Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 17)

Filler level ends with Raiden stealing a motorbike and charging off toward that rocket launch facility in a lunatic rush, trying to get there in time to launch himself to Pakistan before the bad thing can happen. For all that he's supposed to be extra ruthless and dangerous now that he's rediscovered Jack the Ripper, he's awfully considerate toward the person whose motorcycle he lifted.

How long did it take him to carve that into the pavement anyway? I thought time was of the essence?

Raiden meets no further opposition in his escape from Denver. In the background, the World Martial HQ seems to be half-collapsed. On one hand, I can definitely see how Sundowner's decision to have helicopters carpet-bomb the rooftop might have been bad for the building. On the other hand, I'm not sure how we were supposed to have landed Doktor's chopper on that rooftop, loaded all the brains, and then taken off again if that's the condition the place was in. Is one of the UAV's supposed to have crashed into it after we took off? I didn't think we were still so close to the building when those interceptors arrived. Yeah, I dunno.

Well, off we go I suppose.

As Raiden does his photogenic motorcycle-ride-at-dawn across the Colorado highlands, he touches base with Boris and Doktor. Boris assures him that he's still on schedule to make it on time, assuming that there aren't any bigtime complications with the launch. Doktor informs him that he's dropped Pochita off on the highway ahead of Raiden, and since gotten the brains out of Colorado airspace. I'm not sure if he has the VR capacity for this many more, but at least they're not in immediate danger. Well, they're not in immediate danger of anything besides continuing to exist as helpless voiceless disembodied brains, but you know what I mean.

Raiden has already come within sight of the Solis launch facility when he finds Pochita. Unfortunately, he isn't alone.

I started to wonder if this was a betrayal, but no. Pochita ran into Jetstream while the latter was setting up an ambush for Raiden, and has since been trying to convince him to stand down and let Raiden through. As Pochita already told us, he and Jetstream had something along the lines of a friendship during the former's time under Desperado control, and despite now being on opposing sides they've managed to remain on good terms.

When he sees Raiden, Pochita walks over to him (with Jetstream looking unhappy with, but understanding of, this) and tells him that talking hasn't worked. In fact, he hasn't even managed to understand Jetstream's motives for continuing to fight now that his employer organization has been essentially hobbled. Either Jetstream won't answer Pochita's questions, or his answers are just incomprehensible to the AI.

Just like before, it's hard to say if something really has caused Sam to change in the last couple of months, or if Pochita was just wilfully blind to how crazy he was during their time together out of desperation for someone sane to talk to.

Actually...it occurs to me that there is something that might well have changed Jetstream Sam in the time since Pochita last met him in person. The absence of Pochita. Maybe they were each other's anchors, to some extent, and once Raiden snatched Pochita from Abkhazia there was nothing left to keep Jetstream from sinking further and further into World Martial's nihilistic morass.

On the other hand, Sam's words and behavior during the Africa mission don't seem meaningfully different from how he comes across in subsequent appearances. Maybe Pochita was just in denial after all.

Like I said, it's ambiguous.

Well. Pochita is still unarmed in his current reconstruction and - while firmly on Raiden's side - wouldn't be willing to strike against his old friend even if he were equipped to do so. I'm not sure if Pochita has sworn off personal violence in general for the time being. It seemed like he had, what with opting to not carry a weapon in his new form and assisting Raiden in a purely support role, but then toward the end of the World Martial level some of his dialogue suggested that he was actively holding off reinforcements while Raiden faced Sundowner. We know from his urban climbing scenes that he does still have claws at least, so he's not totally incapable of harming a cyborg right now. So yeah, I'm not quite sure where he sits on the pacifism spectrum at this point. Regardless, in this particular fight he won't be participating.

Raiden sullenly expresses gratitude to Sam for intercepting him on the road instead of just going to the Solis facility and killing all the rocket launch people, even though that would be a less risky and more reliable way of stopping him. Sam laughs this off. I like to imagine that he's mentally kicking himself for not having thought of that, but there are no outward signs of it. Then Sam says that he's not doing this for money, but ideals. And also that the war will be the big ideological payoff for him.

