Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 12)

Entering the outdoor mall full of advertisement screens and holo-billboards, Raiden moves in toward the skyscraper. Only to stop when the screens and holoprojectors all stop playing adds and start relaying a message from someone we've met before.

Either World Martial owns every business in this neighbourhood in addition to the city police, or they just have a really good hacker onstaff.

I guess it's possible they had their rent-a-cops tune every single shop's computers in to their own signal after clearing out the civilians, but that seems like an awful lot of work just to enable a villain speech. Not that that's ever stopped anyone in this setting, but I'm just noting it as it happens.

It keeps going as Raiden moves through the mall, Jetstream's face appearing on more and more ads to deliver subsequent lines as the player advances. No enemies, for now. Just this guy smugging at you from every other flat surface.

What do I expect to accomplish here? I mean, I feel like this shouldn't really need explaining, yeah? Seems like Jetstream Sam is better at swordfighting than he is at analysing motives. Even after having apparently done some research on his opponent.

Heh, I wonder what kind of dopey codec conversations Jetstream has been having with the Desperado support crew about Raiden. And if they're all as thirsty for him as Maverick's was for Mistral.

Anyway. As Jetstream's speech goes on, it becomes entirely clear that he REALLY hasn't put any thought into Raiden's dossier, though he knows enough details about him that he's clearly read it. He seems to think that Raiden is doing this because he wants recognition or something. Which, hmm. The delivery, especially with the smug smirk that accompanies it, makes me think of the 2010's-era internet, when rightwing trolls' automatic response to any and all displays of social consciousness was to call it "virtue signalling." Like, the insinuation that anyone trying to do anything good is really only motivated by a desire for praise. I was never sure if this was a self-report on their part (being unable to understand genuine altruism and simply assuming a motive that they themselves could relate to), or a knowing gaslighting attempt. I'm not sure which one it is with Jetstream either.

Then um...he starts making fun of Raiden for thinking he can solve everything with violence. Which is sort of a direct antithesis to the stuff he pontificated about back in the tunnel duel. Yeah, this guy is just throwing everything he can think of at Raiden and hoping something will stick.

When Jetstream asks him if he ever thought about the soldiers he's been slicing his way through and their own humanity, Raiden tells him that yes, he has, in fact he already sat through a really annoying cutscene all about it three levels ago. Actually he doesn't say that, unfortunately. Instead, Raiden makes a total rookie mistake and replies genuinely to the guy who is obviously probing for psychological weaknesses.

:/

The Desperado/WorldMartial soldiers he's been fighting, Raiden declares, are all people who chose this life. They agreed to do the things that they're doing for profit. Whatever happens to them as a result is their own responsibility, and if that means he has to kill them himself, well, they deserve no less.

Raiden...Raiden you did not just step into...oh for fuck's sake. Bro, you were a child soldier. You know that shit isn't that simple!

Jetstream (who I guess also has some microphone drones nearby that he can hear Raiden through) points out the obvious; that a lot of his company's mercenaries were in desperate straits before signing on. Poverty. Family dying unless they can pay for medical care. From war-torn parts of the world, desperate for a US greencard that only employment with a US-based company can provide. Some from backgrounds much like Raiden's, with no marketable skills besides fighting. Hell, some of them needed cyber-conversion to save their OWN lives, and could only afford it by entering an indentured contract with World Martial.

Do they deserve to die for that? Did they choose this life, really? Are they culpable?

Jetstream then explains that during the heat of combat, World Martial troopers dose themselves with combat drugs and nanomachine agents that ramp up their aggression and suppress their feelings of pain, fear, and empathy, so it might be hard to tell from interacting with them in battle.

...

Hmm. On one hand, that explains their in-game behavior, at least to an extent. On the other, if cybernetics are expensive, you'd think World Martial would want its men to be slightly less reckless. Even if new recruits are easy to come by (and they have their black-ops wings like Desperado out keeping the world shitty and war-torn in order to ensure an endless supply), the hardware must cost something.

Then again, World Martial is exactly the sort of company that would convince itself that ramping up the brutality and ruthlessness levers on every control panel at all times is necessarily the most profitable course even when it clearly isn't. If the experts tell them that keeping their troops sane enough to value their own lives saves more money in cyberware than it looses them in combat effectiveness, then that just shows how useless expertise is now that higher education has gone woke.

...

After explaining the emotion suppression, Jetstream does a...thing? He leans in to the camera and mockingly invites Raiden to "listen to them." And then another squad of soldiers approaches, and we start hearing these low, nervous voices murmuring over their spoken voices as they psych each other up to attack Raiden. "Let's kick his ass!" A rent-a-cop growls. "Oh god he's going to kill me just like the others!" The other voice says.

"IED took my legs, I didn't have a choice." "They said I was gonna be rich, what the hell have I done?" "My family needs to come to the states, I *need* to do this!" Etc. Basically, Jetstream is having a ChatGPT generate an infinite number of sob stories, fearful prayers, and humanizing regrets and playing them over the speakers in the hopes that Raiden will actually be stupid enough to think that he's hearing the soldiers' thoughts.

