Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (part 8)
Where we left off, a low-key reconnaissance mission had just turned into a time-sensitive rescue, as we learned that Desperado is feeding their black market alligator farm with kidnapped orphans. I will interrupt the review for just a moment here and make sure my readers all understand that this is a terrible thing to do, and that you shouldn't do it. George, a Guyanan street boy who managed to escape, has just met Raiden and given him directions to the hidden entrance to the compound.
Raiden gives George directions of his own to get out of the sewers, and Kevin arranges for some onsite Maverick agents to pick him up and bring him to safety. I have kind of a bad feeling about this, but I guess the only reason I have such little confidence in Maverick's basic troops is because of the African disaster in which Raiden didn't exactly overperform either. So, maybe I should have more faith in these guys.
Before taking off, George gives a little spiel about how he wishes he was a badass cyborg who could kill all the bad guys himself, and Raiden is weirdly judgemental of this. Raiden, come on, this kid has JUST escaped having his organs fed to crocodiles, cut him some goddamned slack.
Anyway, before launching the rescue operation, I check to see how Raiden's support crew feel about this development.
Boris is frank about actually raiding the base being beyond the mission parameters Maverick was paid for (by whom???), but he was hoping Raiden would at least get inside of there to collect more information anyway. Considering that, he's really not going to object to Raiden going further in the interest of stopping literal imminent mass orphan murder. As for what to do with said orphans if Raiden gets to them in time, well, that's harder. Maverick has preestablished lines of communication with some NGO's that take care of this kind of thing, but once these kids are out of danger they're probably going to be considered low priority.
So, their future is very much uncertain, but we need to act now in order for them to have a chance at any kind of future at all. The most important thing to do is shut down this alligator farm and stop Desperado or their backers from opening another one; that will save not only the current crop of orphans, but also many times their number of future ones. Well said, Boris.
Kevin just tells me some Carmen Sandiego facts about Guyana. Kevin, are you sure you're in the right game?
Doktor has surprisingly little to share about the commercial uses of orphans in the biotech industry. I figured he'd be something of an expert on that subject, but apparently not. Mostly he just complements me on how hard I killed those omnicucks.
Courtney thinks that killing children is terrible and that I need to do something to stop it, please do something. Okay, that's just a guess, I haven't actually talked to her yet. Clicking on her Codec tab now and...hahaha yup of course.
Pochita has a hot take, but given his nonhuman perspective it's not one I'd hold against him.
There are children in danger all over the world. Raiden already knew that. Why is he so determined to save these specific children when there are many others whose deaths could be prevented with less effort? If saving children is more important than Raiden's mission for the employer, why wasn't he off saving children instead of doing this in the first place?
Hmm. Thinking about it a little more, this might be less down to Pochita's alien modes of thought, and more down to him being only a few years old and having spent most of that time in a lab. Raiden doesn't feel like answering him at length right now - just makes sure that he still has his cooperation for this rescue even if he is confused by it - but I'm not sure if that's because Raiden doesn't feel like breaking it down at the moment or because he actually doesn't have a good argument.
...
In either case, my own answer would be that it comes down to three things.
1) Maverick needs to keep the lights on, and that means going to where the work is. This group of imperilled children happened to turn up right at one of our mission sites. Thus, the opportunity to save these ones became readily available to us in a way that it usually isn't.
2) As Boris just pointed out in his own conversation, destroying this base won't just protect the small group of children who are about to be butchered. It will also protect all future groups of children that the psychopaths running this place will likely bring in after the current ones. Additionally, if we just do our recon and then give the info to our client(?) without capturing or killing the people running this base, then there's a good chance they'll be able to abandon this site and set up another crocodile farm somewhere else before there's an official crackdown.
3) Raiden has a very particular set of skills and abilities. They do not include medicine, or civil engineering, or adoption counselling. Additionally, while I'm sure he makes enough as a high-end mercenary to easily afford donating to child-saving causes (and he seems like the kind of person who probably already does just that), there are a lot of people out there with much more money to burn than him. Thus, if we're allocating children-saving duties, Raiden is in exactly the place where it's most efficient for him to be.
