Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 6)

More depressing urban scenery abounds as Raiden sneaks forward from what was once a thriving oldtown district toward the refinery grounds. With the help of some smoke grenades I picked up from one of the supply caches I've been raiding, I'm able to sneak past the next couple groups without even triggering them. You'd think that if they suddenly saw a smokebomb go off they'd be alerted at the very least, even if they didn't know what direction they should be shooting in, but apparently not. If these guys didn't try to fight me to the death every time they *do* get aggro'd, it would be easy for me to infer that Desperado's ranks have got the memo about this operation and are phoning it in at this point. More likely, it's just a combination of limited enemy AI and the devs wanting to make stealth tactics easier on the player. If the latter, I think these smoke grenades kind of overshoot the goal.

On one hand, it helps keep my kill count low. On the other hand, it's another detail that chips away at my reason for wanting to keep my kill count low. Not nearly as badly as the enemies' reckless in-combat behaviour, but still.

Stealth fails when I need to cross a wide open fairground area patrolled by a sizeable group of soldiers and a pair of those big GEKKO mechs. The upside is that I manage to cut another guy's leg off and get him to cloak and crawl away instead of killing him, and also that I found a new trick for dealing with GEKKOs. Sometimes they lower their torsos and charge forward to body slam you, and - while the timing is difficult - you can have Raiden parry that attack and then button-mash a little to make him trip the GEKKO while it's parried. This stuns the big robot in much the same way as throwing it by its leech-cord or shooting it with an RPG, allowing you to shave off the rest of its armor with a flurry of blows or land an execution strike if its already damaged enough. The downside, meanwhile, is that everyone except Jeremy Hopsalot chose death, and I took enough of a beating from the GEKKOs before they went down that I needed to do some organ harvesting when they did.

Well, I hope Jeremy at least will learn from his late comrades' examples and make a new life for himself working for a less cartoonishly evil company. I'll have Herr Doktor mail him a new leg if he does, on me.

When I reach the edge of the refinery grounds and stop to open a gate, something confusing happens.

Boris tells me that there's a call for backup coming from the fairground behind me. And then says that I can go deal with it or not, my choice. Nothing about what the consequences for not dealing with it are.

I ran back to the fairground following the new map waypoint he gave me, and two more of those UAV's came swooping down at me. Either I've gotten much better at dealing with them after that first miniboss encounter with one, or the miniboss version is actually tougher than the ones that show up later. Also, I learned that you don't *need* to do the silly missile-climb to finish them off; it remains an option, but if you get up to them another way or manage to down them with a rocket etc before they can start spamming their own missiles it's totally circumventable. Knowing that you don't HAVE to do the missile-climb and that it isn't just a scripted QTE for one singular setpiece boss fight makes me much more okay with it, and now I actually *want* to try and manage it when I can.

...

Something I've been learning about myself as a player is that arbitrariness is my biggest gameplay pet peeve. Especially when the arbitrary-feeling gameplay bit is unavoidable.

If Raiden has been able to reduce the chopper's hit points 90% of the way just using RPG shots and well timed leaping blade flurries, why does he suddenly need to do this one particular stunt to take out that remaining 10%? With the miniboss version of the chopper, the game actually fucked with the camera angles and shoved a big "press X to do the ridiculous finisher that we expect you to drop your controller and make the soyjack face at" into the middle of the screen. Maybe I technically *could* have landed the finishing blow another way, but the game tries hard to railroad you into doing the one particular thing. Even though that thing hardly seems like the most obvious or reliable tactic for Raiden to try, thinking about it in-character. Same issue I had with the similar stunt, with the metal gear in the Africa mission.

If the rocket climb finisher is something you can do when an injured UAV starts hanging back and going into missilespam mode, then that feels like part of the game world that the player can engage with as they will. And, I'm happy to engage with it when battlefield conditions make it convenient to do so.

...

Nobody had anything to say after I took out those "reinforcement" choppers. So, I reloaded and tried ignoring Boris' message to see if there were consequences. Like, say, those choppers showing up later on in the level at a more dangerous juncture. Nope. You can go back and fight the two UAV's if you feel like having a fight with two more UAV's, or you can not and they retroactively will have never existed. Weird choice of framing. At the very least, having Boris describe them as reinforcements that the enemy called in when they don't act like reinforcements seems a bit narratively self-defeating. Awkward way to fit optional battles into the level, they could have done it better. Good fight, though.

