Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 19)

Where we left off, a giant robot spider had erupted through the pavement. Let us proceed.


Pochita's immobile body tumbles into the pit torn in the airbase's floor, vanishing into the darkness below the behemoth's legs as it climbs out into the sun. Raiden doesn't have time to grab Pochita as he dashes back out of the way, and to be fair, after what that robodoge has already survived I don't think anything short of this thing outright stomping on him would make his synthbrain unrecoverable. Really, down in the pit is safer for him than up on the surface where the megaspider is now rampaging.

It finishes emerging. Turns out it's more of a robot praying mantis than a robot spider. Six legs, with the back pair being much thicker. Two arm-type things that...well, I think they're arms, they could also be giant guns or something, but in any case they make it look like a mantis.

I'm not sure how the hell this thing figures into the bad guys' plan. It appears to have the Desperado LLC logo stencilled on it, but what the hell kind of narrative would even...well, Desperado wasn't shy about fielding that Metal Gear Ray back in Africa, so I *guess* this wouldn't draw too much suspicion if that didn't? Maybe?

That said, I recall that the Rays were anti-MG MG's, and they produced a lot of them earlier in the series in order to counteract the original nuclear-armed variety. Making it conceivable that one or two could have ended up in the hands of a second-rate PMC like Desperado without it requiring the backing of a megacorp like World Martial. I'm not sure if that explanation applies to whatever the hell this thing is.

If that wasn't baffling enough on its own, the cockpit opens (it has this cool little cockpit-elevator thing that's just classic retro supervillain flair) and Senator Armstrong swaggers out onto the hull.

Huh?

I knew the endgame was coming up, and I knew that Armstrong would be the final boss, but I was expecting at least one more plot beat before that. How the hell does he benefit from personally leading the attack? Why would he want to be anywhere close to the scene of the crime without a rock solid political excuse?

...

You know...

If it weren't for the Desperado logo on the spidermech, I'd probably suspect that the plan was for Armstrong to rescue the president. They get an attempt on POTUS' life that more or less destroyed an American military base, giving them the casus belli for a new war on terror. Armstrong is *guaranteed* to win the coming election after personally saving the previous president and killing all the bad guys. The giant expensive mantis-mech gets the absolute best advertising ever, resulting in whatever (assuredly World Martial affiliated) corporation built it getting a contract to make a hundred more.

I'm not sure what the hell kind of story he'd need to come up with to justify him being in the region with the mech at the time of the attack, but any story would be better than the apparent "no story at all" that they have for his alibi in this version.

...

...also, is he supposed to be what took out Pochita? If so, he must have not gotten into his mech yet, because that thing was very much not above the ground yet when Pochita got disabled.

...

Well, my confusion can wait for now. We have a villain speech that needs watching. This is one of the two or three cutscenes that I'd already seen long before playing the game, but having context obviously makes it different now. I assume that most, if not all, of my readers have seen those cutscenes too, because dear god did Senator Steven Armstrong become a popular meme in the wake of the Trump 2016 campaign.

Granted, those parallels are mostly yet to come. In this cutscene, he's closer to a version of George W. Bush that's just chugged a 2 litre bottle of testosterone and lost his filter.

It seems that he's read a dossier on Raiden in the wake of our Denver rampage, since he addresses him right off the bat as "saucy Jack." While researching for my JoJo fic, I happened to learn that "saucy jack" was a secondary nickname that the police gave to Jack the Ripper when they thought he might be starting to taunt them on purpose, so that's a surprisingly appropriate use of historical trivia for him. Raiden responds in kind by using his stupid Jack the Ripper voice and making tryhard threats. Armstrong isn't impressed. He just takes a big draft from his cigar (because of course he's smoking a cigar) and smugly asks Raiden if he's had his eyes on the news while infiltrating the base.

Well, um. No. He was too busy storming the base to be checking any news feeds. Funny how that works.

Fortunately, Boris is a call away and able to fill Raiden in on what Armstrong is talking about. Footage of the base's fence cut open and dead cyborgs strewn around on the pavement leaked onto the internet within minutes of Raiden creating them. Air Force one has turned around and is returning to the USA.

Okay. So, that's good then, right? That's what we were trying to do. Why is Armstrong smugging over this?

Boris shows Raiden some comment sections and breaking commentaries. It turns out that the entire English speaking internet apparently wants America to invade Pakistan over this.

Erm. If you say so, game.

I don't doubt that you could find a few thousand shitposters screaming about invasion in the immediate wake of those images going public. I do doubt that very much would actually come of this. "A lone cyborg terrorist broke into an American base and killed a couple dozen dudes" isn't a 9/11 equivalent, or even a 1993 World Trade Center bombing equivalent. Hell, in a world with high-powered cyborgs running around in it I'm not sure if this is even a Benghazi equivalent.

It's more along the lines of the 2000 USS Cole bombing in terms of magnitude, both in terms of lives lost and in choice of targets. You know, the Al-Queda attack at the turn of the century that didn't spark the war on terror.

Granted, the fact that the President was about to land here is a major aggravating factor, true. But he didn't land here. His plane never even came close enough to take aim at. It wasn't even a near-miss like my Armstrong-to-the-rescue proposal, it was a maybe-kinda-sorta-near-ish miss.

