Changelog
Way of the Ronin is a live, growing build — new things land often. Here's what's changed, newest first, in plain terms. Small fixes and tweaks are left out; these are the changes you'll actually feel while you play.
2026 · August 3
Two Ears, Level Eyes.
Two faults you could see on any portrait, both ours rather than the artwork's. Some heads were wearing a second ear — a faint outline of a different person's ear, carried along inside the hairstyle and stamped beside your own. And on a number of men one eye sat a little higher than the other, with the eyebrow leaning to match, which read as a permanent quizzical squint. The eyes turned out to be arithmetic: a measurement was being rounded off three times over, and half a pixel of it grew into two.
- One ear per side — the borrowed ear outlines are stripped out of every hairstyle that carried them.
- Eyes and brows sit level — 81 affected faces corrected, with no change to the drawings themselves.
- Nothing trimmed by mistake — every hairstyle was checked against its previous version; one long fall that had been cut short is back to full length.
2026 · August 2
The Horns Are Gone. All of Them.
Last week's notes said the paired peaks rising from the sides of a head were fixed. They weren't — they were still there on roughly a quarter of the cast, and they were our fault rather than the artwork's. When a hairstyle drawn for one skull was fitted to another, the renderer trimmed the hair along the new skull's exact outline; where that outline dips at the temples, the trim cut straight through the hair joining the crown to the side falls and left the outer piece stranded. That stranded piece was the horn. It now trims along a smoothed line that cannot dip between the two, so the hair stays one mass on every head in the game.
- Every hairstyle, every face — all 534 combinations of haircut and head were checked one by one, on every bloodline background and every hair colour, including white and grey.
- Nothing lost in the fixing — no crown sliced flat, no topknot shaved off; the heaviest change to any portrait's hair is under four percent.
- Topknots read as topknots — the flat grey block that could sit on a shaved head is gone, on the warrior's corded knot and the ordinary chonmage alike.
- The wild mane looks wild, not spiked — the mountain-folk hair falls heavy instead of standing in points.
- A stray pale patch above the ear — parchment from the source drawing was being kept as if it were hair. It isn't any more.
2026 · August 1
A Face That Tells the Truth.
A long pass over the ancestry portraits and the traits they're meant to show. Two traits were not reaching the face at all: an albino's skin came out ordinary, and a sickly character looked identical to a healthy one — the portrait was quietly resolving conflicting traits in alphabetical order, and the wrong one kept winning. Beards no longer end in a hard horizontal line across the chin, several hairstyles have stopped growing points at the temples, and collars are back to the colour the cloth was actually painted.
- Traits named in plain English — Albino, Red-Haired and Odd-Eyed, instead of their romanised Japanese names.
- Albino and sickly finally show — pale skin for one, a wan pallor for the other, on both your own line and the children born into it.
- Beards sit on the jaw — no gap between chin and beard, and no flat cut across the bottom of one.
- No more horns — the paired peaks that could rise from the sides of a head are gone from every hairstyle but a deliberately shaggy one.
- Collars left undyed — a portrait's robe keeps its own colour and its own folds rather than being tinted by house.
2026 · July 31
The Duel, Rewritten.
A duel used to be a slow exchange in which the blade did the deciding: you held a line, hoped it turned the cut, and stood still for the better part of a second while your fighter recovered. It is a fight now. It moves at nearly twice the pace, and every exchange asks you a question.
- The parry is yours, not the dice's — a correct guard no longer might turn a blade. Snap your guard onto the falling cut at the last moment and you parry it, and the opening is yours. Plant it early and you merely block: safe, but it costs you, and it wins you nothing.
- Land a cut and press on — a blow that connects lets you flow straight into the next. A blow that finds only air leaves you wide open, exactly as it should.
- The backstep, and the step around — hop back through a cut and it whiffs. Or step around them instead, and leave them turning while you strike.
- The heavy cut — a slow, telegraphed blow that no guard answers at all. Turtling behind a raised sword is no longer a plan.
- You can see it coming — the line a fighter is winding up now shows above them, with a bar counting down to the cut. Read it and time your guard.
- Blows land like blows — the world stops dead for a few frames on contact, hardest of all on a killing stroke.
