Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 3)

Note: Once again, some of the screenshots in this post are taken from a playthrough by Gamer's Little Playground on YouTube.

Three weeks after Maverick's humiliation in Unnamed Sub-Saharan Country, Raiden has been put back together and given some new upgrades that will hopefully change the outcome of his next cyborg-on-cyborg swordfight. That actually raises the question of whether Raiden only lost that last fight because Sam happened to have better hardware, rather than it being a skill issue as the latter claimed. Hard to say.

Anyway, we have a (very pretty) opening shot of a slush-hydrogen plane coming in low over a stormy sea with fittingly tense and exciting background music.

The plane is piloted by Raiden, via direct neural-cybernetic interface. In his own words, "it's like being a bird...strapped to a rocket." Heh, okay, that's actually a pretty good line.

As Raiden crosses the sea toward the AO, there's some flavorful conversation with his support crew back at Maverick's company headquarters. Raiden and Boris seem to be especially close; I don't remember Boris from the previous games, but Raiden's own appearances were pretty sporadic throughout the series (he was the player character of MGS2, and then showed up as an NPC for some parts of MGS4) so presumably he could have known this guy for a long time without him being mentioned ingame. Also, Boris calls Raiden "tovarish," and the East German Herr Doktor complains about the capitalist outside pressures that they're working under these days, which might just be part of their tinned ethnic stereotypes but also might mean that Maverick has actual communist leanings. Maybe they're a mercenary co-op, rather than a mercenary corp? Unfortunately, I don't remember nearly enough about Raiden from earlier in the series to speculate on his own ideological slant beyond "honorable and stuff."

More practically speaking, Herr Doktor also goes over some new game mechanics enabled by Raiden's hardware refit that he hasn't gotten to field-test until now. He can now give himself immediate healing boosts by stealing repair nanites from other cyborgs he kills in battle. The implants that contain that healing nanogel power down and spoil their contents within seconds of their host dying, though, so Raiden has to carve them out and use them in the time it takes the slain cyborg's body to hit the ground. So, execute special execution strikes on enemies to get healing, sure. Also, the nanogel absorbing device is located in the palm of Raiden's new left hand, which means he has to hold up the harvested gelsacks, turn his left side directly into the camera, and crush them dramatically in his fist in this oppressive gesture the same way that every edgified videogame protagonist from 2010 or so onward finds an excuse to turn toward the camera and crush something in their fists. Okay. Speaking of left hands, Herr Doktor also tells Raiden that most cyborgs have a backup memory chip stored there, so lopping those off can also get them some valuable intel.

In short: enemy cyborgs are yummy and full of goodies.

Confusingly though, the word "cyborg" is now clearly being used to refer to all combat cyborgs, not just the full-body ones like Raiden and the named baddies. Like I said, this game really needs some expanded terminology for its transhumans.

Some more mission-specific exposition also comes from Maverick's intel guy, an American by the name of Kevin. Raiden really shouldn't need a reminder on this stuff if he's already heading in to the mission site, but as far as "as you all know" scenes go this at least isn't as bad as many examples. Anyway, we're flying into Abkhazia for this one. Some whacky general-turned-warlord has just overthrown the democratic(-ish) government and started getting his ethnic cleansing on, and said democratic(-ish) government in exile has hired Maverick to un-overthrow them. On a pettier note, the warlord is being armed and supplied by a US-based PMC called Desperado Enforcement LLC. In the three weeks since the African mission, Maverick was able to identify Sam and Kong as employees of that particular company, so this mission is also a good opportunity to fuck up one of their contracts just like they fucked up one of ours. Petty is good. I like petty.

Also, the baddy who cut my arm off is named "Jetstream Sam." Hah, I get it. "Desperado." Names that sound like they could be the villain of a cowboy movie. Come to think of it, Kong had a Texas accent, and Sam is obviously Latin, so they've even got the right part of the world down. Heh, well, they might be murderous psychos-for-hire, but I can at least appreciate their dedication to the bit.

