Metal Gear Rising Revengeance: Jetstream

This review was comissioned by @LilyWitch.


MGRR received multiple DLC expansions in the couple of years following its release. Most of these were just extra VR missions or character skins or the like. Two of them actually added substantial playable content with new art, voicework, etc. "Jetstream" was the first of these major expansions, and it came out just a couple of months after the main game.

As the name implies, it gives us some more insight into Jetstream Sam, a character who feels like his *thing* ended up getting cut from Revengeance's story campaign.

The way that his thing gets explained is probably different than what they first planned, unless the main game was actually going to include a flashback interlude where you play as Sam in the middle somewhere. But, the concepts. The DLC takes the form of a short VR tutorial sequence where you learn about Jetstream's moveset and game mechanics (or at least, where they differ from Raiden's), and then a boss-heavy, longer-than-average story level telling the tale of how Sam ended up working for World Martial.

So, first, the game mechanics! Overall, they did a very good job of translating (a slightly watered down version of) Jetstream Sam's boss fight tricks into a player character moveset. The end result still feels like Revengeance, but also feels distinctly NOT like Raiden. His combination moves put more emphasis on evasion and parrying than they do on offense. Sam's "heavy sword swing" attack is even slower than Raiden's, but has a charge-up-and-release option where he uses the weird energy burst feature on his dorky red sword. You're vulnerable when charging it, and you need to release it at just the right moment to get the full effect. He's a little quicker on the parry, and he does more damage per hit than (early-game) Raiden thanks to that same weapon, but he doesn't have the bullet-deflecting speedboost. To avoid enemy ranged weapons, Jetstream has to evade and cover the old fashioned way. He also has a "taunt" move that causes nearby enemies to recklessly attack, so you can use Sam's fast parrying and then counterattack more easily, though if you fuck it up it will backfire spectacularly.

Combined with his lower pool of hit points, this makes Sam a much more vulnerable character than Raiden overall. You can't take many hits. You can't passively no-sell enemy attacks of any kind. Your hits might do more damage, but you need to time them much more carefully and spent a lot more time defending than attacking. He's sort of the glass cannon to Raiden's main battle tank. Which makes sense when you remember that Raiden is a full-body cyborg, and Jetstream is just a guy in a suit.

This encourages you to play the same way that Jetstream did in the first phase of his boss fight; defensive, reactive, waiting for openings. The more aggressive style he adopts in the subsequent stages, one assumes, were enabled by World Martial upgrades to his power suit or the like.

That said, it's kind of weird that Jetstream can do the zandatsu and actually recover health from it. That's not only specifically a cyborg thing, but also specifically something that Doktor and maaaaaaybe a few other cutting-edge (heh) cyberneticists were only just starting to field by the time of the main campaign. I'll just call this a concession to preserving the game's most distinctive mechanic, even though in-universe Sam really shouldn't be able to do it.

Also, to make up for the fact that he can't speedboost-jump to leap further, Sam can double jump. I don't know how he's supposed to be doing this. There's no visual indication that it's coming from his power suit, or from esoteric weirdness, or something else. I'm just going to assume that it's because he's Brazilian, and that they can all do this in the MGverse.

...

I'm very curious to try Pochita's DLC now, just to see how his own moveset works in a player character adaptation. And also how different the game feels when you're character's hitbox is horizontally rather than vertically aligned.

I'll definitely play at least its tutorial section on my own time soon, just to see.

...

The sword-flourish Jetstream does before ending the tutorial is a bit less melodramatic and showy than Raiden's. Still a bit melodramatic and showy, but less. Definitely illustrates a slight difference in personality.

Anyway, the story mission starts with a cutscene. I smiled quite hard to see it feature my two favorite characters in my one favorite location from the main game.

The scene basically just rehashes the things we already know about these two from the main game. On one hand, it feels like these characters don't really have much to them beyond the initial presentation and subtext thereof. On the other, watching them bounce off each other in this conversation, with their schticks already established, is really entertaining.

Armstrong is seeing the ridiculous simulated Japanese garden that one of the other World Martial execs just had installed for the first time, and losing his shit over it because he hates good things. In particular, he despises the fake cherry trees. Mostly because they remind him of real cherry trees, like the ones in DC who everyone besides him makes a big deal out of when they blossom every year. They're so delicate and airy and they only last one damned week before it's all over, so empty and weak and surface-level. Implicitly, he also hates them for being pink, because that's all gay and shit. Then Monsoon shrugs and says that it's foolish to see beauty or ugliness in the natural world, because nature is an impersonal valueless force that simply is and must be accepted in all its manifestations. Monsoon is that guy who just will not stop bringing every conversation back to his favorite hobby horse lmao.