- A duel HUD built for a phone — the controls sit in two inked rails either side of the fight instead of sprawling off the bottom of the screen, every button is labelled in plain words as well as kanji, and the whole thing holds together from a small handset up to a desktop monitor.
- The bout waits for you — opening the rules mid-fight now pauses it, rather than letting someone cut you down while you read.
2026 · July 31
A Ronin You Are Dealt.
You no longer pick your traits or spend points at creation. Your founder is dealt to you — rolled, flaws and gifts together — and you make something of whoever turns up. What you still choose is who they are rather than how strong they are: their origin, their name and bearing, their face, and the crest their house will fly. And since there is no optimal opening any more, the screen's job changed: it now tells you plainly who you turned out to be.
- Menus rebuilt as a house register — your family, your character sheets, the ledgers and every other panel are now drawn as brushed paper and sealed entries rather than boxes on a screen.
- Nothing runs off the edge on Android — text and cards no longer disappear past the sides of a phone with a notch or a curved screen.
- No more flashing artwork — scenes and minigames used to open on rough placeholder drawings for an instant before the real art snapped in. They now wait until they're ready. Timers no longer start behind the loading screen either, so you can't lose a minigame you haven't seen yet.
- Read them before you commit — adopting an heir, swearing a retainer, or arranging a betrothal now shows that person's full character sheet first.
- Children walk — they used to fall back to a rough placeholder figure the moment they moved. They have proper walking art now, as does everyone else facing the right way.
- Cleaner sheets — developer readouts are gone from the game, and stats show what a character is rather than what they might one day become. Bloodline percentages stay.
- A handful of quiet fixes with real teeth: your gear, mount and food buffs now count on every roll that claimed them, and rests and wagers can no longer be refunded by reloading.
2026 · July 31
Every Crown Sits Right.
The last of the portrait hair defects: a squared-off block of hair could float above a character's head — flat top, dead-straight sides — and on some faces the bald mannequin underneath peeked through the crown. The cause was hairstyles drawn on one skull being worn by another; every composited portrait now re-drapes its hair onto the actual head it is drawn on.
- No more floating blocks — clipped hair slabs are rounded onto the skull, on every face shape, age and style.
- No more see-through crowns — gaps between strands at the top of the head are filled with real hair from the source art.
- Bald heads are truly bald — leftover topknot stumps baked into several head models are gone, and the tall flat-topped skulls are properly domed.
2026 · July 30
Portraits, Scrubbed Clean.
A whole cleanup pass over the ancestry portraits' source art. Several garments were never actually painted under their ink outlines — on the panel's dark paper they showed as floating wires where shoulders should be, one woman's chest was a ragged black hole, and every bust ended in a comb of bright teeth along its bottom edge. All of it is repaired: garments are solid cloth, hems end clean, and the speckled, scabby-looking faces have been re-warmed to healthy skin.
- No more wire shoulders — unpainted garments are filled in as real cloth on every affected portrait.
- Mouths redrawn — the hard black-bar mouths (and two broken noses) were regenerated from better art.
- Clean faces — grey speckling on cheeks, foreheads and chests is gone across the whole portrait pool.
2026 · July 30
Seamless Heads of Hair.
A deep repair of how hairstyles are cut from their painted plates. The cutter was mistaking real hair for leftover mannequin lines wherever the two overlapped, and whole pieces of every style quietly went missing — the pale arc of scalp that could trace a skull through dark hair is gone, long falls now reach the chest instead of stopping at a razor-straight line, the forward-draped tails and cord-wrapped queues keep their full length, and the wild mountain mane got a complete redraw that finally fits inside its own portrait.
- No more scalp through the hair — crowns are solid on every skull, every style, every age.
- Full-length styles — falls, tails and braids run their whole intended length; nothing ends in a hard horizontal cut.
- One elder, redrawn — a grey-green elder face that read as mottled has been repainted warm and clean.
2026 · July 30
Every Face, True to Its Skull.
The inherited family portraits got a hard polish pass. Hair now fits the head it grows from — a style drawn on one skull rescales to the rounder, taller or broader skull that actually wears it, so no more bare scalp peeking over a crown, no skin-coloured bands through the hair, and no stray strands floating under a jaw. Beautiful characters keep their striking looks across every hairstyle and every age.
