Should you spare or kill Gonzo in Rise of the Ronin?

Mar. 21, 2024

There’s two choices regarding Gonzo - where you can kill him or let him live.

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The Rise of the Ronin kill or spare Gonzo choice in The Bridge to Yokohama is the game’s first big moment where your actions have consequences, given the chance to spare or kill the Bandit Leader who stole the permits into the city (among other things). When the choice is offered to you, there’s no clear sense of what the consequences might be - will Gonzo turn on you? Is there a reward? Will sparing the life of a bandit chief come back to bite you?

Well, there’s a mix of consequences - I’ve actually used a reloaded save to play both paths and map out the results of either sparing or killing Gonzo, so you know what will happen either way and what the better choice is - as well as the second time you’ll be given the choice. Read on for more details regarding the first major choice of Rise of the Ronin: should you kill or spare Gonzo?

Is it better to spare or kill Gonzo in Rise of the Ronin?

Is it better to spare or kill Gonzo in Rise of the Ronin?

Having played both options, I can say firmly thatit’s better to spare Gonzo rather than kill him.We’ll go into more details below, but here’s the spoiler-free version: if you spare Gonzo, you get more rewards than if you kill him, it just takes longer to get them - a matter of deferred gratification. If you kill him, you immediately get some rewards, but your overall prize is less than if you let him live and just wait for events to unfold.

If you spare Gonzo, he runs off, thankful for the chance, and you immediately get the following (rather unremarkable) rewards.

Rise of the Ronin tipsRise of the Ronin fast travelBest Rise of the Ronin classesRise of the Ronin KarmaRise of the Ronin Silver Coins

You’ll still get the Permit into Yokohama even if you let him live, don’t worry - that’s kept in the Storehouse, and you get into there no matter what you choose.

However, later on after progressing through the story and completing a quest in the Pleasure District, an optional mission will appear calledThe Bad Bunchin the region of Yoshida-Shinden (Southwest of Yokohama), where an NPC asks you to help take out a crook who cheated them out of money.That crook turns out to be Gonzo - and you get the same choice again; to kill him, or let him live?

If you kill him, you unlock the Jigen-Ryu stance for Nodachi weapons, one of theRise of the Ronin Combat Styles, as well as another Oban and some equipment and Longhouse gear from your quest giver. But if you let him live again, you and Gonzo work together to kill the quest-giver and his cronies, the “Suspicious Looking Men” - and then get the exact same reward you would’ve got for killing Gonzo anyway. Plus, at this point,Gonzo becomes a permanent ally!He joins your team and can be called in for missions.

This is where the delayed gratification comes in - if you spend time building your bond with Gonzo, you’ll get theJigen-Ryu combat style and Bandit Chief’s Odachi. You can get both of those things by killing him, but obviously you’ll never get the chance to have him as an ally.

If you kill Gonzo the first time you encounter him, youimmediatelyget the following rewards:

However, of all these things,only the Merciless title is unique to this path, and it’s far less good than having a full-fledged ally - which you can’t get if you kill Gonzo. If you kill him here, you also still get to do The Bad Bunch mission, but in this timeline Gonzo is replaced by a nameless NPC goon that you can’t work with.

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Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and raconteur with a Masters from Sussex University, none of which has actually equipped him for anything in real life. As a result he chooses to spend most of his time playing video games, reading old books and ingesting chemically-risky levels of caffeine. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at USgamer, Gfinity, Eurogamer and more besides.

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