Revenge of the Ronin

I love samurais. From Sanjuro to Zatoichi to Lady Snowblood, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing a tense and wonderfully-constructed sword fight. I also love beat ‘em ups, like Final Fight, Streets of Rage and Castle Crashers. So, when you mix samurais and beat ‘em ups, you would expect something exciting, right? If the result is anything like Revenge of the Ronin, then the answer is an aggressive “NO!” This is a low-budget, poorly-made, mindlessly repetitive game that suffers the unforgivable sin of making samurais boring. This is my long-overdue review of Revenge of the Ronin.

When Ren returns to his former home to find his village destroyed and father dead, he is understandably devastated. He’ll do anything to settle the score, even if that means killing every demon on the way to the underworld. In order to do that, he’ll need to team up with another father and protect a young girl, setting up a tale of rage, revenge and redemption. That is an admittedly simple yet effective start to Revenge of the Ronin, which is told through a series of comic panels designed by people who don’t know how dialog bubbles work.

All you really need to know is that this is a paint-by-numbers third-person beat ‘em up, where our samurai hero hacks and slashes his way through hundreds of photocopied enemies in levels that are way too long in order to face bosses that aren’t all that impressive. It’s the kind of game you might discouragingly call a “button masher,” and a bad one at that.

You’ve seen and done this all before. We control the slow-moving samurai through a number of massive stages, where each section is artificially walled off until you beat three or four waves of enemies. We do that by mashing either the light or heavy attack and using a couple different types of magical spells, one that will grant our hero a temporary shield and another that will unleash a flaming sword. There’s also a ground-pound move that will hurt enemies around the samurai. It’s all pretty typical stuff.

If you can’t tell from my tone, I hated this game. Revenge of the Ronin is an aggressively bland beat ‘em up that recycles all of the genre’s worst tropes. Normally, I would like to try to find something good to say about the game before ragging on it, but it’s hard in this case. I suppose it’s nice that it didn’t crash on me a bunch of times, like Slave Zero X. It also controls well enough, even if it’s not doing anything especially new or unique. However, outside of that, this game is a dumpster fire.

Let’s start with the level designs. As I mentioned before, this is the type of game that will trap you in different parts of the level until you fight off several waves of similar-looking enemies. That’s expected from this type of game. What makes it bad in this case is how large these walled-off sections are. They will usually be long hallways or courtyards, where it might take a couple minutes to get from one side to the other. Imagine a massive rectangle with almost nothing in it and you have an idea of what 90% of this game is like.

That would be fine if you were fighting three or four dozen enemies at once, like one of those Dynasty Warrior games. But no, you’ll take on maybe four or five enemies at a time. And when you beat that wave, you’ll have to wait until the next wave warps in, usually on the complete other side of the playfield. The frustrating part is that it’s easy to miss an archer or enemy that doesn’t move because they are so far away from the samurai that you can’t even see them. Fights that should take no more than a minutes or two end up taking five times longer simply because of the massive level designs.

And it certainly doesn’t help that every level is basically the same. Sure, the ugly textures lining the walls change as you get deeper into the underworld, but make no mistake about it, every single stage is made up of a series of these annoying long rectangles with nothing in them. Aside from a bunch of barrels that contain money and health potions, there’s nothing in these stages to interact with. These empty rectangles are mostly linked together by bridges with spike obstacles you’ll need to dodge, which is pretty much the only part of the game that I would call fun or exciting, and those last only a few seconds.

And again, I feel like I need to mention that these stages are shockingly long. The first few chapters will do that thing where they’ll show you the level during the day, which will be followed by a level set at night. On its own, that’s not a bad idea, but the game will repeat the day night thing multiple times in the same level. The fact that I’m seeing the same courtyard in day, night and then back to day again makes you realize that we’ve been fighting in that one location for a full day. And let me tell you, as a player, it definitely feels like you’ve been mashing those buttons for 24 hours.

And just when you think you’ve traveled to the darkest reaches of the underworld and defeated its demon master, the game pulls a fast one on you and makes you play all the levels over again ... in reverse! That’s right, you end up fighting back to the stage you started on, which just feels like filler. This twist doesn’t add anything fun or new to the experience and just prolongs your suffering.

You might be able to get away with this kind of terrible level design if the actual combat was more compelling, but it’s somehow even worse. Like I said, you have a light and heavy attack, which is normally what you would need to string together a bunch of cool combos. But don’t get too excited, because there are no combos here. The combat in this game is, at best, surface level. Every single enemy in this game can be defeated by mashing a single button. This includes the terrible bosses. Sure, they get harder as you go along, but once you’ve upgraded your shield and flaming sword magic, basically every enemy in this game is a massive pushover.

I could also complain about the dated graphics, the slow gameplay and the incompetent comic panels, but the game’s biggest problem is that it’s just so damn boring. This is a game that will only two or three hours to complete, yet that time will feel like days. The action is so bland and uneventful that I found myself nodding off on more than one occasion. I couldn’t wait for it to end, and for a while there, it felt like it never would. If you can make samurais this boring, then something is seriously wrong.