- Cleaner hairlines everywhere — leftover fragments of the art's donor faces (double chin lines, ghost ears, collar seams) are gone from every composited portrait.
- Consistent black — every head of hair shades from the same ink, so siblings no longer drift between blue-black and brown from one style to the next.
- The ghost behind the face is gone — a faint second head outline (misplaced ears, an offset crown, a thin beard-like line along a woman's jaw) could show through on beautiful characters wearing hair drawn for another skull. Every style's cut has been re-milled to carry hair and nothing else, and the crown now closes with true hair colour instead of a skin-toned band.
2026 · July 30
Long Hair, at Last.
Family portraits had a quiet flaw: every hairstyle was cut off just below the ears, so "very long hair falling loose down the back" composited as a neat bob. The cut now runs to collar depth, and nearly half the hair that was always painted finally shows — court falls, wild manes and the northern braid all read properly long.
- Three new styles for the women of a house — the court fall drawn forward over one shoulder, hair bound at the nape with a white paper cord and swung forward, and a low tail wrapped along its length in cord.
- Bloodlines wear their hair — once a line's blood runs strong enough, its women and men draw from the styles their station favours: court houses in long falls, sword schools in plain ties, farm and mountain stock in working bound tails.
2026 · July 28
Every Scene, Repainted.
The world of Ronin was always painted — its villages, its roads, its lantern-lit rooms. The moments in between were not. Sit down to a cup of tea, walk a river bank at dusk, kneel under a waterfall, take a stall's dice: all of it was drawn in flat colour. Not any more.
- Painted settings everywhere — a tea house warm with shoji light, a river at dusk, a gold-screened audience hall, a misty bamboo grove, a lantern-lit gambling den, a storehouse yard under an amber sunset. Twenty-seven new backdrops in all.
- The people are the people — every scene now shows the real character, at real size. Speak with a physician and you see a physician; sit before the Emperor and it is the man himself on his dais, with his court arrayed in two rival blocs.
- Twelve places to draw steel — duels were fought in one of three settings. Now the ground fits the fight: a town street by day and a lantern-lit one after dark, a river ford, a castle courtyard, deep forest, a mountain pass, the shore, flooded rice paddies, a shrine approach under cedars.
- The bamboo drill, properly — a real grove, and stalks that are cut where your blade falls: a standing stump, a severed top toppling away, a pale cut face where the steel went through.
- Takigyō — the breath drill now sits you in the pool beneath a waterfall that actually falls, spray bursting off your hat, a stone lantern and a torii on the banks.
- Readable at a glance — rapport, patience, suspicion and the rest now sit on brushed ink plaques with a vermillion seal, so a meter never disappears into a bright sky again.
2026 · July 28
Slip In Unseen.
An assassination no longer turns on a single held breath in a courtyard. Take a contract now and you walk the mark's own castle — and every hall of it is different.
- A castle built fresh each time — branching corridors, side rooms, dead ends and more than one way inward. Three times the ground of any house in the game, and never the same twice.
- Guards who are actually looking — patrols walk their beats and sentries sweep the approaches, each with a cone of sight you can see. Step into one and suspicion climbs; break their line of sight and it fades.
- Reach the lord unseen — the lanterns light your way and give you away in the same breath. Get to him quietly and he never wakes. Rouse the watch and he is up, armed, and waiting.
2026 · July 28
A Shadow on the Road.
Caravan escort work has been rebuilt from scratch. Both road jobs — guarding a merchant train and commanding a lord's escort — now play out as a days-long duel of nerve with a single bandit band that shadows your caravan the whole way.
- A band that hunts you — one band follows your train from the first morning. You can see them on the horizon, creeping closer as they grow bold; keep them at bay or they will strike, and they remember every man they lose to you.
- A road you can plan — the whole route is drawn up front, with forks: a mountain shortcut that saves a day but feeds their nerve, a walled post-station no band will near.
- Orders, every day — march watchful, push the pace, rest your worn men, send scouts to count their fires, or take the night to their camp in a sortie: break them, retake plundered cargo — or come back bloodied and bolder-looking prey.