Raiden asks him what his ideals even are. Jetstream starts to answer, but then changes his mind and says he won't burden Raiden with another monologue, he's put up with enough of those already.

-______-

I mean, on one hand, yes. That is a correct statement.

On the other hand, Jetstream's role and presence in the story have been so weird and inexplicable that the decision for him to be the one who DOESN'T explain himself feels like ass-covering.

Like. Is this the developers admitting that Jetstream's concept got lost somewhere along the way, and sharing a joke with the player at their own expense? Maybe?

As Raiden gets off his motorcycle, Pochita begs them both not to do this. Is there really no alternative to a duel to the death? Unfortunately, only Jetstream can answer that. Raiden would be glad to not have this boss fight right now, I'm pretty sure, so the necessity of it is entirely Sam's decision. And, well. He's decided.

The music for this fight is basically a ramped-up, faster-paced version of the techno-samurai flute and synth guitar background that most of the normal gameplay is accompanied by. Fits, I guess. There's plenty of Western in this fight as well, too. The unusually high concentration of tumbleweeds for this part of Colorado does a lot for the "duel at sunrise" vibe. Good thing I brought an appropriate-ish hat.

Anyway, the fight. It's a hard one. Very hard, even. Not least because I was low on health packs and it took me a few deaths to realize that there were wooden crates behind some of those rocks that I could break open for more. Even after that though, deaths happened.

Much like in the tunnel scene, this fight is a mirror match. Katana cyborg versus katana cyborg. In some ways, this battle is a very slow-paced one. Or at least, the first phase of it is. Jetstream basically plays defence, holding position and waiting for Raiden to strike, then retaliating, then holding back and waiting again. When he does those ripostes though, they're BRUTAL. He attacks blindingly fast, over and over again, and parrying them all in return is all but impossible. At some point in his flurry, I always slip up, and once he's hit you you're stunlocked for the rest of this blender cycle. A lot like Monsoon, only each blow deals a lot more damage thanks to that souped up electro-sword of his. Hitting him back is relatively easy, but keeping it up long enough to make it worth it against the damage he puts out in retaliation is much harder.

The key turns out to be...the cuckstaff! I'd switched it out for Monsoons sais last level (they didn't impress me), and forgotten to switch it back.

He's fast. He's strong. He's got some weird kind of friction-less charge ability that's hard to get out of the way of. But one thing that Jetstream Sam doesn't have is reach. Making flurries of his own with the staff from out of Sam's reach lets Raiden beat him at his own game. The distance means that you'll usually have time to get out of the way before Sam can lunge back at you. He still hit me a few times, but not nearly as many. Additionally, if you time it right, you can jump over his head and do the downward staff-lunge while he's expecting a frontal attack, and if you hit him with that it'll stun him long enough to land some follow up blows and then back away before he recovers.

The staff does less damage per hit than the sword, but with it I can hit him almost three times more often while exposing Raiden to less damage in return. So, easy trade.

When you reduce his hp to 2/3 or so, there's a forced bullet time sequence where you have to knock his red sith lightsabre out of his hand.

Prompting him to attack with just his metal fists and feet for a while.

I'm ashamed to say he killed me a few times here for a very stupid reason. See, usually, when an enemy in this game lunges forward and tries to grapple you, you can't parry it. You just need to avoid or outrun it. Jetstream's tackle-charges are INSANELY nimble and long-ranged, though, and if you try to outrun it you'll either get grabbed and beaten within an inch of your life (or further), or just be too far away to do any damage in return before he charges again.

Then I realized that when the unblockable tackles happen, the enemy doing it usually flashes yellow to warn you about it. Which Jetstream was not doing. I tried parrying, and it turned out to be incredibly easy. You can see the lunge coming from a long way away, and so - even though the charge itself happens so quickly - parrying it is simple. And, once you've parried his fists, it knocks him much further off balance than parrying his sword did, letting you do good damage in return before he recovers. This is actually by far the easiest stage of the battle.

