At its State of Play event in September 2022 Sony unveiled a few games that people weren’t aware were coming down the pike, not least Rise of the Ronin.
A major new title from Team Ninja, it’s offering an open world adventure set in 19th century Japan, and looks pretty sumptuous. Here are all the details you need to know.
For other upcoming titles, check out our list of the most exciting PS5 releases in the pipeline right now.
Rise of the Ronin release date
Rise of the Ronin is still a long way off – its first trailer might look pretty polished, and contain plenty of glimpses of gameplay, but the game won’t be coming out until sometime in 2024 according to Team Ninja.
That means there’s still plenty of time for it to be polished up to a sheen, and we might not get too much more information about it for quite some time while the developers continue to do their work.
Rise of the Ronin platforms
Rise of the Ronin has been announced as a console exclusive for the PlayStation 5, meaning you won’t be able to enjoy it on Xbox consoles – unless that agreement proves to only cover a certain period of time.
This also leaves some wiggle room for a PC version, but we’d imagine that it’ll be a while before this gets clarified, since we’re still quite a long way off the release window that Team Ninja has named.
Rise of the Ronin trailer
There’s only been a single trailer for Rise of the Ronin so far, but it’s more detailed than you’d expect for a game that’s still two years off release.
It features a mixture of in-engine footage and cut-scenes, apparently, but gives us a pretty solid overview of the world we’ll be exploring and the timeline that we’ll be dropped into.
Rise of the Ronin story
The game is set during the twilight of Japan’s Edo era, in the 19th Century. This period was called Bakumatsu, and is marked by outbreaks of disease, civil war and the arrival of interests from oversease, as you can see from the American embassy glimpsed in the trailer.
We’ll play as the Ronin from the game’s title, without any binding loyalties to leave you free to make choices as you move through the world.
Team Ninja says that the story will be deep and dark – showcasing “the most critical revolution in the history of Japan including the darkest and ugliest chapters that many will shy away from”, which sounds like it could get fairly harrowing given the historical details about reprisals carried out in this era.
We will apparently get the chance to make plenty of decisions that will impact the story as it unfolds in material ways, so we’re looking forward to learning more about the RPG elements at play.
Rise of the Ronin gameplay
As a Team Ninja game, Rise of the Ronin will feature a lot of combat, unsurprisingly, and it looks like it will be impactful and deadly given the brief moments shown in the reveal trailer.
The game will feature katana combat as well as other forms of blade, but will also blend in period-appropriate firearms, as demonstrated by the bayonet kill that you can see in the trailer.
This could make for an interesting combat system where you can switch back and forth between classical and more modern weaponry, but in the absence of actual full gameplay footage we’ll have to wait to get more of a sense for how it works.
Rise of the Ronin will also be open world, with horses available to ride between locations, and we’re interested to see how big its world is. The obvious (probably unfair) comparison will be to Ghost of Tsushima, which has done so well for Sony and Sucker Punch. That game’s sprawling island world was a thing of beauty, so we’d imagine Team Ninja will be hoping to at least match it.