Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 20)

One last time, some of these screenshots are borrowed from Gamer's Little Playground.


Senator Armstrong emerges from the smoking, lightless cavern that was once the Excelsus' cockpit. He looks...annoyed. Not scared. Not even really furious. Just annoyed.

Even if I wasn't spoiled by the memes and suchlike, this is where I'd have realized that Armstrong is a secret cyborg himself.

He doesn't waste any time in making it explicit. Before Raiden can cut him down, Armstrong stretches, lets out a roar of pain and effort, and...okay, either he's got some really extensive technopathic integration with the Excelsus' subsystems, or he's using magic himself. Honestly, at a glance it looks much more like the latter. Wires rip themselves free of the hulked metal gear's limb and hull plating and fly toward Armstrong, and he appears to absorb energy from them.

Not sure if it's just energy either. After the lightshow dies down and the wires and cables fall limp, Armstrong is distinctly larger and more muscular than he was before. He was a big, muscley guy to begin with, but now the way he stretches his clothes to the point of bursting looks outright inhuman. Like he assimilated a whole bunch of nanogel from the metal gear's innards as well as emptying its batteries into his own.

At least if we're sticking to a mostly pseudoscientific concept that's what it looks like. If magic is still a thing in the MGverse, then like I said I'd much sooner think he was eating the robot's soul or something.

Anyway, the next thing that happens is that Raiden asks Armstrong what the hell he even is. In response, Armstrong laughs and facetiously attributes his powers to years of experience playing college football. Then he rips Raiden's protective faceplate off with his bare fingers, football-punts him into the air screaming and spinning like a literal ball, and then finally kicks him across the hulk. Out of nowhere, a sportsball audience hollers and cheers for Armstrong (there's actually a cheering soundclip here), as Raiden collapses to the hull in pain and Armstrong blathers about how you shouldn't fuck with THIS senator. Why, he could rip the president in half with his bare hands!

H...has Armstrong sucked Raiden into some kind of Loony Toons pocket dimension? This game already seemed like a cartoon, but now it seems like a totally different kind of cartoon.

Well. I might not even know what game I'm playing anymore, but either way the next stage of the final boss fight begins.

One thing I appreciate about this battle is that, just like how he was clearly adlibbing his way through the control of the excelsus, it's obvious that Steven Armstrong has no fucking idea how to actually fight. He's slower than even the basic mook cyborgs. His hammy, double-fisted attacks are incredibly easy to parry, even if they have enough strength behind them to knock Raiden a meter back even when he blocks them perfectly. The only things he actually stands a good chance of hitting you with are his tackle attempts (like the other grappling enemies in the game, these are unblockable and need to simply be outrun and avoided), and these area-of-effect energy pulses he releases that you likewise need to dash out of range to avoid.

The thing is, even other enemies with esoteric weapons and weird movesets like this always give a sense of being practiced with them. Having a fighting style (or set of vetted combat behaviors, in the case of the robots). Armstrong doesn't. He's just a flailing moron with impossibly powerful synth-muscles and EMP pulsers implanted in him. If he had these same augmentations but also knew what he was doing with them, he'd be five times as difficult. He doesn't even have any active defences at all; landing hits on Armstrong in between his own attacks is the easiest thing in the world. The hits just aren't doing any damage. Whenever he gets hit, the skin turns a metallic ridgy texture for a moment, and he shrugs it off.

The mid-fight Codec conversations also contribute to this vibe. While most of the cast just express shock and confusion that a man with such a public presence could have had himself cyber-augged without anyone knowing, Kevin volunteers the facts that Armstrong 1) hasn't done sports in literal decades, and 2) never actually saw combat during his navy service, even though he brags about both of those things nonstop. He must have had basic CQC training at the naval academy, sure, but to the best of anyone's knowledge Armstrong has never had a real fight in his entire life.

As for what he DOES have going on, Doktor has some suspicions. Back when the dumb illuminati plot was ongoing, a lot of technologies were being suppressed by the top conspiracy baddies. No one is entirely sure what all they were sitting on, or how many of those secrets were stolen at the end of MGS4 as opposed to being lost entirely. One of these rumored suppressed technologies is claytronics. Reconfigurable nanorobotic composites, what other futurists have dubbed "programmable matter" or "utility fog."

