Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 15)

Raiden only makes it a few short turns into the secure section of the building before he gets a warning from Kevin. Enemy air units coming in from all sides. Swarms of them. He's barely even finished speaking before the windows are clouded by the wings of flightsuits, and foot soldiers come running in from the halls in every direction. The air is suddenly thick with bullets, and - while holding down the speedboost button makes me immune to those, I can't really defend myself from the infantry with their rockets and melee attacks while dashing back and forth in this confined space. The enemy is playing harder now.

Boris points out that I don't need to kill these guys, I just need to get passed them. I was starting to figure out that that's what the game expected of me anyway, but thanks Boris. Chase music plays. Raiden starts speedboosting down hallways around the perimeter of the building, looking for a way further up. Because this building was designed for gameplay padding rather than navigation or even realistic security concerns, no staircase ascends more than a single floor at a time. Whenever I'm not in one of these ridiculous single-floor staircases, I'm racing down a hallway covered in glass windows with wingsuit guys shooting me through them on one side, and doors erupting with infantry on the other.

Luckily, the baddies are also shooting RPG's at me. Which always seem to collapse the hallways around me in a way that breaks the ceiling rather than the floor, letting Raiden move on upward without having to keep breaking the forward momentum with boring staircases.

You'd think they'd stop doing this after the first time, but I'm not complaining.

Eventually the fliers start coming in through the windows they've broken, and it turns out they're actually something different from the men in wingsuits seen previously. Same flight harness, but instead of a soldier they're each hooked up to a small - but surprisingly durable - drone with gun and missile pods all over it. Seen below shooting Raiden in the crotch while I'm fumbling for the printscreen key.

Boris says that these are called sliders, though I don't know if that refers to the flightsuit or to the UG's these ones are attached to. Anyway, these robo-vultures are more dangerous than the human ones, thanks to their increased hp and bigger arsenals, but also kind of more boring. Nothing as dynamic as the option of cutting the soldier free of his harness with these ones.

The final challenge of this bullet-raining sequence is...well, there's two final challenges back to back really. Or, well, "challenges." They look impressive, but they really aren't all that challenging. First, a grad that they somehow managed to stuff inside of these office building corridors.

I thiiiink this one might actually be smaller than previous ones we've seen? Like, the devs sized the model down a bit to make it less of an impossibility in these confines? I'm pretty sure it's smaller. Anyway, the most dangerous thing about a grad is the amount of suppressive missile fire it can spit out while skating around out of reach, so a small arena like this one actually favors Raiden. The grad does have a melee attack, and it does deal a lot of damage, but it's also slow enough that once you've learned to recognize its telegraphing you'll never get hit by it.

The bullets flying in through the windows make the fight sliiiightly more difficult, but only slightly.

Next, Raiden hits a dead end, and Boris tells him that he might be able to use the sliders flying around outside the broken wall-window. For some reason, this wasn't an option UNTIL now, despite the swarm of sliders hovering outside of this wall-window is no different from the last dozen swarms hovering outside the last dozen windows. So, I sigh, roll my eyes, and hold down the dash button while wishing that there was any actual gameplay in these bits.

I said "cinematic" rather than QTE for a reason. There's no quicktime here. Just a cutscene that drops Raiden to his death if you take your finger off the dash button. There is ONE moment where the game inexplicably prompts you to go into slowmo blade mode and slash one of the sliders apart after you've jumped off of it, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what makes that one special.

Then Raiden ends up with his feet planted against the wall of the building and dashes up the outside of it while playing (very, very slow and very, very clumsy) Frogger with some missile targeting reticules that he can conveniently see.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be too busy dropping my controller and making the soyjak face at the monitor to notice how sluggish the maneuvering is, or how there's literally nothing to do in this entire gameplay stretch besides pressing left and right and waiting for Raiden to slooooooooowly adjust his course in that direction. Which means I'm definitely, definitely not supposed to be capable of applying critical thought and musing about ludonarrative dissonance. But, unfortunately, while I was pressing down on the "go left Raiden you idiot" button and hoping he'd move left before the next reticule hit his feet and made me start over again, the one thought on my mind was "why didn't he just do this from the ground floor on up?"

Or, at least, as soon as the first time he was told an elevator wouldn't work, or that the upper half of the building wasn't accessible? Every single floor seems to have these huge breakable wall-windows. Why is there even an office building level at all if Raiden can run up the outside of buildings?

...

People talk up the "rule of cool" a lot, but this is the downside to overusing it. Eventually, you'll want to put the characters in a situation that they CAN'T just awesome their way through, and when that happens it creates this weird sense of disappointment and confusion.

...

Eventually, a chunk of building randomly explodes from inside a few floors above Raiden, and the vertical run ends. The game grades me on my performance in this last segment, which I have no idea how it's even grading me on lol. Anyway, the wall conveniently collapses again behind Raiden to prevent him from running back outside and ascending the fast way again.

Doktor hails Raiden and tells him that on this floor there's a faux-Japanese garden environment for entertaining VIP's in. Apparently one of the World Martial bigwig's is a major Japanophile.

