Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (part 9)
Now under Raiden's remote control, the noble adultery orb scampers up into an air duct and makes its way to a large...okay, I'm not sure what kind of room this is supposed to be, but it's big and U shaped and has scaffolding and stuff. There are quite a few soldiers patrolling here, and a few other cuckballs perched in out of the way corners being cute. Raiden's staff inform me that the soldiers are going to be pretty jumpy at this point, so I should avoid doing anything that might get their attention. I was told this a little too late though, as I got too close to one of the soldiers and he was already kicking me, sending the innocent infidelity sphere flying across the room and spraying out sparks. I don't know how much hp that cost the ball, but it doesn't have much to start with.
):
Fortunately, the support staff also let me know that the cuckball's latch-on-and-electrocute attack pattern might be more effective against these mook cyborgs than it is against Raiden tier ones. And also that said shocks should be debilitating, but nonlethal. So, while I'm not going to bother caring about the lives of the people literally guarding the orphan brain room, there *is* a small chance that these ones don't know the full extent of what's going on in this facility. So, cuckball gets to be the hero we all need and deserve, and the baddies all get stunned before Raiden himself has to pass through this room.
Who's getting cucked now hahaha.
Also, I take the opportunity to make some friends.
Hope I won't have to kill them later.
Anyway, once the room is clear, I guide the cuckball through another air duct and reach the server room. Amusingly, there's a little cutscene that has Raiden struggle to manoeuvre a USB into the port through the cuckball's remote controlled arm, only to realise after a moment that he had the damned thing upside down.
#relatable
Easy peasy. Hard for it to be challenging when the cyborgs don't notice each other's unconscious bodies laying strewn out on the floor and a robot standing right over them. Or when the other robots don't even react when you attack a soldier right in front of them. Gameplay conventions, I know. Still the best part of the game though. Only real flaw is that it needed to be fifty times longer.
Once we're inside the system, Doktor starts reviewing the data for us. Wait, why is HE doing that? I thought he was just an outside subcontractor who Maverick hires for cybernetic support, shouldn't data analysis be someone in-house's job? Eh, whatever. Doktor reviews the data, and finds something that seems informative; an audiovisual log from one of the facility's guards. Seemingly from very recently. Alright, let's take a watch.
After a few seconds of generic security protocols being gone through by our POV cyborg and their coworkers, we come within sight of a conversing pair of non-generic NPC's. One of them is wearing a labcoat, so presumably he's the one doing the brain extraction. The other is the man I've been referring to as King Kong. The conversation confirms that the disembodied orphans are being sent to another facility for VR indoctrination and training.
From the sound of things, Desperado wants to get all the brains out of this facility right now, including both the ones they've already extracted and the ones still in their organic bodies. The doctor protests that this is a delicate process, it's not something they can hurry if they want those children to be even remotely capable afterward. But still, they have to hurry; they know that someone is on to their operation here in Guadalajara, and they need to abandon this base ASAP and preserve as many assets as possible.
Also, King Kong mentions that the VR training the children are being given is modeled after the "Sears Program." A child soldier conditioning regimen invented by someone named George Sears (aka Solidus Snake, aka the villain of Metal Gear Solid 2) and put into practice during the Liberian Civil War.
Oh wow, what an incredible coincidence.
So yeah. It turns out that the kids are all going to face a simulation of exactly what Raiden himself went through, and which turned him into "Jack the Ripper" as he was known back in the day. Because of course.
...
This is another recurring brainbug that Metal Gear suffers from. Everything always has to relate back to the same little handful of people. It wants to be this big world-spanning drama that engages with real world history and conflicts, but everything always ends up coming down to this one soap opera cast.
MGRR is much better about this than most of the series, but evidently it still isn't totally free of it.
Also? If the game really did want to take a stance against this kind of thing, I think that instead of accepting the assertion that this one atrocious child soldier training program invented by this one supermegasmart American black ops villain is both more brutal and produces more effective child soldiers than any other, it should turn out that...the Sears program is total bullshit. Literally just the same kind of brainless two-bit brutality inflicted by every warlord against every traumatized band of child soldiers, just with fancy terminology and CIA iconography all over the instruction booklet.
The game might still do that, to be fair, but from how things are being framed so far I don't think it will. I think that the game uncritically believes that Raiden undergoing the super genius mega evil training devised by soap opera cast member Solidus IS what made Raiden such a uniquely great combatant, and that a less brutal program would not have made him as good of a fighter. Desperado's plan here, if not stopped, will produce the most devastingly effective army in human history, rather than a barely-functional mob of unreliable lunatics.