That said, as far as anyone knows this warlord is only employing Desperado's mook partial cyborgs, not their expensive heavy hitters. So, hopefully Jetstream Sam and his ilk won't be present on the battlefield. If it turns out that they are, well, hopefully Raiden's new upgrades will be up to the task. The plane reaches the Georgian coastline, and....awww man.

With all the camera shots lovingly following the plane and the dialogue about how much Raiden is enjoying his cyberneural control of it, I was expecting a flight sim level. Other Metal Gear games have included vehicular combat sections as a change of pace here and there, so I don't think this was an unreasonable expectation. Seriously, why talk up how great the flight supposedly is if you're not going to let the player have it?

Ah well.

So, Raiden lands on the beach, and my flight sim level goes flying back home on autopilot without me. There's an overly long and loving close-up cinematic of Raiden stepping up out of the water and onto the shore in slow motion, and mission 2 begins!

Boris says that the baddies have turned a coastal oil refinery into their local headquarters, so I should liberate that before anything else. He also says that if I want any more information, I'm always free to contact my support staff via the wifi chip in my brain, which is convenient.

And, well. This industrialized beachfront is nice enough to look at, even if the sudden disappearance of that thunderstorm out at sea behind me is kind of baffling me, so I might as well stand here and face it a bit while going through the optional dialogues. This game was made before the Dark Souls paradigm for inventory etc screens became industry standard, so the game world freezes around you while you're in dialogue mode. I'm not sure if the game will let me do that mid-combat or not; I'll try it later and see.

There's Boris the tactics guy, Kevin the intel guy, and Courtney the life support gal, as well as Doktor for more in-depth technical info. Boris' conversation mostly centers around that hydrogen plane I never actually got to fly, and how much renting it is costing the company. Which is why he had it fly away as soon as Raiden landed; it's faster than anything, but it hasn't got much in the way of stealth, and Maverick really can't afford to return it dented right now. Also, Boris tells me that whenever I'm in a fight with other cyborgs he will helpfully place invisible walls around the arena allegedly to avoid putting civilians in harm's way. Lmao, that's the excuse we're going with, game? This wouldn't annoy me as much if you just didn't acknowledge it in the story at all, let alone saddling Boris with it when I'd otherwise like him.

Kevin tells me more about the situation on the ground; most of the civilians are supposed to have fled the town when the fighting got bad, but there are bound to be some left behind, and things are likely to be gruesome given the nature of the occupiers. The upside is that Kevin has determined that most of the warlord's cyborg troops are mercenaries, so once their patron is neutralized they should all just piss off and go home instead of staying around to keep making trouble. This warlord definitely seems to have money to burn, which...well, I assume that's on account of him having seized the oil infrastructure, heh.

Courtney gives me a status report on my vitals (all good so far, which is unsurprising considering I have yet to get in any fights), and also informs me that she is a game world skin wrapped around the manual saving function. She's very frank about the fourth wall break here, which is par for the course for this series (if you don't know what I'm talking about, go look up "Psycho Mantis cutscene" on YouTube). And...she also expresses concern for Raiden, and he tenderly advices her on how to deal with the stress of what they all went through in Nonspecifa. Oh, I see, she's the team female, I get it. Sigh.

Doktor, notably, is the only accessible NPC who doesn't have the little "Maverick" caption under his name. That goes along with what was implied in the stage intro cutscene, where he said that he would be "permitted" to give me additional services and upgrades in exchange for the data in those arm-chips. He gives me more detail on how to do the nanogel-extraction thing, and then goes on a truly bizarre tangent about Raiden's American bloodlust which segues into ever weirder and more unconvincing claims about the human affinity for violence. Apparently violent movies get more common the more peaceful a region of the world is? Yeeeeeaaah I'm gonna put a big “Citation Needed” on that, Doc.

Definitely the most convincingly Kojima-like bit of dialogue so far, aside from the concision.

