Rise of the Ronin REVIEW - My Brutally Honest Opinion After 50+ Hours (Rise of Ronin Review)

rise of the Ronin is many things it's an Assassin's Creed like open world it's a Securo grappling hook it's a red dead gambling it's a Zelda likee glider it's an over the-shoulder shooter a wo long combat system I could go on while rise of the Ronin isn't the best in class in any of these categories and that's perfectly okay it's simply a fun game to play let me know any questions you have about the game in the comments down below and I'll get back to you so we'll start with graphics and performance now Ronin does have three graphical modes from performance to prioritize graphics and then R tracing now I play mostly exclusively on the performance mode just because more frames are typically better in you know difficult combat Focus games like this and the performance mode is definitely aiming for 60 but just to the my naked eye I don't think it hits a consistent 60 but it does seem pretty close to that Mark throughout most of my playthrough the prioritized Graphics mode does seem pretty close to a locked 30 and seems pretty smooth while the rate tracing is definitely not and I wouldn't be playing the game on that mode the frame rate there definitely drops but the interesting thing about that is I don't really understand why as it's very hard to see the difference between the ray tracing and just the prioritized Graphics mode as it's definitely not doing a whole lot of interesting lighting with any of this R traced settings here and ultimately regardless of what mode you set the game on there's going to be a significant amount of shortcomings in its visual presentation while the game definitely can look incredible from certain Vistas as you take photos of mountains and bridges and sometimes the lighting on a lot of missions really stands out and does have a pop to it but just in the open world in general gameplay there is a lot of object and detail pop in in the world and you can really see it throughout basically the entire playthrough especially when you're using your glider which you will use quite a fair bit now this is team Ninja's first attempt at a game in this genre and like it's definitely Parable from a graphical Fidelity standpoint and it didn't deter me from enjoying the experience it's just something to note I think it's also an interesting detail that rise of the Ronin might not be a typical PlayStation exclusive you know in terms of graphical Fidelity and other features what's interesting is that team ninja has released three games now since Co like how many other large Studios of their size releasing games of this length have actually released three games since 2020 like despite team ninja not hitting that you know typical Triple A Polished Masterpiece that we seem to expect from every video game these days it's it's something to say for a studio that's released three games of decent quality that are definitely fun to play despite some shortcomings and you know I think we need to embrace Studios that are doing this shorter development style approach especially in the current climate of layoffs as this will probably become the new Norm like I think the days of six to seven years of development Cycles with no return on investment in that period are definitely behind us anyway enough of that let's talk about the open world I talked a lot about the open world and its activities and a few other things that I really liked in my preview and I don't want to rehash that conversation here but something I did mention in my preview was that I cleared out a lot of these open world enemy camps and I was was worried about the repetitiveness of of that nature and that's definitely an issue here the open world is split into three decent sized regions that visually look very similar there isn't a distinctive difference between them it's more just whether you are in city-like areas or say in the countryside now as you travel between these areas by progressing the main story you will be able to return to previous regions to complete any side quest or region Collectibles that you may have missed by traveling back in time as story progression doesn't allow you to just smoothly transition between them you've got to use a specific item to travel back in time if you want to go back and do those things this is completely fine and like the world definitely works it's not too large that it feels too big to do these side activities in the area unlocks and I actually quite enjoyed doing them I especially enjoyed collecting the cats and like 100 pering some of these regions to get the rewards I did quite a lot of this and I wasn't really expecting to do a whole lot of it you know in these sort of games where you know you've got tight deadlines for say review periods or something I often skip some of these collectible things because you know you've got other things to do but I actually just in the general flow of playing the game spent time doing this because I actually enjoy just hunting around finding the cats and the chests and you know the shrines and doing these like CH training challenges and there's a good Rhythm and to them especially while you're exploring the world like the movement with the glider is very fun especially once you've unlocked like the you know the Boost that you can do and being able to transition smoothly from horse to glider is quite enjoyable like there's definitely some Jank in the world like some things you can climb and some things you can't and it's never really clear why you can and can't climb certain things that can get a little bit annoying sometimes but you know it's not necessarily the main focus of this experience but I did definitely enjoy that open world and the activities you can do there as a good break in between doing the missions which is definitely the main focus of Team ninja games that being the combat in the preview I touched on how I liked the mission structure that takes you out of the open world to like a fixed almost linear mission where you can bring two allies and complete like the overall objective the further I actually progressed in the game the more this structure became repetitive and sort of frustrating at times especially as you'll F the same enemies in every Mission across the game as well as in the open world right it's just your typical like Millie you know trash enemies with maybe one or two ranged enemies sitting on a rooftop nearby and then there's the odd formidable foe like Elite lurking around somewhere that you'll need to defeat to like weaken the final boss of certain missions now