It took a while, but Team Ninja finally released a Rise of the Ronin demo for PS5, four months after the open-world game launched to middling success. The Rise of the Ronin demo is available now, and it lets you play a decent portion of the samurai adventure’s opening segment, with the option to transfer your save data if you decide to purchase the full game.
Rise of the Ronin’s first chapter ends with a battle against Gonzo – an enemy samurai, not the Muppet – and your choices in that battle determine how some events unfold later in the story. Team Ninja didn’t do the best job communicating what kind of game Rise of the Ronin is, but your relationships with other characters form an important part of it. You can even recruit Gonzo to your cause later, if you play your cards right.
The studio also shared some player stats and an overview of how folks have behaved – or not, as the case may be – in the game in a new PlayStation Blog post. 35 percent of people killed Gonzo outright, and 62 percent sided with the shogunate, a number that surprised Ronin producer Fumihiko Yasuda. Only 42 percent reached the fourth bond level in their relationships with other characters, and most Ronin are apparently lacking a bit of rizz. Only 30 percent started romances in their playthroughs.
Other nifty bits of data include players using nearly 2 million counter attacks and only 13 percent of people collecting all 100 cats to get the cat collector trophy. Please, the kitties need you.
In our Rise of the Ronin review, we called it a unique experience with surprising depth, even if it doesn’t reach the same technical heights as other modern games - the perfect kind of game to try for free, in other words. There's no time limit on the demo, and it's open to non PS Plus subscribers as well.
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