Also, despite nicknaming himself "Raiden" and making random samurai allusions in previous cutscenes, Raiden is a Liberian American. Which. Um. Is he actually not supposed to have any Japanese heritage at all? Is he seriously just a weeb? I mean...that would go along with the earlier characterization of him being incorrigibly too busy posing with his sword to not get ganked over and over again by that robot. But in that case, shouldn't everyone be making fun of him more? Or at least, like, visibly barely holding their tongues, on account of him having invaluable combat skills that only just make up for him being an absolute cringelord? The game seems to think that Raiden is awesome, and also wants the player to think that he's awesome, but like...it also seems to be aware that he's lame. It's weird.

After going through the dialogues and being told that everyone will have more to say if something important happens (read: new conversations unlocked after each cutscene), I move on up from the beach and toward the abandoned building that the invisible walls corral me toward. A trio of Desperado partial-augs decloak and attack.

I like that Revengeance has been true to Metal Gear's original theme of proliferation. Just like the titular metal gears and the sword-cyborgs, personal cloaking technology was introduced to the series as a crazy new prototype and served as the gimmick of a specific boss. And, just like the other scifi elements, subsequent games have it becoming more common until it's just a fact of life for the characters that barely merits commenting on. The series' commitment to that theme has meant that, unlike similar media that sweeps the superscience inventions under the rug after each episode, the Metal Gear universe has necessarily gotten more and more futuristic with each new instalment. I respect this about it.

These are the same grade of Desperado LLC rank-and-file that made up the bulk of last mission's enemies, and aside from the addition of hand grenades to their arsenals they haven't gotten any harder to deal with. Those grenades do a respectable amount of damage if you don't avoid them though, which in turn incentivizes the player to try out Raiden's new cybernetic organ theft trick.

I didn't actually know that Raiden would hold the gelsacks up to the camera and crush them in his fist. I just heard Herr Doktor say that he needs to absorb the gel through his left hand, and based on that was able to make a confident hypothesis which has now been confirmed.

Anyway, as far as gameplay goes the implant-harvesting, or "Zandatsu" as the game insists on leaving it untranslated, is solid. When an enemy is off balance, activate bullet time choppy mode and try to align your blade swings with a little targeting reticule in the enemy's lower stomach area. Chop there and then press the "interact" button quickly before the body can fall, and Raiden will slice the enemy in half and pull out the fuel tank for dramatic fist-crushing. You do need to be aware of other enemies while doing this, though; bullet time mode slows them down, but slowed isn't the same thing as stopped, and you can still get stabbed or shot in the back if you take too long or choose the wrong moment to try it, at which point the maneuver is interrupted and you're worse off than you were before.

It's a good balance of risk and reward. More reward than risk in this easy fight, but I can already see how it'll be much more challenging (and rewarding) to pull off when I'm up against bigger groups or stronger enemies.

Once he's standing over their corpses, Raiden joins a conference call. Everyone is just sort of taking the opportunity to whine about how common cyborgs (of the partial-aug variety) are these days, to the point where baseline human soldiers are becoming an endangered species. This also relates to the dominance of PMC's on the modern battlefield, for an interesting combination of reasons.

Basically, human soldiers just can't compete with transhuman ones, and fully robotic armies are still too clumsy and too unreliable (the latter in particular having been proven in one of the previous games) to be a viable replacement. At the same time, governments face massive civil unrest and international condemnation when they try to pressure their own soldiers into undergoing the process. Mercenaries, however, aren't seen as being the victims of any national coercion if they choose to augment themselves, and nobody cares if something goes wrong and causes them to mutate horribly or die of brain feedback from experimental procedures. In most cases, PMC deaths aren't even counted on official death tolls because none of the belligerent nations will actually claim them for that purpose. So, national militaries have been shrinking, and the demand for transhuman mercs growing.

It's an interesting scifi-sociology concept, but I don't find it a very convincing one. Mostly because I don't think the public backlash against transhumanism would last long enough to have a significant impact. Governments using various carrots and sticks to get people to do massively dangerous and unpleasant things for them isn't exactly a new concept. Also, like...it's hard for me to imagine that the public has less of a problem with their government outsourcing all its hard power to mercs than it does with their government offering big money to cyborgification volunteers.