Raiden isn't that stupid, of course. He hasn't proven himself the sharpest tool in the shed on this mission, but still, come on, this probably wouldn't even work on an elementary school kid.

...Raiden?

Raiden roars in anguish at the hilariously fake voices and tries to fend off the soldiers without killing them. I like to think I've gotten decently good at this by now, but apparently Raiden is useless at it without my help, because cutscene!Raiden gets his ass kicked trying to avoid killing a group of 3-4 low level mooks with basic weapons.

Finally I get to take over again. I do kill one soldier by accident while trying to slice the arm off of the guy next to them. Should have just gone for the legs, much easier to avoid accidents that way. Well, sorry Rivka, maybe if your bosses didn't play those stupid fake voices that mess with my concentration I could have spared you, I'll make sure someone feeds your cat. Oooh, I know! That guy is probably still rolling Earthworm Eddy down the stairs, I'll call him and have him ask Eddy if he needs a new job! He can open wet food cans with his teeth, right? Cyborgs can do that, I'm pretty sure.

Once this wave of attackers has been neutralized, Raiden collapses under the weight of his own stupidity and kneels down on the pavement, panting. Scattered all around him are a bunch of dead World Martial cyborgs that seem to have appeared out of nowhere. Maybe Rivka's corpse can make copies of itself? Too bad she couldn't do that in life, or her cat would be in a better situation right now.

As Raiden has his anxiety attack, Pochita stalks back over to him and helps him snap out of it. Raiden is...prickly...at first, lashing out at him verbally about how an AI wouldn't understand any of this. Pochita is patient, and reminds Raiden that he already knows that not all AI's are built the same way, and that he knows Pochita is psychologically much closer to a human than he is to the nonsense Raiden had to deal with in Metal Gear Solid 2. Raiden apologizes, and Pochita says that he understands.

You know, this is probably the most convincing and well-handled depiction of old trauma in this game so far. The way Raiden talks about his horrific childhood in Liberia is so-so at best, but in this scene he's very clearly acting on his experiences from earlier in the series without saying out loud that that's what he's doing. The way it comes out in a moment of weakness, at a friend who reminds him irrationally of an old enemy, also rings true to me. It's short, but it's effective.

Anyway, Pochita changes the subject to Jetstream Sam. This apparently isn't like him. Pochita fought alongside him a bit during his brief stint enslaved by Desperado, and claims to have gotten along well with him. This kind of sadism and underhanded emotional fuckery...well, according to Pochita it's not like him.

Hmm. Jetstream's personality here doesn't seem different from how he came across in the first mission. That was supposed to have been, what, a few weeks before the next mission, when Pochita was liberated? I guess it's possible that Pochita already hadn't interacted with Jetstream for a while before Mistral took him to Eurasia with her. Which, to be fair, it seems like Desperado has been pretty busy in recent months, and they only have a small handful of real heavy hitters to spread around, so them going for long-ish periods without seeing each other makes sense.

The way Pochita told his story before, it seemed like he'd only been with Desperado for a month or two at most. I guess it could have been longer though.

Anyway, it's possible that Jetstream Sam didn't realize exactly how depraved the organization he'd recently joined was until he was already in too deep, and at that point he decided to just give in and become a worse person because there was nowhere else to go from there.

The other possibility - probably likelier, thinking about it more - is that Pochita is just wrong. As he's repeatedly explained, he isn't a virtual intelligence that operates on pure logic. He can forget things and suffer from biases just like a human. Maybe Sam was just the only one who was ever sort of nice to him, so Pochita latched on to him and decided he was a good person, perhaps wilfully blinding himself to the other side of Sam.

I kind of prefer the second option. Nothing about Jetstream Sam has made me especially interested in him as a character so far, but this would be an interesting bit of characterization for Pochita.

Well. With Raiden back on his feet, Pochita runs ahead to scout for him again. Things aren't all good again, though. Raiden is up, but he's only walking slowly and huched over, and...oh. Okay. Apparently he's so emotionally distraught by Jetstream's little stunt that he's functionally been put back in one-arm-mode. Like, the slow walking, the heavy breathing, the very slow, clumsy sword slashes, they're the exact same as when Raiden was maimed and bleeding out in the train tunnel scene.

Because of some procedurally generated sob stories.

Raiden, sometimes it is embarrassing to even play as you.

Pochita speaks up again over the comms and says that Raiden seems like he should avoid combat until he calms down some more; he can't fight effectively like this. For some reason, he also can't dash effectively like this. Or hide under a cardbord box effectively like this. Or use smoke or EMP grenades. Also, he walks about 1/3 as fast as normal.

This gameplay stretch is awful. Just boring. Slowwwwwwly walking across the mall and looping in big semicircles around soldiers to hopefully avoid triggering them. If you do trigger one, they inexplicably only attack one at a time instead of signalling others like usual, and also their dodging is slowed down massively so that you can still fight them in this state...which begs the question of why the game would even put you in this state in the first place.

It's short, but seriously, it's bad. Not challenging. Just boring. Boring in a way that makes it feel much, much longer than it really is.

