Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 5)

Note: Once again, some of the screenshots in this post are taken from a playthrough by Gamer's Little Playground on YouTube.


With Robo Pochita a pile of scrap metal and Raiden's speed-dial buddies having volunteered their philosophical musings of highly variable quality, it's time to keep moving on toward that oil refinery. The building I was moving through didn't continue for very far passed the point where Pochita cut it open, apparently, so I'd have had to return to the open road soon enough anyway.

A little ways up the highway, there's a guarded road block whose sentries spot me before I spotted them. Sucks to be them, I guess. A few of these mercs bring something new to the table in the form of these big metal tower shields made of something that repels Raiden's sword much better than most armor. Their moveset is otherwise the same gun+sword combo as a normal soldier, but the shield makes them impervious to frontal attacks, and they turn around quickly enough to make flanking them easier said than done. You either have to knock them off balance with a parry before flanking, figure out some zany dash/jump maneuver to get around them faster than they can react, or spend a lot of time hacking through their shields while getting shot and slashed at until you finally break through.

It's smart enemy design. They mostly look and fight like a now-very-familiar basic enemy, but adding one little piece of equipment changes everything about how you have to engage them, and mixing a few of them in with the basic mooks makes the whole battle more tactically complicated. The game is making the most of what it's got.

I wish I could be as positive about the next setpiece, though.

As the highway moves across a bridge, a pair of helicopters swoop down out of nowhere and start blowing it up under Raiden's feet. And, for some reason, the camera switches to THE most annoying fixed angle that it possibly can so you're forced to run Raiden toward the screen and can only see obstacles and opening chasms half a second before charging right into them, even though there's no reason that Raiden should have suddenly gone fucking blind. The sudden change in POV also comes with a change in button controls (not sure if this is an issue with controllers or just with keyboard setups), there's no way to do a quick-recovery or the like if you go off the edge, and there's one part where Raiden unavoidably falls down a collapsing piece of bridge and you need to mash a random button a whole bunch of times before he can slide all the way to the bottom to make him climb back up. It's like some shitty Flash game from Newgrounds circa 2006.

The fact that it comes out of nowhere without any kind of buildup and has nothing to do with the surrounding level's pacing or gameplay modes doesn't help either.

Once you clear the bridge, one of the choppers (but not both? What happened to the other one) sticks around to be a miniboss. It's...eh, okay.

I guess its a UAV, technically. The boss title includes the "unmanned gear" descriptor.​

The chopper spends most of the battle flying out of reach, so you have to either climb up on these convenient stone columns to get closer to it, wait for it to swoop down and do this silly charging manoeuvre, or (if you've picked up enough RPG rockets) stun it with missiles to deal some damage and bring it closer to the ground while it recovers.

Between the sequence of events and the aesthetics (dilapitated Soviet town with bits of scifi tech inelegantly jammed in here and there, collapsing bridge, etc), I feel like this whole section is trying to shout out Half Life 2. That helicopter annoyed me much less than this one, though, even though it stuck around for much longer.

The end of the fight forces you to do another stupid QTE missile-climb that I think I'm expected to be visually wowed by. It wows me exactly as much as the one in the first mission.

Further along the road, things get more built up again. A new element is introduced in the form of Desperado aerotroopers with mechanical wing-harnesses a la the Vulture from Spiderman. A familiar one is reintroduced with the unarmed man being held at gunpoint and accused of being a Russian spy.

On one hand, maybe they have good reason to think that this particular guy is in fact a Russian spy. On the other, this is a fairly large and well-entrenched group with armored vehicles onhand, and a captured spy is much more valuable than a corpse. So, at best they're being stupid and wasting lives because of it, and at worst they're just looking for an excuse to kill someone.

