I've just pulled off one of Rise of the Ronin's best – and most satisfying – moves. Gliding through the air over the Japanese landscape on my hawk-like wings, I whistle for my horse and as it appears beneath me, I effortlessly somersault from the air right onto its back ready to ride into the fray. Rise of the Ronin is full of these little stylish touches, particularly in combat. Hitting R1 after an attack lands, for example, lets you flick your blade to rid it of blood and claw back some precious Ki – or the stamina you need to block or pull off the more impactful attacks.
But it's this that, in part, makes me immediately hanker for news of Ghost of Tsushima 2 while playing Rise of the Ronin. It's a very odd sensation to simultaneously enjoy the game that you're playing, but also regularly think of how much I really want to play Ghost of Tsushima 2 and Assassin's Creed Red when they eventually arrive.
Rise of the katana
While we know a little about Assassin's Creed Red from its reveal back in 2022, we've not heard anything about it since beyond rumors and financial docs suggesting it's due out by March 2025. Ghost of Tsushima 2 on the other hand has had no such official announcement, beyond some Sucker Punch job listings, but it's clearly on the cards. So much so that many search analytics tools suggest fans are wondering whether Rise of the Ronin is Ghost of Tsushima 2 in all but name, and it's easy to see why.
Rise of the Ronin has so much that is reminiscent of SuckerPunch's samurai adventure, to the point that the Rise of the Ronin team has admitted it used the game as a reference for its own open-world RPG. Plus, Sony has promoted this PS5 exclusive so much that you can start to see how consumer confusion has arrived between the two titles – even though Sony hasn't publicly announced it's getting a sequel, but rather a movie.
Rise of the Ronin's slick combat, as developer Team Ninja is famed for, certainly stands for itself as a brilliant hack-and-slash samurai experience, with tons of customization options. It has the same brilliant way of making patience pay off that made me vibe so well with Ghost of Tsushima. I feared Rise of the Ronin would be too Dark Souls, too punishing, but it thankfully (for me anyway) leans more Tsushima than Elden Ring.
I've spent a lot of time in Rise of the Ronin just exploring. It's got a delicious way of teasing out each region with little details to find, whether it's side missions that help develop your bonds with companions or finding a cute cat to pet. But, there's nothing quite like the tense, face-to-face standoffs that can so often randomly occur when you're exploring in Ghost of Tsushima, and although it's possible to have a random encounter in Rise of the Ronin, it doesn't quite have the same spectacle.
The landscape gets close of course, with Team Ninja doing a great job at capturing the Japanese terrain. As our own Joe Donnelly says in his Rise of the Ronin review, "it's not the biggest open-world playground on the market by any stretch, nor is it the prettiest", but it certainly has something.
What it does have though is gameplay that's so evocative of those early Assassin's Creed games, both from the way the narrative plays out to some of the traversal quirks and the way your ronin simply just moves. Even the initial dual protagonists seem like a nod to the duo of protagonists that have defined the more recent Assassin's Creed RPGs, even if we don't quite the nuance of choice-based narratives here. Getting that Assassin's Creed feel against the Japanese backdrop is such a tease for what Assassin's Creed Red will be. I'd imagine, knowing what Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Assassin's Creed Valhalla have been before it, that it'll be a much vaster and denser experience than what Rise of the Ronin has to offer, but Team Ninja's adventure might just be the perfect aperitif.