The only bright side is that there are some fire extinguishers laying around for some reason, and if you cut them open they make a big poofy white cloud.

They're not positioned in places that make them effective smoke grenade substitutes, and even hitting one with a sword slash is hard when Raiden is swaying drunkenly back and forth like this so you'd never be able to get to one and break it before a nearby soldiers notices you anyway. But it makes a big poofy cloud and a silly noise, and that makes it good.

To break up the ennui, I try talking to my codec pals. Raiden's attitude in these conversations is even more all-over-the-place than it was in the post-Pochita talks. With Boris, Raiden goes full guilty breakdown and gibbers about how killing is badwrong and Boris himself shouldn't have done it back when he was a Soviet officer (Boris won't hear a word against Comrade Brezhnev though, which in my understanding puts him in a small minority even among Soviet nostalgists lol). With Kevin, Raiden takes the total opposite approach, ranting angrily about how butchering children is still a hard limit that no one should ever cross no matter how desperate they are, and Kevin agrees. Then with Courtney he's back to being remorseful and her trying to get him not to be so hard on himself. It's honestly headspinning.

Doktor's is pretty effing funny, though. Raiden asks him how Jetstream could possibly be telepathically linking him to the rent-a-cops, and Doktor has to adlib this long, nonsensical technobabble speech that contradicts itself six or seven times to protect Raiden's feelings.

Like...he tells this story about how it might be possible that World Martial is like...turning its soldiers temporarily into Peter Watts monsters? Only, the bodies working on autopilot apparently have their own entire (thuggish) personalities independent on the actual people in there? And...there are drugs that suppress fear and empathy, but then for some reason that fear and empathy is still being experienced in a closed loop somewhere in the brain or...look, the important thing is that as soon as this call ended Doktor spent five minutes banging his head against the wall wishing that he could muster the heart to point out the very obvious simpler explanation that this shit is all fake.

Like, seriously, think about this Raiden. If World Martial was playing its own soldiers' inner second thoughts and fears on audio for everyone nearby to hear, including themselves AND THEIR SQUADMATES, wouldn't that absolutely wreck morale in a way that no amount of combat drugs could make up for? The only alternative is that they're somehow beaming this directly into Raiden's head, in which case...if they can do that, why not use a technopathic flashbang-equivalent and overwhelm him completely with loud noise?

Eh, maybe he'll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, I hope Doktor has an ice pack on hand.

...

Okay, being real now. The game clearly intends Raiden to actually be hearing the suppressed thoughts and fears of the enemy soldiers here, via some techno-fuckery of World Martial's.

But just...think of all the things that would need to be true in order to enable this to happen.

They'd need to have a way of getting those voices into Raiden's head that Raiden can't shut off. But also for them to have not weaponized this in the obvious flashbang-ish way.

They'd need to have their soldiers' minds compartmentalized in a way that makes it so they might as well be robots. And with them having robot bodies too, well, why even bother using humans at all at that point?

The fear-suppression treatments would need to induce a kind of schizoid personality instead of just, you know, suppressing fear. Even though we already have drugs that can do that today.

Doktor has a big technobabble speech that tries to explain all of this away, but like...I'm looking at all the premises it expects me to swallow, and I'm looking at what the game is netting itself by doing this, and just...no.

...

The boring stretch terminates with the sun setting, a rain beginning to fall, and the row of soldiers guarding the World Martial headquarters just standing aside and letting Raiden through. Jetstream is standing outside of the main entrance, waiting.

Terrible wordplay there, Sam. But anyway, I'm surprised I'm fighting you again already. Kind of assumed you'd be the second-to-last boss, and there are still two other Winds of Destruction before we deal with Armstrong. Maybe this will be another abortive battle? Hopefully not one that loses Raiden another limb.

So, Raiden limps into the courtyard. Jetstream Sam swaggers out to meet him. And then...this guy appears out of fucking nowhere:

Huh?

I mean, I like his character design. Garish like you'd expect a cyberpunk weirdo to mod themselves and their equipment to look, but not in a tryhard way. Not made for intimidation, or for flamboyance exactly. He looks earnestly futuristic. But like, why is he showing up NOW?

And...Raiden looks up at the rooftop he's perched on and starts trading barbs with him, even though Jetstream was standing twenty feet away from Raiden and advancing with sword in hand just a second ago.

-______-

Anyway, Monsoon displays his gimmick right off the bat when he descends to ground level by taking himself apart, levitating the pieces down to the courtyard, and then reassembling himself at ground level. Looks like he's just a brain in a totally artificial body, like a more expensive tricked-out version of what they're planning to turn the orphans into.

Magnetically locked body segments. Wonder how they'd react to one of my EMP grenades? Well, I'll probably get a chance to try that out in just a minute.

Back to the perplexing note from before though, Monsoon lands in the courtyard right in front of Jetstream, and Jetstream actually looks annoyed at being pushed out of the spotlight. There's even a moment where Monsoon gives him an inquiring look, and Jetstream responds by sighting, shrugging, and tossing his hands up in an "okay, fine, whatever" gesture before stepping back and letting Monsoon talk.

Splitting here.