Like I said, I don't judge Pochita for his failure to grasp these nuances. He doesn't have much life experience, and probably doesn't see the world in quite the same way a human would to begin with. If anything, Raiden is the one looking bad here for failing to properly answer Pochita's question when he'd probably benefit from hearing a proper answer. On one hand, mission stress, urgency, etc. On the other hand, those factors didn't seem to stop him from having a longwinded conversation about South American ethnography with Kevin two seconds ago, so.
...
Moving on ahead through the sewers, Pochita warns of a very heavy synth patrol zone up ahead, nastier than the previous one. Poking around in a little service chamber for something that might help deal with that, Raiden also finds...oh sweet. NOW we're talking!
Everybody, start humming.
Now that he's properly equipped for the trials ahead, Raiden moves on-
...Kevin. Seriously, Kevin?
I asked about you perhaps being in the wrong place earlier, but now I'm seriously wondering if you only had your encounter with Truck-kun a week before Boris hired you.
Anyway, up ahead is a sewer passageway with a less stealth-conducive arrangement of catwalks and three patrolling mastiffs. Of course, there's no need to depend on the blind luck of the environment for stealth anymore, because I am the night.
Also, I like how MGRR has sloooowly come back around to being a stealth game, at least sometimes. Raiden is still a Metal Gear boss enemy that's been shoved into the player character's position when he's dealing with soldiers, but against superior numbers of other high-end synths he loops back around to be a classic Metal Gear sneaky spy dude. Which is what he already was in his one playable appearance prior to becoming a cyborg (MGS2), for that matter.
Getting passed this room requires slipping out of the box to cut through some metal bars, and you need to time that carefully when none of the three robo-apes are turned toward you. If you mess it up, three of these things are way too much to deal with at once. It's pretty much a game over unless you manage to flee back to a previous room and hide until they forget about you.
...
I wish there was more rhyme and reason to when the invisible walls do and don't appear. Sometimes you're stuck in the room once the enemy detects you and have to fight to the death, other times you're allowed to flee. I died a few times due to not knowing I was able to flee from this battle.
Not sure why they did it like this.
...
After slipping passed the mastiffs and killing some incredibly annoying respawning spider-robots, Raiden reaches the location described by George and discovers that he is not the only master of stealth in the Guadalajara undercity.
Just look at how unsuspicious that door-shaped patch of discoloured semi-translucent wall with metal rivets poking through it is. I wonder what would happen if you were to poke it.
Oh, that's what happens. What an unpredictable development.
Raiden enters, watching carefully for Desperado guards and/or hungry crocodiles as he makes his way in. Doktor calls in to tell me that the best way to get information about this place is by stealing one of their own robots, cracking it, and seeing if we can use that to bypass their main computer's own defences. With the amount of synths they seem to be using to guard this place, they pretty much have to have a full-sized repair bay to maintain them, and they'll probably need to give the robots relative freedom to exchange data with the central computer. Well-reasoned, though that just raises the question of why the robots themselves would have such weak cybersecurity lol. Anyway, the robot maintenance room is pretty easy to find, but there are guards in it, and if they spot you they'll awaken a pair of dormant OmniCucks to back them up, making for a somewhat annoying battle. Not difficult, just annoying; omnicucks are a little more bullet-spongey than they need to be, and combined with their low damage output it makes fighting them kind of a slog. I tried stealthing through here using smoke grenades, but with three soldiers patrolling a small, open room...well, I could probably do it if I was willing to sneak attack them, but that's always lethal, and I'm still going for the pacifist run.
So, I fight. Manage to dismember a couple of the guys without killing them. With the third one, mistakes were made; kinda hard to avoid hitting the guys by accident when you're flailing wildly at their high-hitpoint robotic backup. Sorry Shelby. I can only hope that Legless Stan and Right-Hand Henry won't suffer too much from survivor's guilt, Shelby wouldn't have wanted that for them. Then I open the next door and oh my god what is this
It, um. I think Desperado might have gotten into another side business, on top of the black alligators.