How Armstrong could have come by this supertech secret, assuming that's what it is, is a question that will need to be addressed latter. For now, Armstrong having most of his body replaced with claytronic prosthetics would explain much of his apparent powerset. The nanites' ability to reorganize themselves to constantly provide the most durable structure, the most efficient energy vector, for each situation from moment to moment would make Armstrong functionally stronger and tougher than any traditional cyborg. If some of those nanites can also reshape themselves into other devices on command, then that would allow Armstrong to pack more gadgets and built-in-weapons into the same amount of space without anyone being the wiser.

Are there more Armstrongs out there? Was he given this transhuman metamorphosis by some kind of hidden cabal within the US navy who are even now building an army of others like him in secret? Or maybe he just made sure to kill anyone else who knew how to do it after he received the upgrades himself, to enjoy unique power for as long as it takes the tech to be independently reinvented somewhere else? He definitely seems like the type who would do that, even if it meant risking a horrible death without tech support if his claytronics ever malfunction.

On a more practical note, Doktor doesn't think that nanites this multifarious would be able to do much computing while constantly reorganizing themselves, and coordinating that many nanites would take a hell of a lot of computation. So, Armstrong most likely has some kind of central control unit embedded in his body that acts as a brain-claytronics interface, taking in his conscious instructions and his body's current circumstances and formulating the nanostructures best able to suit them. Destroy that unit, and if Doktor is right about what he is then he'll be reduced to an isolated brain in a paralyzed body just like his victims. It'll probably be somewhere near his center of mass.

Heh, okay, that's clever. Setting it up so the final boss needs to be killed using MGRR's most innovative special game mechanic. We've got to zandatsu his central computer module.

Thing is, you need to destroy an enemy's armor before you can zandatsu them, and Armstrong's claytronic flesh just does not want to be destroyed. So Raiden is still facing the problem of how to actually inflict damage on this souped-up manchild in order to apply the stratagem.

Also, if he DOES manage to hit you, he does more damage per strike than almost any other enemy or boss in the game. So you can't get overconfident, no matter how slow and over-telegraphed his attacks are.

Eventually, the fruitless exchange of Armstrong being too slow to hit Raiden and Raiden being too weak to injure Armstrong is ended by cutscene, with Armstrong grabbing Raiden's cyber-katana and breaking it in his hand like it was the president of the United States.

So that kinda sucks. Guess I'm stuck with just the cuckstaff now, and that does even less damage per strike.

As Raiden's Codec Companions shout their disbelief at what they just saw, Armstrong takes advantage of Raiden's own shock to land a hit, throwing him across the disabled mech again. As Raiden struggles to avoid being grabbed and crushed, he tries engaging Armstrong verbally again, perhaps hoping he can find something to say that will give him pause.

The ranting about the greatness of America, land of the greedy and callous, is all just Armstrong projecting his own mindless avarice onto everyone else. He's not doing anything for the country, just for the corporation he owns. He's another two-bit corrupt politician like all the rest, just with fancy body mods and no impulse control.

That accusation actually does get through Armstrong's emotional defences. It rattles him enough, and also conjures enough righteous fury in Raiden, that the latter is actually able to put the former on the back foot for a moment. Only for a moment, though. Then, Armstrong backs off, sighs, and tells Raiden that fine, he'll be honest now. If Raiden really feels so strongly about Armstrong's motives, then he might as well feel strongly about his actual motives.

Oh boy.

Even if I hadn't already seen this most infamous cutscene years ago, I'd be bracing for the trainwreck. It's a feeling that only intensifies when Armstrong gazes off at the horizon and starts his speech with the words "I have a dream."

Raiden's expression and tone as he "WHAT THE FUCK!?"s are pretty close to what an unspoilered player's would have probably been.

The dream that Armstrong has is that of ultimate freedom. A society where power rests in the hands of the people, not institutions. Where the law changes to suit the needs of the individual, rather than individuals changing to conform to the law.

Erm. What?

Seriously, what the hell does that even mean?

