Team Ninja is a very well-known video game developer; they have been made popular by their long-term investment in games with painstakingly well-designed combat mechanics. Fast-paced one-on-one sword fighting has become the forte of Team Ninja. They have even proven it multiple times with Ninja Gaiden. But Rise of the Ronin runs with that mechanic in a whole new direction!
Rise of the Ronin is Team Ninja’s latest game that will release exclusively on PlayStation 5. This is an open-world game combining the mechanics of Sekiro and Nioh in a very interesting manner. But some fans cannot help but notice that maybe Team Ninja took away something special from this game in an attempt to give it a massive open world.
Did Team Ninja make a mistake by making Rise of the Ronin open-world?
Open-world games have a way of forcing developers to re-think all their work. Imagine having to change all those gameplay mechanics and implement them in an open-world game. Imagine having to make sure that players don’t feel overwhelmed by the side content, and most importantly, make sure the shift from a semi-open world to an open world does not hurt the game.
Rise of the Ronin looks like a game that attempts to do all those things. Team Ninja’s Nioh was a game that many saw as a rip-off of the Dark Souls series, but it was actually a Ninja Gaiden-like game mixed with soulslike mechanics.
Rise of the Ronin now takes things a step further; take Nioh, mix some Sekiro into it, and then drop it in a mid-19th-century Japanese setting. It seems to have worked too, but it appears they forgot to learn an important lesson from another similar game, Ghost of Tsushima. They literally sprinkled side content in every corner of their map.
The problem is that the side content in Rise of the Ronin is pretty trivial. Some say most of it is just busy work and not fun to take part in. This gave fans a reason to suggest that maybe Team Ninja made a mistake with this transition. They should have stayed focused, like Nioh games.
Redditor and Nioh fan ianbits stated their disappointment by mentioning how they don’t think Team Ninja ever needed to develop an open world at all. According to them, Team Ninja had already hit perfection with Nioh 1 and 2.
This review at least seemed to hit my biggest worry which is that I just didn’t know what an open world would add to what Team Ninja is good at. I’m glad the combat seems to still have a good amount of depth and hell, I don’t even mind the overload of loot, but part of the reason I love Nioh 2 is how laser focused it is around its stellar combat and adding stuff that seems like checklist style filler around that is awkward.
Many other gamers seem to agree with this statement. It looks like no one wanted an open-world game at all. Some suggest that if Team Ninja had made a fantastical game instead of a realistic historical setting, things would have worked out a bit better for them.
Whatever the case might be, the real test of Rise of the Ronin would be in sales. It remains to be seen how well this game sells. It being a PlayStation 5 exclusive actually proves that maybe Sony had some hopes for this game, and were therefore right to go in this direction.
Is FromSoftware going to make an open-world Sekiro?
Now that fans have seen an open-world iteration of Nion mixed with Sekiro, one cannot help but wonder: would FromSoftware do something similar? They are, after all, the creators of one of the most popular soulslike games ever made, Elden Ring.
There might be a chance of this happening, but only if Activision allows for it. As the IP is owned by them. But FromSoftware could go Elden Ring’s way and create a whole new IP based on similar mechanics.
