do he's not going to give a [ __ ] it's not going to matter to him uh and then we look at our stat tree the stat Tre is [ __ ] weird to be honest we have skill points and then individual stat points like strength decks Charisma but you end up leveling all the trees because once you get to a certain point you know this needs five strength points this needs two that needs one this needs three Dex points that needs four Dex points and those come in so sparingly that you end up just spreading your your base points around and leveling up the other trees because hey this actually costs regular skill points I can get that but even then you know oh I went from 9% up to 18% on my acquisition rate oh hell yeah 9% reduced damage taken by allies I can upgrade it to to 18 or oo 7.5% more acquisition of item drops from enemies you know it's just the the arbitrary numbers that that you know Neo players are used to but those are back in a way that just doesn't really appeal to the audience I think this game is for and I think ultimately that's that's kind of what I feel here is it's just this game is in a very weird spot where the combat that you usually come for in team ninja games is not here but the convoluted Loot and the convoluted skill tree that is going to appeal to the typical team ninja players that's here your casual audience isn't going to really be drawn into that and in general I feel like the more casual audience are drawn into games to an extent for graphics and I don't think they're going to be graphically impressed here and ultimately it just leaves us with a open world that I'm not sure who the hell this was designed for I mean there's a couple good things like I said audio design you can turn on autocollect that's really good there's an accessibility option where you can press one button and it'll go through the entire combo so people that that struggle with multiple button presses can get to experience it um the fashion there's there's anytime you find a piece of armor it's like added to a wardrobe and you can just put it on so my character has been locked with this look for like the last 10 hours just you know going for a ronin type thing but you know ultimately I feel like the game just falls short in too many areas and you know as much as I hate to reduce it to a meme it very much does just kind of give big we have ghost of tsushima at home Vibes so either way I'm going to wrap things up here uh thanks for checking it out I guess I I'll have a couple let's play episodes coming just to give yall a more raw look at the game but I mean I did not finish this and I don't plan on finishing it if I had to to give this a score I don't think I would um I don't know it's just it's so aggressively average like it's not outright bad in anything but it sure doesn't wow me in anything I would probably go for like the ACG scoring metric and put this in like in between wait for a sale wait for a deep sale it's just I don't know I don't think this is going to do very well but either way those are my thoughts make of that what you will and uh yeah I'll catch youall next time

Channel: FightinCowboy

Views: 76,369

Keywords: rise of the ronin, rise of the ronin gameplay, rise of ronin, rise of the ronin ps5, rise of ronin gameplay, rise of the ronin gameplay 4k, rise of the ronin game, rise of the ronin release date, rise of the ronin impressions, rise of the ronin review, rise of the ronin early impressions, rise of the ronin early gameplay, rise of the ronin combat, rise of the ronin open world, rise of the ronin multiplayer, rise of the ronin character creation

Id: euNhirGhd5E

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024