Also, he reaches out toward one of the trees and has to visibly stop himself from lovingly touching it. Like, he's so clearly lying about his own appreciation of this aesthetic and strenuously sticking to the nihilist party line despite himself.

Seeing this conversation is like watching two trainwrecks tumble off of different tracks and smash into each other on the ground between them. And it's glorious.

The scene ends with the subject of conversation turning to the new arrival they're expecting within the hours. Jetstream Sam, or - as they plan to rename him - Minuano, the cool wind of Brazil.

...wait. Jetstream isn't his Wind of Destruction moniker?

He just coincidentally had another wind-related nickname of his own before joining them?

And they decided to give him a new one instead of just using the one he already had?

And...the new name is never even spoken during Revengeance?

The fuck?

I'm getting the impression that Armstrong had a name picked out for Sam, but then Sam went "no, that's stupid, I've already got a wind name," and Armstrong reluctantly rolled with it.

Maybe this is supposed to represent the ambivalence about his employer that he eventually ended up showing in the main game? Could be. The implication being that he never quite fit in with them, even if he really *almost* did.

Either way, pretty silly.

We then jump over to the Latin-Samurai in question as he creeps through the nighttime Denver streets and accesses the sewers near the World Martial tower. He seems to be under the impression that no one is expecting him, and that he needs to take pains to keep it that way. A pair of the cyborg rent-a-cops stop him, and he's much more casually sadistic about killing them than Raiden is ever shown to be even after embracing Jack the Ripper.

Notably, Sam also (needlessly) takes out the first cop by using this whacky rocket mechanism built into his scabbard that lets him launch the sword out with an extra rush of force that he can harness for an extra-powerful opening strike. This is just presented as yet another goofy Bond-esque trick weapon to go along with the many others throughout Metal Gear's history, but I'm making a note of it because it actually ends up being important later on.

The gameplay begins with Jetstream entering the sewers with more WM cybercops in pursuit.

He comments on how strangely familiar these sewers look, which I'm taking as an apology from the devs for not quite finding the time to make a new sewer map instead of reusing a slightly modified version of the Guadalajara one.

I might have to rethink my assumptions about this DLC being a method for getting to use some cut level design.

After fighting my way through a few groups of enemies, I realized two things.

One, that rather than just playing differently from Raiden, Jetstream is much harder to play as than Raiden. The game previously asserted that the Jetstream vs Raiden battle was a matter of superior skill versus superior hardware (that one sword aside), and the gameplay supports this. You NEED to be much more skilled in order to play Jetstream as effectively as Raiden. The extra sword damage and non-running jump height is just plain not enough to make up for Raiden's bullet deflection and massive hit point pool.

Two, that the game expects you to start playing the Jetstream DLC right after you've beaten Revengeance. Rather than two months later, after getting rusty.

Two facts that struck home simultaneously when I encounted the DLC's first boss.

Since I need to be more conscious of the time I spend on these reviews, and since I didn't want to demand more money for something I'd already agreed to if I could help it, I ended up switching from normal to easy difficulty. I hope this doesn't ruin the experience of the gameplay ahead too badly, but it's my least bad option here.

So, with that unfortunate admission made, the boss in question is a familiar face that I hadn't been expecting to see here.

Granted, this is supposed to be less than a year before the main game, so the timeline checks out.

Pochita's pre-fight dialogue with Sam is shorter than his one with Jack. He hasn't yet come to resent his situation nearly as much, and thus doesn't feel compelled to vent about it to the enemy he's been sent after. Mostly, this conversation is just here to give Sam a chance to exposit a little bit about who he is and why he's here. Apparently, he's been fighting a vigilante campaign against drug and human trafficking cartels around the western hemisphere, and his latest investigation led him to Desperado, which in turn led him to World Martial. At least as importantly, Sam makes it clear that he's not fighting crime to punish the guilty or to prevent them from doing more harm. He's doing it because he wants to test and improve his fighting skills through constant battle, and targeting these groups lets him do so with minimal moral inhibitions or police opposition. Though granted, he seems to have stopped caring as much about the latter if he's now targeting World Martial.

This highlights both an important similarity and an important difference between Jetstream and Raiden. Both of them love to fight, kill, and risk their own lives. The difference is that Raiden, even at the height of his bloodlust, still prioritizes saving people over killing people, and sees his enjoyment of the latter as essentially his reward for services rendered to the world (well, maybe. As with so many other things about Revengeance, this really depends on how you interpret the final cutscene). For Jetstream, the killing is very consciously the entire point, and he only targets bad guys because it's more convenient.