This intervention is much harder to pull off, unless I'm missing something super obvious. It's not so much harder to sneak up (the Vulture dudes have a higher vantage point to spot you from, but you can still get onto a rooftop above them and use it to get a drop on their earthbound buddies who are bullying the captive before they can react). The thing is, there are a few guys with guns pointed at the captive, and as soon as you drop one of them the others all reflexively squeeze the trigger before actually switching to target Raiden as the active threat. Try as I might, I couldn't figure out a way to neutralize all of them without getting the maybe-spy killed as well. After a few attempts, I decided to just slip passed and avoid getting my hands bloody if I couldn't save the man anyway.

I'm sure there WAS a way to save him, and that I'm going to feel pretty stupid when I find it out, but for now that's the best I can do.

The next couple groups are easy enough to slip passed, but then I reach a heavy duty locked gate that Raiden apparently can't jump over or cut open. I'm...not sure I buy this, considering the other shit I've seen him do up to this point, but okay. There's a handscanner to make it open. Or rather, a chip-scanner, with the chips in question being the ones kept in most cyborgs' left hands that Doktor's employers are interested in.

Specifically, I'll need the hand of a sergeant-or-higher ranked Desperado member to make it open. Kevin and Doktor instruct me to use my sensor mode to figure out which soldiers are officers, and hint that I should head back to the groups I avoided killing and kill them to find what I'm looking for.

Sigh...

Well, the guys who I tried to spare before are harder to sneak passed going the other way. I managed to get by one group of them, but then an ATV pulls up and lets out more soldiers right in front of my face as I'm about to reach the sergeant. So, time to kill them and the aerotroopers who I spared before and got aggro'd by me getting detected now. Finally, I meet the sergeant whose been scripted to stare off into space obliviously regardless of the pitched battle going on a dozen meters behind his back. I sneak up behind him, go into slowmo choppy mode, and...kill him.

I was trying to cut his hand off. He dies though, and then his hardware self-destructs before I can try and cut anything loose.

-___-

I've collected a few left hands circumstantially during the battles so far, to the Doktor's approval, but I'm not sure what I did to make them fall off and become collectable on those occasions.

Boris yells at me for screwing up and tells me that I'll just have to go around the long way and fight a million more dudes now since I can't open the gate.

...okay lemme try this again.

...

Many attempts later...

...​

Okay. Sergeant is dead, and he's dead in a way that made his left hand go flying off before his heart could stop beating. I guess you need to line up the slash at just the right angle so that it bisects the limb before you swing, which is much harder than it sounds with how sensitive (and simultaneously, weirdly, insensitive) the controls for it are. I'm certain that this is a place where a controller would improve the experience, so I won't blame the game for this.

I did learn something else important about the gameplay, though. I'd noticed previously that Raiden has a stamina bar, but I wasn't sure what the heck it was for because it always seemed to remain full. I rewatched some earlier tutorial dialogue, and played around a bit earlier in the level, and now I've got it. Hitting enemies with your sword, in most circumstances, will refill a little bit of stamina in typical fighting game style. Going into slow-mo precision choppy mode is what uses stamina. As far as I can tell, it's the *only* thing that uses stamina. Parrying, leaping, and speedboosting do not. If your stamina meter isn't full, you can't enter blade mode. If you don't finish your surgical procedures before the stamina meter runs out, then you exit blade mode and can't enter it again until you land a bunch of normal attacks and/or use a stamina pack in your inventory.

Since I was only using blade mode in the middle of pitched battles when I needed to heal myself or quickly finish off a tough robotic enemy, my stamina was always full when I needed it. When sneaking up on the officer, this was not the case.

Okay. Well. I'll have to experiment with this some more.

Behind the gate is the courtyard of a ruined hotel, where I get ambushed by a group that includes a new enemy type. A cyborg wearing an extra suit of heavy armor over the usual prosthetics and weilding a two-handed greatsword that gives him better reach and makes him hard-to-impossible to parry, at the cost of speed. Much like the shields being used by those other guys before the lame helicopter sequence, you need to hit each piece of armor a bunch of times to break it, revealing the vulnerable body underneath. Grenades and rockets are also handy for this, and also leave the big guy stunned for your follow up, giving you an opening to go into blade mode and-HUH.