- Two roads to a triumph — outrun them and deliver everything early, or break the band and hand your patron a cleared road. Pay scales with either.
2026 · July 26
Forge Your Ronin.
Character creation grew from a name and a handful of points into a real beginning — and the world around it got faster and more solid.
- Choose your origin — begin as a Fallen Retainer, a Wandering Duelist, a Peasant-Born, a Merchant's Son, a Temple Novice, a Disgraced Samurai, or a Nameless Rōnin. Each shapes your starting talents, a trait, your coin and gear, and your standing — a different road from the first step.
- Pick your face and your crest — choose your ronin's portrait and the family crest (kamon) your house will fly, or leave either to fate. Your face now appears on your household sheet, and your crest flies on the HUD.
- A character sheet as you build — a live preview shows your ronin taking shape: their face, stats, traits, crest, and exactly what they'll start the game holding.
- Randomized names for everyone — a much larger pool of period names, and female characters now get proper female names that follow your chosen bearing.
- The world map loads in a beat — returning to the overworld from a town or a battle is now near-instant instead of a long wait, with a clear loading screen that shows what it's preparing.
- Castle walls that mean something — the ramparts around castle towns and the capital now hold you in; you pass through the gate, which reads as a real opening you can see through.
- Bandits look like bandits — road and quest outlaws now wear their own rough look, on the map and in the duel.
2026 · July 24
The Village Overhaul.
Towns are the heart of the game, and they've been rebuilt from the ground up. The old flat, top-down streets are gone. Every settlement now sits under a gently tilted camera with real depth — buildings stand up off the ground, cast their shadows, and recede into the distance the way a place you could walk into really would.
- A tilted, closer view — towns are drawn in a warm, painterly perspective with real depth, and the camera sits nearer and more immersive than before.
- Everything sits on the ground — contact shadows and long, directional cast shadows ground every building, tree, sign, and person, so the whole town reads as one lit scene.
- Softer, lived-in streets — roads meet the grass with worn, meandering edges instead of hard lines, with packed-earth crossroads, courtyards, and forecourts around the bigger buildings.
- Light that moves through the day — windows, lanterns, and the smith's forge glow through dusk and night; drifting cloud shadows and soft ground fog give noon and evening their own moods.
- Towns that feel alive — chimney smoke, market stalls with wares out, crates and yard clutter, wandering animals (a cat naps on the inn's step, a dog rests by the stable), and faction banners flying overhead.
- Places with their own character — farming hamlets with rice-drying racks and a scarecrow, shrine towns with a torii approach and a purification basin, market rows, post-road milestones, and castle guardposts.
- Real fishing villages — coastal towns now sit on an actual shoreline, with beached boats, drying nets, a pier, sea and sand, and gulls overhead. The sea has depth, a smooth sweeping coastline, textured sand, and gentle drifting swell and lapping foam.
- Sharper landmarks — the big buildings — manors, inns, taverns, dojos — were re-rendered at higher detail so they stay crisp up close next to the crowd.
- Towns laid out like real towns — buildings line the streets in neighborhoods and rows facing the road, instead of scattered at random; lanes branch off the main crossroads and every street is one people would actually use.
- Gates at the road out — each settlement is marked at its exits by a gate that fits its character: a torii for a shrine town, a fortified gatehouse for a castle town, a market arch, a post-road checkpoint, a harbor gate on the coast, a simple wooden gate for a hamlet.
- Plazas fit for their lord — the crossroads square grows with a settlement's standing: a humble earthen clearing in a village, a stone-flagged plaza at a lord's seat, and a grand formal court with a central medallion and stone lanterns at the Imperial capital.
- Walled seats of power — castle towns and the Imperial capital are now ringed by proper perimeter walls with towers and gatehouses, so a lord's seat reads as a stronghold, not just a bigger village.
- Streets and forecourts of stone — the approaches in front of buildings are paved to match their street: laid flagstone with kerbed borders in castle towns and the capital, and worn packed earth in the smaller towns.
- Streets full of life — with towns laid out in tidy neighborhoods there's room to dress them, and each kind of town now fills its open ground with fitting detail: flower beds, potted plants, morning-glory trellises, hydrangea and chrysanthemum; sake barrels, firewood stacks, benches and handcarts; market sacks and hanging wares; guardian lion statues and offering boxes at the shrines; drying straw, ox-carts and plows in the farms; crab-pots and net floats on the coast; and a noble's palanquin or a carved stone monument in the grand towns.
