Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 14)

I'm up quite a lot of XP after that last mission, so I'm finally able to afford that "be bulletproof from all directions while ninja-running" upgrade that I've been coveting since the early game. That should be a lifesaver the next time I'm up against a group of heavy synths shooting their big stun-locking machine guns at me from every which way. I won't say it's enough to make me *look forward* to meeting my next pack of mastiffs, but I feel much more confident facing them knowing they can't stun me at range anymore unless I do something stupid like stop to use an item when I'm in their line of sight.

That, on top of the usual health, stamina, and damage upgrades, makes me feel stronger in general. I was already at the point in the game where Raiden's leveling up was starting to make itself felt during battle, and I have a feeling that now I'm really going to experience that thrill of effortlessly wading through enemies that challenged me in the early game. I know a lot of it down is to my increasing skill and familiarity with the mechanics, but part of it is still very much down to Raiden's upgrades. One of my favorite things about improving my player character in games when it's done well, and one of the things that can really kill my interest when it's ignored or (worse) actively worked against.

I know you can't tell on account of this being written text, but I had a weird sudden coughing fit just now, and the coughing noises sounded almost like "Diablo Four." I'm not sure why that just happened to me. Think I should see a doctor?

There's a new backup weapon available, in the form of Monsoon's pair of...apparently those were Japanese sais. Huh, really thought he'd have used a more regionally appropriate weapon, but I guess not. Anyway, the flavor text says that Maverick has managed to study and reverse-engineer a version of Monsoon's sais, and they even worked in a weaker version of his magnet powers. Which is hilarious, because the next level starts with Raiden stepping into World Martial's ground floor lobby literally less than one minute after kill Monsoon. I know this flavor text was probably just written before they'd finalized how this next level transition was going to work, but I still choose to believe in Boris' FTL recovery-and-research squad.

Anyway, the magnetswords sound interesting, but the overhead strike and the long reach that the cuckstaff gives me are pretty hard to part with. Not to mention I've already sunk some upgrades into the staff, and I think I'll have to spend a lot more points bringing the sais up to par. So, maybe after another level or two.

Also, I won't lie; part of the reason I didn't take the sais now is because I needed the points for this absolute masterpiece of high-end cybernetic customization:

I made a terrible mistake by not checking out the new "body" options after the Guadalajara mission. I spent an entire mission not wearing this when I could have been wearing this. Why would you ever not make Raiden wear this? How is he supposed to strike terror into the hearts of the remaining Winds of Destruction without it?

So, with points still in the bank to buy those sais and upgrade them later, as well as to get some of the more expensive damage and stamina-absorption buffs for my main sword, it's time to try the VR missions I've been unlocking. Including one for "ripper mode" that became available after I beat Monsoon.

And...it turns out that for the rest of the game, Ripper mode will be doing the exact fucking opposite of what it did in its debut appearance.

When your stamina is at full, you can press a button to activate ripper mode. Raiden glows red and gets a damage boost...but also rapidly depletes his stamina until you either toggle ripper mode off or run out completely.

-_______-

We just had an ingame introduction to ripper mode where it did nothing at all to Raiden's damage output, but gave him infinite stamina.

Literally the opposite.

Would it have been that hard to balance a "once per level, you can go into ripper mode for thirty seconds' of infinite stamina" implementation? Or maybe "in ripper mode, you have infinite stamina but also take more damage from attacks and get stunned much more easily" to reflect Raiden's pain receptors being switched back on? Not just for consistency, but also just for practicality. As it is, I don't think I can ever see myself using ripper mode when I could spend that same amount of stamina on bullet time flurries. Disappointing, to say the least.

The other VR minigames are mostly forgettable, with the exceptions of a "stealth-kill a maze full of simulated enemies without ever being spotted" one and a "how fast can you run through an obstacle course full of enemies with heavy weapons" one. Neither were exactly thrilling, but they were both moderately fun and challenging. Didn't feel the urge to replay either of them after beating them, but I did feel compelled to beat them.

One thing that would have helped these holodeck missions would have been making them less visually boring.

Anyway, that covers the questionably diagetic inter-level stuff. Time to go inside that office building and fuck some shit up.

As Raiden enters the lobby, Sundowner addresses him over the loudspeaker. Congratulating him on his unexpected defeat of Monsoon, and inviting him to have fun on his way up to the penthouse level where Sundowner says he'll be waiting with the captive brains.

I...think I'd best send Pochita down to check the basement while I work my way up. I mean, if I were Sundowner, that's exactly what I'd have said if I was huddling down in the basement with the brains after activating the hundreds of booby traps in the building above.

Also, conspicuously absent from that voicecast is the other Wind of Destruction who I know is in the building and who has a history of taunting Raiden over telecoms. So, that's something else to be wary of. Well, maybe. Again, Jetstream's presence and absences throughout this game so far have been pretty bizarre, so I'm not sure what the hell to expect on that front or how much sense I should be expecting it to make.