Okay. You can do that, apparently.

He's still alive. He's still walking toward me, struggling to keep his sword raised in his remaining hand. But his other arm is laying on the ground a few steps behind him.

I thought that maybe he'd surrender or run away now, but...nope. He staggers toward me, one handed, and throws slow (but still painful if they hit) clumsy one-handed slashes at me.

-___-

They're human beings with human lives, game?

Really? Really?

Well...okay. Hold on, I may have spoken too soon. Maybe.

After dispatching the Monty Python cyborg, and filling up my stamina again, I tried this on another soldier. It took a few reloads for me to get it just right, but I eventually managed to use a blade mode chop to slice off his legs without touching his torso at all. When the slowmo ended, he started Monty Pythoning his way across the floor to bite my ankles, but then I ran away to see if he'd eventually bleed out without further intervention and after not being able to reach my ankles for a minute he shouted a face-saving "this ain't over yet!" and then engaged his cloaking device. Letting him vanish from the battlefield without forcing the devs to animate a full escape animation and think through an egress point for every possible fight location.

I then remembered the lore about cyborg nanogel packs, and how they ensure that anything that doesn't kill the cyborg immediately will heal in a matter of days. Additionally, getting a limb or two replaced is probably not nearly as big a deal for someone who's already heavily augmented than it would be for most people. So, yes, I spared his life.

You just need to land a whole bunch of hits to charge your stamina while being careful to not run anyone out of hit points (or else happen to have a stamina back onhand. These are not super common), enter slowmo mode, do an extremely precise bit of buttonwork that will kill the person if you mess up even a little bit, and then run away from them so they actually retreat instead of trying to keep beating Raiden up with their bloody stumps. Repeat for every individual soldier who you don't want to kill.

-__________-

I mean, it's better than nothing? I guess?

On one hand, this WOULD be easier if I was using a controller, I'm sure. On the other, even with that, it's still an awful lot of work to make these guys show any sort of human self-preservation. If Raiden was fighting fanatical zealots with a cause they're eager to sacrifice themselves for, I'd have fewer issues with the way this works. These guys are supposedly in it for the money, though. They should be way, way more interested in preserving their own lives.

I think this game could have benefitted from some kind of morale mechanic. Something that accounts for how injured an enemy is, how injured Raiden is, and how many of their friends they've just seen Raiden cut down. Maybe give the player an "intimidate" action that makes demoralized enemies more likely to flee, at the cost of making Raiden vulnerable to attacks while he flourishes his sword and shouts threats.

...maybe this is supposed to be a turnaround of Raiden's battle with Jetstream Sam? The game prompts you to keep trying to ineffectually fight Sam even after he's dismembered Raiden, much like the unnamed NPC's are now doing. Like, the soldiers are putting Raiden in the same dilemma that Raiden put Sam in, with the mook soldiers' unreasoning determination to keep fighting actually being shared by the player who therefore can't judge them for it?

Ehhhh.

Is that's the intent, my problem with it is that Jetstream Sam didn't cut off Raiden's arm and then try to run off. He stayed there, taunting and goading the wounded Raiden, clearly indicating that he was just playing with him before making the kill. He also, notably, made a point of sloowly stepping up to the edge of the train car once he had Raiden dangling from it by his fingertips to make a totally pointless coup de grace against someone who obviously couldn't pursue him at this point. So, if that's what the game is trying to get at, I don't think it works.

I guess that so far, MGRR is making more of an effort to put its money where it's mouth is than I expected. It's not making as much of an effort as it should given where it's trying to put its thematic emphasis, though, and also (moreso, really) not using that effort efficiently. I can see how it would be very difficult to make a spectacle fighter about the importance of human life that's any fun to play, but by that same token I don't know why you'd try to make a spectacle fighter about the importance of human life.