...also, if some dead soldiers and damage to the base was an acceptable plan b, why did Armstrong even wait for Raiden to do the honors? He could have much more easily had his own guys do it.

And hell, I still don't understand what plan a was going to be.

Well, whatever. He proudly pontificates about what a soulless, valueless, consumeristic culture America's is, and how much he loves it. America is Number One Baby. America is Number One because of all the stuff you can buy there, and all the victories you can watch on the news. Wealth and pride, those are the closest things America will recognize to a "moral good."

That means that anything that improves the economy and scores more victorious battles is capital G good, with no other factor - up to and including dead Americans, whether they be soldier, civilian, or head of state - being worth even the slightest bit of consideration. God bless America, son. God bless America.

Right now, America needs a big war. Jumpstart the flagging economy. Put some big explosions and dead brown people on the screens. Everyone knows they want it, even if many are too cowardly to admit it. So he, a true man of the people, will do what needs to be done. And also kill Raiden, because he's a troublesome witness and also Armstrong is annoyed at him for fucking up World Martial.

...

I'm still not at all convinced that this works as an inciting incident for a war, no matter how much he insists America wants it. Especially once the crime scene is investigated.

But then, to be fair, Armstrong having completely miscalculated here doesn't ruin the story. Even if they're doomed to fail, his plans are getting a lot of people hurt, killed, or worse. And - again, whether or not he ever could have succeeded at reigniting the War on Terror with this scheme - he still has a big robot that he's going to try to kill Raiden with. An incompetent failure of a villain can still be very dangerous, and can still be a satisfying antagonist even if not for the reasons they themselves would have wished.

...

The refreshingly honest neocon climbs back into the cockpit and sinks it into the safety of the vehicle's inner hull. He climbs back in pretty slowly, honestly. I feel like Raiden should have been able to dash up there and stop him before it sealed itself up again, but oh well. Time to fight!

Frankly, after all that MGRR has contained so far, could it have possibly ended any other way than with a cackling villain in a giant spider robot?

According to the Codec Critters, this building-sized behemoth is called Metal Gear Excelsus. Its namesake being Apatosaurus excelsus, one of the largest known dinosaur species. Unlike previous endgame mechs from the series, Excelsus isn't some secret black budget MAD weapon. It's development was apparently known about for some time now; it's just that no one had yet confirmed that developer AT Corporation had sold one to anybody. Between Boris, Kevin, and Doktor, it's explained that Excelsus is meant to serve more or less the same role in modern battlefields that tanks did when they were first introduced in WW1; it's just that infantry these days is getting ever-more superhuman, so their "tank" counterpart needs to be overwhelmingly large and durable.

The "metal gear" branding is a bit of a misnomer. Excelsus was never intended to carry nuclear weapons, or to act as a countermeasure to nuclear-armed units. However, AT Corp had a major role in the development of the MAD-mech metal gears earlier in the series, and since they owned the rights to the name they might as well stick it on there to get more attention.

In other words, the Excelsus is a weapon waiting for a war, with presumably billions of dollars' worth of engineering and manufacturing behind it that the investors demand rewards for.

For Armstrong - proud of his stupidity, greed, and vanity - it's basically a shining white horse to ride into battle.

...

Getting back to the parallels between Armstrong and Sears and their respective understudies, I think the Excelsus works well as a personal symbol too. If Monsoon was a foil to Raiden (and Mistral and Sam both tried to be foils to Raiden but kinda flubbed it, but that's besides the point), then the Excelsus is a distillation of that personal demon.

Raiden can't seem to keep himself away from the battlefield, no matter how much he claims to want to. Because of how he was raised, how he was "created" in a sense, he cannot stop seeing himself as a soldier, and what is a soldier without wars to fight in? Excelsus' existence within the world of investment capitalism requires there to be armies willing to buy it, and no army would be willing to shell out for this overbuilt monstrosity if it didn't think war was coming. Monsoon spoke about how free will doesn't exist. Over the course of his life, as he keeps failing to stop being a fighter, Raiden loses piece after piece of his organic body and becomes more machine. Excelsus is not only fully machine, and also a machine shaped like an insect - lowliest and most disposable of all creatures - despite its awesome power and staggering price tag.

So, in Raiden's darkest self-perceptions, this vehicle is him. A mindless, inhuman automaton fuelled by a bottomless money pit, literally breaking the world underfoot as it walks forward into the battles its existence requires, with a smug Washington DC psychopath embedded deep inside it controlling its every movement. If you did an ill advised pan-Konami crossover and dropped Raiden into Silent Hill, the town would probably manifest something that looks a lot like Armstrong piloting an Excelsus.

...

Unfortunately, the battle itself is a bit of a let down. The music for it is great; a military-sounding metal number with lyrics and vocals that could be from a particularly unsubtle Pink Floyd song. The excelsus model is beautifully animated, with each movement really capturing the weight and scale of this fool-sized machine with all the whiplash and counterweights that such a design suggests. But then we get to the actual gameplay, and Raiden is arbitrarily confined to a narrow rectangular area right in front of the mech, slashing at whichever limbs the metal gear happens to be reaching out through the invisible wall with at the moment. The boss arena is considerably smaller than the damned boss.