With that gate opened and those helicopters ignored, Raiden has finally reached the oil plant where Dolzaev lurks and Mistral pretends to be guarding him (you know, maybe pointing a gun at her was a bad idea for his security's reliability after all...). Boris tells me more about the plant and the murky geopolitics surrounding its construction and operation. The fact that it looks so much better maintained than the gloomy city just outside its barbed wire perimeter fence, even accounting for recent battle damage, very much illustrates his point. This place could definitely use a liberator, honestly. Too bad the one it got is so corrupt and genocide-happy that he needs to rely on foreign mercs to do almost everything for him. Kevin and Courtney give me an almost Carmen Sandiego-like litany of historical trivia about the Georgia and its region, and then another one about Mistral's native Algeria. Seriously, read these lines in Zack and Ivy's voices, you'd barely have to change a single word.

Doktor, meanwhile, has finally finished musing over whether Mistral's tiddies are organic or not and is ready to be given yet another technical puzzle by Raiden.

Raiden seems to have been thinking over what everyone said about Pochita, and he's decided he wants to see if the AI was telling the truth. Both about being actually self-aware, and about it resenting its masters and the limited scope of existence they allowed it. If it turns out it was just a cleverbot programmed for psychological warfare after all then whatever, Raiden owes Kevin a beer.

I guess I'm supposed to infer that Raiden picked up robodoge's brain-equivalent component after cutting its chasis into thirds, and that it's still pretty much intact.

Actually, that hardware turns out to be even more important than I thought. According to Doktor, if Pochita was made even remotely the same way as the more basic AI's that control most robots in this setting, then it's not a software entity. Unmanned gears use something along the lines of synthetic neurons to make their computations. So unless Pochita is something completely different from usual rather than simply an evolution of it, its consciousness is no more separable from its computer hardware than a human's is from their brain. Hmm. Good to know.

Also, just HOW similar to organic brains are these robot AI units? Are all these unmanned gears actually more like animals than automatons, in terms of what's going on upstairs? Do most of them actually have a rudimentary, animalistic awareness? Weeeeird.

Anyway, we're gonna have the doc revive and unshackle Pochita once Raiden brings its remains back to HQ. Hopefully it won't make Raiden regret this.

Outside of the city, it's just a short treck down a rocky slope to reach the refinery, and then a mere barbed wire fence to slash through to enter the facility's grounds. Here, Raiden is ambushed and surrounded by a swarm of little black cuckballs.

They make these kawaii little squeaking noises when they attack, too.~

They only take a couple of slashes each to kill, and they aren't especially fast or evasive, but there's a lot of them and they keep coming. Their little claw attacks do totally ignorable amounts of damage, but if they manage to jump at Raiden from behind they'll latch onto his back and give you only a few seconds to button-mash them off before they explode. Which...still doesn't do very much damage, to be honest. Much less than it should, given how much other explosives hurt in this game. But it still does enough to make you want to avoid it if possible, and more importantly it also stuns Raiden for a second and leaves him vulnerable to getting grabbed by another one.

Additionally, a second wave of cuckballs is accompanied by a handful of soldiers who will happily take advantage of any time Raiden spends being grappled by little cuckball arms or stunned by unprevented cuck explosions to shoot and stab a lot more of his hit points away. It's a good bit of show-not-tell tutorialized gameplay; the balls are barely even a nuisance on their own, but as a support unit they can make other enemies much more dangerous if you ignore them. It's good enemy design, and a good introduction to that enemy that shows off both what to watch out for and how to deal with it.

Too bad for those couple of cyborgs who attacked along with them. One I killed by hitting his shoulder too much when going for his arm. The other just went down to hp damage while I was surrounded slashing around wildly. On the bright side, while cuckballs don't have nanogel sacks inside of them, they often drop a little mini-healing pack when killed, so after dealing with a bunch of them you can usually run around and regain most or all of the hp you lost. Might save me from having to fillet a few dudes for healing purposes, going forward.

The doors won't open, and Raiden can't climb ladders (devs, why are you putting obvious ladders going up to windows in the building the player knows they need to get into if you won't let their character climb ladders? It's just obnoxious, seriously). Fortunately, there are some boxes and shit to jump up on to get up to a ventilation fan, and ventilation fans are weaker than robo-samurai katanas. On the other side of the vent is this game's first proper old-school Metal Gear style stealth sequence.