...

Also, because this review might be starting to sound overly negative, I will take the opportunity to remind you that most of MGRR's interactive material is very fun to play. My review has been more focused on the game's story than anything else because a) that's what I'm used to doing as a critic and b) MGRR has a lot of dialogue and seems to want you to pay attention to it, but that story is still not the entire work.

When it isn't doing the forced QTE shit (and it usually isn't), the game world is extremely enjoyable to run and limb around in, and the combat is diverse, well-paced, and incredibly fun, both as a tactical challenge and a finger-straining test of one's hand-eye coordination. The story and themeing would have to be much worse than they are to completely overshadow the high gameplay quality. Well, that, or you'd need to add a bunch more QTE's. That would also do the trick.

...

Another indoor section. There's some more equipment crates to find and hack open to resupply on health/stamina packs, grenades, and rockets, as well as some more holodeck programs to try out later. I wonder if Raiden will ever be able to pick up a plane old gun to put in his secondary weapon slot, or if he's just going to be stuck with explosives? It seems like he should be able to, but maybe that would go too badly against the grain of the fighting-game style. While poking around, I also check to see if any of Raiden's buddies have more to say. Courtney doesn't, really. Herr Doktor just talks more about different cybernetic systems and their pros and cons. Boris contributes some interesting background about the oil refinery coming up (it's a Soviet-era construction that Russia and Georgia both still get a lot of use from, and that the local Abkhazis probably should be profiting from more than they are). He also admits that while we're doing this mission for the Abkhazi government-in-exile, some of the money they're paying Maverick with is almost certainly coming from Russian interests who just want their cheap oil back. Raiden isn't thrilled, but hey, you work with what you've got.

Hmm. Watching their interactions some more, it's starting to seem like Boris might actually be the one running this company. Granted, if they're earnest about the communist sensibilities, they might not have a formal hierarchy like a typical corporate PMC, at least among their longterm members. That actually fits Boris and Raiden's interactions much better than either of them being a boss or an employee.

Kevin gives me a little more detail on Desperado's heavy hitters, the Winds of Destruction. There's Mistral who's known to be leading their operations here in Abkhazia, Jetstream who we lost a fight with in the intro mission, and two others named Monsoon and Sundowner. I'm guessing that King Kong is probably one of those last two. So, four major bosses that need to be beaten before we reach the endgame, got it. Mistral is up first, and the laws of dramatic pacing say that the rematch with Jetstream is last, so Monsoon and Sundowner will be somewhere in the midgame.

The talk of silly codenames prompts Kevin to ask more about Raiden's, and the story behind it is more reasonable than I expected.

Raiden's real name is Jack, so his mission controller back in his debut appearance in Metal Gear Solid 2 gave him a codename playing off the world war 2 era Mitsubishi Raiden "Jack" fighter. I've seen parts of MGS2 (that's how I know how badly that AI conversation was written), but I didn't seen that specific part, so I hadn't known this. It works for me, though it still doesn't explain why Raiden kept the nickname after that mission. Or why he decided to go all in on it in the years since and restyle himself as an Anglo-African samurai while everyone who knows him groaned and winced behind their hands.

After looting the upper stories of the building for all they're worth, I bring Raiden out onto the balcony that the radar tells me is along the critical path. Said balcony gives me a great view of the sprawling refinery complex, and also triggers a cutscene in which Raiden zooms in and spots some key individuals up on the refinery scaffolding.

The man in the ushanka is Andrey Dolzaev, the ethnonat warlord behind this whole mess. The cyborg woman he's pointing the gun at has got to be Mistral, the Desperado lieutenant. Looks like he hasn't been thrilled with her organization's performance. On one hand, they did seize the territory and its invaluable refinery for him. On the other, a rival mercenary group hired by his enemies has spent the last couple hours tearing through the defences with just a single agent.