fundamentally this works right the structure everything it completely works but being that this is a historical setting I do understand that the enemy variety is essentially pretty limited here in the fact that everything is essentially a human or a humanoid which will keep that like sense of realism if you know what I mean but like the variety there really comes from the enemies using different weapon types but it's just not enough visual or combat flavor to to keep these encounters enjoyable over the 50 hours that it took me to beat the main story these become essentially mundane task that you have to do just to get to the final boss in a lot of encounters and the because of these linear Mission structures there isn't even any particularly interesting ways that you can tackle these scenarios other than either from stealth or just direct combat over that period of time to keep that experience feeling fresh and as you continually do these missions the structure does tend to wear on you even if the core combat Loop is actually really enjoyable the larger issue with these missions however is that final boss right it it's often an ally that you've bonded with or an enemy that you have faced before earlier in the story and the purpose of these encounters is just kind of baffling beyond the fact of just having a final boss for these missions so basically every Mission you are sent to go and get some information or talk to someone or give someone something right and you go on these missions and every time you get to the end with that final boss it's that person you need to talk to do whatever and they're like what are you doing here let's fight and then you fight and you beat them and then you're just like bro chill I just wanted to talk to you and they're like okay cool here's the information you wanted or they'll take the item or they'll give you an item what have you and then you'll move along to the next mission and you'll do this with sometimes with your allies that you've already been talking to for you know 20 hours they'll just be the final boss of a mission and the first thing that they want to do is fight you it just seems really illogical that you know you spent all this time building this connection with these allies and building up that Bond meter and then you run into them in this Mission structure and they immediately want to fight like like Ronan has a dialogue system and you can make dialogue choices and the occasional consequence will come from that so it's really jarring that in these moments you are fighting people that you have bonds with that doesn't really make sense and then also they are often reused as you'll often fight some of these key ones multiple times throughout the journey and their mechanics are exactly the same later on in the main story but what I found equally frustrating is team Ninja's poor difficulty balancing like I don't know what it is with them and difficulty balancing luckily here unlike some of their other titles you do have three difficulty options and you can unlock a fourth one called Midnight once you've beaten the main story if you want a harder challenge it also gives you access to like Masterwork equipment which is has additional slots and like High stats Etc and through the first like 20 hours or so I really thought that they'd finally cracked the difficulty issue that Tim and ininja seemed to have with all of their titles that they have these weird difficulty spikes that are just so oppressive all of a sudden and I thought they cracked it until I got hit with one of those one of those really tough fights that was it was essentially two bosses and I won't show it for spoilers but you fought them individually like just before that and then you fight them together and they attack relentlessly and these massive difficulty spikes do occur throughout the game at a couple of different encounters and it's it's a consistent issue with Team ninja titles that I just it almost feels intentional that they do this they have these really weird insane difficulty spikes at certain parts in their titles and you know that's like I'm not a stranger to difficulty like I play a lot of hard games so difficulty is fine with me it's just that what's missing is that natural progression towards that difficulty Spike right it doesn't feel like a graph going up it feels like a flat graph and then you immediately hit 100 and then you go back down to being you know 50 again for whatever reason and the issue here is that the game doesn't teach you anything new before those encounters occur right where I think difficulty really shines in games and souls like games similar to to ronin's experience is that you learn different mechanics from say trash enemies and then you fight a boss that uses a stronger or more difficult version of that mechanic and it shows you that personal progression that learning that you have learned to be able to take on that challenge and beat that boss whereas here there isn't really any of that it's just that you get to these encounters that have these really strong overpowered attacks that are essentially like unblockable or they'll attack you with this like quick combo strikes that's like you know six or seven attacks like right after the other and your only option because you can't actually roll very comfortably in Ronin is to Parry these attacks which is what you're supposed to do but you miss one parry and that's it it's game over now it's worth mentioning as well that I wasn't playing on like the day one patch there is a patch that is supposed to come out just before launch which is after this recording date that has the final adjustments to combat level design and game balance so some of these difficulty concerns that I have may be resolved already by the time that you play the game I also wanted to mention here as well that because Co-op can make things a little bit easier I wasn't actually able to try the co-op just because during the review period there wasn't very many people despite me actually trying to get into matches and and missions with people but there is one to three player co-op if you do want to go that route now you can drop the difficulty down to like the dawn setting which is like the easy mode even then it is still a little bit challenging like I tested some of these higher encounters on all the different difficulty settings cuz you can go back and retry missions and like I would not be playing this game on the hard mode that's for sure but you know whether you're playing on Dawn or just like the normal difficulty it is doable but I think the the real Crux that's missing