Rise of the Ronin beginner’s guide: 7 best tips and tricks you need to know

The longer you can survive in Rise of the Ronin, the better your chances at beating bosses and ultimately seeing the ending. This is why you need our best Rise of the Ronin tips to keep you alive.

Rise of the Ronin is a Team Ninja game, so you already know it’s going to be hard. The character creation setup is one of the rare moments of serenity you’ll experience as many of your hours will be spent locking horns with skilled warriors.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve played a Team Ninja title before, these top tips are important snippets of advice that will guide you on the right path to becoming a renowned ronin.

7 best Rise of the Ronin tips to get you started

1) Acquire more Medicinal Items

Like Wo Long‘s Dragon Cure Pots or Estus Flasks in Dark Souls, you’re allowed a limited amount of Medicinal items in your inventory—although Rise of the Ronin generously gives you two different types of healing.

Medicinal Pills, of which you can store up to 10 in your inventory, can “restore a little health and all your depleted Ki,” whereas Healing Elixirs completely refill your health and Ki—although you can only carry three of them with no room to upgrade the capacity.

The key thing to note is you won’t have 10 Medicinal Pills on your person from the get-go, so you’ll need to know how to get and upgrade Medicinal Pills in Rise of the Ronin.

2) Level up Speechcraft stats to increase relationships quicker

As part of Rise of the Ronin‘s exhaustive collection of skills, you can upgrade your Speechcraft across three of the four main characteristic skill upgrades: Strength, Charm, and Intellect. Certain slots in these trees allow you to become proficient in Intimidate, Liar, and Persuade.

Along with giving you additional dialogue choices in conversations, these extra options offer different ways of handling situations, like avoiding combat. Additionally, picking a Speechcraft dialog option will increase your Relationships and Bonds quicker.

Doing this will make an ally stronger, bolstering their physical capabilities, and you can even romance them if things move smoothly enough.

3) Parry, parry, parry

You can finish Rise of the Ronin without being adept at parrying, but I strongly recommend you persist and nail it down as best as you can. Dodging will only get you so far—with limited Ki and enemies capable of long combos, you’ll have a much easier time if you get good at parrying.

Spend the early hours of Rise of the Ronin studying how enemies attack, really understand how combat works, and even resist the urge to attack at times so you can better practice your parrying skills. If you do this, you’ll be able to deflect damaging attacks more regularly, and you’ll increase enemies’ stagger, leaving them open for you to deliver hugely damaging critical hit strikes.

4) Don’t be afraid to use your Sub-Weapons

I’m a huge advocate of using Sub-Weapons in Rise of the Ronin as ammo is fairly plentiful, and these weapons can deal eye-watering damage numbers. They can one-shot many fodder enemies, and inflict serious pain on a boss, possibly staggering them in the process. Sub-Weapons can even finish off bosses on their last legs.

There are multiple types of Sub-Weapons you can acquire, from Revolvers to Bows, and I’ve even handpicked the best Sub-Weapons in Rise of the Ronin that I highly recommend you utilize—with justification for each.

5) Go out of your way to unlock combat styles

One of the biggest aspects of Rise of the Ronin‘s combat is using combat styles to exploit an opponent’s weakness. Each weapon can have up to three unique combat styles equipped, and they will serve you well: Chi, Jin, and Ten.

When you first start Ronin, though, you will only have one unlocked per weapon. So, check your currently equipped weapon, analyze its combat styles, and do what you can to expedite the unlock process to access the remaining styles. You may need to increase a certain Bond, or the RPG may task you with eliminating a certain target.

After you finally have one of each combat style, you won’t need to rely on switching to your allies as much during combat, and you can switch up your style on the fly to deal the most damage to an enemy or boss.

6) Remedies and Whetstones

As your inventory and skills grow, so will your penchant for being adaptable and varied as you wage war with yet more Samurais. Along with Sub-Weapons and combat styles, it’s imperative you don’t overlook the importance of Remedies and Whetstones.

Firstly, the “Craft Bolstering Medicine” and “Craft Status Ailment Items” skills—found under the Intellect Stats tab—are a must so you don’t have to waste too much money on buying them from traders.

Secondly, their significance is massive. Different Remedies can increase damage, Ki damage, or Ki recovery speed, while using Whetstones will add elemental damage to your chosen weapon. Some of the benefits include temporarily inflicting an ailment, hurting or immobilizing an opponent, making them take more damage overall, and increasing their Ki loss—opening them up for a critical hit.

7) Failure is a feature

Souls games are one of the few genres that pretty much encourage dying. Rise of the Ronin is a Soulslike at the end of the day, and unless you change the difficulty settings to the easiest setting, death is sure to be a frequent occurrence.

Once you accept that death is as regular as clockwork in Ronin, it becomes more enjoyable. Unless you have the power of clairvoyance and somehow know a boss’s moveset before you even face them, they will inevitably crush you the first couple of times and more. Adapt, bosses will perish, and you will inevitably overcome the challenge. Take it from someone who died a lot from beginning to end.