Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 2)

Note: a few of the screenshots in this post are taken from a playthrough by Gamer's Little Playground on YouTube. I just had trouble screencapping the right moments during the fast setpiece sequences.


You know, it occurs to me that they could have just called the game "Metal Gear Rising" or "Metal Gear Revengeance." I guess they just needed to reinforce how X-treme this game was going to be.

Anyway, after Raiden's nightmarish descent into psychedelic pavement-horror, he suddenly found himself awake again among the wreckage of the metal gear. An unearthly premonition, or just a consequence of inhaling too much aerosolized robot? Herr Doktor can hopefully help figure that out later, for now we need to rescue the princess! Or the prime minister. I forget. Someone political.

So. Dash through the parkour alley maze. Jump over some pipes, cut through some fences. Leap off a series of bridge pylons to re-OH MY GOD RAIDEN GRAB THE FUCKING LEDGE-okay there he finally did it now holy shit. Make it up onto a roof overlooking the colonial historical district of whatever city this is meant to be. And then, suddenly, a barrage of missiles comes arcing up out of nowhere and cuts our hero off with a carpet of explosions! A moment later, a one-armed robodragon with half its armor missing comes limping over from the same direction.

Hey Raiden, remember how you just turned your back to the collapsing robot to not look at the explosions and stood there fellating your own sword for twenty seconds? Maybe instead of doing that, you should have inspected the hulk and made sure it was actually disabled. Just a thought that occurred to me. Random little stream of consciousness.

Earpiece friend Boris expresses surprise that this "unmanned gear" is still up and running after that beating. Well, at least it wasn't JUST Raiden who got careless here, heh. Also, I guess that's confirmation that this is a fully robotic gigerdragon, rather than being piloted or remote controlled. Well, anyway, time for phase two of the boss battle. It's a lot like the first phase, except instead of having a big arena to enjoy Raiden's mobility in I'm trapped in a tiny space between two invisible walls, and instead of a logical immersive set of fight mechanics there's an open question of "why doesn't it just knock over the fucking building Raiden is standing on?" hanging over the entire thing.

There's one wide open space behind the robot in front of Raiden, and another wide open space behind the camera in back of him where we just ended the parkour sequence. This little rectangular rooftop space he's on is just barely big enough to dodge the laser gun in. Why is he staying here?

It looked like maybe the game was expecting me to jump onto the robot's head and trigger a cutscene or something that would end with me on the ground behind it and able to properly manoeuvre. But nope; Raiden has impressive jumping ability, but the invisible walls go even higher.

So, I run back and forth dodging a giant laser in a tiny space while rolling my eyes and gently reassuring the game that no really, it doesn't need to worry, my suspension of disbelief is just fine. Every once in a while the robot will stick a part of its body through the invisible wall so I can whack it a few times and maybe trigger a QTE (honestly, with how generous the timing is it's more like STE) where Raiden outjumps the wall and gets to whack it a lot more times before landing right back where he was. Exciting.

There was one kinda cool part where it extended its remaining arm over like a roof above me and started raining missiles on me from it, and I had to chop the rockets out of the air while getting close enough to jump up and QTE the arm off, but aside from that this fight was just lame.

I'm still amazed that a close-up of a man falling through the air passed a giant robot while slashing its armor to ribbons can look so inert.​

Eventually, it leaps back across the wide open space behind it that I should have been fighting it in all along and fires all the rest of its missiles at me, which is finally enough to destroy the building I was on. Why didn't it do this before? Maybe it knew Raiden was stupid enough to stay in that tiny unfavorable-to-him arena if it didn't prompt him to do otherwise until it was left with no choice. It turns out I was really onto something with that Contra similarity earlier, because when the missiles come in Raiden leaps up and does this:

You know what would be hilarious? If the robot realized that Raiden was leaping toward it across its own missiles and so just...stopped firing them...when he was only halfway to their source. And then he just falls to the ground and has to anticlimactically walk the rest of the way to it. For bonus points, the tryhard (but admittedly very listenable) butt-rock song that starts playing during the missile climb should keep on going as he spends half a minute trudging across the pavement with nothing happening.

Oh well.

I watch my guy run across the missiles, reach the robot, and press X to continue a bunch of times when prompted. He cuts off its missile launcher and brings it crashing to the ground again, and then...turns his back to it to be a cool guy who doesn't look at explosions.

My thoughts on this don't get any less complicated when the robot gets up *again* two seconds later, grabs Raiden, and throws the stupid twit into a concrete building hard enough to crater it.

I'm not taking the piss. That's actually what happens.

Okay, I'm being serious now when I ask if this meant to be a parody. Him making this same stupid mistake in the interest of posing for the camera over and over again with the same enemy in such a short period of time feels like parody. The problem with that, though, is that in general the game seems to think that Raiden is this unironically super cool guy. If Raiden was characterized as a vainglorious buffoon who you're supposed to laugh at throughout, this would be great. It would fit the character, and it would be hilarious. But he isn't.

So, who is the butt of the joke meant to be? What IS the joke, in context?

Is there actually a joke being made at all? Is the humor actually at the developers' expense rather than the character's?