For some reason, Doktor *doesn't* use this opportunity to make the obvious jab at Raiden, with whom this World Martial exec has a bit in common. I'm confused. Why would a person not do that? Anyway, right behind the themed VIP stateroom is a grimy, utilitarian cargo lift that can take me the rest of the way up. And...apparently DOESN'T go down to the ground floor. This building I swear. No one else has much in the way of insights about this.

Pochita comments that he's fallen behind Raiden after the wall-climbing sequence, so he doesn't have any more on-the-ground intel about this section. Fair enough.

Courtney...well, she definitely seems to have calmed down after that moment of emotional and moral intensity pretty quickly.

It occurs to me that this bunch on vacation would *literally be* an extra-violent Carmen Sandiego instalment, unless you gagged Kevin. Then it would just be extra-violent.

Anyway, this is the Japanese garden:

It's even got a simulated moon that's five times bigger than the moon normally looks in this game. And holographic cherry petals falling from the ceiling regardless of whether or not there's a tree branch over that spot.

As Raiden fords across the decorative brook in the middle, a squad of soldiers decloak and - okay, is it just me, or do these guys' armor have more of a "ninja" look to them than the normal enemy soldier skin? I'm pretty sure that they do.

And...this is the moment when I realized that these developers were just getting tired of working on a Metal Gear game.

After beating the maybe-ninjas, I go through the codec, and...yeah. The CHARACTERS all give very short, embarrassed-sounding comments about the simulated garden that sound a hell of a lot like thinly veiled developer apologies.

You want to know what I think, though?

I think the entire game should have been like this.

No grudging lip service to Metal Gear's overcomplicated conspiracy plot. No soliliquys about the morality of killing the suicidal lemming enemy mooks. You're a cyborg with a katana. There's stuff that you need to kill. We can have the oil refinery level, the sewer level, the Japanese garden level, the jungle level, the volcano castle level, the alien hive level, and the glam-rave level. And screw these monotonous cyborg-and-robot enemies while we're at it. Or rather, they can stay, but they'll be joined by the nazis, the orcs, the dinosaurs, the creepy animatronic mascots, and the screaming writhing manifestations of the human collective unconscious' primordial fears. Have each of those enemy types give you a different temporary bonus when you pull out their guts. Call your friends on the Codec at any time to hear tactical advice, risque jokes, random party game trivia, or lore about individual setpieces that each have nothing to do with each other. Give each Codec NPC a romance meter, and let the player unlock multiple phone sex scenes for each of them if you max it out.

I'm not even joking. The game I just described would capture and improve on all the best things about MGRR.

Also, it turns out that ripper mode actually can be useful in some situations! Carving through one of the destructible walls in this area brought me face to face with a pair of mastiffs and a group of soldiers providing fire support for them. Their shots kept knocking me out of bullet time mode, and there wasn't enough manoeuvring space to use rockets or acrobatic cuckstaff techniques. Ripper mode's damage boost is significant enough to let Raiden shear the armor off of mastiffs in just a few normal sword-hits though, and once the mastiffs were down it was simple to recharge my stamina off of the mooks. So yeah, it's worth having in the toolkit even if the situations that it's useful for are somewhat rare.

Other than that, there's really not much for me to say about this area except that it's good. It's pretty to look at. It's fun to fight and jump around in. There's no QTE bullshit. It's good.

With that refreshingly honest bit of self-indulgence cleared of hostiles, it's on to the cargo lift. Doktor and Pochita think they can get this one working too, with Pochita tapping into the system from its lower end a few floors below. This lift goes right through the armory sections, so there will be a lot of enemies to deal with, but we've stopped pretending to care about that by now.

Pochita apologizes for falling behind so much, and says he'll try to catch up again in time to help with Sundowner. No mention of Jetstream. Did we all just forget that he's also inside the building? I swear that guy is like a reverse reality-warper; the universe is constantly stretching him in and out of existence. At this point I wouldn't even blink if it turned out that Raiden cut off his own hand and Jetstream is a recurring stress-hallucination of his.

Anyway, Raiden and Pochita also have a little heart-to-heart that might have been a good scene if everything it tells us hadn't already been told several times. Pochita says he thinks he's figured out why Raiden cares so much about these specific children rather than the many others in need throughout the world. It's because...Raiden identifies with them.

Pochita. Raiden literally said that already. At least twice. Both in optional Codec conversations and in unskippable conference call dialogues. I guess maybe he wasn't listening in, idk. Still, I think it would have been much better here to have Raiden be the one to explain it to Pochita, so we can see how the AI processes this new information, rather than the focus of the scene being on the revelation of something we already know.

It does get better at the end, though. Pochita tells Raiden that he feels the same way himself, and thus has come to share Raiden's motivations beyond merely feeling like he owes him.

Child soldier solidarity.

Also, thinking about it more, it does seem meaningful that Pochita says he'll help with Sundowner. He's been pointedly avoiding personal violence since his reconstruction, restricting himself to a purely support role and even refusing to carry a weapon like he did before. If he says he's going to help me fight a boss now, then that points to a breakthrough for him similar to Courtney's. Or else he just hates Sundowner that much after having had to serve under him; I can readily believe that as well.