The Pochita side of this scene is comparatively disappointing. Sam makes a comment about how "I'm here because I want to be, whereas you're here because you HAVE to be, so I'll have the morale advantage," and tries to segue from there into talking about Pochita's lack of free will in general. The thing is, Pochita hasn't said or done anything to imply that he has human-level intellect (he even describes himself as merely "having a conversation-capable user interface" rather than bemoaning the lack of stimulation his super-advanced brain is getting like he did with Raiden), much less anything to imply he's unhappy with his situation or even capable of experiencing unhappiness at all. So, it comes out of nowhere, and overall feels like a weaker, watered-down version of that earlier scene without much impact or takeaway.

Anyway, this version of the Pochita fight is harder, both due to Sam's squishiness and to Pochita playing a bit more aggressively (even in easy mode), presumably to reflect him not yet hating his job as much. Still, with the difficulty now lowered, I get through it and collect a health upgrade. Apparently, Jetstream is just going to be getting upgrades throughout his one-level campaign, instead of the xp system the main game uses. Sure. On a similar note, there are laptops with VR scenarios on them, but instead of adding them to a library when you interact with one the game has Sam kneel down in front of the laptop and then send you right into the sim.

This brings me to another important difference between Sam's adventure and Jack's. In Revengeance, even when Raiden is going vigilante, you always feel like you have support. Like you're part of a bigger system. Even in the brief period when you're out of contact with Maverick, you can still talk to Doktor and Pochita whenever you feel like it. The upgrade menu and VR library that pop up between levels always - even when in-universe Raiden shouldn't be able to access them - remind you that Raiden has resources and infrastructure behind him.

Jetstream gets none of that. No Codec. No one shouting "Sam? Sam?? SAAAAAAAAAAAM!!!!" when he dies. No menu options that imply a secure home base with a holodeck and a weapons' workshop. He's got no lifeline, and no anchor.

Which...hmm. This does sort of support the negative reading of Raiden's ending scene, with him appearing to cut most of those ties himself. I'm leaning more toward that being the authorial intent now. Which is too bad, because I really don't like it.

Anyway. Jetstream comes up through the basement and enters the lower levels of World Martial HQ. Presumably, this is possible for him when it wasn't for Raiden on account of Armstrong deliberately laying a trap in this case. The level hits most of the same gameplay notes as Raiden's own raid on this facility, with different enemy compositions going up against Sam's more skill-reliant powerset in familiar rooms ending up feeling relatively fresh. Even though nearly all of the rooms in question are, in fact, recycled from that Revengeance mission. Pretty neatly done.

One of the exceptions is the second boss arena, in a large, hangar-like space that I'm pretty sure Raiden never saw anything like. There's an incredibly mean fakeout here, when - after learning through experience how much more difficult Jetstream is to play than Raiden - Monsoon appears and throws a smoke grenade at you. Even in easy mode, I was absolutely dreading what was about to happen.

And then Monsoon siccs a Metal Gear RAY on you and leaves, which prompted me to shout "Oh FUCK YOU game!" out loud, and then laugh. They got me, fair and square.

Also, Monsoon's in-person appearance has him using his magnet powers to walk upside down on a metal ceiling. And...combined with his weird futuristic design and his creepy smile, it just makes for such a surreal, unsettling visual. Almost makes me wish his boss fight had an indoor portion, so he could have done this back then too.

Monsoon and Armstrong both make occasional intercom calls before and after this point. Monsoon, to needle Sam about his philosophy, methods, and motives. Armstrong, to tell Sam that he's doing great on his job interview so far, and that Armstrong will be very pleased to meet him on the rooftop once the exam is complete. To the latter, Jetstream's response is, for the most part, "what the hell are you even talking about you lunatic?" To the former, well...unlike Raiden, Jetstream isn't in denial about anything, and he doesn't have a professed idealistic goal like justice or a genuine one like saving the children. When Monsoon finally accepts that he has nothing he can actually get a rise out of Sam with, he is pleased about it, and implies that Jetstream has now passed the theory portion of the exam.

...

Two bits of the Monsoon teleconversation struck me as worth mentioning. The first was when Monsoon asks Jetsream if he thinks he's made the places he's visited any better by wiping out the local gangsters, or if new gangs have simply sprouted up to meet the same market demands. When Jetstream says that it's the latter, and that he's fine with that, Monsoon is pleased that he understands that "violence alone" cannot change this. The second is when Monsoon points out to Jetstream that World Martial is much bigger and more widely dispersed than any little crime syndicate he's fought before, and that even destroying their headquarters won't end the corporation. For this, Jetstream doesn't really have an answer beyond "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," which Monsoon just snickers at.