Additionally, unless the game reveals some meaningful downsides to being a cyborg (which it hasn't yet), you'd think a lot of people would want to do it just for its own sake. The strength, durability, and tirelessness that even the mook partial-borgs in this world enjoy aren't only good for military stuff. Hell, looking at what those medical/repair nanites can do, I'd expect a LOT of people to want it just for the healing factor alone.

Last, and probably most importantly, I've never gotten the impression that governments in the metalgearverse are more democratic and subject to outside pressure than they are irl. It would only take a few countries to just turn up their noses at the bad press and make soldier augmentation drives, and then everyone else would be forced to either do the same or basically cede their state power to hired thugs while those first few countries rule the world. That's how military proliferation works.

So, it's an interesting thought experiment, but it relies on some very blinkered premises.

Kevin the intel guy does muse about where Desperado is finding enough recruits to give them so many low-tier cyborgs. What, are there not enough poor and/or morally flexible people in the world for this to be self-explanatory? I guess not. Raiden says something to the effect of "more enemy cyborgs just means more goodies for me to collect," which gets his support staff chiding him about how these mercs are still human. Raiden simply replies that anyone willing to help this scummy warlord's genocide campaign just for money isn't human as far as he's concerned. He puts it in way edgier and more pretentious words, though.

Someone please put Raiden in a weaker body so that he can be bullied the way he deserves oh my god.

Kevin insists that dehumanizing one's enemies is a very bad thing to do, and sort of obliquely expresses concern at the incentives that Raiden's new vampire-like upgrades are giving him. But, whatever, they've got a job to do, let's go create some peace or whatever. The camera lingers on the corpses before doing a closeup on Raiden's remaining organic eye before gameplay resumes.

I guess it's one of these plots, then. Man, this game really is dating itself.

...

Around the same time that QTE's were all the rage, everyone and their mother thought that they were going to make the long-awaited Citizen Kane of Videogames by raising the question "but what if ur the real monster tho?"

Indie games were doing this. AAA games were doing this. Did any of them actually manage to become the Citizen Kane of Videogames by exploring this intriguing philosophical query? Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion. Some people think that 2012's "Spec Ops: The Line" did in fact become the Citizen Kane of Videogames by exploring that intriguing philosophical query. Some people disagree.

With that context in mind, I spent some time thinking over the question, and looking at MGRR's storytelling and gameplay as I've experienced them thus far. And, I think I have a response:

I'm calling your bluff, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

For the next two missions, I'm going to do the closest thing to a pacifist run that you'll let me. I will only fight enemies who I can't avoid. When a lone opponent is injured, I will back off and see if any want to flee or surrender or beg for mercy. When I've killed most of an enemy group, I will do the same for the last couple of survivors. I will only do the organ-harvesting manoeuvre when I'm badly injured and have no other choice.

There's no technical limitation preventing you from doing this. There are games that came out long before you did that had enemies break when the fight turned against them.

I will not demand that you let me spare enemies in these situations. Raiden is your steel donut, not mine. If you say that sparing enemies is out of character for him, then it is. Have Boris break out the invisible walls and force me to kill to progress. Or show him chasing down and murdering the ones who I spared in a cutscene at the end of the stage. However you want to do it. You don't have to give me a choice; you just have to give Raiden the choice. Let me see the enemies act like human beings who place some modicum of value on their own lives and have desires other than "kill Raiden or be killed by him."

If the enemies ever try to drop their weapons and run, or beg for mercy, or fall to the ground in mid-combat stress and start crying for their mothers, then great, you've defeated me. If the enemies always bum rush me down to the last hit point of the last man without any sign of hesitation or fear no matter how many chances I give them, then shut the fuck up.

...

