Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 13)

Once again, thanks to Gamer's Little Playground for a couple of these screenshots.


The speech that Monsoon gives is a perfect follow-up to what Jetstream had been saying. Totally smooth transition. Like they rehearsed it, only if they'd rehearsed this I don't think Jetstream would be annoyed at him, right? But also like...Raiden's reactions to this whole thing, like he (or maybe the developers?) forgot that Jetstream was even in this scene for a minute there, it's like...what?

This is bizarre.

Now, weirdness of the Wind-switch aside, this is actually a good villain monologue. It's relevant to Raiden's position, addresses his arguments instead of talking passed them or randomly switching topics, exactly as long as it needs to be to say what Monsoon wants to say, and - most importantly - it's actually a philosophically sound and challenging argument.

Raiden's whole reason for being here - do justice, protect the innocent, etc - is predicated on the assumption that human beings have agency and are responsible for their own actions. The way Monsoon sees it, though, that's delusional. There's no such thing as personhood, or even as "a person" for that matter. The brain is just a substrate for ideas to take root in, grow on, and spread from. Memes, the "DNA of the soul" as he describes them, dictate all behavior, all decisions. There is no such thing as innocence. There is no such thing as guilt. A child soldier, a coerced soldier, a voluntarily soldier, a nonsoldier, nobody had any more choice than anybody else.

Richard Dawkins may have coined the term "memetics" to describe what he's talking about here, but Monsoon understood it long before he was old enough to read scientific journals. Growing up in 1970's Cambodia was a very enlightening teacher for him.

Eesh. Well. That's definitely the sort of background that might make this kind of nihilism seem more comforting than the alternatives. I lost enough of my extended family in the holocaust to not throw "worse than the nazis" around lightly, but, well...the Khmer Rouge were worse than the fucking nazis.

Also? Monsoon only mentions his backstory in one sentence. One *short* sentence. He doesn't pour out his life story and expect Raiden to inexplicably give a shit. This whole scene coming after an extended sequence of Raiden visibly losing his nerve also makes it much more justified for Monsoon to be monologuing right now; this is him escalating a psychological warfare tactic that appeared to have been working. The game is doing a pretty good job of justifying the genre convention here. For Metal Gear this is really remarkable.

Anyway, this is the strongest scene in the game so far. Heck, I think Monsoon might - in just his very short appearance thus far - have made himself one of my favorite videogame antagonists. He probably wouldn't impress me nearly as much in a vacuum, but in context he's just such a perfect foil to Raiden. In fact, looking back at Raiden's previous heart-to-hearts with the Winds of Destruction, Monsoon succeeds where both Mistral and Jetstream failed for me. He does the "you're just like me, only dumb" schtick that Mistral flubbed, pointing out the lessons he and Raiden each took away from their war-ruined childhood's and why Raiden's are wrong. He says the same "idealism is weak bullshit" thing from Jetstream's train tunnel fight, but he actually bothers to explain WHY idealism is weak bullshit.

...

The best part is that Monsoon's philosophy (or at least, the conclusion he draws from his mostly-correct premises) isn't really that unassailable. Make the simplest utilitarian argument, and it falls apart. Appeal to consequentialism and rational self-interest, and it falls apart. Raiden isn't coming from any of those places, though. He does everything he does in the name of justice, and that's a philosophy that cannot survive exposure to Monsoon's. So, in order to beat Monsoon in this battle of ideals, Raiden will need to change and grow in some way.

Monsoon is a great villain because he's being played off of this specific hero. This is the scene that most of the best antagonists force the protagonists to undergo. The "death and rebirth" moment, in Campbellian terms. The challenge that YOU need to change before you can overcome.

It's just too bad that the framing events of this speech are so what-the-fuck.

...

Once Monsoon has finished, Raiden falls to the ground again and muses aloud while the enemies are polite enough to give him his moment. Yeah, he guesses, Monsoon is right. People don't make their own choices. Raiden thought he could choose to stop being a killer, for a while. Moving to the west, marrying and having a kid, trying to put war behind him. But, well, apparently it wasn't really him choosing what he ended up doing next.