Armstrong's voice gets louder and angrier as he reveals that he doesn't actually love America. He despises it. It and everyone in it. It all needs to burn. And WHY does he want to burn it all down, you might ask? Because he's tired of talk instead of action, of people struggling for money and hollow ideologies instead of their personal life's desires. Of "oil wars and celebrity bullshit."

It's a truly deranged mix of actual, legitimate critiques of liberal consumer culture, and rejections of literal fundamental axioms of human social behaviour. Presented in a way that fails to distinguish between the two whatsoever. And even the actual critiques are being made from a completely bizarre direction that makes their correctness only skin deep. Like someone saying "we need to do something about air pollution" and then following it up with "it's making people's livers taste awful."

The tables turn, as Armstrong psyches himself back up and Raiden struggles to comprehend this series of words. With each blow, Armstrong's adaptive dermal armor shows itself more and more grotesquely around the point of impact.

He's harnessing the military-industrial complex and enriching it with an engineered war in order to amass the capital and the votes he needs to end the military-industrial complex. And the military. And industry. And complexity.

Thiss part sounds like the rambling of a particularly lunkheaded anarcho-primitivist, but somehow, inexplicably, he isn't that either.

As he delivers a brutal beatdown to Raiden that's honestly painful to watch, Armstrong describes his vision of what will rise from the ashes. A New America, a land of the strong and self-actualized. A nation. Somehow. Inexplicably. The weak, meanwhile, will simply die out if they are unable to amass sufficient strength to make it. And...somehow, he expects this place to still have the infrastructure necessary to even be a contiguous, recognizable entity.

...

Honestly? I believed Armstrong the first time.

I don't think he was actually lying during his first villain speech, before the metal gear fight.

I don't think he's lying now either, though.

Frankly, the second monologue doesn't contradict the first one any more than it contradicts itself. Less, honestly.

...

He finishes the incomprehensible babble with the assertion that he's going to, in the words of Reagan before him and Trump after him in OTL, "make America great again." Though I'm truly and utterly at a loss as to what he means by "again." What period of American history does he think looked anything like the writhing mass of irreconcilable contradictions he just described? But then, looking at Reagan and Trump, the time he usually seems to be harkening back to is the 1950's and 1960's. When labor unions were strong, the government's institutions were ironclad, and states' rights were evaporating under the march of federal consolidation. So...is this so much more nonsensical than MAGA has always been? More nonsensical, sure, but not that much more.

With Raiden laying, half-unconscious, on the deck, Armstrong turns around and lights another cigar like the smug dickhead he is. And then, in this insufferably paternalistic tone of voice, he tells Raiden that maybe he should try fighting for what he himself believes in sometime, rather than for a leader figure or for a paycheck.

The irony, ow. Raiden stopped working for pay before the halfway point of the damned game, and has been fighting solely for his own ideals and desires ever since then. Armstrong, meanwhile, has just admitted that everything he's done in this whole game has been for money. Money that he thinks he needs in order to pursue his true goals, sure, but like...that's what money is for. He's not special.

Slowly, Raiden manages to whisper that he might have misjudged Armstrong. Armstrong looks up from his cigar, an expression of childlike joy on his swollen, vein-ridden slab of a face. He runs over to Raiden and asks him if he's started to understand the necessity of Armstrong's plan. If he realizes that Armstrong's...erm..."vision" is worth all the costs. When Raiden implies that he does, Armstrong dusts him off, helps him to his feet, and offers him a hug. Raiden accepts it.

Raiden: "You're not greedy."

*accepts Armstrong's embrace, then gets his arms under the buffoon's center of gravity and growls right into his ear*

Raiden: "YOU'RE BATSHIT INSANE!"

*slams Armstrong into the hull hard enough to crack it*

I'll go into the philosophy of this whole thing at the end, but to put it succinctly...well, Raiden already did put it succinctly. Armstrong's position doesn't deserve any more analysis than that. The approach the game itself ends up taking to it, well...again, I'll talk about it at the end, but I have some issues with it.