Naturally, those sentry turrets will raise an alarm and call in cyborg and cuckball reinforcements if you enter their line-of-sight beams, but they *won't* raise an alarm if suddenly destroyed by something outside their field of vision. Which well, that's how Metal Gear enemies have usually been, so fair enough on Revengeance. On the other hand, unlike in most MG titles, if enemies do get summoned by an alarm I'm a bigger threat to them than they are to me.

Really, the biggest danger in this sequence comes from the sentry turrets themselves. They might not be all that good at spotting you, but if they DO get tripped their heavy machine guns are more accurate and powerful than what the infantry use. In addition to the high damage output, they also have a much higher chance to stun you on a hit than any other bullet-based attack in the game thus far, and by the time you button-mash enough to shake it off they'll have shot their way through the lion's share of the dazed Raiden's hp. That said, their line of sight is narrow, and they go down in just a couple of slashes.

Also, speaking of things to shake off, a couple of enemies actually showed me a new combo attack that I think I *could* have encountered at any time before this, but just didn't happen to. If a soldier comes up behind you, he can actually grab you and hold you in place for a moment, during which time another cyborg can come up and deliver an autocrit melee attack while Raiden is held in place. The basic cyborg mooks in this game are really impressing me with how versatile their combat behavior is. Their moveset isn't just reimagined by the addition of rocket launchers or riot shields, but also by factors like "how many buddies do they currently have with them" and "are we fighting in cramped enough conditions to make grappling the player character a practical option." All without overcomplicating them or making them too challenging to serve as the game's basic common enemy.

I might actually go so far as to say that Desperado soldiers are my favorite videogame mook-enemies to date. Not because of their aesthetics or lore or the like, but just the sheer quality and complexity of game design that went into them.

...

That said, the game still isn't doing anything to make me see them as characters rather than just videogame enemies. I still have to cut their damned legs off and let them get exhausted trying to drag themselves toward me for ten seconds before they'll even think about alternatives to fighting to the death.

Which, let me remind you, I wouldn't care about - or even THINK about - if the game hadn't also made the decision to moralize at me about being callous with their lives.

...

Another thing this sequence teaches me is that you actually can un-aggro enemies after they've been alerted. At least, sometimes. If you stay out of sight and at a comfortable distance for a little while, they'll forget about you, the fight music will stop, and the invisible walls that the game tries to pin on Boris will disappear, letting you try to sneak on ahead without further violence. Not every enemy group encountered had an arena with hiding places that let you attempt this, but I'm sure some of them probably did. I probably could have spared a lot more guys if I had known. I'll try replaying this level with that in mind.

Eventually, I navigate to the central refinery, where a tall spiral staircase leads up to the most obvious boss arena in the world.

Mistral time? Mistral time. I doubt squishy organic Dolzaev is suitable for the role, heh.

Now, granted, I still wonder why she didn't raise the damned alarm when she saw me before, if she still was intending to fight for her dumbass patron. Maybe she'll tell me. Or maybe it'll be a fakeout, and I won't have to fight her at all. Well, anyway, there she is across the tower now.

I guess Raiden will go say hi and hope for the best.

Well, the first thing the ensuing cutscene reveals is that she's done her opposition research. She calls Raiden by his old and more inauspicious nickname of "Jack the Ripper," which he apparently got in the Liberian civil war before being brought to the USA. Oh, right, I remember hearing that detail before, I must have forgotten about it. Raiden was a child soldier, once, having been groomed for that task by the villain of Metal Gear Solid 2 or an underling of his. He reacts in irritation to being called that old nickname by Mistral now, and I don't blame him.

He asks where Dolzaev is. She...either challenges Raiden to a duel, or tries to ask him on a date. Maybe both.

She keeps needling Raiden about his origins. Including mentioning how being a rare white Liberian was part of his mystique, back in his bad old days.

...

Hmm.

You know, game, she actually raises a good point, if unintentionally. Why IS Raiden white? Was him *not* being from the typical Liberian native or African American stock actually important to the story, at some point?

If this were a different game series, I might be annoyed if its only black player character were something as stereotypical as "African child soldier," but this is Metal Gear. Half the characters were child soldiers of some stripe or another. Also, while there are *technically* multiple white protagonists, they're all literally clones of the same guy, so there wouldn't be token-stereotyping issues.

Were they afraid that MGS2 and MGRR would have sold poorly if they starred a black guy? I mean, if so, they were probably right. Not sure if that excuses it though.