Monsoon tells him that it's good that he understands human nature now. That means he knows that he has nothing to regret, just like no one else has anything to regret. He can die with a clean conscience. Monsoon draws a pair of...they look kind of like kukris, but I don't think that's what they are. Some other type of oddly shaped shortsword that I assume is a South Asian weapon I've just never heard of....and makes as if to execute the demoralized Raiden. Jetstream is still just standing there lol. It turns out that Raiden isn't done yet, though. Looking up with a suddenly energized expression, Raiden explains that his whole thing about justice and duty really was just an excuse. He's been fighting because, owing to whatever combination of ASAB disposition and spooky CIA child soldier training, he likes doing it. Fighting, and killing. He does it because its fun.

To be fair to Raiden here, the developers at PlatinumGames did a pretty damned good job at making this so. Kinda hard to avoid going down that road when you live in a world with such engaging action gameplay.

...being more serious now, I once again wonder if this might be deliberate. If the game making combat really fun even while the NPC's shake their fingers at you for overindulging in it is meant to communicate how Raiden experiences the world. That still runs facefirst into my (repeatedly) aforementioned issues with how the enemy behavior and nonlethal(????) dismemberment option plays out. Still, it's an interesting thing for the devs to have been trying to do, even if they tripped over the execution.

Anyway, Jack says that Monsoon has indeed helped him shrug off some guilt and regrets, but he's wrong about the "about to die" part. Because, this entire time, Raiden has been holding back, and now he isn't going to.

Erm. Apparently when Raiden had his "Jack the Ripper" moniker in Liberia, he also had glowing red eyes? Or...maybe his ocular enhancements have some chemical in them that react visibly to edge? Either that, or he just has a red LED embedded in his eye socket that he can switch on for intimidation purposes and just never felt the need to until now.

Not sure what this is all about now, Monsoon gestures for some nearby mooks to get Raiden before he can finish standing up. They do manage to get the surround before Raiden is fully in it again, and one manages to stab him straight through the midsection. Ouch. Doesn't look like he hit anything vital (Raiden's synth body's vitals likely aren't exactly where a normal human's would be), but still, that's got to be a nasty chunk of hp. Not that I expect the game to actually punish me for cutscene damage, but you know what I mean. For some reason though, even though Raiden doesn't immediately retaliate, neither the mooks NOR the watching pair of Winds of Destruction press the advantage. Instead, they all just gawk at him as he tells Doktor to turn off his pain suppressors.

Hmm. Guess Raiden still has enough organic bits around that area to feel pain. With what's been increasingly implied about cyborgs of this era, I was starting to assume he was fully robot below the neck. Anyway, Doktor is understandably reluctant to comply with this request, but Raiden insists, and the bad guys keep standing around with their thumbs in their asses for long enough that he's able to change Doktor's mind. The inhibitors go off. Raiden chokes in agony, then chokes even harder in agony as he pulls the blade out of his chest in a fountain of his own blood and nanogel. He laughs, and wallows in how alive he feels, how he finally feels normal again.

Then...the red glow in his eye spreads to the rest of his body.

Did Raiden have magical powers, back when he went by Jack the Ripper? Is *that* what makes the Sears Program so dangerous? The abuse and atrocities the subjects endure and are forced to commit are fuel for some kind of blood magic ritual?

I'm not being entirely facetious here. The Metal Gear series has...well, it's kind of weird.

...

No overt supernatural elements appeared in the old 2D games as far as I know, but 1998's Metal Gear Solid was very, very frank about this being a world with magic in it. Two members of that game's supervillain team had supernatural powers, and the friendly NPC's don't make that big a deal out of it. The game outright starts with a mission briefing in which your commanding officer summarizes the enemy roster, and he's like "This one is a deadly sniper. This one is telekinetic. This one is skilled in close quarters combat. This one is a shaman." It had a very superhero comic vibe to it, where magic is rare but well-documented, and individuals who can use it just operate on the same playing field as the ones with pseudoscience powers or super martial arts or whatever.