here is that consistent growth in the difficulty level not that just insane spikes that just seem to randomly occur this isn't as punishing as some of the other team ninja games especially because of that open world it does like an incredible job of pacing out these missions as well as some of those difficulty issues allowing you to level yourself up gain new GE and skill points and allowing you to sort of progress in that way before you take on those difficult challenges where it seems like you have the option to do that or you can go and do the open World stuff just sort of if you feel like you need to break up that that mission flow but the difficulty and that mission design was really my biggest complaint with the game really that would be great oh it looks like you have quite the collection good work so progression is something I love to talk about in all of my reviews and and coverage because I think it's such a critical part of open world and role playing games it's that sense of progression that pushes you forward into these experiences that make you want to keep going and feel like you're going somewhere as a as a character Ronan does do a really good job with that sense of progression alide it being maybe a little bit confusing so you've got two levels of or ways of progressing here from experience points to Karma now just quickly experience points are earned from defeating enemies and completing missions you'll never go backwards in experience once you like complete a bar you'll essentially level up your player level will go up increasing your equipment level so the higher level equipment you can actually use as well as gaining a skill point Karma on the other hand is your typical Souls like runes or Souls that sort of a currency that you only gain from defeating enemies and once you have like filled up enough bars you can then turn that in for skill points or rare skill points but if you are defeated in combat you'll actually lose your karma now this is is all well and good and there's plenty of skills here to upgrade yourself that are quite tangible like a lot of them I really enjoyed actually learning and using a lot of the grappling hook ones especially like being able to assassinate enemies with my grappling hook and do things like that plus there's also the technology development tree so you can develop some of the like the glider and the technical tools you have available to you so there is a really good sense of progression and learning new mechanics and systems as you progress through the game which adds to that enjoyment in combat and being able B to tackle things in a different way like being able to use the grappling hook in stealth scenarios or you know using the glider a bit more when you're in those Mission structures or in the open world to initiate combat that sort of a thing and there is definitely loot here there is a lot of loot by default you have 2,000 inventory slots so you know you can definitely expect to be filling up a lot of those slots and pretty much every enemy drops an item sometimes multiple items and you're going to be looking at all sorts of weapons from Millie to rang as well as armor and accessories throughout your whole experience and trying try to combo them together to create sets as well as to create some sort of a build now build diversity here isn't as rich as I thought it was going to be but it is quite enjoyable now it's the stuff that I love in these games you guys know I love to make builds and Tinker with stuff and there is plenty of that here like I think one of the issues though is that some of the sets struggle with a sense of identity to feel its benefits right a good example of this is say the mighty warrior set which will lower the amount of damage you take while increasing the amount of damage you do when you have like a lower amount of Health right and you can't really see that tangibly once you've got that set like fully maxed out but then some of the other sets you can really feel those benefits in combat like the master strategist that adds the Affliction wave explosion when you trigger status effects like you can you can visually see that and you can feel the benefits and I would like more of these sets that actually feel like you've gained something and I think that that's lacking from some of them but overall across the board the set bonuses and the different gear and trying to build craft and deciding what sets you're going to use along with what weapons was one of my favorite Parts about the experience especially when you find a new like weapon that has an interesting set on it that you haven't seen before and then deciding whether you're going to try and aim for that set try and find it and then being able to use the different combat Styles so each weapon has at least three different combat Styles and you'll use these combat Styles in like a rock paper scissors with the enemies that you fight using the right combat style will do more key damage to them allowing you to stagger them faster to follow up with critical hits and some of them have like unique combat Styles like a Shinobi style as well and unlocking these and leveling them up through your bonds with your allies I did enjoy but then there's there's that extra layer on top of that like the weapon proficiency so the more you use weapons you do additional damage from just like straight damage to key damage or certain damage with combat Styles so the game's a little bit at odds there where you want to use one specific weapon to level up your proficiency to do more damage with that weapon but then also like I wanted to switch and use like essentially everything because I found just a lot of enjoyment in trying the different combat Styles and their linked Marshal skills like the weapon skills they have and so there is a little bit at odds there but it's not a bad thing it's actually a good thing in my opinion because you've got so much flexibility in terms of finding weapons that you really connect with as well as then different combat styles that all have different attack animations from light to heavy attacks to the Marshall skills there a whole lot of flexibility and the weapons there and and that leads perfectly into the combat system which is enjoyable like despite my complaints with the mission structures and some of the difficulty issues that combat Loop which I talked about in my preview as well is really really solid being able to Parry those attacks and follow up with criticals and learning the different timings as well as facing those challenges and and taking on those challenges and learning how to