Rise of the Ronin Slips Onto PS Plus, and It's Overdue

Rise of the Ronin arrived in 2024 with a tricky problem: it was a big, ambitious samurai game from a respected studio, and it launched into a year already crowded with big, ambitious games. Plenty of players filed it under “later” and never circled back. The July PlayStation Plus Game Catalog fixes that. Team Ninja’s open-world action RPG is now the month’s headline addition for Extra and Premium subscribers across the US, UK, and Japan, and for a lot of people this is the version of the game they were always going to play.

What you actually get

Rise of the Ronin is a combat-focused open-world action RPG set in 19th-century Japan, during the Bakumatsu period when the shogunate was collapsing and the country was tearing itself between tradition and the outside world. You play a nameless swordsman caught in that upheaval, free to side with different factions as the story unfolds. It is Team Ninja, so the combat carries the studio’s fingerprints, weighty, stance-based, and demanding in a way that rewards learning enemies rather than button-mashing.

As a PS5 console exclusive, it was also built to show off the hardware, with a large open map you traverse on foot, horseback, and with a glider. The scope is the selling point and, at launch, was also the sticking point. A sprawling open world invites comparison to the genre’s very best, and that is a high bar to clear.

Why PS Plus is the right home for it

This is the classic case for a subscription catalog. A game that is genuinely good but hard to prioritize at full price becomes an easy yes when it is already sitting in a library you pay for. You lose nothing by starting it, poking at the combat for a few hours, and deciding whether the open world and the faction system pull you in. That low-stakes trial is exactly what a game like this needed. Word of mouth on Rise of the Ronin was solid but not deafening, the kind of reputation that a wider, no-extra-cost audience tends to help rather than hurt.

It is also a strong anchor for the month’s catalog. The July lineup is a varied one, with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora arriving globally on July 21 and the acclaimed sci-fi RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector joining on July 28. But Frontiers of Pandora is a licensed adaptation and Citizen Sleeper 2 is a narrower, story-driven pick. Rise of the Ronin is the broad, meaty, do-a-lot-of-things game that tends to define whether a given month feels worth the subscription.

A note for newcomers

If you have never touched a Team Ninja game, go in with a little patience. The studio built its name on Nioh and Ninja Gaiden, series known for punishing players who treat combat as an afterthought. Rise of the Ronin is more approachable than those, with difficulty options and a broader open-world structure to soften the edges, but the fighting still expects you to engage with its systems. Once the parrying and stance-switching start to click, that is usually the moment the game hooks people.

The short version: if Rise of the Ronin has been on your someday list since 2024, someday is now, and it costs nothing beyond a subscription you may already hold. A war-torn open-world Japan with combat this deliberate does not come along every month, and this is the friendliest possible way to finally see it.