To that first exchange: Monsoon is admitting that the world can be made less violent, and that violence can be employed to accomplish that. Violence just can't do it alone. That's a surprising admission, coming from him. And also one that makes me wonder yet again what the takeaway from the end of Raiden's campaign is meant to be.

At every step of Raiden's in-game adventure, the violence he performs is being done alongside allies with other specialities who can bring other tools to bear. Doktor most notably, with his handling of the rescued brains, but also Maverick. For all that Maverick's lofty mission statement was often impeded by financial and political realities, they always did seem to make the world better rather than worse with their choice of gigs. They were having a positive impact in Africa, until Desperado broke it. Their operation in Abkhazia might have kept Russian domination over the region in place, but that's still a lot better than what Dolzaev had been doing, and Boris' later dialogue suggests that the rebuilding of the refinery was actually helping the local Abkhazian economy quite a lot. What they did in Mexico was just pure heroism, no caveats. The end of the game, with Maverick becoming a cyborg employment agency going into business with Doktor's company and Solis, represents a further embrace of nonviolent measures that are only made possible by and in conjunction with Raiden's violent actions.

When Raiden goes independent at the end, he notably hasn't completely cut ties with Boris and Co (and with the criminal record he now has, there's no way in hell they could keep *openly* associating with him anyway). He also still isn't just out for blood there, the way that Sam is in this DLC. He has a specific enemy that he wants to eliminate, and he ostensibly wants to do so for the sake of changing the world (whether this will be a positive or a negative change depends on what exactly it is that he's supposed to have inherited from Armstrong). So, Monsoon making this admission here sort of pulls me back in the other direction about Raiden's endscene. Maybe Raiden's new direction really is meant to be seen as part of the imperfect solution for an imperfect world, rather than him falling to darkness while the other characters rise.

As to the other conversation: Monsoon establishing that Jetstream both A) doesn't care if what he's doing actually serves a greater good or not, and B) probably isn't capable of bringing down World Martial no matter how hard he tries, sets up the groundwork for him joining them pretty succinctly. If you can't beat them, and you don't actually have any ethical issue with them, why not join them? And yeah, for someone like Sam this is a pretty good question. He'll get to keep doing what he loves doing, but in more exotic locales and with a much better salary. It's a good deal.

Of course, Jetstream still isn't willing to admit to the first part of "if you can't beat them, join them." Which is why he needs Armstrong to demonstrate it for him up on the roof.

After crossing through the server room (the orphan brains aren't supposed to have started arriving yet, but they have the place set up for them. Granted, they also might have already had this room set up to give normal VR training to their normal cyborg troops for a much longer time). The final boss arena is reusing Sundowner's arena, of course, but just the aesthetic touch of it being a clear late night instead of a rainy predawn makes it feel different enough.

I'm playing on Easy now, but I wonder if part of the reason Armstrong seems so much easier now than he did in the main game is also just down to the wide open space Jetstream fights him in. I remember wondering how much of Armstrong's difficulty was down to the game forcing you to fight him in a tiny space, and fighting him on this big open helipad and having a much, much easier time of it makes me wonder again.

Granted, part of it is also the double jump. That makes his ranged fire attacks easier to avoid, and that was the thing he usually killed me with when I fought him as Raiden.

The highlight of this fight isn't Armstrong's antics (he's in much more control of the situation here, so he isn't nearly as funny), but rather Jetstream's. When the battle begins, Armstrong juices himself up into utility fog fight mode by yoinking the nanogel out of a group of hammerhead choppers and then launching them up to explode in a massive fireworks display overhead. Jetstream displays zero curiosity about what he just did there, and just thinks the ostentatious display is funny.

I wonder. Are the citizens of Denver just used to this happening, occasionally? Armstrong isn't making any attempts whatsoever at avoiding attention with that stunt. I wonder if "falling UAV debris" has mysteriously risen to the number one cause of death in downtown Denver in recent years. I guess World Martial's presence is enough of an economic boon that the people are chill with it.

It's actually kind of satisfying watching Sam's reactions slowly change from "hahahaha that's hilarious" to "holy shit what the fuck even are you???" over the course of the battle.

At first, I was a little surprised that Armstrong's didn't change his own tune as he realized Jetstream's sword could actually hurt him. That gets resolved at the end of the fight, with an exchange that sort of recontextualizes Raiden's own duel with the senator.

