Rise of the Ronin – our 9 tips and tricks to get ahead

Jumping into your grand adventure through Japan? Our Rise of the Ronin tips and tricks will be invaluable to you and help you get ahead in this tough game.

Whether you want to know the best way to deal with your hoards of gear, how to unlock more skills or some general gameplay tips, we’ve got you covered.

With Rise of the Ronin out in the wild, make sure you read our guides covering the best skills to unlock and our primer on each skill tree. Now, these are our Rise of the Ronin tips and tricks.

Disassemble your gear, never sell

In Rise of the Ronin, you have access to Blacksmith shops that will sell and buy equipment and offer a service to disassemble any gear you have for more resources. Throughout the whole game, you should never, ever consider buying gear or selling any of your equipment for money unless you are in extreme need of a quick bit of cash. Instead, you should always disassemble any unwanted gear for upgrade materials.

Giving the Blacksmith your unused weapons, armour, and accessories via the Disassemble option is always the best choice. Based on an item’s rarity, you can get several upgrade materials that will be more useful to you than money. While upgrading isn’t necessary until much later, it’s better to have these materials sooner. Make sure you don’t get rid of all your weapons, though. During our playthrough, we kept one of the strongest of each weapon type we had, giving us the freedom to change things up if we wanted.

Save your Silver Coins for later

Silver Coins let you buy special items in Rise of the Ronin, most of which you will eventually find in the world anyway. The more you progress, the more you will notice you need them in special shops. We highly recommend you save them in the early game and try not to think of them until later on.

As you defeat fugitives and collect cats, you can spend your Silver Coins in shops that let you buy Skill-Point books and other things, but you will accrue enough of them naturally that they are just happy bonuses if you want to spare a few. The Black Market trader also deals in Silver Coins, but his wares are seldom worth it.

Don’t feel the need to do everything

It might be obvious, but this is a crucial point to staying sane in Rise of the Ronin. As we mentioned in our review, even with half of the available content in the game there would still be too much to do. This is a good rule of thumb for any open-world game, and you should always pace yourself to avoid burnout.

Rise of the Ronin has so much to do, but you will eventually leave regions behind to go to brand-new ones. When you do, you will have the option to return to previous areas, so it is impossible to miss anything. You don’t need to bother doing every single Bond mission, either, and we won’t blame you for wanting to skip them.

Don’t forget about Inventions and Foreign Books

During Rise of the Ronin, you will meet a Bond character who will tinker with inventions. To use this system, you will need Foreign Books. The more Foreign Books you possess, the more upgrades you can get, so long as you have the money for each upgrade. Unlocking skills at the Inventor is a great way to get more passive bonuses.

For example, this is how you can decrease Ki consumption while gliding and unlock other useful abilities like this. The Inventory can be easy to forget and you need to discover them on the map first, but this is where you should take all your Foreign Books.

Weapon and armour enhancement is kind of pointless, to begin with

Since the game throws so much loot at you, investing in one piece of low-level gear is never a good idea. Let’s say you upgrade your armour by two levels, you can almost guarantee that you will find something better from the next chest you open or quest you clear. You can also guarantee that you will find something better than the one you just picked up, and on and on it goes. To this end, save your weapon and armour enhancement materials for much, much later in the game.

✓ Jack’s opinion

Save the materials for later

Once you get to the mid to late game, you can start enhancing some of your favourite gear. We only recommend doing this for gear that has a gold rarity.

Practice your Countersparks by blocking first

Some of you aren’t about the parrying life, and that’s totally fine. However, depending on the difficulty you choose, you might have to become a bit better at timing your Countersparks. Generally, enemies in the early game won’t string together many combos so you can use this for practice.

Later in the game, successful Countersparks require you to deflect the final attack in a chain to send enemies reeling. Naturally, deflecting every hit like a champ will greatly damage your enemy’s Ki bar. But, you can also just block the attacks and wait to counterspark the final hit in a combo. Blocking is fairly powerful in Rise of the Ronin, so don’t be afraid to hide behind your block – just make sure you manage your Ki accordingly.

Spend your skill points equally.

There are types of builds in Rise of the Ronin, but the game rewards you for not focusing on one skill tree. There are four to pick during the main story; Strength, Dex, Intellect, and Charm. Investing skill points in each tree will increase the damage you deal with weapons that scale with those stats. However, the increase isn’t the be-all or end-all. We pretty much took a look at all the trees and decided on the best skills from each one to aim for and spread our points out liberally.

As we made progress through the game, this playstyle was rewarded and we never encountered any problems for doing so. Picking one tree to focus on seems like it would limit you too much, so spend skills points around and take your time to see what works. Besides, you can always respec later.

Change Your armour and weapons Regularly

Since this is a Team Ninja game, you can expect it to throw a lot of loot at you. There are so many different variations on armour and weapons, to the point of being completely overwhelming and sometimes infuriating. Armour, weapons, and accessories will be dropped by enemies and found as treasures over and over, most of which will be the same gear with a small change. 

Unfortunately for your fashion dreams, your style will suffer and you will be wearing some ugly stuff most of the game. At least you will never wear one piece of gear for very long unless you glamour it. This will require a lot of tedious inventory management, but if you’ve left your armour unchanged for a while, you might notice a difference in survivability. This is also the case for weapons, you should try out every weapon type since each one is viable and not one of them is ‘meta’. There is tons of variety in Rise of the Ronin’s combat, so make use of it.

Stock up on extra healing by crafting Healing Elixirs

The Healing Elixir is a consumable item in Rise of the Ronin that is separate from your normal healing method. Typically, you have a restockable resource called Medicinal Pill that you use to restore your HP. The Healing Elixir is another such item, but it will let you have more healing early in the game until you unlock more slots for Medicinal Pills.

You can craft items at Apothecaries and other vendors. In here, you should always make a bunch of Healing Elixir to give you more healing in tough spots. You can only hold three at a time, but they will restore HP and fully refill your depleted Ki gauge. The best part is they only require two very easy-to-find ingredients, so make sure you stock up on extra healing

That’s it for our Rise of the Ronin tips and tricks. For more, read our guides covering the best Ally companions to take on missions and how to respec your spent skill points.

Rise of the Ronin – beginner tips and tricks FAQs

Is Rise of the Ronin difficult?

It can be, but you can change the difficulty options whenever you like and there is no punishment for doing so.

What is the best weapon type to use in Rise of the Ronin?

There are so many and none are considered the best. For raw damage, Greatswords and Odachis are good, but every weapon is viable.