...

When Raiden expresses absolutely zero interest in discussing his background, Mistral starts unsolicitedly telling him about hers. When he expresses even less interest in hearing about that, she goes into more detail.

Nearly every boss in the series from 1998 onward has done this, I know. Sometimes they at least have a liiiittle bit more prompting from their surroundings and/or the player character before going off, but not always. It's a conceit of the series. It's just the way Metal Gear does things, and you're meant to just accept it and let the game tell you the information it wants you to know on its own terms.

I will not accept that conceit on the game's own terms. It was stupid in 1998. It was stupid in 2013. It is stupid today.

I don't but that it's some kind of deliberate stylistic choice that serves an artistic vision either, because I've seen Kojima's writing in some other, much more obscure games he did too, and it's exactly the same. Giant context-independent walls of text that just tell you everything all at once are the only way he knows how to write.

Kojima didn't write for this game (which is why Mistral's monologue is only about 25% as long and 50% as nonsequitur-filled as usual), but it's clearly trying to do his style, because it wouldn't be a Metal Gear game otherwise.

Oh my god lady I don't fucking care.

Raiden doesn't care either. He literally TOLD YOU that he doesn't care. Shut the fuck up.

Raiden, can you PLEASE just shoot an RPG in her gigantic fucking mouth already? You don't care about this either. You SAID you don't care about it, to her, just a minute ago. Act like it, damn you!

The actually relevant-ish part of her story is that she joined the French Foreign Legion, then quit and became a mercenary, and then started getting depressed because her enemies always had a cause they were fighting for instead of just money. This realization led her to...

-____-

Okay. Here, we get to one of the series' most longrunning and pernicious brainbugs, in terms of its message and themes.

...

When it's at its best, Metal Gear's writing does a decent-ish job of exploring how society both lionizes and dehumanizes soldiers. In fact, this very game had a pretty good incidence of that in the cutscene where it challenged me to a pacifist run (I had actually been planning to talk about this in my wrapup for the mission, but I guess here is just as good a place). The Maverick support staff are all smiles and excitement when they explain how his new upgrades let him consume enemy soldiers as a resource, but then start acting appalled at him for thinking of enemy soldiers as a resource to be consumed. What I felt was best about that scene was that it didn't try to make Kevin and the others seem like bad people, or even like you should necessarily resent them for being like this. They clearly don't realize what it is they're doing here, because their society has conditioned them (and Raiden himself; he notably doesn't call them on their hypocrisy, or even appear to THINK of it as hypocrisy on their part) to not think about it. That stuff in the Metal Gear games is good, usually.

Thing is, it's joined at the hip with this completely batshit insistence - consistent throughout the series' decades' worth of releases - that being a soldier is an immutable characteristic. I'm not talking about the very real difficulties faced by former child soldiers trying to readjust to normal life (which you totally could make a great videogame story about, imo). I'm saying that, in large part, these games are all about turning a sympathetic eye to the persecution and intolerance endured by those assigned soldier at birth.

No, seriously. There was even a major plot in the series - clearly intended to be taken seriously by the player - about trying to found a new nation where soldiers can be free from exploitation by civilians and governments. Soldier liberation movement. They probably have pride parades. None of the characters seeming to realize that soldiers liberated from exploitation by civilian society already exist, and are called "civilians."

...

Anyway, she finishes her stupid speech, which terminates with her praising an unnamed "he" who showed her the way and turned her life around. Even though she's still a mercenary. As she finishes, a bunch of cuckballs come crawling up the pipes to join us, and she rips their limbs off with bizarrely sexual grunts and grins to attach them to her exoskeleton. I guess her boss gimmick is "having lots of arms?" Ehhhh, not the best that these games have ever done, I must say. She also sticks several other arms together into a long, rigid black cuckstaff, which can also relax itself into a whip type thing. She still has a few balls left over afterward to be adds for the fight.

So, um. Why did she do such a shit job guarding the refinery? I was hoping her speech would at least shed some light on why she let Raiden in, but um...I guess not. Perhaps Dolzaev pointing the pistol at her annoyed her more than I thought.

I wasn't expecting Arm Lady to be the most memorable boss fight I've ever played through to begin with, but after the challenge and engagement of the Pochita battle it's downright underwhelming. And also kind of annoying, to be honest. Her attacks do almost pathetic damage, considering how many health packs the game lets you pick up before the fight, so her strategy is to just keep things going on and on for as long as possible with invincible attack cycles and neverending swarms of cuckballs to get in Raiden's way and/or grab his back and make him waste even more time shaking them off while she slooooowly chips away at you.