After being thrown across the Excelsus' back, picking himself up in a characteristically cartoony upside-down way, and even more characteristically throwing a roaring stomping tantrum at having been tricked, Armstrong has the obvious hollowness of his ideals thrown back at him. "Might makes right" is a very easy thing to say for someone born to might. Wealthy and privileged from birth. Enacting his will through legions of desperate minions. Flexing the power granted to him by technology that he most assuredly played zero role in developing or building except maybe by throwing money at it. As evidenced by his laughable excuse for a fighting style, he knows nothing about the struggle he so fetishizes.

Armstrong tries to turn it around on Raiden, saying that of course, obviously, Armstrong himself is a poor softened child of western decadence, stuck doing the best he can to atone for the original sin of living in a society. It's people like Raiden who embody the ideal he'd like to see humanity become. Raiden had nothing, and was weak. Now he's powerful and strong, where so many others fell to the Darwinian conditions of postcolonialism. A testament to Raiden's worthiness and will. Wouldn't it be great if the world belonged to individuals like Raiden, instead of belonging to neocons, lawyers, (((globalists))), and people who block Armstrong on Twitter?

Raiden says that yeah, sure, fine, the world is his. And he's going to kill Armstrong now.

...

Kind of a perfect encapsulation of their conflict, isn't it? Raiden's stated goal at this point is to prevent any more innocent children from being turned into Jack The Rippers. Armstrong, in addition to his plans to profit off of their exploitation, thinks that being turned into a Jack The Ripper is good actually.

You know, this explains World Martial's dubious choice of training sims almost as well as my "the Sears Program is magic" headcanon. It's not actually, necessarily, the most effective way to turn a kid into a capable soldier. It just feeds into Armstrong's insane beliefs. In addition to being a source of income for World Martial, these kids are meant to be Armstrong's proteges. If the VR atrocity maximizer sim ends up breaking them instead of turning them into Armstrong's idea of a badass, then that means they were too weak of will to be worthy of his patronage.

THAT SAID...

While I do think the game intended Armstrong's plan for the orphans to be motivated by ideology as well as profit (he's greedy AND he's batshit insane, imo), I don't think it's trying to subvert the "more brutal training = more effective soldier" meme. I think the game is wholeheartedly swallowing that, and truly believes that the Sears Program really does produce the bestest fighters ever by virtue of how terrible it is.

This relates to a more sweeping critique about this entire endgame sequence that I will make at the end. Just keep this mind for now.

...

This next phase of the fight is even shorter than the previous one. Raiden has much less reach than usual, since he's using his fists (hey, what happened to my cuckstaff, Armstrong never broke that!). This does make Armstrong a bit harder to avoid, especially when he does his area EMP-burst attack, since you have to start your retreat from much closer to him each time. Also, slow and obvious though Armstrong's attacks might be, getting hits in around them was much easier when Raiden had a reach advantage. Now Armstrong, with his greater size and height, is the one with that advantage.

Heh, I just realized that this is a mirror of the previous boss fight. Raiden is the one with inferior tech but superior skill, and Armstrong disarms him and forces him to use his fists at one point. Interesting.

There are more Codec conversations now, though all of them are very brief exchanges. Everyone is now almost as shocked by Armstrong's politics as they are by his ridiculous cybernetic power. Disconcertingly though, Raiden hints in a few of the dialogues that while Armstrong is obviously insane and evil, he also isn't entirely wrong. Damn, maybe the flattery back there about Raiden being good just the way he is was more effective against him than he would like to admit. Which...well. Definitely foreshadows a Very Bad End as far as where the game leaves Raiden's character. We'll see how it plays out.

The fistfight phase gives way to a QTE where you have to mash the buttons really fast to make Raiden punch Armstrong a million times.

If you don't punch him fast enough, he kills you. If you do punch him fast enough, a cutscene triggers where he tries to kill you and fails for reasons that aren't at all related to having been punched more times. I don't think I need to explain why this annoys me.

Cutscene triggers. Raiden asks why Armstrong won't just die already, which prompts Armstrong to remove his shirt (wait, are his clothes also claytronic superarmor? ), showing off a torso absolutely ravaged by surgical scars and deformed subdermal growths, and deliver the most popular meme out of a game filled with popular memes.