This more or less continued in the following couple of games, with the odd random psychic or necromancer turning up in each rogues' gallery alongside the commandoes and cyborgs, and all the other characters mostly taking their existence in stride. Like I said, real Marvel/DC sort of handling. But then, starting mostly in Metal Gear Solid IV, things got...how to even describe this? The series started doing this thing where it builds someone up as obviously being supernatural, only to reveal that it's actually some extremely implausible and overcomplicated technological thing and treat that like a big twist. Even as ACTUAL MAGIC continued to appear, albeit much more rarely.

So far, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has presented its world as a soft scifi cyberpunk setting through and through. It's committed itself very thoroughly (and pretty competently, all things considered. It's one of the few things about MGRR's writing that I've consistently been praising) to the series' theme of proliferation and militarization (which the magic stuff had always been sort of an exception to). It's also leaned fairly heavily on the events of previous titles here and there, though, and some of those titles DID have magic in them. So like. Is that within this game's possibility space, or not? What's going on now LOOKS like magic, but is the game expecting my mind to go there?

Hmm. You know. Some of the issues I have with the premise of the Sears Program would actually be solved by going the supernatural route. The Sears Program isn't being replicated because it's TEH MOST BRUTAL and therefore makes TEH DEADLIEST WARRIUHS, it's because it includes the formula for an occult ritual. The virtual reality adaptation and mass production would then imply that someone HAS found a way to proliferate magical weapons instead of relying on lone exceptional individuals with powers. That could be something interesting to explore.

Alternatively, the VR version of the Sears Program might not end up succeeding at all because World Martial misunderstood how magic works, with simulation not being enough. In which case this is all an example of mass atrocities being committed to no end at all due to corporate ineptitude and tunnel vision. That could ALSO be something interesting to explore.

Is that what's going on here? I earnestly don't know. With this series, it's hard to predict.

...

The mooks rush at glowy red Jack the Ripper mode Raiden, and he kills them. The music and cinematography accompanying this make it seem like this is supposed to be an unusual display of brutality and/or lethality from Raiden, but like...it isn't, really? Cutting three or four basic soldiers to pieces in the space of a few seconds is just. normal for him (at least, it would be normal for players who aren't trying to avoid kills). When I get frustrated and just go all out to get through a difficult crowd of mooks, it goes pretty much like this. So, yeah, this isn't having much impact.

With the canon fodder down, Raiden is left facing Jetstream and Monsoon. Jetstream moves to take point, but then Monsoon tells him to go report to the boss, he'll handle this alone.

-___-

Why.

Also, is the boss that he's referring to here Sundowner? As in, he's also physically here in Denver? They have three Winds of Destruction here, and there's deliberately only confronting Raiden one at a time? Usually games just handwave away the reasons for multiple bosses to not jump you at once when you're infiltrating their fortress and they should realistically be able to call each other for backup on short notice. They arrange things so there's at least a fig leaf justification for it, or simply avoid raising the possibility and hope the player doesn't think about it. Here, we're seeing multiple bosses together only to then WALK AWAY once the fight starts.

This can work as a flex for villains who haven't yet learned to take the hero seriously. But Raiden's already killed one of the four Winds. They should be taking him seriously by now.

Oh well.

Sam reluctantly leaves, for no reason other than to make the game winnable. Cue battle with Monsoon. Appropriately, it's fought under a pouring rainstorm.

It turns out that glowy red Jack the Ripper mode allows Raiden to convert pain into electrolytes. Infinite stamina for as long as it's active. Which...this really SHOULD be magic. It looks like magic. It acts like magic. I think I'm going to choose to interpret it as that, regardless of what the game's text ends up saying. In any case, it turns out that infinite stamina is very, very necessary for the Monoon duel.

Remember when I said that Raiden has no intent of dying today? Well, his intent doesn't amount to much, because he dies. And dies. And dies.

This guy is a fucking nightmare.

To give you an idea of my general gaming skill; I've beaten Hollow Knight's Radiance, but not Absolute Radiance. I've beaten all the sub-bosses of I Wanna Be the Guy, but not the final boss. So, with that context in mind, I'd say that MGRR's Monsoon is in the top ten hardest videogame bosses that I've actually beaten. Maaaaybe in the top five. If this game's boss difficulty keeps escalating from here, I genuinely don't know if I'll be able to beat it. At least, not without switching to easy mode.