It's not challenging. I only died to her when I was trying to get everything lined up for screenshots, which makes her the easiest boss in the game so far besides maybe the helicopter. She just wastes your time.

When you get her health down about a third of the way, she arbitrarily grabs Raiden in her whip and throws him onto a pipe where you have to fight her in a functionally 2D environment where she can hit you with her long cuckstaff over the bodies of the many balls trying to hump Raiden's legs, and which he has to slooowly hack his way through to get her within his own reach.

What I want to know is why Raiden is playing her game here. This terrain heavily favors her. There are much wider rooftops etc around that he could move to and force her to follow him (she's the one playing defence here, after all). The fall to the ground below isn't higher than other jumps I've seen Raiden make, so he could just lead her down there too. Why would he not do this? Why is he letting her make things harder for him?

The pipe part is the closest this battle ever came to actually being a challenge. It's where I died trying to get screenshots; in the other phases, I could get away with that easily.

Stage three has them...tumbling to the ground to fight in terrain that favors Raiden again. And it's easier for that. Seriously, why didn't Raiden just do that to begin with?

The only memorable thing about this battle is the music. Helped by the way it builds throughout the stages; stage one on the tower just has the beat and some quiet instrumentals, stage two on the pipe makes it louder and introduces the jingly Europop synth sounds, and then stage three on the ground finally lets fly with the moaning vocals and their emo lyrics. It's a perfect fight song for a French cyborg who thinks her life story is more compelling than it is. Very hummable, too.

The music makes the last third in particular the most enjoyable part of the battle. I still wasn't at all sorry to see it end when I finally had Raiden reduce her health to zero and triggered a cutscene where he freezes the babbling prat with a convenient industrial coolant tank and chops her into icy scrap metal.

On one hand, I tried to avoid killing most of the other (trans)human enemies. On the other hand, none of the others tried to sexually assault me with their life stories, so I won't grudge the game for forcing my hand in this case.

Somehow, despite being frozen and in small pieces, Mistral manages to get one last speech out via codec. To be fair, making a Metal Gear villain reliably shut the hell up requires nothing short of divine intervention, so I already knew there would be a good chance of this.

Her final words are seemingly addressed to "him." The mysterious cult leader type person who she claims to be serving in lieu of mere profit, despite appearances to the contrary. Probably Cyber-Trump, but I guess there could be another mastermind between her and him that she's the devotee of.

Dolzaev speaks up over the comms and seems to think she's talking to him, which Raiden just outright snickers at. The warlord, realizing he's lost his bodyguard and with her his link to Desperado, flies into a rage and starts cursing Raiden out in Russian. It sounds like Dolzaev might have also had a bit of a crush on Mistral, which surprises me given what we saw of their previous interactions. Eh, well, I guess at least he's in good company with 3/4ths of Raiden's support crew.

Anyway, Raiden ignores the salt and tells him the jig is up. Surrender, and there's a chance he might only get life in prison.

Unfortunately, however corrupt he might have been and how insincere he was about caring about Abkhazia, Dolzaev really was earnest about hating Russia. If he's going down, he might as well take a few billion dollars worth of Russian assets with him. And, what do you know, he's standing on top of a giant oil refinery built with Russian money to make Russia money.

Raiden, ascending back up the scaffolding, spots Dolzaev on another silo tour across the complex. It's too late to get a bead on him with a rocket launcher or something, unfortunately. He already has his finger on the button.

Raiden is at the edge of the blast, so he's just thrown back and battered a bit. Some of the refinery infrastructure around the peripheries is also still intact. The entire middle part of the complex, though, along with all the oil, just went up in Dolzaev's funeral pyre.

Mission successful. Target eliminated. Desperado and other potential mercenary forces retreating from the region. Parliamentary government back in power, civilians moving back into their homes, ethnic Russians and Wrong-Kind-Of-Caucasians no longer in danger. Maverick probably would have gotten a nice bonus if they managed to save the refinery at the last minute there, but hey, we did what we were hired to do. And also hopefully taught Desperado to not get in our way again when we killed one of their Winds of Destruction.

I mean, obviously they won't stay out of our way after this. The game has been building up to the rematch with Jetstream, and the Winds as a whole fit way too neatly into the template of Metal Gear midboss teams to not be one. But you know what I mean.