Before trying to make any Codec calls, I notice that Raiden isn't alone in the lobby. Looks like there's a receptionist still sitting at the desk, which is odd considering that it's after hours and all non-essential non-combat personnel are supposed to have been evacuated. As I have Raiden approach, she very, very placidly tells him to come back during business hours tomorrow, and I realize it's just a robot. Getting closer, "she" turns out to be one of those adjutant-synths from StarCraft, just with better decoration.

I do a little vandalism to make the annoying voice stop. I'm sure it's just going to be a drop in the bucket of everything else that's about to happen to the interior of this building, but you know, it's the thought that counts. With that important business taken care of, to the Codec! It's time for the most hilariously all-over-the-place crop of phone conversations in this entire game.

Talking to Boris, Raiden is just maximum tryhard. Like, he has the entire conversation in his growly, bilious, not-even-remotely-scary Jack the Ripper voice, and it mostly consists of Raiden going "Isn't it fucked up how much I like killing? Isn't this super creepy? Aren't you freaked out?" and Boris sounding like he wants to die of embarrassment as he gives one-word to one-sentence answers.

The funny thing about this is that the way it's written doesn't feel self-aware at all. And, looking at Boris' written lines in isolation, they seem like they're *meant* to be a legitimately freaked out commander tiptoeing around a dangerously unstable soldier. I think that that's what the writer of this scene intended it to be. But Boris' voice actor is just so obviously taking the piss, and I can't even remotely bring myself to blame him.

The Kevin conversation is even funnier, but in a way that seems less intentional on anyone's part. Him and Raiden continue talking about memetics in the wake of Monsoon's whole schtick. The thing is, Kevin is just doing his half of the conversation with the same trivia show host delivery that he usually does for these convos, while Raiden is grabbing every single piece of furniture in the room into his mouth and shredding it apart with his Jack the Ripper voice. They go back and forth like this for a fairly long conversation, with Raiden slowly getting more and more middle-schooler-trying-to-sound-bloodthirsty with each line until he sounds like he's about to start drowning in his own saliva, while Kevin completely fails to notice. I think someone may have mixed up the notes about whether or not Raiden was supposed to be in Ripper Mode for this dialogue when each actor was recording. In short, it's perfect and beautiful and I don't want anything about it changed.

Courtney's is a mixed bag. Surprisingly, it also starts to give her some kind of character development, which by this point I'd been sure the Team Female would never be deemed worthy of. To begin with, Courtney is being eye-rollingly scared of Jack the Ripper and also using her feminine empathy to try to reach out to the Raiden she knows and all that crap, but then the turnaround comes when Raiden tells her she should take the rest of this operation off and she refuses.

What World Martial is doing is just too atrocious, and its amount of political influence too big a threat. She doesn't want to live in a world where they get their way. If she has to work with an unhealthily bloodthirsty soldier in order to take them down, then that's fine. She is honoured to serve this cause in whatever capacity she is capable of serving it in. In fact, she's decided not to go back to complete an advanced degree next year as she'd been planning to; she wants to keep fighting evil, even if it's just in a support role.

Heh, damn. That's actually really nice. Definitely a more mature take on the nature of violence than what most of the game's dialogue seems to have been pointing to. It also seems to be implying that Raiden has actually been a positive influence on Courtney, his determination to make things right no matter how impossible the world tells him it is an inspiration for her. And, like. She's growing a backbone. Able to stand up and say no to Raiden even as she aspires to become more like him.

...

You know...in a weird way, that also makes her a foil to the Winds of Destruction we've gotten to know (and kill) so far. Mistral seemed to have what amounts to a cultist mentality, blindly worshipping the man (implicitly Senator Armstrong) who showed her the way. Contrast with Courtney's much healthier and more critical admiration for the man of action who inspired her. Monsoon's whole deal was about not taking responsibility for anything, letting go and letting the currents of mood and happenstance carry him wherever they end up carrying him. Courtney, even as she acts out a textbook example of memes spreading from host to host, is doing so with the exact opposite mentality.

Makes me curious to see how Raiden (her aspirational example) ends up playing off of Armstrong (Mistral's aspirational example). And also makes me curious how her character would have evolved in subsequent games if those had ended up being made and Kojima with his woman issues had been kept a minimum of one kilometre away from the writers' room.

...

There's also some details from all three of these conversations that didn't jump out at me until I'd heard all of them, but in aggregate have me once again wondering how serious versus how ironic anything going on in this story is meant to be taken.

