Metal Gear Rising Revengeance: the Concept Album

Before starting the Jetstream DLC comissioned by @LilyWitch, I have decided - in part due to popular demand - to have a look at the main game's soundtrack. More specifically, at the lyrical boss themes, each of which allegedly tells you some important information about the boss whose duel it accompanies.

I commented (briefly) on the musical aspect of some of these songs and how they contributed to the atmosphere of their respective setpieces, but I didn't talk about the lyrics. In large part because for nearly all of them, I couldn't distinguish the lyrics while playing the game. MGRR has a lot of soundwork, and during the boss fights you'll be hearing a lot of sword-clashes, explosions, etc that make it hard to hear the lyrics. Additionally, as I noted in my playthrough, some of these bosses are hard as balls, and paying attention to anything besides the fight itself while you're fighting them is asking for a game over.


The first on the list is "Rules of Nature," which plays for both the multipart Metal Gear RAY battle in Africa and the first GRAD encounter in Mexico. One of the most (if not the most) popular tracks from the game.

Classic butt-rock, leaning harder on the metal side of that spectrum than the rock side of it. The thing that most people remember this song for is how the lyrics suddenly kick in at two separate points in the Metal Gear RAY fight(s). First when you parry its melee strike at the beginning of the QTE gauntlet that ends the free range battle, and then again when it starts the missile spam after the rooftop fight that leads into the tower-running setpiece.

Lyrically, it's an edgy paean to the brutality of nature, specifically about the desperation of predators and prey chasing each other through the night. I can see how this relates to the themes of the game overall. Both with Raiden coming to recognize that the law is useless in this situation and he'll have to resolve his difference of opinion with World Martial the old fashioned way, and with Armstrong's brutish flavor of social Darwinism.

That said, I'm not sure that it fits the RAY and Grad in particular. Especially the lyrics emphasizing the "strong predator" and "weak prey." Like, who's supposed to be who, in this analogy? Neither battle involved a stronger party pursuing a fleeing weaker one.

I guess the song might not be about those specific robots, but rather about the military-industrial complex that produced them acting as a predator with the rest of humanity as the prey desperately trying to outmaneuver it. Maybe? The other possibility that occurs to me is that since those two bosses are near-mindless robots, they don't get a theme of their own, so instead the game defaults to Raiden's theme. "Rules of Nature" sort of works for him, I guess, in light of his arc throughout the game?

Anyway, the "THEY RUN WHEN THE SUN COMES OUT" line is really headbangable.


Next up is Pochita's boss song from when you fight him as a midboss in Abkhazia, "I'm My Own Master Now."

Much more screamo this time, with all the howling and moaning in between verses. Musically, I really like the melancholy tone it manages to hit while still being a fast paced battle theme, but...I just can't help but crack up when the vocalist is just screaming into the mic. That's not an issue with this song specifically, mind you; it's a bridge I've never quite managed to cross with this genre of music.

The lyrics are pretty self-explanatory. Interestingly, the moment in time that they seem to be sung from the perspective of is actually right after the level the song plays in, when Pochita wakes up again in Doktor's lab and realizes he's no longer shackled. At least, that's what it sounds to me like. The other possibility is that Pochita was hoping Raiden would kill him during the battle, with his desire for freedom manifesting as a deathwish, but that doesn't really square with his dialogue during the fight (especially him begging for his life at the end).

The one line that really sticks with me is "being led by the blind." It's interesting that that's how Pochita thinks of his Desperado handlers. Not cruel, not greedy, but "blind."


Finishing up that same level, we have our first Wind of Destruction fight theme. Mistral's "A Stranger I Remain."

I commented more about this one during the review itself than most of the others. Mostly because, unlike the other bosses, Mistral's final stage where the lyrics kick in was actually her easiest stage, so I was able to pay much more attention to the music than I could with the others.

Musically, I really like it. The familiar MGRR metal beats with the jingly euro-synth playing over it somehow doesn't clash like you'd expect them to. The vocalist has a great voice, but so did the previous ones; the vocals are just much clearer in this song, so it's easier to appreciate.

Lyrically...meh. I mean, it works for Mistral. She's boring, self-pitying, and thinks her background makes her more sympathetic than it actually does. The lyrics definitely feel like Mistral's self-description set to verse, and it makes me want her to stop talking just as much as the nonmusical version did. Looking for a place where you belong? Girl, just fucking retire, I'm sure you've got the money to at this point.

Two lines did interest me a bit more. The first being "I've finally found what I was looking for; a place where I can be without remorse." Sort of hinting that her desire for a cause greater than herself to fight for really was exactly the bullshit it sounded like, and really Armstrong and Co just gave her a friend group willing to tell her "killing people for no reason is good actually." Which, I mean, if the game knows that, then that's good, but it doesn't make her actual pre-fight cutscene that appeared to play her story straight any less annoying for it.

The other line I liked is "I am a stranger who has found an even stranger war." Not because it fits Mistral in particular, but because it's an accurate description of the entire Metal Gear franchise. It amuses me.


The next song on the list is "The Stains of Time," accompanying the Denver battle with one scene wonder Monsoon.