Thinking back the first round against the Ray in the Africa mission, and looking at some similarities in eg the way you parry and counterattack the stomping legs, I suspect that the devs wanted this fight to be like that one. A free-ranging battle where the player can run all around and under the robotic titan, and it can freely move around as well as it attempts to keep you in its sights and/or step on you. But, time, budget, filesize, etc. It really is a shame though. The beautiful modeling and animation work they did on this boss is almost wasted on such a static, two-dimensional fight.

That said, the real highlight of this battle that's likely to stick in the player's memory has nothing to do with the gameplay OR the production values. It's Armstrong.

There's nothing that drives home the sheer, surreal inanity of the situation like looking up at the towering death-robot, the punk-metal drumbeats marching on your ears, and then suddenly hearing this mega-manly amplified voice shout "STOP HIDING AND FIGHT LIKE A MAN YOU LITTLE BITCH!" Direct quote.

Ditto "FEAR THE MIGHT OF THE YOU! ESS! AYYYYYYYY!" before it brings its trailer-sized mantis claws down at Raiden.

There were two moments that stood out especially for me. The first was in the middle of the battle, when I'd just barely managed to parry a sweeping attack from the scythe blades, and the excelsus suddenly just drew back for a second and held still while Armstrong's voice on the loudspeaker went "YOU LIKE MY RIDE, JACK? WORTH EVERY PENNY!" And then it goes right back to attacking you a second later.

The second was when, after bringing Excelsus' health bar down to a certain threshold, a QTE triggered that has Raiden cut off one of the metal gear's legs. Armstrong just lets out this *incredibly* undignified yell of panic as the vehicle starts tilting to the side before managing to stabilize on its five remaining legs. And then, after just long enough of a pause for you to imagine Armstrong sitting there in the cockpit panting and looking desperately over the controls, he says "FINE...I'LL GIVE YOU THAT ONE" in this voice that perfectly captures a macho manly man unsuccessfully trying to not sound sulky.

I actually just lost it for a minute or two after that one. Portal came out in 2007. This might just have been the funniest final boss dialogue since then, when MGRR went up on the shelves in early 2013.

As a capstone to the game, it's...well, it definitely leans more heavily on the silly parts of Revengeance and less so on the serious parts. Even to the other natives of this cartoony setting, Armstrong must seem like a cartoon character come to life.

On one hand, the child abuse and human experimentation plots that are given realistic weight? I don't know. This being what it was all building up to almost seems like a slap in the face to that side of Revengeance.

From what I've seen and heard, most Metal Gear games tend to lean more on their serious (or at least, on their failed attempts at being serious) sides for the final bosses. These games have all got plenty of silliness and stupidity, both intentional and otherwise, but those tend to be mostly left aside for the endgame. I *think* that's a better approach than this one.

But then, on the other hand, there's sort of an apatosaurus in the room here.

It's impossible to take Armstrong seriously, of course. At the same time though, he's only just barely an exaggeration of some real American politicians who hold real power and are responsible for real harm. No one takes Marjorie Greene or Matt Gaetz or, hell, even Donald Trump himself seriously. It's impossible to. They're living cartoon characters. But the world we share with them, somehow, maddeningly, isn't a cartoon, and the consequences of their actions often aren't funny at all.

Watching the Armstrong scenes on YouTube in 2016, I found myself wondering if maybe this series was actually much more insightful than I'd given it credit for. If perhaps the tonal dissonance is an important part of the message, because the real life institutions it criticizes are - somehow, though this shouldn't even make sense as a combination of words - tonally dissonant to everything else about real life.

I'm still not sure, honestly.

For now, after a handful of deaths as I figured the boss out, the first stage of the battle ends with Raiden cutting off a second limb from the excelsius and then...okay, I'm starting to think that Raiden's physical strength just grows and shrinks to mirror his current opponent. Sometimes, a fall off a twenty story building can kill him and a gorilla-sized robot is too heavy for him to lift. Other times, he can do this:

Not the first such outlier in the course of the game, either.

Also, the codec conversations established that the excelsus is meant to overwhelm high-end cyborgs by virtue of brute strength. That's the whole point of making it so big, right? If size and strength aren't correlated at all though, then what's the point of that entire design philosophy?

Anyway, there's an annoying QTE where you tear one of its own armblades off and beat it with said armblade until it stops moving. Overall? A+ on the visuals and dialogue, C on the game design. In terms of difficulty, meanwhile, I'd put excelsus next to Pochita right in the middle of the game's other bosses. Nowhere near as challenging as Monsoon or Jetstream, but much moreso than Sundowner and Mistral. Assuming you have as many upgrades as the game expects you to have by then, of course.

Raiden approaches the disabled hulk, understandably eager to deal with the bellowing buffoon sheltering inside. Somewhat surprisingly (at least, in the unlikely event that you haven't been spoilered on the single memeiest line from this entire game), Armstrong emerges of his own free will and faces Raiden without any sign of fear.


The next Revengeance post will be the final one.