Rise of the Ronin review - Team Ninja without the bite, or the Nioh heights

Rise of the Ronin is a frustrating game. If you’re familiar with the work of Japanese studio Team Ninja, that sentence may not be surprising to read. This is a team that has long prided itself on creating challenging, and sometimes unforgiving, action games laser-focused on delivering a specific experience. You’re either onboard with that or you aren’t.

But this game is not frustrating because of its exacting difficulty, myriad of interlocking systems or rage-inducing boss fights. No, what makes it so is that - in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, Rise of the Ronin appropriates the worst parts of its contemporaries.

Rise of the Ronin is simultaneously Team Ninja’s most modern, and its most dated, game. The jump in graphical fidelity compared to the Nioh games is massive, and it’s all the more impressive when you factor in how large and open the game’s world is. It’s the sort of upgrade many Western studios had to undertake between the PS3 and PS4 generations. That this is happening in the PS5 era, lessens the effect, but the benefits are nonetheless palpable.

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