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Rise of the Ronin is finally here! Developed by the makers of the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive games, this new action-adventure RPG is Team Ninja‘s first foray into open-world games, and it’s got a lot to live up to, both in terms of the studio’s past games and other samurai-themed games like Ghost of Tsushima. Like a lot of other open-world games, Rise of the Ronin takes place in an expansive world, and it can be easy to miss certain features when first starting out. To help, check out our list of the top beginner tips to make your first steps in 1800s Japan much easier.
1. Adjust Your Health Recovery & Ki Loss in the Settings Menu
When you first start up Rise of the Ronin, you’ll be able to choose between three difficulty settings: Dawn, Dusk, and Twilight. This difficulty setting can be adjusted at any time, but the difficulty settings are actually more nuanced than they first look. If you’re happy with your difficulty setting but find you’re not healing enough or losing too much Ki in combat, you can do it individually in the settings menu. To do this, go to “System” in the main menu, then “Game Settings.” The first three options are where you can adjust your health recovery, Ki loss, or general difficulty mode.
2. Keep an Eye on Your Ki Supply
During the initial combat tutorials, Rise of the Ronin will introduce you to a concept called Ki. Similar to stamina in a lot of other games, Ki is the energy available to you, and it’s used up when you attack, block, dodge (while in combat), sprint (while in combat), swim underwater, or use the glider, among other things. Sprinting and dodging outside of combat don’t use Ki. You can see your Ki represented on a blue bar above your health bar while in combat – keep an eye on this because if your Ki runs out, you’ll be left stunned and vulnerable. You can recover Ki by using elixirs or by doing a Blade Flash (R1) immediately after an attack.
3. Use Your Blade Twin/Allies in Combat
One of the first mechanics Rise of the Ronin teaches you about in the tutorial mission is the ability to switch between your protagonist and your Blade Twin or other allies. While you might be tempted to ignore this advice and soldier through with just your protagonist, it can be really useful to switch between characters for tactical advantages while in combat. For one thing, you can attract an enemy’s attention with one character and then switch to a second character to attack from behind; additionally, your allies have different fighting styles that may be more useful against certain enemies.
4. Fast-Travel Between Veiled Edge Banners
Not long after starting Rise of the Ronin, you’ll come across a Veiled Edge Banner, which you can touch using R1. Veiled Edge Banners are found throughout the world of Rise of the Ronin, and they function similarly to synchronization points in the Assassin’s Creed series or meditation circles in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. By finding and interacting with Veiled Edge Banners, you can rest, autosave, and spend any Karma you’ve acquired, but the most helpful feature of the banners is that they let you fast travel by going to the map and selecting any banner you’ve previously unlocked.
5. Restore Public Order to Reveal More Map Information
As you travel through the early stages of Rise of the Ronin, you’ll find areas of unrest – usually villages under attack by bandits or the forces of the shogunate. You’ll be given the option to clear out these villages and “restore public order.” While you can ignore them to continue with the main story, we recommend restoring public order wherever possible because doing so reveals more of the map around you, similar to clearing out Mongols in Ghost of Tsushima. You can see the hostile villages marked by red dots on your map, and after they’re cleared, you can see the location of nearby Veiled Edge banners and collectibles.
6. Visit Stables to Buy Better Horses & Gear
Once you find the Horse Whistle in Rise of the Ronin, you’ll automatically get a Chestnut Horse. Like most other starting mounts, your first horse is…decent. It’s not spectacular, but it’ll get you where you need to go faster than running. However, you might not know that you’re not stuck with that horse forever – just go to any stable in a village or town that has one, and you’ll find other horses for sale. Each horse has different stats, and you can buy one that best suits your needs. If you don’t want to change your horse, you can also buy new horse gear to improve its speed or stamina stats.
7. Use Your Skill Points Wisely
As you level up in Rise of the Ronin, you’ll get skill points to spend on one of the game’s four: Strength, Dexterity, Charm, and Intellect. Your favorite tree of the four is determined by the fighting style you chose at the beginning of the game, with quicker, more agile fighters favoring dexterity while stronger shield-breaking builds obviously favor Strength. That said, there are incredibly useful skills on all four skill trees, so be sure to pick wisely when cashing in your skill points.
8. Don’t Forget to Get the Glider
If you’ve seen any of the trailers for Rise of the Ronin, you were probably waiting to get the glider from minute one, and if you’re like us, you were probably waiting for a big story moment where the glider was bestowed upon you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. There’s no big cinematic moment, and the glider in Rise of the Ronin is actually pretty easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. In the “Curtain Falls, Curtain Rises” mission with Ryoma Sakamoto – the Eccentric Ronin – you’ll have to defeat a boss named Gonzo. Once he’s defeated, turn around, go back down the stairs, and turn left to follow the path down to a storehouse. Use the Storehouse Key you picked up from the boss to open the door, then open the big chest at the location below to get the glider.
9. Redesign Your Appearance at the Yokohama Longhouse
Once you’ve helped Ryoma get into the city of Yokohama in Rise of the Ronin, you’ll unlock the Longhouse, which you’ll be able to use as a home base during the game. While you can do all the usual things like organize your storage and rest, you can also “redesign” your character. This means you can use transmogrification to customize your character’s aesthetic appearance without regard for the stats of your equipment. Put simply, this means you can wear all the best gear stats-wise without looking like a mess, and you can have your appearance remain the same even as you change your gear.
10. Disassemble Equipment You Can’t Use
Rise of the Ronin gives you a lot of weapons and equipment at the beginning of the game, and this isn’t a bad thing when you’re trying to decide which weapon or armor you like best. Once you settle on your favorite, though, you’ll find that you still have a lot of stuff sitting in your storage you can’t – or won’t – use. Maybe your fighting style doesn’t fit spears, or you’re just not a fan of polearms, or those armor stats are too low. You might be motivated to sell them at the nearest merchant, but rather than doing that, we recommend going to a blacksmith or a black marketer and disassembling whatever equipment you can’t use, which will give you the raw components to craft something better.
Rise of the Ronin is now available for the PlayStation 5.
