Skeptical about 7/10 review score median and price point

[Garamoth]

On 3/24/2024 at 3:47 PM, Garamoth said:

When I played Nioh in 2017 I said: "That Ki/stamina thing is a great system! They should cut out the monsters, make all the enemies humans with similar stamina bars and put the game in a realistic historical setting where you're a ronin going on adventures and stuff."

 

Hey, I got my wish! Guys, guys, I think I could be a video game designer!

 

And yet...

 

Having played a few hours, the game's fine. The game looks great, the combat is smooth. It's fine, it's just... they leaned a bit too heavily on the cookie cutter open world elements, i.e. it has all the bad quirks of an Assassin's Creed game. You frantically hoover up icons on the map, because getting your % completion is basically what those games are all about. It has a Diablo-esque random loot pinata system, which I absolutely hate. "Oh boy, +0,4% stamina regain upon parry! Good thing I get 3-4 new items every fight!" The combat is fine, but I suuuck at parrying. Besides, your levels seem to actually be doing the fighting for you, at least on normal. You have a mute, player-created protagonist, so there's not much character interaction, which I'm fine with, but the game is stuck in that weird area of being story-heavy but everyone just talks at your character.

 

I'm not sure what I would have preferred. Less filler, certainly. Less Ubistuff. Maybe they should have stolen pages from Way of the Samurai instead. Or Sekiro, or maybe Zelda, something like a realistic Majora's Mask.

 

I'll never get tired of the late Edo period though, such a fascinating era. Samurai with guns! Gunboat diplomacy! Kimonos meet business suits!

 

Funny, I also bought Dragon's Dogma 2 on the same day, and I have a feeling it's probably the better game.

 

Now that I’ve platinumed the game, here’s my closing thoughts.

 

The combat system is extremely complex, but in 60 hours I’ve never ever really gotten into a good groove with it. Perhaps a real pro can get the true potential out of the combat system, but I have my doubts. On top of having to press a button to recover stamina mid-combo, you can switch weapon styles on the fly. The point is to get the upper hand with a rock-paper-scissors system, but since only bosses switch styles and one time at most, it’s not really relevant. Every style has different special moves, but many of them are utterly useless so you’re better off with regular attacks. It doesn’t help that every “style” or combat school is translated phonetically, so it’s really hard to remember what is what. Plus, so many things are tied to holding R1: switching weapons, switching styles, using special attacks, changing item sets. For a long time, I kept switching style while trying to move the camera. The only original thing I like is that you can use the grappling hook on an enemy trying to buff himself or heal for a quick “Nope! Buff denied!” Very satisfying.

 

But yeah, all these intricacies barely matter because of one thing: the parry system. I swear, games are going parry crazy right now. It's a fad or something, one I don’t like. Heck, even Resident Evil has a parry button now. Anyway, the combat system seems too complex for its own good considering how massively important the parry button is. Parrying protects against damage, recovers your stamina (maybe even HP), makes the enemy lose theirs and staggers your opponent, opening him up for even more hits and a critical hit when their stamina is gone, which deals enormous damage. In contrast, defending makes you lose too much stamina and dodging is well, dodgy. The game even grades you on your parries in the dojo.

 

The problem is that the parry timing is ridiculously tight. It’s so tight that it is much shorter than the actual parry animation. And it’s not one of those games where you just press the button when you get a warning prompt. God no. In fact, the only warning you get with some attacks is basically useless. Even regular mooks have 4-5 hit combos with fakeouts and timing changes mid-combo. Sometimes an attack like a spear thrust connects with you, but the actual “attack” happens a tiny bit after that, screwing up the timing. You also can’t parry when out of stamina and can be staggered out of being able to parry... but it’s really not clear when. To make things worse, some combat styles mess with the parry timing. When it works, parrying is incredibly badass... but it doesn’t work often. I swear I’m trying my best, I can pull it off consistently for a while, then completely lose it. I suppose a master Sifu player will think it's a piece of cake. And yet, despite all of this, you can still tank an entire boss combo without dying. Seriously, I'd trade 20 hours of Ubistuff and enemies that deal more damage for a tiny bit more of a parry window. As far as I’m concerned we’d have a much better game on our hands.

 

There’s a stealth system, but it won't even let you dispatch a single medium strength enemy. This is still a Soulslike: all the real fights happen in a big empty square room with a boss, and no dirty tricks or talking will get you out of trouble. So yeah, you’d better work on those parries.

