“I said my sword was a tool of justice,
Not used in anger, not used for vengeance.
But now… Now I’m not so sure.
Besides, this isn’t even my sword.”
Four years after the Guns of the Patriots incident. Despite the fall of the Patriot AI system, the war economy still thrives across the world and Private Military Companies (PMC) keep profiting off of proxy wars fought by Cybernetically enhanced soldiers, unaware of the true nature of the wars they fight.
Unable to follow his promise of staying with his family, Raiden now works at a peace-keeping PMC Maverick Securities trying to maintain his ideology of protecting the weak, no matter the cost or the methods required to do so. Operating in Africa, fending off against terrorist groups trying to overthrow a government, his team is suddenly attacked by Cyborg superhuman soldiers of a shadowy group called “Winds of Destruction”, who work for the PMC Desperado Enforcement LLC. The attack overwhelms Raiden and his team, leading to his brutal dismemberment at the hands of one of the Cyborgs, but several weeks later, he returns with a new cyborg body and a new wish upon those who threatened his career, Revenge.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a spinoff of the widely successful Metal Gear franchise which focuses more of Hack and Slash action than its stealth roots. After a rocky development which almost lead to the cancellation of the game, Rising was handed over to Platinum Games, which made the game rise from its ashes and into its current incarnation.
I mention Platinum Games because of how I think that most of this game’s virtues and striking style is attributed to a development studio with plenty of experience in making games that put focus on this very specific style of action gameplay, where speed and fluidity are given priority as well as the intensity and pure adrenaline that comes from the player having the ability to perform a wide variety from combos. dodge maneuvers, among others.
Metal Gear Rising is not an exception to their unique style, and this style is at the forefront of the gameplay of the game, though it also makes Metal Gear Rising lose a lot of its own franchise’s identity, often becoming more of a Platinum game with a light Metal Gear vibe rather than the full-on Metal Gear spinoff and sequel one might have hoped for.
Taking away its Metal Gear identity, Rising does hold up really well as a standalone action game thanks to the great direction and design effort from the Platinum Games team. The player can perform one of two types of attacks, be it a Light Attack or Strong Attack, combining these two in sequence to perform combos. This approach to gameplay makes it so that combat is incredibly fluid and responsive, yet incredibly simple to perform. Its a combat that is very easy to understand and pull off, yet hard to master when combined with the other mechanics present in the game.
In order to defend yourself from enemy attacks, the game allows you to parry them, which is a light defensive move that blocks an enemy attack instantly unless it is performed with very specific timing, in that case the player performs an instant counterattack that causes great damage to the enemy. The parry move in Metal Gear Rising is performed by pressing the attack button in the whatever direction the attack may be coming from, an approach that works great at making it so that the pace of combat is kept constant and so the player doesn’t need to interrupt their flurry of attacks in order to defend themselves from a move.
Once the enemy is weak enough, the player can activate blade mode, which allows them to freely move their blade around and instantly cut whatever they see fit with a single slash. Blade mode is accompanied by Zandatsu, which activates slow motion when the player’s FC gauge is filled up or the player performs a successful perfect parry, this slow motion allows the player to be more precise with their cuts. The player will require to be more precise because in Metal Gear Rising, the most effective method of healing is through enemies themselves. Each enemy in the game can be instantly killed by cutting them in their specific weak spot, which also allows Raiden to assimilate their Fuel Cells and completely recover his health and FC gauge. The Blade Mode, Zandatsu and Fuel Cell dynamic makes it so that the player is constantly trying to fill his FC Gauge by attacking enemies up until they can cut their weak spot and refill their health which also makes them want to be more careful about their moves and the order in which they take down enemies, so that they can ensure their survival in more intense fights.
The player will also want to be at top performance in the game, because it is awarded by points that they can spend on an in-game shop for new skills, health or weapon enhancements and even whole new weapons with their own unique set of rules and styles that the player can use to form their own strategies around them. What makes all of these mechanics come together nicely however, is the care and attention Platinum Games has put towards making all of them feel satisfying to use and get good at. Enemies have clever visual indicators that telegraph attacks that can either be parried or dodged entirely, satisfying sound effects play when the player achieves a combo or performs a Zandatsu, and seeing each enemy being cut down to hundreds of pieces by Raiden’s blade never gets old.
The highlight of this surely comes from the game’s iconic boss fights, each with their own unique design, backstory and insane personalities. These bosses have their own specific strategy in order to be defeated, which tests the player’s skill and understanding of the game’s mechanics up until a final confrontation that puts all of the player’s experience with the game to the test in a challenging but ultimately satisfying to beat final boss fight.