With the end of the mission, the game informs me that I have upgrades available for Raiden and his equipment. It turns out that there's quite a lot you can upgrade in MGRR.

The resource points that you get through gameplay (either by performing well in battle, or by doing things like finding hidden resources and chopping off hands for Doktor etc) are pretty easy to come by, so most of the unlocked upgrades are affordable for purchase. The "body" options let you choose a different visual skin for Raiden that also gives bonuses to one particular playstyle (there's one that lets you carry extra grenades and rockets, one that uses healing items more efficiently, one that's faster and more fragile than the default, etc). The "life" and "fuel cell" options are boring, straightforward, and too useful to not take; they increase your maximum health and stamina, the latter allowing you to use blade mode much more often and making it easier to pull off both nonlethal amputations and deadly nanogel-vampirism as desired.

The two most interesting upgrade menus are "main weapon" and "skill." The former lets you upgrade virtually every aspect of Raiden's techno-sword, and these upgrades are actually expensive enough to make you pick carefully. You can upgrade damage, stamina recovery per hit, rate of stamina loss during blade mode, you name it. There's also a new sword altogether that you can get, but that's by far the most expensive item in this entire system so far and I can't get it yet. "Skill" gives you new context-dependent attack combos, you can only equip so many of these at once, not because of a hard limit but rather because of button and situation overlap.

The upgrade I'm most eager to try out is one that lets Raiden repel bullets from all directions while he's speedboosting, rather than only from directly ahead. Basically, press the dash button to make bullets completely irrelevant. Honestly, I'm afraid it might be a little TOO good, heh.

Finally, there's "special weapon." Apparently, Maverick's engineers have been reviewing the footage and tinkering with the loot, and they think they can reverse-engineer Mistral's black cuckstaff. Going by the battle with her, I'm guessing using this might give me longer reach at the cost of damage. Assuming I can switch between that and the sword at will...yeah, that actually might be pretty useful. Taking it! And also some upgrades FOR it that become available afterward, for that matter.

Next it's time to look at those VR missions I found on unattended Desperado laptops throughout the level. And also the ones that I had from the beginning and didn't realize I had. Yeah. So. Apparently the tutorial I played was only the first of a few that Raiden starts the campaign with, and the others fill you in on pretty much everything I had to discover through trial and error myself. In my defence, I'd like to call your attention once again to your mother's history in the sex industry.

Anyway, practice makes perfect when it comes to nonlethal takedowns. When combined with my expanded stamina meter, this practice should do wonders for avoiding enemy deaths.

Another useful tutorial teaches you the ins and outs of various secondary weapons. I didn't realize until now that there are actually two different rocket launchers Raiden can pick up and switch between. The RPG launcher fires unguided rockets that go in a straight line and do lots of damage and stunning when they hit. The MANPADD fires weaker rockets, but they lock onto their targets and track them, making it ideal for aircraft and other fast-moving enemies. I also learned how to use the EMP grenades, that momentarily stun any cyborgs and robots within a small are...

Ohhhhhh.

That's how I was supposed to save that second civilian. Lob an EMP grenade right on top of him so it stuns all the dudes surrounding him at once.

I will try that on a replay. Gotcha.

The other VR missions I picked up ingame are...well, decent. Visually they're all kind of boring and samey, with the holographic yellow block environments and grainy-looking simulated enemy soldiers, but gameplay-wise they're diverse enough. Some are stealth excercises, some are combat sims against gauntlets of soldiers and robots, etc. They work. One minor complaint about the combat exercises is that if Raiden "dies" in one of them, you get the usual game over voiceover of Boris going "Raiden? Raiden? RAAAAAAAIDENNNNNN!!!???" With the amount of dialogue this game has, you think they could have squeezed in one extra line to replace this with Herr Doktor going "gg no re l2p" or something.


So, that's the first proper mission after the semi-tutorial one in Nonspecific African Nation. Gameplay-wise? Pretty dang solid, occasional obnoxious QTE's and one annoying boss aside. Art-wise? Ehhhhhh. Very, very mixed bag, both in terms of visuals and writing. Especially the writing. I don't dislike everything about the story, and there are some fun moments and actually promising plot threads, but man is there also a lot of stupid even after handwaving the innate cheesiness of the setting and series. The music is nice. Tryhard, but nice.

As a complete package, it has my recommendation. We'll see if that holds up in the following mission.