 

I say it's a Soulslike, but all those mechanics feel like weird vestigial limbs. The game has "karma", which you lose some (how much?) on death, like souls, but it also has experience AND money, which you don't lose. So it's some kind of third value, which gives more ability points, that you already get elsewhere, at unspecified thresholds. The game has bonfires as well... it's not really clear why. It makes enemies respawn, but not really?

 

The game’s biggest crime IMO is that they didn't even try to craft a battle system consistent with the late Edo era. It's just Nioh. I know it's a big ask, but I'm still dreaming of a battle system where you actually feel the weight of modernity encroaching on the old ways. Here a punch is stronger than a revolver bullet. Pfeh, who says the era of the samurai is over? Guns are glorified subweapons. Hell, a direct hit from a cannonball barely takes away half of a regular mook’s health. You get a rifle and bayonet as a main weapon, but guess what you do with it? You twirl around like a princess and whack enemies with the butt of your gun, shooting it occasionally for chip danage. What a waste. Did no one watch the final fight in The Last Samurai? Bullets should be overwhelmingly powerful, because they are. But guns were still relatively slow to fire and reload. Steel could still prevail with patience, grit and quick thinking. It would even fit well with a stealth system and the ninja thing the game has going on. Look, devs can create any battle system they want, but when it clashes this hard with the setting, it deserves notice.

 

The open world and story parts of the game are Assassin’s Creed, through and through. It’s the usual ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn history lessons between two mass murders. On one hand, I assume it's the most faithful recreation of late Edo Japan ever made. If you do take a break from cleaning icons, the maps are nice to just be in. Cicadas in summer Edo, falling leaves in autumn Kyoto, the multi-lingual bustle of Yokohama. On the other hand, the game does an awful job of putting you in the shoes of a Ronin. You hear nothing about the strange position ronins find themselves in because of strict feudal norms. Hell, your main character isn’t even a ronin, just some random assassin dude.

 

Your main NPC buddy Ryoma Sakamoto is actually an extremely interesting historical character. The dull dialogue doesn’t make him very compelling. I mean, he started from being anti-foreigner to wanting to reform Japan’s political system according to Western principles. He botched an assassination so badly that he ended up being convinced into becoming the protégé of his would-be victim. How's that for passing a charisma check, huh? For the other guy, I mean. Still, Ryoma Sakamoto’s greatest claim to fame is writing “abolish the feudal system” on a piece of paper... but I might be selling it short a bit. Is it weird that I'd like to hear more about his plans for a bicameral Parliamentary system, instead of more animu clichés? God I'm getting old.

 

Foreigners are very oddly written in particular. Simply put, they all sound like a bunch of weaboos fawning over Japan, when their actual thought must have been much more nuanced, to say the least. Straight from the mouth of one random NPC: “This here temple is so beautiful even the thief Goooeymon, was impressed by it. Yeeehaw, pardner!”

 

Seriously, the only well-written characters are the geishas. The standout is the crazy cat lady geisha. How did they end up making a literal gag character the best one of the lot? I have no idea. She keeps giving you completely overwrought praise while being abysmally sad. Her name comes from a sad passage in the Tale of Genji. She tells you that when she dies her soul will fly into a cat and it is the only way she'll be free of her gilded cage of servitude. How tragic. The sadness behind the eyes seems genuine, but I’m not sure about the praise. In the words of another geisha: “Don’t believe everything we say. We just tell you what you want to hear, that's how we reel you in.”

 

The clothing system deserves praise. It's just excellent. Everyone knows the chest piece is the one that matters the most, why not explode it into multiple parts? So they did it. You can individually mix and match parts of different chest pieces regardless of equipped items, like combining a Western shirt with a hakama, plus the coat from a third item and the belt from a fourth. You can finally be the ninja businessman you’ve always wanted to be. Now that's extreme fashion souls.

 

In the end, Rise of the Ronin just sets out to take the Nioh formula open-world, just like Elden Ring did for Dark Souls. It's not particularly bad, but it's not particularly good either. It just wants to be a big dumb action brawler with hardcore mechanics, but it doesn’t do its setting justice, either in terms of story or mechanics.

Edited April 16 by Garamoth

[Espada-girl]

9/10 for me, fun game and good story also the combat systems pretty much like Nioh just with an easy mode