Another thing that makes the game consistently satisfying to play is the great pacing, which makes good use of quiet time to ease the player in to each of the encounters, making it so that they never reach a point where they are fatigued of the high octane action, instead giving them time to explore or listen to optional codec conversations which help flesh out the story.
While the main campaign may be short for some people, it does have a lot of collectibles to find, new techniques and strategies to master, rankings which will keep the player constantly trying to reach the top score, and optional VR missions which will truly test the player’s skill in a number of challenges.
Much of this is also due to the game’s Original Soundtrack, which features intense heavy metal tracks with a strong edge to their sound, but also unique vocal tracks that play during each boss fight with incredibly well written lyrics that accurately reflect and give extra depth and dimensionality to their characters and the given context of why they are fighting. Putting this aside though, the songs have really good vocal performances by a variety of singers and thanks to the dynamic programming of the soundtrack, play their most intense parts at the most heart-pounding moments of the game, creating highly memorable moments such as the iconic Metal Gear RAY boss fight at the start of the game.
On the other hand, while the visuals of the game certainly help convey a lot of the satisfaction of playing the game and mastering its mechanics, a lot of the aesthetics of the visual design are certainly lacking such as character or environment designs which are mostly lacking though they may have a few shining examples of good design. And the gameplay isn’t exactly perfect either, for the camera gets in the way of a lot of the action, not allowing the player to properly perform certain parry moves or not making it clear enough where the action is taking place or where the enemies are positioned in the map, which leads to a lot of confusion. Besides, the blade mode has rather awkward controls and making truly precise cuts can take a couple of tries.
But the problem that is prevalent throughout the whole game lies within the identity crisis of its own narrative, which can’t fully decide whether it wants to be an campy and over the top Platinum Games’ plot, or a preachy and philosophical Metal Gear plot. Instead of settling with one of the two, Metal Gear Rising tries to do both at the same time, which leads to mixed results When it’s not trying to be a Metal Gear plot, Rising’s narrative follows almost the same structure as your average action centric story, but made stronger due to Platinum Games’ odd sense of humor involving highly memorable and ridiculous dialogue coming from characters with well-defined characteristics, motivations and goals, which are taken up to its extremes in a way that almost borders on affectionate self-parody. Characters speak of their ideological motives in a way that almost makes it feel like satire of their specific ideology. Aside from this Rising also presents a very solid cast of memorable characters which are endearing to the player and also highly memorable, like the game’s Winds of Destruction.
But the positives of Rising’s plot end here, for the rest of the plot that tries to be more like its Metal Gear counterpart comes close to being insulting to its source material. When the game tries to deliver hard hitting truths about the nature of war, or the philosophies of why humans fight each other, it delivers them without much finesse or thought put into what its saying. Unlike other Metal Gear games, there is no grey between the black and white moral scale, heroes are heroes and villains are villains, despite both committing to their violent ways, which makes it so that the only redeeming thing about the hero is that they aren’t quite as atrocious as the villains.
That’s not to mention the way the game handles its main character, Raiden, which returns after having his own character arc fulfilled in the previous game in the timeline, Metal Gear Solid 4, to terrible effect. After multiple games of learning to stop following Solid Snake’s coattails and accepting his need to have a peaceful and loving life with his family unlike Snake’s tragedy-filled and hopeless endeavors, Raiden goes back into action once again to do the same thing he’s been taught against doing, now becoming an edgy anti-hero esque psychopath who rips and tears his way through his enemies because of his traumatic past as a child soldier and his morally upstanding ideals, brushing his family away, the one thing he’s been taught to preserve and care for, in order to fight more battles and kill more bad guys. None of it adds up, and this sudden shift in character cheapens the message that Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 tried to deliver, that Raiden should stop looking forwards to these kinds of action heroes and follow their own lives instead.
The game’s message also makes things worse for the character, teaching him to embrace a violent psychopathic side that he never once had throughout the whole franchise, the opposite in fact, and fight battles that he wasn’t ever a part of because of how he must follow through his ideals.
Removing it from the context of the Metal Gear franchise though, Rising shows promise of being an interesting story about the hero having to accept his villainous and violent side after having his ideologies exposed and shattered by the people that he opposes, but it’s not delivered with the kind of impact it should have not only by introducing a character arc to a character that doesn’t quite fit with said character arc, but also by a tonally inconsistent plot which flip flops around from being serious, to comedic, to ridiculous and eccentric without the proper build up to make it work properly.
Thankfully, the plot of Metal Gear Rising can be skipped easily or not taken very seriously, instead choosing to focus on the game’s stellar gameplay which truly is the selling point of the game and the reason why, all in all, I still really enjoyed Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and would definitely play more of it as time goes on.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Didn't have much to say here, but its still a fair and decent review. Must be because I finished the game in like a weekend.