In my defence, I will remind you what your mother used to do to support herself. >:(

Stage three is annoying. There's a dumb QTE where Jetstream grabs Raiden's sword, and you have to click a bunch of times to make him let go without it being at all clear what action you're making Raiden perform to do this. Then...Jetstream just calmly walks over to his sword and picks it up again without Raiden doing a thing to stop him.

-_____-

If the cutscene had showed him using his weird speedboost thing to get to his sword while Raiden was still getting his bearings again, I wouldn't have questioned it. It's been demonstrated that Jetstream's weird speed trick is much faster in short bursts than Raiden's ninjarun. It should have just showed him using that while Raiden tries and fails to keep up, instead of Raiden standing around like a total nincompoop while he meanders over to the sword. Oh well.

Stage three is like stage one, only more aggressive. Sam initiates the clashes of blows as often as he waits for you to do so, and it's hard to tell which to expect. He also starts making greater use of his sword's energy-blast thing, making explosive or incendiary swings that cover much more area and can throw Raiden back even if you parry them. Still, I know what to do now. He did kill me once or twice again, but replaying the battle after each death had me clearing stages one and two almost without taking damage. Once you know the tricks and countermeasures, there's not much he can do about them. He's a tough boss, but not a very adaptable one.

Hilariously, one of his sound bytes during stage three is "How did you possibly beat Sundowner like this?" It's funny both because a) he's saying this after I've brought him to well below half health, and b) the little boy from "Limbo" could beat Sundowner.

Also during this stage, I remembered that I can consult Raiden's codec friends mid-battle. Most of them don't have much to say. Pochita informs me that there are some crates nearby left over from a recent helicopter crash that might have supplies in them. Which, well, your mom. Doktor has a real galaxy brained take though; since Jetstream is so fast and good at dodging, explosives and other high tech tricks will be useless here, so the outcome of this battle will be determined "by willpower alone."

Ah, I see. It all makes sense now. That latent blood magic from Jack the Ripper is what powers Boris' FTL r&d team. That's how they're able to work these miracles, and that's also the real reason that Boris hired him. Raiden having a weapon with longer reach than Jetstream's is a manifestation of Raiden's willpower, made physical through the rituals of Maverick's technomagic squad.

Still, there must have been at least a LITTLE bit of actual engineering involved alongside the candles, incense, and sacrificed kittens. Give that aspect of the process a bit more credit Dok, come on.

Hmm. Earlier on, Jetstream also shouted "Let's see what you really believe in!" during a clash of blades. I guess he also knows that Raiden's secondary weapons are indirect manifestations of his determination and will. Smart guy.

...

I know what the game is getting at here, with will and determination being proof of ideological commitment and 1:1 fuel for combat effectiveness. A lot of shonen-y stuff does this.

The thing is, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance also has things to say about power and powerlessness. About victims, victimizers, and the cold material realities of economics, technology, and circumstance that force the two into their roles.

And like. If you're heavily engaging with that second theme, then your story does not have room in it for the first one. The prevailing power of will isn't something I'm going to entertain in a story about people with advanced technology fighting over the abuse and enslavement of people without it. Sorry.

...

Also, Sam contemptuously called Raiden an "amateur" during a moment when I was actually damaging him a lot. I'm going to interpret this as Sam being butthurt that Raiden brought a polearm to what he thought was going to be a swordfight. Lmao. Willpower and ideals need a little bit of tactical intelligence to use effectively, it turns out, eh Jetstream?

The Cuckstaff of Willpower and Belief finally cuts Jetstream down and triggers the QTE where Raiden can impale the fucker to make sure.

His last act is to wink at Pochita before succumbing to his wounds and sprawling out on the pavement.