- Room for the shrine's gate — village shrines now sit further back from the road, so their vermillion torii arch stands clear on its own approach.
2026 · July 23
A Living Road, and a Longer Song.
The world between towns stopped being empty. Travelers now make real journeys from settlement to settlement, and the soundtrack grew up to match.
- Real travelers on the highway — samurai patrols riding out from castle towns, monks bound for shrines, merchant caravans with guards and pack horses, and peasants on the road — all moving from place to place on their own schedules, not just spawning around you.
- Rob a caravan, wear the consequences — stop a trade caravan and you can raid it, if you'll answer for it once word gets around; the ones you deal with stay dealt with.
- Bandits with room to run — outlaws lurk off the road near towns and give chase into a real duel — never close enough to ambush you at the gate.
- Longer, richer themes — the town and overworld music was rewritten into full six-minute pieces led by koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, and taiko, each region and season with its own mood, so it no longer loops back on itself so soon.
- Smoother coastlines — a hitch that made the game stutter near water is gone; the coast holds a steady framerate now, even on phones.
- Fresh downloadable builds — the Android and Windows versions were rebuilt with all of the above.
2026 · July 21
A Smoother World, Now on Your Desktop.
A big performance and packaging push: the overworld got far smoother, and the game became something you can install, not just open in a tab.
- A smoother overworld — crossing the map no longer stutters as you move, water and mountains included. It's the single biggest feel improvement to travel.
- Native downloads — playable builds for Android and Windows, alongside the browser version.
- A proper title screen and saves — the downloadable versions open to a real main menu with Continue, New Game, and Exit, plus ten manual save slots and automatic saves so you can keep more than one story going.
- A real soundtrack — an original score fades in and out as you move between the map, towns, interiors, and fights, with a music toggle and volume in Settings.
2026 · July 20
The Overworld, Repainted.
The map you travel got the same detailed-pixel-art treatment the towns had — warm, painterly country you cross on foot.
- A hand-painted map — grass, forests, rivers, and sea all redrawn, turning through the seasons from cherry blossoms to snow.
- Mountains that recede — ranges built in layered, hazy peaks that read as real distance instead of stamped copies.
- Landmarks at a glance — hamlets, towns, castle towns, and the capital each have their own look on the map, with faction banners and name plates.
- Wildlife in the wild — wolves, boar, and bears roam the open country, and pack horses and travelers move along the roads.
2026 · July 19
Duels With Real Weight.
Swordplay was rebuilt to be readable, brutal, and consequential — and the world around it grew a conscience.
- Fully drawn fighters — every duelist is now an animated character with distinct poses for guard, strike, hit, and kneel, so a landed cut, a parry, and a miss are unmistakable.
- Mercy or the blade — beat an opponent in a lethal fight and you choose to spare them or take their head; a beaten foe may show you the same mercy — or not — weighed by both your reputations.
- Fights that don't have to be to the death — friendly and honor bouts are fought down to a yield, with the option to concede or flee, separate from a fight with steel.
- Children in the world, and kin who remember — children now walk the towns and can't be drawn on lightly; kill someone and their grown kin may swear a grudge and come for you.
- Clearer feedback — every success now shows the skill you gained, and scenes load behind a clean cover instead of popping in half-drawn.
2026 · July 17
A Whole Life to Live.
An earlier milestone worth remembering: the systems that fill the days between duels all came together, so a ronin's life is more than the sword.
- The tavern — a hub to drink, take work off a mercenary board, and gamble at chō-han dice or a game of gomoku.
- The shinobi's path — a track from recruitment through assassination contracts, rising in rank and gaining the tools that go with it.
- A home of your own — buy a plot, build it up in tiers, and walk your estate with your family; it passes to your heirs.
- Rest and reckoning — inns in every village to rest and skip ahead, and a jail cell instead of an execution when the law catches a wanted ronin.
- Hands-on, not dice-rolled — training, invitations, and challenges play out as real minigames rather than a hidden roll behind a menu.