Anyway, being bitten by a giant hydraulic claw and then thrown into a building only did cutscene damage, so when I get control of Raiden back he's still at the same hp as before. He ninja-runs down the side of the building to get back to the robot, which politely remains standing right under him and ineffectually shoots easily avoidable projectiles back up at him. Hey, at least the game is letting ME do the dodging in this part! Like, this is actually gameplay, where I'm playing the game, and I can succeed or fail at doing the thing based on player input!

The butt-rock song is good, as those go. And it matches the setpiece. Eventually, I reach the robot and press X to continue a bunch of times so that Raiden will cut it some more. It falls. He lands in front of it and is a cool guy who doesn't look at explosions.

To be fair to him, this time he remembered to extend his sword to its full 5 meter length to cut all the way through the robot's torso and make sure. I guess? I don't know, it looked like he was just slitting its spine, but I guess his sword got longer while it was inside because it cut it fully in half. Why didn't he use the extendo-sword before? He could have ended this battle at least one, possibly two, stages ago.

This isn't even ludonarrative dissonance. It's narrative-narrative dissonance.

...you know, thinking about it now, the more opaque player-input-to-raiden-action bits during the spectacle sequences might count as ludo-ludo dissonance. :V

...

I'm aware that most of the things I'm complaining about were ubiquitous in gaming in the late aughts and early tens. This is just making me glad I played almost nothing but indie and retro games during that period.

And, to be fair, I was enjoying the gameplay a lot until the boss fight. I suspect that this will be a pattern going forward, but perhaps I'll be proven wrong. Either for better or for worse.

...

While I was garishly finishing off the robot, the baddy has taken the prime minister onto a train, and now I need to go outrun it. Which I can apparently do, at least for short distances. Parkour onto train. Boris tells me that they've brought Prime Minister N'mani (oh cool a name) to the front of the train, and also warns me that there's a small unidentified aircraft inbound, so watch out for that. Thanks Boris. So, more parkour is required to cross the cars stacked with shipping crates on the way to-RAIDEN GRAB THE FUCKING LEDGE.

There must be something I'm doing that causes him to grab the ledge sometimes and not grab it other times. I cannot tell what that thing is.

Both of the enemy cyborgs have regrouped at the front of the train, and they've got N'mani chained to a crate. When Raiden makes it over to them, Kong smugs even harder than usual and informs him that N'mani's human shield utility has now been expended.

He then promptly slits N'mani's throat.

Huh?

He stopped being valuable as a hostage when Raiden caught up to them, but was valuable as a hostage until Raiden caught up to them?

I guess carrying him around prevented Kong from being shot at while he was running through the streets to get here, but the other cyborg baddy doesn't seem to have needed that to get to the train. Or to have thought that he needed that to get to the train.

Are they really so sure that no one will be shooting at them after this point? How can they be sure of that?

If they don't plan on using the PM as a hostage anymore, why did they go through the trouble of chaining him up like that and standing over him waiting for more interlopers before killing him?

Do they have a personal grudge against Raiden or something, that makes them want to rub his failure at bodyguarding in his face? What if Raiden didn't manage to catch up to the train though? How long were they planning to just stand around waiting with N'Mani still alive?

As N'Mani bleeds out, Kong gives another cheeky speech about how no one ever appreciates war or considers the plight of the hardworking people who depend on it. It's repetitive, but I actually like how overly pleased with himself he looks and sounds during the delivery. Like this is the only joke he's ever managed to come up with, and so he's desperate to milk it for absolutely all that it's worth. Meanwhile, the other smugborg fends off Raiden's attempts at intervention.

So, Kong extravagantly finishes killing N'Mani (impaling him through the chest now, in case the slit throat didn't work I guess). That small aircraft swoops down and drops a rope for Kong.

Who takes it and then lets the plane fly away with him, leaving the other cyborg to deal with Raiden alone. "He's all yours, Sam!" Kong shouts. Sam the smugborg doesn't react as if this is a betrayal. He just smiles, and starts the boss fight.

Why aren't they ganging up on me?

If they AREN'T both ganging up on me for whatever reason, then what is even the logic of one of them exfiltrating now? Are they going to have to send another plane back for Sam?

Why do either of them even want to fight me at all at this point?

The train goes into a tunnel. Boss fight happens. As expected, it's basically a mirror-boss. Sam is a cyborg of similar make to Raiden, with similar capabilities, and wielding a similar weapon. It's also significantly more challenging than the big robot, though I'm pretty that in this case it's because I'm using mouse controls and the close-quarters turns and flips really want you to be using a controller. To the game's credit though, even with my suboptimal choice of interface, it's still fun. Additionally, it's pretty clear to me where and how exactly not having a controller is making things harder, so I know not to hold any of those things against the game.

That said, I'm not sure if it's actually possible to lose this fight. The reason being that it's also impossible to win. Sam beats you up in a series of mid-fight cutscenes regardless of how well you hold him off in the gameplay bits between them.

Maybe it's possible to fight badly enough for him to kill you before the scene is supposed to end, in which case you actually would have to do it over again. I'm not sure though. I fought pretty badly even when the game wasn't forcing me to, and I made it through to the end. So yeah, I think this actually is un(lose/win)able.

