FROM its very first announcement, Team Ninja’s Rise of the Ronin was haunted by the shadow cast by Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima. It certainly did not help that Team Ninja intentionally leaned into how much their latest game was taking cues from it and other similar games. Now that Ronin is out, we can finally see how it fares against its predecessors and let me just say, this sake is quite lukewarm.
Team Ninja’s latest game is both its most ambitious and riskiest project. For the first time in the studio’s lifespan, they have departed from the comforts accorded by the formula of their past games.
The self-contained levels and mission design from the Ninja Gaiden and Nioh games are abandoned for an open-world setting in Ronin. The game also goes further by importing the gameplay mechanics not just from Team Ninja’s games, but also highly acclaimed titles by other developers, such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Ghost of Tsushima.
On the one hand, Team Ninja does this impeccably but on the other, it shows Ronin’s weakness, which we will cover later.