beat certain bosses and Parry their attacks and their combat animations and really enjoyed all that stuff and it's definitely some of the best combat that team ninja have ever [Music] created please come and see me later in your sha I wish to speak to you alone Ronan has dialogue choices and consequence a good example of this is that early on I chose not to kill one of like the early bosses and then I actually had a side quest so they could become one of my allies and I used them through heaps of missions because they weren't allied with either the pro- Shogun or the anti- Shogun faction so I could take them on like any Mission and speaking of those factions and the choices you make here in this system it just doesn't go all the way it it does feel a little half-baked in some areas that it never feels like it materializes into any meaningful consequences or outcomes now there are green and purple missions that you'll come across and dialogue options as well that Define the decisions you make picking green for the anti- Shogun ey and purple for the pro- Shogun ey only happens maybe three or four times throughout the entire experience and in dialogue options it happens even less this is kind of perplexing because there is a tutorial in a system that tells you about being able to make these choices between Pro and anti but sometimes in dialogue you'll have two different options that are clearly different options but whether they are pro or anti aren't actually reflected in the coloring of that dialogue option you'll only find out once you've selected it and it'll tell you whether you gained Pro or anti like bond status and it also on top of that this Choice system seems at direct odds with the historical story that team ninja are trying to tell here as this is a specific era in Japan's history and these and some of the characters here are actual historical characters that team ninja are trying to tell us about it's perplexing that you can make these choices but in a lot of cases they don't seem to go anywhere because a lot of those major decisions are actually historical based and your allies will actually make them for you your sort of decisions there are well I guess I better follow you or I'll follow you to the ends of the Earth like it's like yes or yes in some of those encounters because those major story beats are historical things that happened so you don't really get to choose anything in those outcomes now there is also another story that's uring as a througho throughout this game and that's the main plot between you yourself as a veiled Edge twin and and what happens with your valed Edge partner right at the start of the game that really sets this journey off I actually really felt a strong connection with my main character because of that connection as well as Roma who's sort of your main Ally that a pretty constant presence throughout the game and it does really help you to connect with the revolving door of Side characters as you are going to meet just so many Side characters that you can all build bonds with and it's often hard to remember who's who and who was cited with which side especially as some of them flip-flop between anti and pro throughout the story and I'd like to say that in some case the story loses its focus as it's trying to tell the story of the bakumatsu era of Japan on the brink of War as well as that personal Journey that you're on as one of the veiled Edge twins and you know I I don't know if it ever really found its focus because of these two jarring aspects it's very similar issues that that Wong actually suffered with that constant revolving door of Side characters throughout that historical piece but they've alleviated some of those issues with having Roma come with you throughout your journey and a player character that is actually involved in those events that are occurring right CU you can make some of those choices but it just never goes to that level that I really wanted it to It's just sometimes that you are making choices you're not sure exactly what side you're making choices on and then sometimes characters flip flop between the sides and it's hard to keep track of but the one thing that's is you yourself and roma and that's the one thing that connects you with the world that I actually did quite enjoy the biggest issue that rise of the Ronin will face is its lack of a core identity not only amongst other PlayStation exclusives I mean even its own release date to be honest but you know it's not ghost of shishima but you can see the ghost influence bleeding into the game's presentation it's not Assassin's Creed but you'll be stealthing around rooftops and completing similar open world activities it's also not securro but you've got a grappling Hawk and you can Parry attacks in a really satisfying way and that deep combat system is all present here very little about what you'll experience in Rise of the Ronin is novel or a completely brand new concept however what is there is of good quality that's absolutely worth experiencing if you like any of the games that I've just mentioned it's just disappointing to see Team ninja release their most polished and refined experience to date and see it crammed in between an already busy release period this is absolutely the most polished and refined experience they have ever put out at launch right I've experienced zero bugs despite the typical camera things you get in these sort of experiences where sometimes when you're crammed in the corner the camera doesn't handle that too well but that's always been the same with games like this across the board so other than that you've got a tight combat Loop a pretty engaging open world and some interesting additional elements from the Allies to the bonds to the story to connect with and I do really think that rise of the Ronin is worth your time if you like these sort of experiences team ninja have done an excellent job with their first attempt at an open world despite some shortcomings and I do recommend you play it let me know your thoughts in the comments down below thank you guys for watching this video till the end thank you to our members for supporting the channel and thank you to Sony for the really early review code for Rise of the rone it really helps put your thoughts together and actually put a comprehensive review together like this so I do appreciate that but thank you guys for watching this video till the end my name is noza and I hope you have a great day

Channel: NorZZa

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Id: qVHZlp6hZKY

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024