Monsoon's gimmick is, of course, magnetism. He can separate his body into parts and levitate several of them toward you to attack while keeping his vitals at a safe distance, or separate himself into an evasive tornado of components that your weapons go right through without hitting anything. To disorient him long enough to land some blows, you need to parry him and then counterattack when he's off-balance, and parrying Monsoon is hard. He attacks lightning fast, zips around you to come from god even knows which direction next, and his stabs almost always stun you long enough for him to land several more before dashing out of reach again.

EMP grenades do help. They stun him for a moment, and if he's separated into parts when you hit him with one he's forced to recombine and be vulnerable for a bit. This is easier said than done though, because - as aforementioned - he's insanely fast, and if you don't catch him as soon as he starts extending his limbs at you then you won't have time to get a grenade off; you either need to devote full attention to defence, or get slashed to ribbons.

Sometimes, he'll also throw a smoke grenade and then use his superior mobility to loom out of the fog and hit you from random direction after random direction after random direction while you're blinded. Sensor mode isn't an option, since you can't attack or parry while in sensor mode, and if you let your guard down for even a second while inside his smoke cloud you're going to spend the rest of the cycle stunlocked and losing hp.

On the bright side, if you manage to parry his projected limbs well enough and then make it to his main body while he's still off-balance and pulling himself together, you can use your infinite stamina to bullet-time-slash his head loose. It'll go flying, and you then have a few seconds to run over to it and use more of your infinite glowy red stamina to land as many hits as you can before he remagnetizes and either runs away or counterattacks and completely mutilates you.

At certain damage thresholds, Monsoon will leap onto a nearby rooftop and overdrive his magnetic attractors to throw some World Martial equipment at you. Up to and including multiple simultaneous APC's and helicopters that I guess must be parked just on the other side of those courtyard walls.

You can bullet-time intercept the projectiles to avoid damage and make them drop supplies, including desperately needed health packs and EMP grenades.

Except for when he gets cheeky and just sends a roiling cloud of metal shrapnel to tear across the courtyard, while screaming some memetastic soundbytes about MAGNETIC FORCE, JACK! NATURE'S FORCE! YOU CAN'T FIGHT NATURE JACK! That, you just need to outrun.

The mid-battle Codec calls aren't terribly memorable. Mostly just Raiden's friends being freaked out by his not-remotely-scary growly Jack the Ripper voice, some technical musings from Doktor about Monsoon's electromagnetic weaponry, and (of course) Carmen Sandiego facts about Cambodia from everyone's favorite misplaced Japanese teenager. Ah well.

Finally, after several IRL gameplay sessions' worth of attempts, I got his health down into the single digits. When he's just about out of hp, Monsoon levitates this giant phallic symbol at you that World Martial had up for decoration. I thought it was supposed to be marble, but apparently it's got enough metal in it for Monsoon's purposes.

The QTE sequence where you need to run up along the shaft while he's thrusting it at you and then pin Monsoon against the wall behind him for a final bullettime blade bonanza is predictable. But after a battle as intense as that one, I don't even mind.

Monsoon's final speech, over the codec, is directed at Raiden. Some of the memes that Monsoon knew had infected him, he claims, seem to have spread on to Raiden. That's not good. It's not bad either. There's no such thing as either of those things. It's like water flowing downhill, or the sun rising, or the strong doing as they will while the weak suffer what they must. Just, natural forces, doing natural things. Now, he returns to the earth. All is right with the world, just like it always has been, and always will be.

There's no point in asking Monsoon why he even was working for World Martial/Desperado, of course. He'd have just said that he doesn't know why he's doing it, and he doesn't care. It's just what the information moving through his brain told him to do. I think Raiden realized that's what he'd have said, and hence didn't bother asking before Monsoon fell silent.

Raiden marches on into World Martial's ground floor lobby.


To temper my generally high opinion of this fight, I do have two minor criticisms. In addition to the story issues I already pointed out with the lead-in to it.

First, the soundwork here is...underwhelming. The music isn't bad, but it's nowhere near as atmospheric or as hummable as Mistral's theme, to the point where I didn't even notice it for most of the several cumulative hours I sank into this battle. Likewise, Monsoon's English voice acting is just kind of annoying, and not in a way that I feel fits the character. In particular, this nasally "DOES IT HUUUUUUUURT?" line he repeats every single time he lands his overhead stabbing attack on you gets almost unbearable after the first two dozen times. The Japanese version might be better, of course.