So, into the abandoned building, scale the conveniently tall stack of crates and boxes to get to the street level floor above (Raiden grabbed the ledges just fine! I'm getting better at this, see, I can do it!), and then out the door onto the town's waterfront promenade. Boris tunes in again to inform me that one of Desperado's heavy hitters might be on location after all, but it's not either of the charmers we met in Africa, so that's good at least. Anyway, there's a lone baddy guarding the exit who I unfortunately don't seem able to sneak by and who doesn't prove interested in negotiation no matter how little he has left to lose in said negotiations. Regrettable. Tragic, even. But necessary. I go outside, and then...

Huh.

Okay. Interesting. This is interesting.

It turns out that MGRR actually has a stealth mechanic. Sort of. There's no purpose-made "sneak" action like in most Metal Gear games, but the enemies have pretty small aggro ranges and they periodically turn around so you can pass behind them without activating their group. You really don't NEED to do this. There are only a handful of mooks in this group, so fighting them head-on isn't much of a challenge. Stealthing by these guys does more to protect them than it does to protect Raiden. And, in the earlier Codec conversation, Kevin did mention that killing Desperado's employer should be enough to make the mercs all go home without needing to be fought, so...I think the game might actually be making its first step toward meeting my challenge.

What really makes it interesting, though, is that this group of enemies also comes with a hostage situation. Two of the mercs are standing over a kneeling civilian and idly conversing over whether or not they should just kill him and say it was self-defence. The civilian is begging for his life, telling them that he has a family he needs to get back to, without it getting any reaction out of them at all. It seems sure that they'll murder him if nothing is done to change the situation.

Interesting.

I don't want to give the game too little credit, but I also don't want to give it too much.

On one hand, it would be very easy for me to infer that the developers felt obligated to shoehorn an unfitting stealth mechanic into their spectacle fighter just to appease longtime Metal Gear fans, and that's all that this is. In fact, looking at some spoiler-free reviews of this game from its year of release, it appears that some critics said exactly that.

On the other hand, the game did just give me a way to sneak past the mercenaries AND tell me in as many words that no mercenaries need die if their employer can be removed. Then, only one scene later, it's showing me that sparing the mercenaries might not actually be the way to protect human life overall. Additionally, there are four or five mercenaries in this group, and only one civilian. Two of the mercs are about to murder him, but the others are just standing guard on the other side of the street; apathetic to the atrocity their coworkers are about to commit, but not actively complicit in it. I can't only fight the two murderers; attack any of the mercs, and all the others in the area will immediately come at you as well. Is one innocent life worth four or five guilty ones? What if those four or five aren't all equally guilty? What if half of them are just deep in debt to pay off their cybernetics and afraid of rocking the boat? And then, on the other side, if at least two of the mercs in this group are this bloodthirsty, then it's likely they'll commit more murders in the future if I don't end them now. Does that probability shift the moral calculus back? This setup feels deliberate.

It legitimately could just be coincidence, though. It could just be a shoehorned legacy stealth mechanic happening to co-occur with an optional "save the civilian" sidequest. But then, it comes RIGHT on the heels of that conference call scene, and that feels like one coincidence too many.

Well, regardless of whether the game intended this line of questioning or not...

My own ethics tell me that I should save the civilian and consider it the other mercs' own problem if they decide their lives are less important than stopping me. I'm interested to see what the game thinks of either option though, so I'm going to replay the sequence twice. I think the civilian's presence changes things enough for this to be an allowable exception to my "don't aggro enemies unless I have to" commitment, especially if I might not even keep that version of events going forward. If the savescumming prompts a talking flower to sprout up through the floor and call me out, then I'll throw the towel right then and there.

So, version 1: I sneak attack and one-hit-kill the guy about to commit the murder from the terrace overhead, and then allow the others the freedom to make poor life decisions, which they promptly exercise. The fight is slightly more challenging than I thought, on account of some of these soldiers having rocket launchers instead of the usual gun+sword combo, but even so Raiden never dropped below half hp. In addition to doing damage, getting hit by something big like a rocket can also stun you and make you do a button-mash thing to shake it off, which does balance Raiden's impressive durability a tad. As promised, I try to leave the last guy alone. And then tried again after chopping through most of his health. Oh well. I was kinda beat up at that point, so I figured I might as well harvest his nanogel sack and heal back to full if he was determined to die anyway.