Smugborg Sam congratulates Raiden on his impressive-but-still-inadequate swordsmanship (heh, the way I play Raiden he's definitely being patronizing), and then cuts his arm off. Which is annoying. Not as annoying as it would be for a fully flesh-and-blood human, but still annoying.

Raiden has apparently gone through this a few times by now. Which, I mean. Cyborgs with replaceable body parts who use cutting weapons. I feel like this is probably the number one occupational hazard of fighting others of their kind, heh.

The game actually gives back control to the player at this point. The train tunnel is only barely visible through a red haze, and distorted by glitching HUD elements to convey how much damage Raiden's systems have taken. Obviously he's not just down an arm; his central computer systems have also taken a beating at this point.

I like this a lot better than the "red haze" effects most games use for a near-death player character. It seems like this might actually be how the world looks to Raiden when his systems are on the fritz. It's immersive rather than merely stylized.

It looks like Sam is about to cut off something much less replaceable when the train comes out of the tunnel, and bullets start flying at Sam from all directions, forcing him to abandon the wounded Raiden and defend himself. He smugs his way off, and then that plane swoops down and evacs him as well.

Yes, it's the same plane.

It was just flying around, wasting fuel and risking getting shot down, while waiting for Sam to finish his completely pointless single combat with Raiden.

The game even shows the good guys trying to shoot down the plane as it retreats again, forcing it to drop a white phosphorous smokescreen behind itself to escape. Um, okay, so. If the game remembers that planes can be shot down, and that there are good guys with antiaircraft weapons in the area all this time, then what the hell was everyone doing during the tunnel duel?

The answer is that these characters aren't actually trying to achieve conflicting goals. They're trying to have fight scenes. The reason the bad guys waited for Raiden to catch up to them before killing N'mani (and why they didn't kill N'mani as soon as they grabbed him in the first place) was to have a fight scene with Raiden. The reason that Kong took off before the tunnel but then hung around to pick Sam up at the other side is because they didn't actually come here to do an assassination; they came here so that Sam could have a fight scene with Raiden.

This isn't the kind of bad writing that I can smile and laugh along with. It's the kind of bad writing that reminds me that I'm staring at a bunch of pixels. It's a product of laziness, not stylistic camp.

...

Heh, I remember when I made this exact same complaint about RWBY, and commented that it wouldn't bother me as much if the show was an actual fighting game rather than just being written like one. And, well, I was right. It doesn't bother me as much in a game. It still bothers me, but not nearly as much. If the actual battle with Sam had been longer and less scripted, it would have bothered me less still.

Once my mind recalled that though, I realized that this mission of MGRR includes 1) a fight atop a train as it runs through a tunnel, 2) a scene where someone speedboosts along a high vertical surface to charge a giant monster while dodging projectiles, and 3) a melodramatic amputation with a glowy red sword, some of which co-occur with 4) a very particular style of screamy tryhard butt-rock. I know that other fighting games of the era had similar setpieces and aesthetics, but the conjunction of so many in such close proximity made me wonder.

And, it looks like RWBY season 1 started coming out right about six months after MGRR's release.

I wonder how many scenes in RWBY's early seasons were ripping off of this one specific game? Maybe none at all and this is just coincidence, but I doubt it.

…

Boris, manning a missile turret on one of the pursuing vehicles, makes one last attempt to down the retreating baddies. No dice, these guys know how to use the mountainous terrain to their advantage, and it seems that neither Maverick nor the Nonspecifican military have any aircraft of their own able to make it in time.

Raiden is left, one-armed, anemic, and growling in impotent rage, on the roof of the traincar. The corpse of his customer and charge lays on the ground beside the train tracks miles behind him.

Not the proudest moment of his career. God only knows what this humiliation is going to do for Maverick's business prospects.

Next time, I start the game's second mission, which takes place after a three week timeskip with a fully healed and repaired Raiden.

I'll spoil a little bit and say that the next mission is much more enjoyable on both the gameplay and story fronts. For the former, it gets back to the atomic controls and free-form action from earlier on, and lets you employ them in a much more open and varied set of environments. For the latter, well...I haven't finished the mission yet, but there hasn't been any narrative bit nearly as frustrating and illogical as the train sequence so far. The tone of my next post will therefore be much more positive.

Also, I think there's kind of a missed opportunity in this level transition. Since the next mission starts with Raiden all fixed up again anyway, it seems like the game could have given the player the freedom to NOT lose that arm to Smugborg Sam. If you fight well enough, then maybe Raiden actually gets Sam on the backfoot and his escape at the end is more of a desperate last minute flight than a contemptuous exit-stage-left. It wouldn't change anything besides letting the player earn some extra satisfaction, but little touches like that go a long way. It would mean they'd need to make two versions of the cutscene, but like...it's Metal Gear. Since when has this series ever been daunted by the prospect of too many cutscenes?

Generally weak beginning, but with good core gameplay when you're allowed to use it and a lovably silly soundtrack. Next mission, like I said, capitalizes on those merits while avoiding most of the flaws.