Confirming Doktor's suspicions. And also, almost certainly unintentionally on Armstrong's part, telegraphing the very weakness that Doktor thought he might have. There's a spot right over his heart where the synth-flesh is all puckered and cratered, and where most of the vinelike growths under his skin seem to be branching out from. Makes sense; put the CPU in the same place as the pumping mechanism that sends the nanogel where it's needed. And put that in the same part of the human body where it makes sense for the pumping station to go. Depending on how many organic bits Armstrong still has under the utility fog casing, it may also still be supplying those with blood like a normal heart.

Well, "utility fog" might be a bit of an exaggeration, given that its ability to reshape itself is still limited to within certain parameters. When that term appears in scifi, it usually refers to a more mature version of this kind of technology, and Armstrong isn't quite a shoggoth just yet.

...

Once again, it occurs to me that even were it not for Konami's mismanagement ending the Metal Gear franchise shortly after this game's release, Revengeance would pretty much have to be the end of the playable timeline.

With the series' commitment to the themes of proliferation and technological acceleration, any game set after this one would have to feature a world where strong AI, space development, and super-claytronics are everywhere (and jusst the last two by themselves bring us to Ray Kurzwell's predictions for the technological singularity). For the research envelope to be pushed even further from there, we'd then start getting into actual, no joke, "turn people into sentient shapeshifting indestructible blob monsters" territory. And at that point, it just isn't viable. Conflict in a future like this one is going to have to be so bizarre, so alien to the kind of warfare we know today, that a game about it just won't be able to have anything in common with Metal Gear at all anymore.

A game like that would be fascinating, but I don't think it would be remotely the same type of game that fans of Revengeance OR of the mainline stealth series are here for.

...

Armstrong knocks Raiden down and delivers a flurry of punches of his own. While shouting "DIE! DIE! DIE!" Weirdly though, these blows don't seem to be nearly as hard as the ones he was throwing previously, either in gameplay or in the cutscenes. Or...no, no, they definitely are supposed to be. Raiden has just gotten much tougher in the last two seconds. Armstrong literally punches Raiden down through the hull of the robot, exploding it into fiery chunks around them and letting both cyborgs fall to the broken pavement underneath.

Raiden doesn't look any more beat up afterward than he did before.

-_____-

Okay, yeah, I'm back on the "Sears Program is black magic" train. Not sure why the magic would intensify now rather than at any previous point in the battle, but I've got nothing else.

While this is going on, Pochita finally, slowly, manages to boot himself back up again. He's still at the bottom of that pit Armstrong had his mech dig up through, and he's still got Jetstream's sword with him. Apparently, the thing that managed to spur him awake was the sword deactivating its special locking system, and a recorded audiomessage starting to play from...I thought the sheath had an audiorecorder in it at first, but on second thoughts I think it's Pochita himself doing the playback.

He scales a piece of Excelsus and gets Raiden and Armstrong's attention before the latter can finish outwaiting Raiden's random invincibility cycle and kill him. Both cyborgs are treated to a monologue that um, well. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.

Apparently, Raiden did *something* during the World Martial raid that caused Sam to start rethinking his allegiances. Given everything that Jetstream Sam has said throughout the game, I think that something might have just been "beating the two stages before Jetstream's."

As in, I think Jetstream Sam is taking Armstrong's "might makes right" spiel in a very weird and literal direction. He thinks that the winner taking the spoils isn't just a fact of life, but a moral virtue that must be protected and reinforced; an "ought" statement rather than an "is" statement. If Raiden seems to be winning in his fight against World Martial, then that means that World Martial might be in the wrong, and that Jetstream might have been in the wrong for helping them.

If Raiden ends up killing Jetstream, then that means he might deserve Sam's assistance, retroactively. Hence, the lock on the sword was set to turn off after a certain period of time, and this message was recorded. He apparently told Pochita to hang onto it and decide who to give it to at that point.

...I just noticed that there's a Jetstream Sam DLC.

......it's going to be revealed in that that Sam joined the Winds of Destruction because Armstrong beat him in a fistfight or something, isn't it? That's the logic he seems to operate under. "The person best at fighting who I know about is my master and I'll do whatever they say with full conviction."

Well. He might just have been crazier than Armstrong all along, it seems.