After you reduce Armstrong's hp to zero, he falls down and plays dead for a moment, before getting up again with a smile and congratulating Sam on passing the final practical exam scenario. Sam, who has already sheathed his sword, uses that rocket-powered unsheathing trick again, and THIS time he cuts off Armstrong's arm. And, just for a moment, Armstrong looks actually nervous.

He surprises Jetstream back by reshaping his stump into a claytronic spike and chopping his own arm off with it before he can realize what's happening. But still, that one moment.

The implication is pretty clear. The sword actually isn't potent enough to injure Armstrong. At least, not on its own. A man in a power suit can never be as strong as a full body cyborg. Putting a rocket boost behind the sword will do it. Putting a high-end cyborg's strength behind the sword will also do it. But a mere human, even a mere human in a powered exoskeleton, simply cannot do it.

Earlier in the fight, Sam bleated out some very hesitant sounding nonsense about wanting to rid the world of people who are trying to keep it so cruel and unpleasant. Which totally contradicts everything he said to Pochita and Monsoon. In the context of "The Only Thing I Know For Real," I'm taking this to mean that when Sam started his crusade, he really was a man on a mission. Somehow, since then, he's started having too much fun while doing it, and totally blew off his original motive until Armstrong pressed him on it, and then he sounded very unsure of himself when he tried to remember it.

On one hand, I think this is pretty poor character writing. Sam didn't have any trouble at all telling the truth to Monsoon or Pochita earlier. Why would he even feel the need to think back and start pretending again for Armstrong? Nothing Armstrong said or did seems like it should have pressured him into this. And frankly, it seems like even if he did say this part, Sam would be totally comfortable following it up with a smile and a "...at least, I used to. Now I just fight crime because it's fun."

On the other hand, this does at least imply a somewhat more interesting backstory for Sam. We're just only seeing the very end of his corruption arc, after all the moral falling has already happened and he's just being made to think about the implications of his new self.

The DLC mission ends with Armstrong reattaching his own arm and unconvincingly assuring the wounded Jetstream that the two of them really do want the same thing, and that Armstrong will show him a way of actually changing the status quo. He offers him a hand with a laugh, and Sam - looking even more crushed in spirit than he does in body - accepts it.

He now knows that he indeed cannot beat them, which means there is no reason for him not to join them. Especially if the alternative is being left on the roof to bleed to death.


I still don't find Sam to be a very interesting character. At least, not based on the parts of his life we've been shown. I feel like understanding his dynamic with Raiden would require knowing more about who he was before he started his corruption arc, and even then, I suspect his role in Revengeance was still more a product of last minute story changes than anything narratively intended.

That said, I found this story informative for what it suggests - via comparison and contrast with Jetstream - about Raiden.

With the kind of very blunt but also very convoluted symbolism that this series tends to favor, it seems like what's being said about Raiden wielding Jetstream's sword is an affirmation of what I talked about earlier. Evil cannot be defeated by violence alone, but it can be defeated by violence backed up with principles, plans, and support. You need Jetstream's edgy red sword, AND you need Raiden's servomotors, representing the union of bloodlust with real strength of character and commitment to positive outcomes.

To (appropriately, I think) use examples from American foreign policy, compare the military occupation of Japan with the military occupation of Iraq. The former has been subject to a great deal of whitewashing and revisionist history, making it look more benevolent and less rapacious than it actually was (and the atomic bombings that immediately preceded it were war crimes of a scale rarely seen before or afterward). But still, despite those factors, the USA made a real, serious commitment to rebuilding the country, providing at least some kind of bare minimum to its people, and making the necessary compromises with the defeated regime to ensure stability. Look at the latter, now. There was no Marshall Plan for Iraq. The regime and the national military were liquidated without quarter, a new pupper regime was set up with zero continuity of governance and little to no grass roots support, and America was stingy and indecisive with its commitments to anything besides hunting more enemies in the aftermath.

Look at Japan twenty years later, and look at Iraq twenty years later.

To quote a very wise saying from an otherwise very unwise character who failed to follow his own advice: "True victory comes when your enemy realizes he was wrong to have ever opposed you in the first place."

You can't do that with weapons. But, at least in many cases, you can't do that without weapons either.

That said, I still don't know if Raiden is supposed to have learned this by the end of Revengeance, or if he tragically failed to learn it (or decided he just didn't care to) and just became Jack the Ripper again (or worse, a Jack the Ripper with Armstrong's ambition guiding him). I'm pretty sure this was an intended message of the game, and it's a mostly good message, but I don't know if we're supposed to learn from the protagonist's success or from his failure. Were Sunny's final words a bleak irony, or an unironic pronouncement by the authors?

I still don't know. But, even if it hasn't answered that burning question, the Jetstream DLC at least gave me much more to think about it with.