Sony has now made a new statement about Rise of the Ronin’s Korean release.
As reported by Insider Gaming, Sony shared this statement to IGN when asked about the situation:
“Rise of the Ronin for PlayStation 5 was never officially announced for release in Korea.”
When we initially reported on this issue, it was noted that the title was available for pre-order in the country, and those pre-orders were cancelled. Insider Gaming also noted that Sony clearly had marketing and promotion for the title for Koreans, including a post in the Korean PlayStation Blog. The title also has Korean language support.
So Sony’s statement doesn’t seem to be factually correct, but they may have used this language for a reason.
As we had noted then, the game suddenly garnered a lot of controversy when one of Team Ninja’s developers made mention of a historical figure as inspiration. A certain Shoin Yoshida was an important figure in Japan’s history, but was also a controversial figure in Korea, for having advocated that Japan needed to control Korea.
Team Ninja should have known that they were entering touchy territory when making this game, but perhaps their focus was on making a Japanese title that would be regarded as foreign in the West, where they expect most of the game’s sales will come from.
While that’s true, they should have also been more mindful that this would be an international release, as Sony itself has spread their reach around the world. It may not be only Korea that finds things in the game that are offensive, given the direct historical context it is based on.
To put that in hard contrast, Team Ninja’s title about Chinese historical figures, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, placed itself in a setting distant from China’s modern day politics, even by association. It’s also notable that Wo Long does not claim to or try to depict historical events as they happened, but took inspiration from the mythical retellings of those stories, and makes their own supernatural spin on them in their story.
So it’s not like Team Ninja couldn’t have known to avoid this topic. Perhaps the reason they went ahead with this, even talking about this in promotion, is because they really wanted to tell the story in spite of the potential controversy.
As we had noted before, Sony is also partly to blame for not keeping better check on their own marketing materials. But perhaps, on a deeper level, Sony should have raised more questions about the project itself, and if it really was something that Sony should be publishing in the first place.
Rise of the Ronin will be released on March 22, 2024, exclusively on PlayStation 5.