Definitely a real challenge. Harder than Monsoon? I started to type "yes," but on further thought I don't think so. I think Sam might have killed me more times than Monsoon did, but once I figured out the tricks for each of his stages he became much more manageable; I'm pretty sure I could handle a rematch with him very easily now. Monsoon is less about learning the tricks, and more about gitting gud; pretty sure I'd still struggle with him on a rematch now even after beating him. Part of it is also that with Monsoon you're at his mercy in terms of when more health packs get literally tossed at you, whereas with Jetstream they're strewn around the battlefield from the start for you to unbox at your leisure.

So, overall, I don't think he quite edges out Monsoon for hardest boss in the game so far, but he's a close second. After the letdown that was the Sundowner fight, this was a welcome challenge. And it was really well designed and brought to life too. Music was nice, scenery was nice, and the three different stages of the battle were nicely varied while all being clear variations on the same enemy moveset. There was a little bit of annoying QTE stuff, but only a little bit of it within a long battle, so it doesn't hurt it much. Jetstream Sam is probably the most fun boss to fight. Just really good game design. If the World Martial tower is the most replayable level in Revengeance, then Jetstream is the most replayable boss fight.

Anyway, post-victory cutscene!

Jetstream doesn't keep talking after falling. He bleeds normal red, in the normal amounts. Raiden notices this as well, and - after a cursory inspection of the body - realizes that Sam barely had any cybernetic implants. He was just wearing a power suit, and had a few neural interface thingies to help him control it. His strength and toughness came from the suit, but his reflexes and skill were essentially unaugmented. Damn impressive.

I just wish I knew why he did any of the things that he did.

Pochita wonders if this outcome might have been avoidable. Which, I mean, yes, it was avoidable. Sam could have decided to not fight Raiden. Why he made the choice that he did, unfortunately, it is probably too late to ever find out. Raiden can't help Pochita here, because this duel wasn't his idea.

Genre conventions suggest that Sam might have been acting out of personal loyalty to Armstrong on account of a life debt or something. Maybe. I don't think that's it in this case though.

Pochita muses some more, and the writers seem to forget everything they've established about how he supposedly works. He says he can't understand the clashes of ideals because he "wasn't programmed" with any such ideals or attachment to them. Even though every conversation before this one was very explicit about Pochita not having been programmed at all, though, so...yeah, he's just acting like a generic scifi AI now. Lame.

Also, Boris and Doktor really need to sit Pochita down and read him some theory, because holy shit does this boy need to get some historical materialism in him:

Nuff said.

Next, Raiden picks up Sam's kewl red sword. Unfortunately it's ID locked, so in any hands besides Sam's it's just going to be a normal blade without any of the high tech whatsit that makes it so powerful. And...oh my god this is so stupid...apparently the reason for the sword's power isn't because of new technology that Maverick doesn't have access to yet. Rather, you can apparently reforge any sword into a high tech vibroblade, and the quality of the new weapon will correlate to the quality of the original. Sam's sword is an original Murasama that's been passed down through the generations. It has the same tech in it as Raiden's sword, but the fact that it was folded a million billion times from purest nippon steel allowed that same tech to make it much stronger.

How...is this...can it be...

...a weeaboo game made by actual Japanese people?

It all fits. Raiden's out-of-nowhere samurai fixation that the other characters fail to recognize as ridiculous. The random sakura garden. So many other details. Now this.

Japanese weebs.

I really thought that this was a contradiction in terms.

...

Just in case there's anyone here who doesn't know: the really special thing about early modern Japanese swordmaking is how labor-intensive it was. Japan's low quality iron forced the swordsmiths to devise the elaborate folding process in order to get a similar end result to what continental swordsmiths did in much less time.

This isn't to say that Sengo Murasama wasn't very, very good at what he did. But, in terms of functionality of the weapon, looking at the history of bladed weapons throughout the world from the 1600's onward to the present, NEVERMIND extrapolating into a near future where bladed weapons come back into style for use by cyborgs and thus get a lot of attention and money sunk into them, well...it's nothing that extraordinary.

