Rise of the Ronin Breaks a Team Ninja Curse

Game ZXC

Rise of the Ronin

By Matt Karoglou

Published Mar 23, 2024

Highlights

Rise of the Ronin marks Team Ninja's debut into open-world game design, breaking free from traditional mission-based structures.
The game's art direction and environmental diversity address past criticisms of uninspired level design in Team Ninja's titles.
Rise of the Ronin showcases impressive verticality and variation in its setting, with a unique blend of 19th-century Japan and Western influence.

Rise of the Ronin represents new territory for Team Ninja, with the title serving as the studio's first foray into open-world game design. Prior to Rise of the Ronin, most Team Ninja titles have traditionally relied on a mission-based structure, with both Nioh games, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty adhering to this kind of model. One of the main gripes players have with the studio's past games is their seemingly uninspired level design, and it's a studio curse that Rise of the Ronin definitively breaks with its art direction and environmental diversity.

Players still take on "missions" in Rise of the Ronin, but the process is decidedly more organic than in Team Ninja's previous games thanks to the title's take on an open-world Soulslike adventure. Rather than selecting levels from a menu and dropping into self-contained maps that pale in comparison to the encounters they feature, Rise of the Ronin provides a captivating rendition of 19th Century Japan that offers plenty of verticality and variation in its art direction, avoiding one of the few areas of weakness inherent in Team Ninja's other titles.

Rise of the Ronin's Matthew Perry Explained

Rise of the Ronin features a fictionalized version of real events, and players will want to get to know the real Matthew Perry ahead of its launch.

Rise of the Ronin is an Ambitious Step Forward for Team Ninja

Comparisons between Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Ronin are well-deserved considering both games are open-world adventures set in Japan featuring samurai protagonists, but Rise of the Ronin earns its own unique identity thanks to the ways Team Ninja has designed its world. Where Ghost of Tsushima is arguably still one of the best-looking open-world games and a showcase of Sucker Punch's stellar art direction, Rise of the Ronin is equally impressive, albeit differently. Where Rise of the Ronin shines is in its setting, allowing the developer to incorporate a surprising amount of verticality in the world design.

The temporal difference between Ghost of Tsushima's 13th Century Japan and Rise of the Ronin's 19th Century Japan ends up allowing Team Ninja to incorporate Western-style architecture and buildings into the game's cities. The city of Yokohama is rife with tall towers and plenty of commercial buildings for the player to grapple up to, and its rendition of the merging between isolationist Japan and Western influence allows for some truly inspired interactive spaces. Even outside the few cities, the player gets to visit, Rise of the Ronin's open world features plenty of excellent diversity in its biomes and variation in the topography, making the act of just wandering around the map an enjoyable and exciting experience.

How Team Ninja's Level Design Has Evolved

Most fans' first experience with Team Ninja would come about from playing the classic character-action reinvention of the Ninja Gaiden series. Since those games' release, the DNA of the 6th and 7th generation Ninja Gaiden titles has continued to show up time and again in Team Ninja's modern output, including its somewhat bland level design. While Team Ninja games are known for their excellent white-knuckle combat and incredibly deep mechanics and high skill ceiling, level design has traditionally been one area where the company struggles. Though the interactive spaces in its games might have some compelling art direction, Team Ninja used to never branch far from one series of corridors after another.

Both Nioh 2 and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty are two games to somewhat buck this trend, offering more biome diversity and interesting level layouts than previous Team Ninja games, but the combat of both those titles was still undoubtedly the main focus. And while Rise of the Ronin essentially entices players from one satisfying combat encounter to the next, the spaces in which these encounters take place are a massive improvement over Team Ninja's prior output and a stunning display of how much the studio's approach to level design has improved in just the short time since Wo Long's release.