Rise of the Ronin reinvents hack-and-slash in a remarkable open-world Japan

polygon.com:

Stalking through the neglected ruins of an empty graveyard, I crouched through a hole in a wall with my katana in hand, ready to strike. I was about a dozen hours into my playthrough of Rise of the Ronin, the latest open-world action RPG from Team Ninja, and I’d already abandoned the beaten path of the game’s main quest to hunt down fugitives terrorizing the countryside.

I was closing in on my latest target, a notorious graverobber. I trained my sights on the body of a man slumped in a corner being ravaged by a pack of dogs. I didn’t fully understand what was going on until I heard a snarl from my periphery and the telltale sign of a life bar materializing across the top of the screen. Suddenly everything clicked into place: Holy shit, the graverobber wasn’t a man; it was a freakin’ rabid dog.

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Rise of the Ronin is full of such surprises. Just when you think you’ve gotten ahold of everything it has to offer, the game introduces another curveball or a mechanic that organically builds on a preexisting one, offering a depth of variety that feels exciting yet seldom daunting. Coming off of the success of last year’s Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and 2020’s Nioh 2, Team Ninja has taken its design philosophy of precision-based hack-and-slash combat and applied it to its most ambitious project yet: an open-world action adventure set amid the political tumult of 19th-century Japan, a period known as the Bakumatsu.

Players assume the role of a “Veiled Edge,” a swordsman and assassin trained from youth by a village of anti-shogunate conspirators to fight alongside a