Rise of the Ronin drops you into Japan in 1863, at the tail end of a 300-year Edo Period the country knew as Bakumatsu. The Tokugawa Shogunate is rotting from within. Western ships have forced the borders open. Cholera and civil war are doing the rest.
Team Ninja built this one, Koei Tecmo and Sony published it, and it landed in 2024 on PlayStation 5 and PC. It is the third time Sony and Koei Tecmo have worked together, after Nioh and Nioh 2. It scored 7.5 out of 10 across seven critics in the IGDB aggregate.
That number is honest. Rise of the Ronin is a big, messy, frequently excellent game that never quite decides what it wants to be.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
The Blade Twins and the Veiled Edge
You do not play a named hero. You play one of the Blade Twins, a pair of warriors raised in the Kurozuku clan until Shogunate oniwaban murdered the family for its anti-shogunate politics. The Veiled Edge resistance took the twins in. Their leader, the Bladesmith, trained them.
In 1853 the twins get their first real job: kill Commodore Matthew Perry and steal a secret message he carries. They get the message. They do not get Perry, because another assassin called the Blue Demon intervenes. One twin escapes. The other stays behind to buy that escape and is presumed dead.
The survivor is your character, and the search for the lost twin drives everything that follows.
A Duel With the Bladesmith
The Veiled Edge village comes under attack by Shogunate oniwaban. The protagonist, convinced the partner is still alive, decides to leave the clan and look for them. The Bladesmith will not simply let that happen. She forces a duel to the death for the right to walk away.
The protagonist wins. The Bladesmith dies wishing them luck.
It is the best scene the game has, and it happens early. A teacher dies so the student can be free, and the game earns it because the Bladesmith is written as a person rather than a quest-giver. Nothing later hits the same mark.
Yokohama, 1858
The story picks up in Yokohama in 1858. The Perry Expedition has already done its damage. Western influence is spreading through the port, and the social order is coming apart at the seams.
Here the protagonist meets Ryoma Sakamoto, a wandering ronin who becomes the closest thing the game has to a friend. Ryoma is looking for his master, Shoin Yoshida. The protagonist is looking for the Demonclaw Samurai, which is what the lost twin now calls themselves while working for the Americans and the British.
Shogunate Chief Minister Naosuke Ii responds to all of this with purges. Anti-shogunate and anti-foreigner voices get crushed. Shoin is arrested and executed in 1859, and that death radicalizes everyone around him.
Genzui Kusaka Picks Up the Sword
Genzui Kusaka takes Shoin’s place. Kogoro Katsura, Shinsaku Takasugi and others rally behind him. They raise a small army and go straight at Ii.
The Blue Demon turns up again to protect Ii. His real name is Akikatsu Manabe, and the protagonist cuts him down.
This is the historical spine of Rise of the Ronin, and it is the game’s strongest asset. Team Ninja is not inventing a fantasy Japan and hanging real names on it. The Boshin war is coming, the factions are real, and the game treats the leadup with a seriousness that most open-world games would not bother with.
What You Actually Do
Combat is the core, and it is where the game is at its best and its most uneven.
You build a custom character and fight with the weapons of the Boshin war: katanas, and the firearms that were actually in circulation at the time. At key moments the story branches. You can side with non-player characters or fight them, and the choice changes what happens next.
Yokohama, Kyoto and Edo are all explorable, along with stretches of countryside. You get a horse, a grappling hook and a glider for moving around. Three difficulty settings. A three-player cooperative mode.
| Feature | What Rise of the Ronin does |
|---|---|
| Character | Fully custom, gender selectable |
| Weapons | Boshin war katanas and firearms |
| Traversal | Horse, grappling hook, glider |
| Difficulty | Three swappable settings |
| Multiplayer | Three-player co-op |
| Story | Branching choices at key moments |
That table is a feature list, not a personality. The problem with Rise of the Ronin is that it has all of these things and rarely makes them talk to each other.
The Open World Is the Weak Link
The three cities are the selling point, and they are also the letdown.
Yokohama, Kyoto and Edo are historically grounded and genuinely distinct from one another on paper. In practice they blur. The horse, the grappling hook and the glider are all fine on their own. Together they flatten the map into a set of routes rather than a place you learn.
Team Ninja has never been a studio that builds worlds you want to live in. It builds combat you want to master. Rise of the Ronin does not change that, and the open-world structure it borrows from its competitors mostly gets in the way of the thing it does well.
The Combat Still Carries It
Here is the case for Rise of the Ronin: when you are in a fight, none of the above matters.
The weapon variety is real. Katanas and period firearms play nothing alike, and the game expects you to move between them rather than pick a lane. The three difficulty settings are not a token gesture. They change how much the game asks of you, and the hardest one asks a lot.
The branching story choices also do more work than they first appear to. Siding with or against a character is not a cosmetic toggle. It reshapes the narrative, and it gives the campaign a second life that most action RPGs of this size do not have.
Three-player co-op is the other thing worth your time. It is not an afterthought mode bolted onto a single-player campaign. It works.
Where 7.5 Comes From
The IGDB aggregate landed at 7.5 out of 10 across seven outlets. That is the right neighborhood.
Rise of the Ronin is not a great open-world game. It is a great combat game wearing an open-world game’s clothes, and the fit is loose. The Bakumatsu setting is the most interesting thing about it, and the game knows it — the historical detail is careful, the factions are drawn with real weight, and the Bladesmith’s death early on sets a tone the rest of the campaign keeps reaching for.
What holds it back is structure. Three cities that should feel like three worlds feel like three maps. Traversal tools that should create freedom create shortcuts. The Blade Twins’ search for each other is a strong hook, but the game keeps interrupting it with systems.
The order of what matters here, from most to least:
- The combat and weapon variety, which is genuinely excellent.
- The Bakumatsu setting and historical grounding.
- The branching story choices and their consequences.
- Three-player co-op, which works better than it should.
- The open world, which is the weakest part of the package.
- The traversal toolkit, which is fine and forgettable.
- The three-city structure, which never justifies its own scale.
If you came for Nioh, you will find the combat you want and a lot of walking between it. If you came for the setting, you will find a game that takes 1860s Japan seriously and mostly does right by it.
Rise of the Ronin is worth playing. It is not worth pretending it is more than it is. The Bladesmith duel, the Perry assassination, the slow radicalization of Ryoma’s circle — those are the parts that stay with you. The map does not.
7.5 of 10.
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