Not sure why he put that delay on the sword's ID lock, though. You'd think it would have been easier to just unlock it before the duel, no? Or, if he was sure he wanted Pochita to make the decision, then...wait, why is he letting Pochita choose at all if he's making the entire thing contingent on who's stronger...

...whatever. Sam is a bullshit kludgework of a character who never belonged in this game and was messily shoehorned in at random places. Feel free to decide for yourselves what, if anything, this is supposed to mean.

Armstrong grumbles about how much of a pain in his ass Jetstream always was, which is definitely the most relatable thing the senator has said so far. He then tells Pochita that if he gives Raiden the sword, they're both dead, whereas if he doesn't then only Raiden is. Pochita says...this:

Even though he's explained to us at length, in multiple codec conversations, that his emotions are organically emergent from his development and that he wasn't "designed" to fear or not fear anything.

Also, literally his first appearance in the game had him begging for his life before Raiden landed the killing blow.

And also, fear of death (or at least personality death) was his stated motive for fighting Raiden in the first place.

This could be Pochita making an empty boast, but it's not framed that way. And also that doesn't fit his personality even remotely. Really, it - like everything else in this cutscene - just feels like it was written by someone who'd only seen a paragraph's worth of notes for the story leading up to it.

Also, Pochita says that when Jetstream died, the data was still inconclusive. Now, though, he's come to a decision.

Erm...because Raiden fought well enough to impress him too? Because Armstrong revealed how deranged his motives are? I really just do not know what's going on in this dialogue.

Anyway, Armstrong leaps toward Pochita, but Pochita uses his mouth (I didn't even realize those jaws could open, lol. They seemed purely decorative until now) to toss the sword to Raiden. Armstrong tries to grab it out of the air as it flies passed, but I guess his football days were just too long ago. Or else he just wasn't ever that good at football; we know he played college ball, but we only have his own word that he was good enough to have gone pro lol.

Raiden catches it. And, in his stupid Jack the Ripper voice, tells Armstrong that he's just had an epiphany. He used to think his sword was a tool of justice, never used out of anger or revenge, but now he's not so sure anymore (wait...didn't he already have that epiphany three levels ago, with Monsoon?). Also, this isn't his sword anyway. Armstrong might have a million nanorobots fortifying his skin, but this blade was folded a million and one times.

Pochita gets punched out again, but I'm sure he's recoverable.

Cue the next, last, longest, and by far most difficult stage of the fight.

My favorite detail is that his health bar is labeled "Senator" instead of his name or the type of cyborg he is like all the other bosses. Like, the fact that he's a US senator is what makes him a boss-worthy enemy, not anything else about him.​

This fight is brutal. Definitely harder than Sam. Probably harder than Monsoon. Armstrong is right up there with the most challenging video game bosses I've ever managed to beat.

What I like about this is that even now, with no holds barred and Armstrong using everything in his arsenal and environment against Raiden, he still fights like a total amateur. He has incredibly high-speed charge attacks now...but they don't involve his legs moving, so it's clearly some kind of magnetic propulsion or similar bullshit doing all the work, and he telegraphs it unnecessarily just like before. A big part of the added challenge in this phase comes from him absorbing energy from the flaming metal gear wreckage all around and using it to surround himself in a halo of blazing heat that will wreck you if you touch it. While he's got the orange glow around him, you just have to run away and keep avoiding him until it runs out again. Thing is, Armstrong is such a moron that he doesn't play defensively when his energy aura is recharging. He doesn't even seem to notice.

The speed, the strength, the everything, is all ramped up so high that he's an extremely difficult boss despite him being obviously terrible at fighting. I'd almost compare him to the likes of Gray Prince Zote, from Hollow Knight. Not quite as extreme, or as purely comedic, but definitely a similar concept.

It's a LONG fight, and while most of his individual attacks aren't too difficult to avoid, you have very, very little margin for error. His fire-aura charged attacks will wipe Raiden out in just a scant 4-5 hits, and health pickups are much harder to come by than in the Monsoon or Jetstream fights. Even with your sword forged with the strength of a thousand weeaboos all jizzing themselves at once, Armstrong has so much health that the game needs to give "Senator" two health bars just so you can see whether or not you're making progress with each of your own strikes. You have lots of time to make mistakes, and any mistake will cost you dearly. Meanwhile, playing over-defensively just means you do damage slower and give yourself more time to make mistakes.

