Rise of the tryhard

Let me make this clear from the outset: I did in fact download the demo of Rise Of The Ronin, and then very soon afterwards buy the full game, principally so I could take advantage of the fine-grained character creator in order to obtain some screenshots of Auron and Braska in Situations. But of course I didn’t reckon on the same thing happening to me that happens every time I go near a game that has more than 1 gram of plot, i.e. developing an intense and probably brief obsession with it. This is why I don’t consume media very often.

Anyway, a brief synopsis of this PS5 game released in March of this year that apparently nobody in creative fandom circles has heard of: you’re a samurai in 19th-century Japan. People have different ideas about how the country should develop in response to contact with the west, and being a strong independent ronin, you somehow manage to make friends with people from all sides. Meanwhile, another samurai of your acquaintance is going around sowing the seeds of discord. As a result of all these shenanigans, you end up having to fight various people (often befriending them afterwards … or indeed befriend them and fight them afterwards … or, you know what, fight them and then befriend them and then fight them again, why not), scramble around on the rooftops, stroke a hundred cats, pursue several very low-commitment romantic attachments, and occasionally fling barrels of sake at random men for monetary reward. The answer to “can you pet the dog” is a resounding yes.

As ~lissajous and I have sagely said to each other multiple times, with our characteristically great insight, this is not a final fantasy game. It is, in fact, the first PlayStation game I’ve played that isn’t one, which means I’ve had to temper my expectations regarding both graphics [see here for some good scenery gifs though!] and the profundity of character interactions/dialogue. The characters are actually pretty complex and do good stuff, but a lot of it is confined to cutscenes that feel quite separate from the gameplay; when the player character talks to NPCs, they just stand in place saying a few predefined and often clumsily expressed things, and while there are a few dialogue choices, these never have a huge effect on what actually happens. Certain characters can be romanced, which works like this: when you say things people agree with, they like you more. When you give them gifts, they also like you more (especially if it’s a gift they particularly enjoy; the game makes it very clear which these are). When they like you enough, you can ask them out. They will always say yes. Then you get a special accessory. If you enter relationships with more than one character at a time, they might get angry with you and eventually break it off with you. Otherwise, you can break up with them and they’re like “sure, that’s fine”. Then you go back to being good friends and they act like you were never a couple. If you’re still in the part of the game where they can be pursued (this varies according to the character), you can start the relationship again if you like and they will apparently be unaware you’ve had one already.

That said, the characters are predictably one of my big highlights of this game, because that’s the case for anything I ever get more than slightly interested in. I have to reiterate here that my player character was modelled after Auron (I switched to Braska for any particularly heterosexual moments), so realistically I was looking at him any time he was onscreen. Despite that, though, I did come to enjoy a substantial selection of the unnecessarily huge cast. The idea of this game is that the events and characters are based on real things and people from 19th-century Japan; some of the dates have been fiddled with to squeeze in a few people who weren’t exact contemporaries, but nearly all the characters are genuine historical figures. The one exception I’m aware of is Alexandria Moreau, who appears to be in the game just to fulfil the role of “big-breasted American lady”, and could have been left out, tbh.

Some I particularly enjoyed included:

I appreciate how there doesn’t tend to be a clear sense of which faction is morally right as the game goes on; there’s one particular character who is gradually established as the obvious villain, but below that, you see aspects of the story from the perspectives of the different groups, and alliances are formed and broken as time goes on. This feels quite FF16-esque to me; there’s something equally FF16-esque about the fact that the player character has the option of hitting up all their friends for individual chats before the final battle, which gave the last part of the game a surprisingly large amount of emotional weight. This boyo can in fact be added to the list of games that nearly made me cry … iirc only FFX and FF16 share that honour. The list of games that actually made me cry is empty because I have a heart of stone.

I played the first mission of the game in normal mode, died several times but thought that was ok … then once the mission ended and we were just fighting very normal bog-standard enemies I was still dying several times, so I put it into easy mode there and then and never looked back. My conception of the combat is “press square until you’re being attacked, then press triangle instead”; it is in fact more complicated than this, but playing in easy mode and seeking out every possible sidequest means one ends up comfortably overlevelled. Judging by what I’ve seen of the fanbase I think there are actually a large number of people out there who care about builds and loadouts and all that shite … I’m sorry, my interest in combat is solely because it gives me new clothes for my character to wear.

On that note, the boys!

I’ve really enjoyed learning about Japanese history from this game, bearing in mind that a lot of the events are clearly heavily fictionalised. I think I would feel much less comfortable about doing so if the game hadn’t been made by a Japanese studio, given the subject matter. On a similar note, I appreciate how the game very anachronistically [as far as English goes] has everyone refer to the player-made characters as “they” at all times. The character creator does operate on the basis of a gender binary, but once you get into the game itself, this is irrelevant (including in terms of the romance options). The tiny amount of fanfiction I’ve seen seems to categorise the player characters as “male blade twin” and “female blade twin”, but I’m more inclined to stick with what the game itself does and just have everyone blithely theythem these characters (as well as not name them. There’s a point in the game where someone asks the protagonist their name and they straight up refuse to give it … my kind of shit).

The transformative fandom for this game is, as far as I can tell, effectively nonexistent. A handful of people posted enthusiastically about the game (mostly about Ryoma, which is valid) on tumblr in like April, the number of instances of fanfiction in the largest multifandom fic repository is in the single digits … there’s a discord for the game with nearly 300 members, but its sole concession to the idea that people might have what we could call a traditionally fannish approach to it is a channel called #fanart … which is … wait for it … Empty. There’s some good art on pixiv though! I didn’t think I was going to write fic, because, as discussed, I was just in it for screenshots of my lads, but as soon as I beat the game the other night I started writing two things … this is the fault of a. hot sword ladies and b. the post-credits scene fucking me up.

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