In the Boris conversation, even after going on about how fucked up and bloodthirsty he is and how impressed Boris should be by that, Raiden acknowledges that the thing he's here to do is save those children from suffering what he had to suffer. In a little aside within the Kevin conversation, Raiden expresses gratitude (STILL IN the stupid Jack the Ripper voice) that it isn't business hours so he doesn't have to kill any poor unaugmented office drones. Then there's the conversation with Courtney, and like...what does becoming Jack the Ripper again even mean for Raiden?

He isn't making any moral compromises that he wouldn't normally make. His motivations haven't changed; he still mainly wants to save the children, with bloodlust and revenge only being secondary objectives. He isn't behaving in a threatening manner to any of his support team, just sort of being edgy in their general directions. If the story wanted this to be a genuine fall to darkness for Raiden, it could have done all sorts of things to SHOW that. But it's not. It's consistently not doing that, in any meaningful way.

Then, on top of all that, when I move on to Doktor's conversation Raiden *completely drops the growly drooly voice* and just chats with Doktor about the probable location of Sundowner and the brains in the upper floors in his normal Raiden voice.

-_____-

So. Thinking back on the earlier self-sabotaging drama queen characterization for Raiden that I've been pointing out in the earlier levels, and looking at Jack the Ripper in context: is Raiden just putting on an embarrassing little performance that the others are grudgingly indulging him in? Like, is that actually the authorial intent? I legitimately don't know.

Pochita just tells me he's creeping around the building ahead of me trying to find access points that haven't been sealed off. Cool cool.

Well. Moving on into the gameplay again.

A small group of soldiers emerges from the back of the lobby, followed by two Fenrirs. I was expecting the latter to kick my ass (they've only appeared alone or escorted by mook soldiers up until now), but it turns out that in this enclosed arena they aren't nearly as hard to deal with.

Or maybe it's just the Mariachi bonus making itself felt. Pretty sure it like, triples your weapon damage.

Once cleared, the lobby proves to be littered with health and stamina packs, as well as breakable display cases full of grenades and rockets. That probably means this level is going to be hard as balls, so I take the hint and stock up on everything. The elevators are turned off, of course, but a conference call with Pochita and Doktor has them figuring out that if Pochita can get to the right spot then Doktor can use him to link up to and crack the control system. Pochita's suggestion, impressively enough. Seems like he was inspired by that time Raiden and Doktor did something similar with that cuckball back in Mexico. While they get to it though, waves of World Martial troops start storming the lobby entrance, and Raiden has to hold them off while the other two work on the elevators.

There are a couple of gigantic machine gun turrets on the mezzanine overlooking the entrance, conveniently enough.

A lot of games from around this time period had a turret-manning sequence. Often just a one-off like this, rather than it being an organically recurring part of the gameplay like those of the Halo and Half-Life titles that they were probably trying to ape.

Anyway, it's a pretty short turret defence sequence. Which is just as well, because these turrets are sort of clunky and unsatisfying to control, all things considered. Elevator comes online, Raiden hops in, Doktor explains why this level is going to have so much padding in it.

Basically, the lower half of the skyscraper is full of mundane office suites, boardrooms, archives, basic medical facilities, etc. The upper half is where all the crazy scifi shit and ostentatious executive accommodations are. Making Raiden fight his way through floor after floor of boring modern-looking offices would suck, so those parts are skippable via elevator, but there are still 20 floors' worth of cyberpunk death fortress stacked on top of them and underneath the brain room.

So, off we get on floor 20. Chopping off someone's hands isn't going to be enough to get through the security shutter that blocks off further ascent here; the only way is by cutting off the shutter's power supply. See, it's designed to unlock and open if its power lines are cut, and those power lines are accessible from outside of the part of the building it's protecting instead of just using an internal battery located on the upper floors. Security!

Floor 20 is one of the only nonlinear bits of level design in MGRR. It's not big, but still, it's a nice little temporary change of pace. In another example of "gimmicks that games were passing around like a joint throughout the late aughts and early tens," you have to use your sensor mode to follow the glowing orange circuit-lines from the shutter and track them to destructible fuseboxes scattered around the area. Three fuseboxes to find, which you can hit in any order. There are some soldiers and omnicucks patrolling the area, with more spawning in after you cut each circuit.

...

As an aside, there's a cool indie game called Gunpoint that came out the same year as MGRR and had electrical circuit tracking as a major game mechanic that serves as a basis for all sorts of other tricks and abilities. Ten bucks on Steam. Has my recommendation.

...

Once the big blast doors are open, Doktor warns Raiden about how hairy things are going to get from here on out, and recommends that he turn off Raiden's pain receptors again. Predictably, Raiden turns down that offer. Apparently pain is an essential ingredient in the blood magic that fuels Jack the Ripper.

Ripper Mode is useless, so I really don't know why Raiden is insisting on doing this to himself, but whatever man. Your body, your choice.


Those codec calls ended up generating a lot more wordcount than I realized. Next time, I fight through the greater part of World Martial HQ.