Second, the battle itself is longer than it needs to be, on account of Monsoon being both an evasion-boss with frequent invulnerable phases AND a damage sponge with tons of hp. I think that if you reduced his hit points by about a quarter, and compensated for it by increasing his attack damage and/or making the healing items from his bombardment cycles drop less frequently, you could preserve the high difficulty while eliminating the tedium.

That said, this was good. Both as a (brutal) gameplay challenge, and as a thematic art piece.

Monsoon's body flying apart and coming back together again, like a corpse hacked to pieces by a sword. The way these segments have visible red Tron-lines demarcating their edges even when he's in one piece, looking like cuts on a slab of meat. Both reinforcing the weight of Raiden's brand of violence hanging over him despite any and all justifications, and illustrating the concept of an individual human really just being an inanimate object inhabited by multiple competing infomorphs. Magnetism pulling at things, combining them or scattering them, an invisible power causing the movement of ostensibly distinct objects in an unpredictable direction. The fact that many of the objects he throws are, themselves, weapons and military vehicles, adds a new dimension to the symbolism as well. The sequences where he attacks from out of the surrounding smoke cloud, everywhere at once, like he's an avatar of the world itself. These details all seem obvious and even hamfisted when pointed out, but in practice they feel organic and actually do take a minute to sink in.

There's another thing here that I'm not sure at all is intentional, because it requires reading a few steps further into the characters' histories than the game actively invites you to. But, basically: Liberia was founded by former American slaves who were returned to a random part of West Africa in the 19th century, with the causes of its civil wars in the 20th century stemming directly from that bizarre origin. The Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in the wake of the Vietnam War, taking advantage of the chaos left by American attacks. In effect, the political situations that created both Raiden and Monsoon were indirect consequences of USA imperialism. And, in the wake of that, both of them were scooped up and used as soldiers - their trauma profited from - by a wealthy, well-connected white American man with a fancy office in DC. Early on in Raiden's case. Seemingly much more recently in Monsoon's, depending on when and how Armstrong hired him. But still, it reads as a parallel. And now here they are, fighting each other like gladiators in front of an American military-industrial complex skyscraper. As part of a larger storyline about causing wars to profit from and harvesting war-orphans as tools for collecting that profit.

Like I said, this analysis requires you to read a little bit more into the history of those two countries than the game tells you to, so it's intentionality is questionable. Still, intended or not, it did jump out at me.

Getting critical again now, and looking at the emerging shape of MGRR as a whole, at this point I'm very, very confused about Jetstream Sam. Specifically, why does he exist?

Both times that we've met him up to now, it was alongside another Wind of Destruction. Both times, only one person talked at a time, and only one person fought while the other inexplicably left. In the second instance it's even weirder, because Monsoon actually completes the villain speech that Jetstream had already started. Even moreso, the way Jetstream appeared on all the billboards on Raiden's way is an extremely close analogue to Monsoon's "attack from the smoke all around" schtick, and an illustration of the power and ubiquity of memes, which is also Monsoon's schtick.

Why wasn't it just Monsoon on the billboards to begin with?

And, now that we've asked that question, why wasn't it just Sundowner who cut off Raiden's hand? He's the guy we were chasing up until that moment, right? And, as the apparent head honcho of the Winds, it would be more fitting for him to be the one Raiden has a rematch-vendetta against.

In both cases, the story needed to jump through hoops in order to accommodate the extra person. And, in both cases, it seems like the more fitting Wind to actually fight would have been "not Jetstream."

I think this might be another seam left over from MGRR being two different Metal Gear game concepts mashed together in development. Like, there's something important about Jetstream that the late game hinges on, but all the early game stuff that he was supposed to do to set himelf up as a bigtime villain was made redundant. Or else they showed some footage of him in an early trailer and everyone loved him, so the devs felt compelled to keep him important even when the project had changed directions. One of those two. Possibly both.


Anyway, next time I level Raiden up, try the new VR missions I've unlocked, and then begin the raid on World Martial HQ.