Anyway, here's the freight lift. Time to stand on it and fight a gauntlet of enemies while it rises.

This ends up being a longer sequence than I expected. Enemy groups slowly ramping up in size and composition, mixed up by some bits where you need to keep clearing cuckballs away before they can clog the lift rails with their bodies, or jump from the platform you're on onto an adjacent one when it takes too much damage.

This one actually ended up getting pretty tough by the end. Made me use a lot of my health and stamina packs. Which ended up being very unfortunate, because of what comes right after the lift ride.

Approaching the spot where the server/VR complex should be (Doktor rings to inform me that the name "server room" might be more euphemism than anything else. Both to keep rank-and-file employees in the dark, and to perhaps soothe the consciences of people in the know), Raiden first has to pass through a strange, large room that looks like some kind of high tech dojo or training room. And, standing at the other side of it, blocking the entrance to the other door, is Mistral.

Or, well. Most of Mistral. The synth body appears to be faceless. Which, combined with what this room looks like, suggests to me that...yup, Doktor confirms that this custom body is a perfect match for Mistral's, but appears to be under AI control. This room is accessible directly from the freight lift, and also adjacent to the place where isolated brains can be stored, and has a big empty space for high-powered cyborgs to flex their artificial muscles in. Resleeving chamber! Mistral had a backup already waiting for her in case she got too badly damaged in Abkhazia.

This bit of level design makes more sense than anything else in the World Martial building. Environmental storytelling isn't something MGRR has particularly called attention to itself with either for good or for ill, but this is a really nice, instructional piece of it. It shows how just deciding what order to arrange the rooms of your linear fighty game in can help to sell a story concept.

Although, it also makes me wonder. If they're producing this many high-end supersoldier bodies, why let them gather dust in storage instead of sleeving other high-performing contractors in them? I guess maybe Mistral paid to keep this one in reserve to use as an immediate backup out of her own salary or something. Some kind of weird insurance package that Desperado/WorldMartial offers.

Anyway, the real Mistral wasn't all that challenging, and her robotic revenant is even less so due to its slower reaction times and less versatile moveset. Interestingly, it still has the cuckball swarm accomponying it, which I guess makes sense given how many of its customizations seem to be built specifically with fighting alongside them in mind. A nice techno-instrumental remix of Mistral's boss theme plays for the battle.

And then as soon as I destroy the Robo-Mistral a Monsoon one appears and starts bouncing Raiden's head off of the goddamned walls.

Oh fuck you Boris.​

Robo-Monsoon is less dangerous than the man himself, but that's not necessarily saying very much. And, while the Monsoon boss fight gives you infinite stamina and plenty of opportunities to collect health packs, Robo-Monsoon traps you in an empty room after the gruelling elevator gauntlet and Robo-Mistral. I'm not ashamed to say that I died multiple times to this thing. To the point where I was tempted to just restart the entire level and try to make it through the elevator sequence with more items in storage.

More critically though...

...

When Robo-Monsoon appeared, I found myself wondering if this was really the end of the game already. Because this really, really feels like the end of the game. Nearly every enemy from throughout the game before this point has made another appearance. We're in the antagonist faction's main base. We've just had a very long and challenging "ascending the dark lord's tower" sequence. We've fought a gauntlet made up of versions of the previous bosses. This is the final level. It's built like the final level. It's paced like the final level.

But...it's not the final level.

There are still two Winds of Destruction to go before reaching Armstrong. And, on account of having seen the same endgame cutscenes that everyone with an internet connection in 2016 saw, I know that the final battle takes place in a completely different location that seems like it must have a good bit of gameplay separating it from a skyscraper in Denver.

So. We're doing the "ascend Olympus to challenge the gods" symbolism during the midgame?

We're doing the reprise boss rush sequence with only half of the bosses?

If this WAS the endgame, I'd be more inclined to forgive it for making me fight Robo-Monsoon just one level after Actual-Monsoon. Since it isn't the endgame though, making me fight the same boss twice almost in a row is just...annoying. And weird. Weird in the bad way, not weird in the good way.

Knowing that MGRR is a crash victim of two different Metal Gear game concepts, it's pretty obvious to me that this WAS going to be the final level of one of the two. It's built like a final level, paced like a final level, and has the dramatic "all in" energy and desperation of a final level. It's placement in the game as it exists does it a disservice, because honestly, it's a good final level.

...

So, it takes me a few tries, but not nearly as many as the original Monsoon took me. Afterward, fortunately, there is a staircase with plenty of items to pick up and restock with. And then, right behind those, is the server room.

I'm guessing those hexagons are slots for brain cases, with the tubes being VR servers. Looks like they've got a few hundred brains undergoing the Sears Program sim. And then, the hulking figure of Sundowner steps out onto the platform overlooking it all and malevolently tells Raiden not to interrupt the students while class is in session.


Next time: sundown at midnight.