Boris prompts me to go up to the still-cowering civilian and reassure him. Which I do by pressing F. Hope I didn't accidentally pay respects instead of reassuring.

He thanks me and runs. Neither Raiden nor Boris have anything to say after the fact. It's sort of anticlimactic, not gonna lie. Well, maybe this rando really will have a chance to repay me later on in the level, in which case the payoff will have just been deferred rather than neglected. We'll see!

Version 2: those same raised terraces make it fairly easy to slip by this group of mercs without being spotted. After a little bit of back and forth, the two who have captured the civilian gun him down in cold blood and then silently go back to their patrols, still unaware of Raiden's passage. Neither Raiden nor his support crew make any comments.

There is also a possible version 3, as I learned replaying this section again to make sure I caught all the dialogue. If you fight the mercs, but then don't take care to move the fight away from the civilian, he can get hit by stray shots and die anyway. Worst of both worlds. I like that; the game makes you put a little bit of care and effort into doing the right thing, if you think it is in fact the right thing to do.

Moving on down the street toward the oil refinery marked on my radar, I see another couple of patrolling mercs. I make to sneak around them, but this time the game doesn't give me the option. It turns out a mini-mech was perched on a nearby rooftop watching the passage, and when it leaps down at me the mercs are alerted as well.

Also...did this robot just throw back its head and howl at me before attacking?

Well, granted, it might not actually be a "robot." The chasis is just about large enough to fit a human pilot inside, and intimidating battle cries would be in-character for Desperado thugs. And...yep, when you manage to do the parry-retaliate button mash against this thing, Raiden jumps on top of it and stabs into a spot on its hull that promptly bleeds red. Looks like there's a guy in there. Or, rather, there was. It keeps fighting for a bit after that, but I figure it just switched to a backup autopilot after losing its occupant; it notably seemed a little less dangerous after that point.

Destroying the mech isn't enough to scare the surviving infantry away. Hmph.

Fortunately, the last group of enemies along this street doesn't auto-trigger. It's a bigger group too, and includes several rocket-launcher-dudes and two more mechs like the one I just fought. A tough enough group for me to consider sneaking by instead of fighting even if I wasn't going for pacifism. The men turn around fairly often, and the mechs have a habit of suddenly jumping up and down between street and terrace levels, so it actually takes some effort to not be seen.

My first couple tries, I got caught and had to fight. As soon as an enemy sees you, Boris deploys the invisible walls around the area and you're forced to eliminate the entire group. It's all or nothing, and some patience is required for it to not be nothing in this segment. Still, I learned some important things both from succeeding and from failing at stealth in various replays.

For one, sneaking around lets you find and pick up some spare weapons the enemy left laying around. Including spare healing packs that you can use later when needed, hand grenades, and rocket launchers. Using the items is easy and quick; almost too quick for someone used to having to wait for weapon-switch animations to complete before using them. The rocket launcher, in addition to doing good damage, also stuns enemies just like their own rockets can stun Raiden, with stunned enemies being easy targets for execution moves and the like.

Also, sometimes instead of kicking or shooting at you, the mini-mechs will fire this grappling line that sucks out Raiden's nanogel until he breaks free. And which he can, with the right combination of button presses, turn the table on them by pulling off the hooks, grabbing the tether, and flinging the cheeky mech around rodeo style to leave it stunned, prone, and vulnerable.

The normal combat in this game is REALLY fun, to the point where succeeding at a stealth passage actually feels like a letdown. Which, once again...is this just a clashing legacy mechanic, or is it actually meant to reflect the corrupting lure of Raiden's bloodlust tempting the player? Like I keep saying, I feel like I'm constantly on the brink of badly overestimating OR badly underestimating this game, and I don't know which one it is.

Next time, some more Codec conversations, more optional side-objectives, and we meet a new friend.