The cruellest approach is the most effective approach, and the gentler ones are always less effective. On principle. As a law of nature. The people doing the cruelty are the bad guys who need to be stopped, sure, but if you don't care about right and wrong then their way really is the right way. :/
I might be overly pessimistic in my predictions here. The game could pull the rug out from under me and reveal that Desperado is completely wasting its effort on adhering to whatever specifics the Sears Program entails. Again though, I don't think so.
...
The dialogue between Kong (who I think is the Wind of Destruction called Sundowner? It was sort of hinted at that this is Sundowner, but not said outright) and the surgeon is interrupted by another man. Middle aged. Wearing an expensive business suit and glasses. The others all behave deferentially to him.
It looks like we've met our mystery financier.
He tells the surgeon that if they don't have time to do a proper job, then they don't have time. Just process as many brains as they can before the payment goes through, and dispose of the other captives. They'll set up another lab somewhere else, and getting ahold of more orphans was always the easy part of this project.
The mastermind turns his face in POV soldier's direction for a moment as he excuses himself; he's got to head back to the USA and deal with some other obligations now. His face doesn't mean anything in particular to Raiden, but I recognize him from the memes as CyberTrump.
I knew it had to be either him or a middleman of his. It's impossible to go into this game completely blind if you've been exposed to even a little bit of the last decade's meme-o-sphere.
The three then move out of the POV soldier's patrol area, ending the relevant footage.
Kevin chimes in to tell me that Kong is indeed Sundowner, operations chief for Desperado and senior Wind of Destruction. The sundowner is a California wind that's infamous for spreading wildfires, and Sundowner the cyborg is American (not Californian specifically, going by his accent, but close enough). Whereas Mistral, named after a Mediterranean wind, was French Algerian. If the pattern holds true, then Monsoon will be from somewhere in South Asia, and Jetstream...hmm. Looking it up, Jetstream winds occur over quite a lot of places, so it doesn't really narrow things down. Somewhere in Latin America that has them, anyway.
As for the mastermind...well, Kevin can't put a name to it off the top of his head, but his face definitely seems familiar. Like he's someone mildly-to-moderately famous. I suppose that's the best we can reasonably expect from an early-midgame protagonist of "I Was Reincarnated As a Cyberpunk Mercenary In Another World But Then They Stuck Me With a Desk Job?"
Anyway, we've got the data, and there may or may not still be time to rescue the children who still have their bodies, so stealth is no longer a concern. I move through the hall that I just used my cuckold companion to infiltrate (sadly, I *am* forced to murder all of its friends after all ). Continuing on passed that room, I get a disturbing update from Courtney.
I guess Maverick's rank-and-file really aren't something to rely on after all. :/
Nobody has anything particularly helpful to say about the George situation. Boris fatalistically comments that if Desperado is already planning to kill most of the kids they haven't processed yet anyway, then odds are that if they caught George they likely didn't bother bringing him back. Raiden himself just wishes he'd escorted him to safety, or at least sent Pochita to escort him to safety. Pochita still doesn't see why this one kid matters more than all the many other imperilled children that the world contains, but he admits that this might have been a better use of the resources at Raiden's disposal toward that objective if indeed he was committed to it, and that Pochita himself should have thought of it at the time. He is, after all, here to help Raiden out.
Doktor and Raiden have a conversation about the Sears Program.
Everything I'd want to say about this piece of dialogue, I've already said in my little rant earlier. No pleasant surprises yet.
Courtney also mentions the mastermind's face being familiar, but like Kevin she can't say from where. Raiden also asks Pochita if he's seen him, but he hasn't. Raiden asks if he has a database of Desperado patrons or the like, and Pochita explains to him once again that - as a biomimic neural AI - he doesn't have a "database" at all. He remembers things the same way a human remembers things, and he's never seen the man in the footage.
Didn't really expect anything else. From what he already said in previous conversations, it seemed like they kept Pochita away from sensitive information, and like they didn't even have him active for very long at all since acquiring him from wherever they acquired him from.
Down another hallway, another couple of mooks fuck around and find out, then there's a big boiler room or something with a boss in it.
Why is this big transforming tank/walker robot here? Why am I encountering it at this juncture, in particular? Other than "because this level needed a boss" I mean.
Sigh...
It's not even a particularly good boss fight. Nor does it come with interesting lore. Just "it's called a Grad, it's meant for heavy infantry support, and it comes from Ukraine."