Honestly, moreso than even the Jack the Ripper stuff, this would work much better for me if the game just called it magic. Like, explicitly establish that the Metal Gearverse version of Sengo Murasama was a wizard who forged magic swords. That wouldn't be any more "out there" than previous supernatural stuff in the series.

Part of the reason this bugs me so much is that Metal Gear occasionally goes out of its way to puncture pop history myths like the katana-wank. So, seeing it just bite the weeb hook so uncritically in this case when a much better approach is sitting right there frustrates me.

...

Anyway, we can't use the dumb red lightsabre yet, so for now Raiden sheathes it and lets Pochita keep it as a memento of his late friend. Boris hails Raiden and reminds him he has less than an hour to go. Off they hurry to the facility.

On foot, for some reason. Maybe Raiden's ninjarun is faster than the motorcycle for relatively short distances like this, idk.

And, apparently that was the level. The Jetstream boss fight was its own level.

Even though it came right after a really short, really pointless level without any bosses.

Why? Because Jetstream Sam is important. He's Raiden's big rival. We need to show how important he is and give the character his due weight.


I hate Jetstream Sam.

Not the boss fight, obviously, he was a super fun boss. Not even the character, exactly. It's more like I hate the fact that he's here.

This game had no need for him. This game had no ROOM for him. And yet, somehow, the game seems to think that it's ABOUT him and his relationship with Raiden. Except when it doesn't.

To get my most uncharitable take out of the way first: it often feels like Jetstream Sam exists in order to be (archetype). The fans like (archetype), therefore they will like this game because it has (archetype) in it. Nevermind what (archetype) represents, or how it typically fits into the story. He's here because he is (archetype), and (archetype) is popular.

Now, being much MORE charitable, and knowing what I do about this game's long, turbulent development, I think I can see what might have happened. MGRR is basically a crash victim of two different game concepts, and I suspect that ONE of those games was meant to be about Raiden getting revenge on the guy who maimed him. Hell, the title "Revengeance" would have been a better fit for that story than this one. But, with the brain plot becoming the main plot, it all just trips over itself.

The scene early on, where Jetstream maims Raiden? It's ruined by the fact that Sundowner is also there at the time, and considering his much more important role in the game it would have made much more sense for him to be the one to do the deed. The game does this weird cutscene dance in order to remove Sundowner from the scene for exactly as long as Jetstream needs in order to do it instead of him, whereas the entire level besides that scene was about trying to stop Sundowner.

The approach to World Martial headquarters, where Sam lectures you about free will and social momentum from bits of TV screen all around? That's obviously supposed to be Monsoon. It's exactly what happened with Sundowner in the Africa mission, just with Jetstream butting in for the talky part instead of the fighty part this time.

Really, I think it's the overlap with Sundowner that's doing the most damage here, even if the weirdness with Monsoon was more noticeable in the moment. Sundowner is the guy who Raiden is hunting for much of the game, with Armstrong being treated as a more distant problem up until the very late game. He's the one who killed N'mani and undid Raiden's efforts to make his home continent better for today's children than it was for himself. He's the one actually, personally running the Neo-Sears Program. But...there's this other guy who maimed Raiden, and we want revenge on him too...or...erm...do we want revenge on him, actually?

Raiden occasionally makes some mouth noises in the cutscenes and codecs about wanting to get revenge on Jetstream, but that almost completely stops after the brain plot is introduced. He never makes any actual efforts to track Jetstream down. He never seeks him out. His crusade against World Martial is for unrelated reasons. The final battle happens because Jetstream wanted a rematch, not because Raiden wanted one.

Honest to god, Jetstream is the one acting like he has something to get revenge on Raiden for.

But he doesn't.

He just appointed himself Raiden's rival for no apparent reason.

Because there was one game about hunting down your evil-but-honorable samurai rival dude, and another game about rescuing orphans' brains from World Martial.

So, maybe "hate" is too strong a word. Jetstream Sam might have been a perfectly good antagonist for the game that never got made. It really isn't his fault.


Next time, we raiden rokkit into spess.