I think...yeah. He's harder than Monsoon. Not by a lot, but by enough. Which is fine. He's the final boss, after all, and it's fitting for the blind, overfed, unrestrainable madness of empire in decline that he represents.

If I have a complaint about this battle, it's that - just like the Excelsus fight - much of the difficulty is down to the small arena with limited room to manoeuvre when it looks like there's empty space that Raiden could be using to his advantage all around. It would have been really easy to avoid the invisible walls in this case too, because Armstrong has an attack that makes firewalls shoot up out of the floor. If the arena was just surrounded by those firewalls to begin with, it would feel much less artificial.

Well, I guess another half of a complaint would be that Armstrong is such a noisy combatant ("YOU KNOW WHAT JACK? I DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THIS WAR ANYMORE, I JUST WANT YOU DEAD!!!!") that it's hard to hear how good the fight theme is within the game itself.

...

This fight being both very long and very difficult is why I'm using so many more YouTube screenshots than my own screencaps. If you miss the moment you want to capture, it's a lot of effort to get back to it.

...

When you finally get his health down and trigger the final QTE-blademode sequence, the game really sells the nature of Armstrong's physiology. Unlike all previous zandatsus, you have to keep hitting the little red targeting reticule over and over again within the space of a few seconds, or it doesn't take and he breaks out of the critical cycle again.

The nanogel flesh closing itself again before your eyes, even with his energy reserves being down as far as they are. You need to chip all that utility fog away before it can move back in to fill the space and then grab his heart within the fraction of a second it would take the hole to constrict too much again.

Whatever Armstrong's heart is, it's weird. A totally different-looking kind of biotech than anything seen in the series previously.

It's shaped like a human heart, but clearly entirely synthetic, and also much too large even for a big guy like Armstrong. Is that just nanogel it's pumping, or does he still have blood as well? How much meat did he still have in his body? At any rate, once Raiden crushes the heart and breaks the computers built into it, Armstrong's claytronics lose all their flexibility, and without the fluids circulating inside his life support systems seem to be going offline as well.

Looks like "trapped in a hulked body" isn't in the cards after all, even assuming Raiden wouldn't have destroyed his brain a minute later anyway. He's dying.

Before his brain runs out of oxygen though, he gets a final speech out. To be fair, having her entire head and body cut into tiny little shards and the shards being frozen didn't stop Mistral from delivering one of those, and her design was much less hardy than his, so this is totally legit. The status quo, he says, will continue, at least for a while longer. People will fight and die for things they don't understand or believe in. But, at least Armstrong feels he left a decent legacy.

Apparently, he thinks that by going rogue and doing vigilante guerrilla warfare, Raiden has followed in Armstrong's own footsteps. I guess he bought the rights to the concept of armed insurgency along with World Martial. Or thinks he did, at least. He's easily got enough "I can declassify documents just by thinking about it" energy to believe that.

He and Raiden, he insists, are very much alike. They do what they want. They don't care about the law. They kill people who get in their way at will. Again, these are not exactly rare traits among the people with the power to get away with shit (even moreso in this setting than IRL, frankly), but, well, dude's batshit. His memes, he says, have been passed on to Raiden. Playing this a decade after it came out, it really feels more like Armstrong is addressing the player than the character, because dear god has he become one of the most meme'd characters in the entire gaming medium by now.

Raiden says nothing. The final shot of the scene looks like this:

Eeeeeeesh.

...

Senator Steven "microscopic robots, boychild" Armstrong. Let's talk about him.

I'm surprised he wasn't in the game more, with how much he gets talked about (and frankly, even just how big a personality he is onscreen , without any pop culture priming, makes it seem strange that he isn't on it more). I think that works to the game's favor, though. It's like Raiden is cutting his way through all the layers of pretention and justification and disingenuity to expose the real heart of the problem (talk about literalized metaphors!), and deep down it was just this fucking clown the entire time. It's basically like peeling off the layers of right-wing thought. The capitalism was just a skin over the jingoism. The jingoism was just a skin over the bully mentality. The bully mentality was just a skin over the frothing insanity. If we'd seen more of Armstrong being his bizarre self before the endgame, the impact wouldn't have been anywhere near the same.