The weird thing about this is that according to that footage, Sundowner was here very recently. Probably within just the last few hours. If we've decided that every level absolutely needs to have a boss, why not use him? I guess they might be saving him for later in the game, since he's evidently more important to Desperado's operations than eg Mistral, but...I dunno. This Grad fight felt incredibly perfunctory and out-of-nowhere, and a Sundowner fight wouldn't have.
So, after yawning my way through that nonsense, I open the next door and get another update from Kevin. They ran facial ID on the BBEG, and it turns out the reason Kevin and Courtney thought he looked familiar while Boris and Doktor didn't is because he's specifically been on American news lately.
US Senator. Probable candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Major shareholder of World Martial Inc, the world's largest and most well-regarded PMC. Going by what we just saw, World Martial probably manages to keep itself well-regarded by quietly outsourcing the atrocities it knows can't be spun to thugs like Desperado.
Bad news, in short. If World Martial is the company raising the orphan brain army, then that means that Desperado is completely disposable. We can kill all four Winds and get their company disbanded and its execs arrested, and World Martial will just find another bunch of thugs to continue their work.
That said...this next bit of dialogue just doesn't make any goddamned sense at all.
No major media outlet is willing to investigate World Martial?
Really?
Even though World Martial is joined at the hip to a guy who's going to be running for POTUS soon, and the evidence implicates him personally? You don't think that, oh, I don't know, maybe media outlets affiliated with the party he's running against might be interested in this?
This would make way more sense if Armstrong was just a corporate fatcat who the leadership of both parties were in deep to, rather than someone with actual opponents in the US government.
I guess the game could just be positing a world so numbed by information silos and media manipulation that nothing actually matters; some aspects of the preexisting plot definitely lend themselves to that. But in that case, Kevin wouldn't be getting so antsy at the prospect of doing operations inside the USA. If nothing matters, then nothing matters, right?
Through the final hallway. Along it are the surgical room (thankfully empty) and a room full of medical refrigeration fluid (which Doktor informs me is probably for preserving orphan blood and organs for sale as for a little extra profit; looks like there never were any alligators after all). At the end of it is the place where they're keeping the children.
Game, think about this. Think for a second about what you just did here.
The holding cell and operating rooms are all over here on this side of the base.
Behind them are the security staging area, the drone maintenance facility, and the big boiler room that randomly has a twenty foot tall Ukrainian warbot in it.
Behind THOSE, in turn, is the sewer entrance that George supposedly escaped through.
Do you see the problem here?
I guess he used a cardboard box or something.
Speaking of George, Raiden's attention is called across the room to the boy in question being held at gunpoint by the surgeon from the recording. At the same time, the other boys in the cell behind the one way window all start coughing and choking. The doctor explains that he's flooding their chamber with chloroform; small amounts work well to sedate the captives, but this concentration will be deadly after a few minutes of exposure. Raiden can maybe try to go for the controls, but then George will get it. So, his best option is to stand down and negotiate an arrangement that works for everyone.
I don't think the doc thought this through very well.
Raiden and George makes eye contact. George tells him that if he needs to die for the sake of the others, then that's how it'll have to be. Raiden tells him that that's all he needed to hear, thank you George. Then George twitches his head downward and completely takes the idiot doctor by surprise, enabling Raiden to cut him in half.
Heh. Even I didn't expect the surgeon to fuck this up THAT badly.
Anyway, mission complete.
There were some pretty good moments, and I wouldn't say any part of it sank to being *unfun* per se, but this level was a mess. Different gameplay modes being randomly thrown at you in quick succession with little to no attention to pacing. A whole slew of new enemies get introduced, but none of them besides the mastiffs have the space they needed to sink in. Tone and plot both all over the place, and not even in the usual Metal Gear way.
Storywise, this mission makes me wonder what the point of the first two missions was. There's no reason for Maverick to still be targeting Desperado after Abkhazia, but this mission DOES provide a reason for Raiden (with or without his company's sanction) to continue targeting them and World Martial henceforth. Nothing that happened prior to this mission provides any momentum to the plot going forward.
I've heard that MGRR started out as two separate games - one called Metal Gear Solid: Rising that was supposed to be a prequel to the others and have a much darker tone than most of the series, and another one which would be a silly spectacle fighter spinoff/sequel to MGS4. I haven't verified this, but after playing this mission I have a very easy time believing it. This feels like it was thrown together in a desperate attempt to tie a bunch of clashing plot elements in earlier and later levels together.
That said, the fact that it was fun all the way through despite all these issues is a testament to the strength of MGRR's core gameplay. And hey, I got to play as the cuckball.