I'd say it was a very bad policy for him to try to threaten the mercenaries who provide the bulk of his army. But then, that's just a little low-powered pistol he's waving around there, and Mistral is a full-body-aug on the same level as Raiden and Jetstream Sam, so I don't know if it really counts as "threatening" her. For people with bulletproof hide and nanobot-aided healing factors, this might be a perfectly acceptable way of emphasizing a point during friendly arguments.

Heh. Makes me wonder if cyborgs left to develop their own culture would end up a bit like the pillar men, in some ways. Tearing each other's arms open for stepping on their shadows etc just being a normal personality quirk that no one holds against anyone else.

After a minute of Dolzaev shouting at Mistral and her looking extremely unconcerned about it, he storms away out of sight and leaves Mistral alone on the scaffolding. She turns around to look out over the nearby town, and then startles as she appears to spot something. She makes it clear what that something is by looking directly into Raiden's zoomed-in eyes, winking, and blowing him a kiss.

Raiden himself startles quite badly at this, of course. He readies his sword, prepared to fend off whatever forces she's about to call down on his position or evade whatever sniper shots she tries to take, but there are no troops and no bullets. By the time he looks back in her direction, she's disappeared into the refinery, and no alarm is being raised.

Hmm. Well. Either she's really, really bad at her job, or Desperado has decided to cut its losses with Dolzaev's coup and she's telling Raiden to go ahead and save them the trouble of killing the disappointing twat. One or the other.

Doktor calls in to ask why Raiden's heartrate just spiked. Erm...isn't Courtney the one who's monitoring Raiden's vitals? Come on game, let her do the one thing that you've decided she can be responsible for, seriously.

Raiden tells the doc that it's fine, and gives the refinery one last wary look before gameplay resumes. I try and ask his team if they have any insights on Mistral's behavior there. Boris has some thoughts to share.

For an ethnonationalist revolutionary, Dolzaev seems to have surprisingly little grass roots support. As evidenced by the lack of local militiamen - baseline human or otherwise - to support the mercenaries. Even if normal people are obsolete on modern battlefields, you'd still expect to see plenty of them in support roles, right? Boris' guess is that Dolzaev is really more interested in oil than he is in national liberation, and most of the people who would join an earnest revolution have already seen through his bullshit. Overthrowing a government without grass roots support is easy if you have an army, but holding the land for any length of time is a very different story. If Dolzaev isn't having any luck winning hearts and minds, then it would make sense for Desperado to sense that this is going nowhere and just try to get out with as much money as possible now.

Granted, Boris also points out that if that's all that was going on here, Raiden shouldn't have had to fight his way through so many damned Desperado troopers to make it this far. So, there's something else going on here. The money must be coming from somewhere else; most likely someone manipulating Dolzaev from behind the curtains as part of some bigger geopolitial stratagem. The oil refinery may be important to that someone's goals, or just a piece of bait to goad other factions with. Some within Desperado's organization might know more than others, with the Winds obviously being better informed than the rank-and-file.

Sound reasoning, Boris. I'll keep all that in mind going forward and look for clues.

The other staff members aren't nearly as helpful.

Literally all three of the others just blather about how much they want to fuck Mistral. With Kevin and Doktor literally just talking about her tits for half of their respective dialogues. Even though the tits in question were barely even visible under her baggy overcoat in that cutscene. Seriously. I notice tiddies. Pay quite a bit of attention to them, in fact. Nothing in that scene called attention to Mistral's.

Between this and the way our own team female is being written, I'm really not thrilled with the game's gender politics. Infinitely better than what Kojima usually does with female characters (MGS4-5 were the worsts about this. Allegedly MGS3 had a positive counterexample, but I haven't seen that one and therefore can't testify), but still definitely not good.


Next time we vanquish a Wind of Destruction, complete the Abkhazia mission, and try out the new virtual reality missions Raiden's been picking up.