More strictly metal than the previous tracks. Apparently some people really like this one musically, but I personally don't find its sound as memorable or mood-setting as "A Stranger I Remain" or "I'm My Own Master Now." That said, there are some very clever things going on in this song, even if they don't particularly contribute its musical quality.

First, the dubstep-y distortion effect. It's so simple, and in retrospect so obvious, but it's a stroke of genius nonetheless. "Character who can break himself up into pieces, how do we capture that in sound?" Bam, done.

Second, that same distortion effect plays into the gist of the lyrics, even if it also makes them harder to understand at times. The song is about the stuff that Monsoon tells you without telling you during his monologue, and which I commented on a little bit at the time. Unlike some other Winds of Destruction who shall go unnamed, Monsoon only mentions his backstory in one short sentence, and he uses it to emphasize a point rather than trying to puff himself up. The thing is, living through the Khmer Rouge didn't actually give him evidence that rationally convinced him of personhood-nihilism like he tried to make it sound. Rather, seeing people he knew turn into ideology-consumed genocidal monsters made him want to think that no one is really accountable for their actions, because the alternative was just too horrifying for him to deal with. Since then, he's been surrounding himself with the absolute worst and most nihilistic elements of humanity in order to keep himself convinced of nonpersonhood, for fear that otherwise he might reconsider it and then have to deal with the alternative again.

Letting the rain pour on and on, keeping himself buried, hoping it'll wash away the dreams forever. Nevermind that the rain needs to be innocent blood in order to do the kind of burying he needs.

This might be painting Monsoon more sympathetically than he deserves. After all, the vast majority of Cambodian children of that era did not, in fact, go on to become murderous psychos-for-hire. But you can see how, if his life after the Killing Fields era was pushed in a certain direction that prevented him from getting the help he needed, how a person who went through that potentially COULD end up like him. The audio distortion, and the physical metaphor of him already being a chopped-up body, emphasize that while he might be a terrible person, Monsoon is ultimately more damaged than anything else. Killing him might have been almost as much a mercy for him as it was for World Martial's victims.


The next boss battle is Sundowner's, at the opposite end of that same Denver skyscraper, set to the song "Red Sun."

Maaaaaannnnnnn.

I didn't even know Sundowner had a second stage. Apparently, you have to cut off every one of his reactive shields to trigger it. The problem is that it's much easier to just stab him in the back a bunch of times until he's dead, which means you end up unknowingly skipping the crown jewel of this game's soundtrack.

Musically, this one kind of does the same thing as "A Stranger I Remain." Overlaying the game's baseline metal sound with some type of regional music from the general area of the world that the boss is from, in a way that contrasts nicely instead of clashing (did "Stains of Time" also do this? I didn't hear anything recognizable Southeast Asian in that song, but I don't know much about Southeast Asian music in general so it might have just gone over my head). The song doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know about Sundowner, but really, you've already learned everything there is to know about the guy after his first 30 seconds of screentime. Sundowner is kind of more of a symbol than a character.

You can humanize Sundowner, if you're willing to read a bit more into the bare-bones dossier Kevin gives you. Born into what he was told should be the most privileged racial and sexual demographics in the world's richest country, in a regional culture that's more open about its racial and sexual hierarchies than most of the US. Kept low despite these alleged privileges, on account of generational poverty and personal mediocrity. Angry, bitter, resentful, and then given an M16 and encouraged to go whole-hog in the bloodthirsty madness of the early War on Terror. Discovers how much better this makes him feel. Fastforward a decade and a half, slap on some cybernetics and not-so-subtle pedophile coding, and you've got Sundowner. But, at the end of the day, doing this doesn't really net you very much, so it's probably for the best that "Red Sun" doesn't take that approach.

So, what makes this song so great? First of all, the vocalist. Music and lyrics aside, this guy has the best voice in a soundtrack full of good vocalists. Second, the level of poetry and metaphor set to a soothing country cadence and being used to lovingly describe such base destruction is...it has an almost satanic quality to it. I think the part that really chilled me was the line "In the distance machines come, to transform Eden day by day." Evoking not only the immediate damage inflicted by modern warfare, but also the longterm environmental consequences of the military industrial complex in its entirety. Sundowner himself is just a two-bit thug with some fancy toys, sure, but all the people like Sundowner, in aggregate, are a literally apocalyptic force.

Another part that jumps out at me, thinking about the lyrics, is that the mention of animals fleeing the smoke-reddened sun might be a callback to "Rules of Nature," with its much-memed line about them running when the sun comes out. Maybe I was right about "Rules" being about the MIC after all, only both the animals in it are actually just its victims, fighting for scraps in a landscape left ravaged by the smoke-reddened sun. Which in turn reminds me of the thought I had about the Monsoon battle, with two victims of American foreign policy being made to fight like gladiators for the entertainment of the watching World Martial office building.

Also, I just realized that Monsoon and Sundowner aren't the only ones whose songs use their namesake winds as a metaphor. It's brief, but "A Stranger I Remain" has a line about crossing the sea, and the mistral is a transmediterranean wind. It crosses the sea in the opposite direction of the route Mistral's life took her in, but still, it's there.


