Look Mom, I am a Samurai

There are so many great looking games coming out this year and Rise of the Ronin was one of the ones I was really looking forward to. It released right about the time I was finishing up Final Fantasy.

The story of the game is pretty simple. Your family was killed by the Shogunate and your mission is to get revenge and overthrow the Shogunate. It's a pretty straightforward tale of revenge, but the setting is what really interested me. The game takes place in Japan around the 1850s to 1860s. I loved living in Japan and I really enjoy these types of games that let me explore Japan during the samurai times.

The game is an open world with a shit load of things to do. It seems like anytime I clear up an area of the map, new things pop up for me to do. I normally am not a huge fan of these types of open world games that are filled with a lot of stuff because I would normally get overwhelmed and not really know where to start. But things have slowed down a lot for me lately and I am able to just enjoy playing games for a couple hours a day instead of trying to blow through the entire story as fast as I can.

Rise of the Ronin has a lot of Dark Souls type influence with it. Especially regarding the combat and how hard it can be at times, which is one reason why I am really enjoying the open world aspect of the game. If things are too hard, I just go somewhere else and do other stuff. While out doing the other stuff, I get new gear, level up and learn how more of how the game works, which is another reason I don't mind the filler content in the game.

This game does go away from the traditional way of leveling up and upgrading stats that so many of the souls like games have. In the traditional souls like games, you tend to dump the majority of your stats into one skill, but in this game, the stat upgrade bonuses are spread out amongst all the different stats. So spreading out your skill points is a more effective way of playing.

The graphics in this game are not that great. There is a lot of ugly models in the game and it suffers from a lot of pop ins as you are running or flying around the world. At first I was a bit upset with how shitty the game looked, but after playing for a while and really enjoying the combat, the ugly graphics seemed to matter less to me.

Speaking of combat, there is a lot to how the combat works in this game. There are so many different weapon types that you can use and each one plays a bit different. Each weapon also has three stances that you can use and depending on who you are fighting, the stances can either make you stronger or weaker, so you need to pay attention to your weapon selection.

You also level up your skills with the different weapons as you use them more, so it forces you to kind of try out new weapons because you dont want to get to the later stages of the game and have no skill on weapons that would benefit you at the time. You also don't know all the different stances for each weapon and you unlock them through progression or finding wanted enemies in the world that unlock the stances as you defeat them.

One thing I am a bit disappointed in is that all the enemies are pretty similar. This game reminds me a lot of Sekiro and I loved all the different bosses in Sekiro and how weird a lot of them were, but this game, it is just normal looking humans that you fight. It makes sense though because the game is tryin to be pretty historically accurate.

The combat is a lot of fun but can be pretty challenging if you are not familiar with these types of games. Fighting is kind of like dancing with swords and you are forced to clash swords back and forth while looking for a perfectly timed attack. You have a block and a parry system that works pretty well once you get the hang of it. At first, I was trying to parry every attack, but that is a quick way to end up dead, so learning to block and parry certain attacks is the only way to learn in this game.

One thing I love about the game is that you can wander around and find cats to pet. There is a crazy cat lady in a city that rewards you for all the cats that you find. Looking for cats is another one of the many things that this game has to take up time.

So far, I have put about 25 hours into the game and I have no clue where I am in the story. I spend a lot of time clearing the map because you get bonuses when you do everything in a region. It is cool when a game rewards you for being thorough.

I am playing on PS5 and I have heard that the game sucks to play on PC because of graphical and framerate issues, but I have not had any issues so far. Overall, I am enjoying this game. It is going to take a while to beat and I am in no rush to finish it. I have a grandkid that will be here very soon and this is just taking up time until that happens.