There's one point, after the "burn it all down" speech, when a disbelieving Raiden asks Armstrong how the hell he got elected to office, and Armstrong chuckles and says he has his top-notch speechwriters to thank for that. The really scary thing about Armstrong, though, is that that line of dialogue was wholly unnecessary. A real life version of Armstrong wouldn't need speechwriters to get people to vote for him. There are Americans- a not insignificant number of Americans - who would listen to his unhinged screed from beginning to end and then say "yes, this is the man I want to be head of state." He's a bad joke, and it doesn't matter, because he's a very, very popular bad joke that gets told in all sorts of angry, entitled places. Armstrong is the character who fascists play when they're trying to get themselves elected, and it often works for them. It's ridiculous, and embarrassing, and it ends with them dumping you in a mass grave.

When it comes to illustrating the hypocrisy and entitlement of billionaires saying they want a meritocracy with themselves in charge, Armstrong is solid ("only the strongest are worthy" says man who bought the best synth-muscles). A lot of critics have already praised this about the character, and rightly so. At calling out the depravity underlying even the more superficially dignified strains of authoritarianism, ditto, he's amazing. He's a perfect capstone for the game, dialling the difficulty, the silliness, AND the grim dystopian tone from the rest of the work all up to 11 and beyond.

But, here's where I'm iffy on the presentation.

The game actually already gave us a devastating counterpoint to everything Armstrong believes, and seemingly without realizing it. Not Raiden, or Jetstream. Monsoon.

"The sun rises. The rain falls. The strong prey upon the weak."

What did Armstrong say his vision for a new better America would be? The strong thriving and crushing the weak underfoot. Everyone doing whatever their power allows them to do to everyone else.

You have that freedom right now. Everyone does.

It's just that if you try to exercise it, people stronger than you will stop you, because they also have that freedom. That's what government is. That's society. Hell, follow the chain of causality behind this and you will literally hit physics in just a few links.

What would Armstrong do if he cultivated his ruling class of amoral lolbertarian badasses, and they decided that what they really wanted to do is consume celebrity gossip and fight over oil? Seriously, what the hell would he do? This isn't just a contrarian hypothetical scenario either, that IS what such a clique would very likely end up doing (just look at the stupid dramas and petty resource wars that premodern kings used to obsess over). And those too weak to stop them would be forced to comply or be crushed underfoot, just as intended. And um...I guess then he'd need to jump into another spider mech to burn it all down again.

Armstrong's so-called "vision" is that weakest of all types of idea: the unfalsifiable hypothesis. A set of descriptions that fit any and every material reality. There is no possible world in which Armstrong's desire isn't already manifest; every single one of them is, to equal degree, a product of force exerted by the people able to do so. Monsoon said it in almost as many words. Jetstream's entire schtick (insomuch as he had a consistent one) revolved around a weird confusion of the "is" and "ought" of that same worldview. Might doesn't make right, it makes reality.

Basically, Armstrong is Tyler Durden, from Fight Club. A blob of shapeless frustration, machismo, and rage that doesn't even know what it's angry about. Railing against society while replicating all the exact same institutions that it allegedly hates, just with a hypermasculine vibe, more dead people, and itself on the throne. Pure aesthetics. All spectacle, no substance. Like Armstrong, Tyler Durden also has a good number of very creepy IRL ultra far right defenders who think he was the real hero of the story he appears in.

Fight Club knew what it was doing with Durden. Having him literally gloat over the growth of his organization with the words "we're a franchise now!" while also railing against corporatism is pretty explicit.

I don't think that Metal Gear Rising knows what it was doing with Armstrong. It knows he's evil and insane, obviously, but it seems to think he has a valid point buried in there too. That his ideas are wrong, but more in the moral sense than the practical sense. Leaving his vision essentially unchallenged as a vision. And, in turn, accepting the premise that the world as it is doesn't run on might, but could potentially be made to. Which is vastly over-dignifying some really, really, REALLY bad ideas.

Or, maybe not? The final final cinematic coming up could mean a few different things.


I guess I was wrong about this being the last post. One more. Just one more.