Next is a rather baffling song for a rather baffling character. It's a good song musically, but also a baffling one lyrically. "The Only Thing I Know For Real," played over the battle with Jetstream Sam on the Colorado highlands.

The main thing that appeals to me about it musically is how it reconciles both of the game's default musical styles. It has the butt rock metal aspect of the other fight themes, but combines it with the traditional-sounding Japanese flute music that plays throughout pretty much all of the lower-key gameplay sequences. It's sort of an encapsulation of the rest of the game's soundtrack, and also a very representative example of the "these two sounds shouldn't work together, but they do" thing that several of the other boss themes have going on.

Lyrically, what's being implied is that the real reason Jetstream decided not to tell Raiden what the ideals they're fighting over are is because he doesn't know what they are himself. On one hand, this is hilarious. On the other hand, it doesn't make Jetstream's deal any less perplexing.

One other thing I think I'm getting from these lyrics is that Jetstream is something of a fallen hero. And yeah, he looks the part, and that kind of background often goes with his archetype. But like. How did he fall? Why did he fall? How does someone with good intentions ever possibly end up on World Martial's black ops superteam? Granted, this might add a layer to his weird obsession with Raiden, if Raiden reminds him of his younger and less corrupted self and the reminder pains him. Though in that case, what the hell IS the game saying when it asserts that following Jetstream's advice and wielding his sword of bloodthirst injustice is the only way to defeat the BBEG?

Hopefully, both this song and the character it's connected to will make at least a little more sense to me after I've played the DLC.

Nothing about the jetstream winds in these lyrics, as best I can tell. Ah well.


The last two boss themes are for the final encounter with Senator Armstrong in Pakistan. The first, "Collective Consciousness," plays while he's wearing his neocon hat and piloting the excelsus. The second, "It Has To Be This Way," plays while he's wearing his batshit insane hat and fighting on foot.

I already talked about this one during the review, as the metal gear excelsus battle has only one stage with plenty of quiet bits throughout in between the plasma gun salvos and entertaining bluster from Armstrong. And, well, it's "The Wall." It's just Pink Floyd's "The Wall," but metal-y and even less subtle.

It's appropriate. It matches the concept of a giant boondoggle war machine. It matches the spiel that Armstrong delivers before starting the battle. It matches the kind of fears about his own agency and personhood that I think the excelsus represents to Raiden. But there's also not really much I can say about it that I haven't already.

This song is almost the opposite of "The Only Thing I Know." Rather than encapsulating the rest of the game's soundtrack, "In The End It Had To Be This Way" almost rejects the rest of the game's soundtrack. If anything, its melodic high techno sounds like it came from an earlier game in the series, back when that was the default musical style for scifi-adjacent video games. I guess that's one way to make the final boss theme stand out from the others. Anyway, I like the melodic techno music that a lot of older games have, so I'm not complaining.

Lyrically, there are a couple of things going on here. First, the repeated sentiment that Raiden and Armstrong are very alike. On one hand, I still don't buy this. On the other hand, the song seems to be sung from Armstrong's perspective, and we know that he believes that. I take issue with the game itself seeming to agree with him about this, but that's beyond the scope of this song.

More interesting to me, and engaging with a thematic takeaway from the game that I'm really not sure how to interpret, is the chorus line from which the song takes its title. "Violence breeds violence, but in the end it has to be this way." Basically, it brings back the question I asked at the end of my playthrough: is this supposed to be the story of Raiden's fall to villainy?

The game makes it clear that violence really was the only possible way of stopping Armstrong's plot. The ending cutscene (save the very final scene with Raiden) seems to hinge around "imperfect solutions for an imperfect world." Violence breeds more violence, but sometimes it's the only way to make things better, even if there will be consequences to using it. "In the end, it has to be this way."

But, in engaging with this necessity and taking it upon himself to do the violence, is Raiden dooming himself to be the next problem that someone else will need to doom themselves to be the next problem in order to solve? "Everyone who fights is damned to monsterdom, but we need people to keep fighting the monsters, so get used to everything being terrible forever with no recourse?"

That kind of pessimistic tragic ending could work for me. I like depressing stories sometimes. But looking at what Raiden actually does over the course of the game, such a pronouncement just seems incredibly unfair to him.

So, I prefer to interpret this song as saying that violence is terrible, but also needs to be kept on the table as an option. Connecting this with some of the thoughts I had about the civilian rescue situations the game periodically tosses your way, the application of violence must be carefully measured and calculated if it's to prevent more harm than it causes (both in terms of immediate effects, and in the potential for future violence to be incited by it). In the end it has to be this way, so we need to work within those boundaries to minimize harm as much as possible. Even someone like Raiden who enjoys killing can turn that bloodthirst toward minimizing harm and trying to breed less violence than he stops.

That's how I prefer to read it. But I don't know at all that it's how the game wants it read.


Anyway, those are all the boss themes. I didn't love all of them, but that's mostly on account of my tastes only partially overlapping with the game's choice of musical genres. Overall, Revengeance the concept album is definitely better put together than Revengeance the video game.