When Raiden turns on the lights, the ninety-odd cybernetic braincases raise their visors and turn their lidless eyes toward the figure in the doorway. It's hard to tell, with the lack of eyelids or any other features, but somehow the look in those synthetic eyeballs communicates, well...
One gets the impression they were conscious this entire time, left in the dark, unable to move or speak.
A noise from behind calls Raiden's attention away from the room full of isolated brains. Another group of Desperado soldiers has apparently come to avenge Shelby. Raiden quickly closes the brain room door and turns to deal with them.
...
The game hasn't done the best job of actually selling the Desperado thugs as human beings who care about their own lives. It's put slightly more work into this than I was afraid it would, but not much.
The thing is, when you have your bad guys vivisecting orphans by the hundreds and keeping them alive in disembodied torment for profit, it's like...why bother? At a certain point, it doesn't matter if the perpetrators have complex internal lives and sympathetic backstories. Vivisecting orphans on an industrial scale is significantly passed that point.
So like...have I been punked? Was the game just trying to tug at my guilty conscience earlier so it could pull the rug out from under me now and shout "PSYYYYYCH!" or something?
...then again though, most of Desperado's employees probably don't know about the highly sensitive stuff like this. So, the guys in Abkhazia, Generic Subsaharan Country, etc, might have just been at the "usual everyday gangster" level of evil whose lives at least potentially have some kind of value. The ones who are literally standing guard outside the orphan brain room, though?
Well. I guess I could use some more nanogel anyway.
...
Once that's all been dealt with, I decide it's time for another conference call. Boris doesn't even know what we're supposed to do with these kids now; getting orphans taken in is hard enough to begin with, and accounting for the needs that these ones are going to have now...hell, even just the maintenance costs for all those life support units is daunting.
For now, it sounded like George's group was only just taken into this lab a few minutes ago, so they couldn't have performed that many procedures already. There are still some kids whose brainless corpses haven't been tossed to the gators yet, and the more of those and the fewer brainjars we need to look after the better. So, let's hurry!
Doktor recognizes the model of life support unit, and is able to provide some technical insight. The good news is that those things are very durable and efficient, so keeping them powered and nutriated won't be as expensive as Boris probably assumed. However, they're also not at all meant to provide any kind of quality of life on their own. You're supposed to integrate them into a larger cybernetic body that provides additional senses and actions, and those will be pricy. Granted, that raises the question of what Desperado or their employer was hoping to use the kids for themselves.
Doktor suspects that the highly illegal parts of this project - the kidnapping and forced disembodying - is being done out of sight in third world countries, but the subsequent stages are likely going on somewhere with better infrastructure. Probably the United States. Importing isolated brains legally en masse wouldn't be too hard if you were fronting this through a medical organization or something.
Erm...earlier, someone mentioned in one of the Codec conversations that the first world countries have been getting stricter and stricter about immigration. That's kind of hard to reconcile with the assertion that you can ship hundreds of transhumans into the United States without each of their passports being scrutinized, let alone without anyone demanding to speak to the brains themselves. This is starting to seem like mutually exclusive bits of grimdark.
Kevin asks Raiden if he thinks we might have been fighting child soldiers this entire time; if Desperado has already been running this project for a while, then there's a chance their mook cyborgs all came from here at one point. Raiden dismisses that possibility. The Desperado troops he's fought up to this point didn't act like child soldiers; he's had enough experience with those to know. I lack Raiden's experience, but to my layman's sensibilities...yeah, the bits of conversation I overheard during the Abkhazia mission didn't sound like children, even traumatized cyber-dehumanized children. If Desperado is planning to use these kids as battle thralls, then it hasn't started fielding them yet.
Pochita has little to say about this revelation, surprisingly. I thought he might have some unique insights, being as he's essentially a child who got press-ganged by Desperado himself, but nope, not yet.
Courtney is upset.
Regardless, we still need to find a robot to get into their computers with. And, Raiden does seem to have the robotics bay to himself now. Peeking around in some other alcoves that don't lead to the brain closet, he finds something that will both help with the mission and lighten the mood considerably.
A little.
Black.
Cuckball.
All other factors are now irrelevant. 15/10 best game ever.
Next time, I complete the Mexico mission.
