Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 7)

Before we continue onward into Raiden's adventure, I booted up the Abkhazia mission again to try and recapture some missed opportunities, just to see what changes as a result.

First, try as I might, I couldn't find an EMP grenade in the early part of the level to save that second civilian with. Smoke grenades don't help; the mercs panic and shoot him as soon as they see the smoke. In frustration, I decided to just shoot the whole group of them with a rocket launcher and try to position the rocket so that it would hopefully catch them in the blast radius while leaving the civilian outside of it...and, to my surprise, that worked. The guys in the flight suits were outside the blast, but the RPG out of nowhere pulled their attention away sharply enough for the civilian to not get fired upon. Saved him.

Is it just me, though, or does this guy not look awfully similar to the previous one I had to rescue? Different clothes, but he could have changed. I'm starting to think this dude might be a Russian spy after all. Well, relay my regards to the FSB my guy. Tell them to consider this a free sample of Maverick's services, and that they can give Boris the code R41D3N to get our special discount on any contracts - but just for a limited time only!

The other thing I wanted to try was to see if I could put my VR blade mode practice to use and try to beat that first enemy group without killing any of them. Raiden's callousness about killing that specific bunch of soldiers is what triggered that first cutscene about how he should feel very bad for taking human lives, so I wondered if there'd be a different version of it if you commit to nonlethal methods. To my disappointment, three cyborg corpses appeared out of nowhere as soon as the battle was over, and it played exactly the same cutscene.

-___-

The game tells you not to take the lives of your opponents lightly, and it also gives you a (more difficult) option for nonlethal takedowns. For it to do both of those things, and then not actually account for the player trying to engage with the challenge poised is...strange.

Eh. Well, I said I'd try and keep it up for at least one more level, so I will. That surge of optimism I experienced when I reached the first hostage situation has been reduced by this, though.

My feelings about the story continue to be very mixed as I watch the intro cinematic for mission number 3.


An unspecified length of time after Dolzaev's downfall, Raiden is sent on another infiltration mission. This time in the rather surprising location of Guadalajara, Mexico. And this time with a partner riding in the car alongside him.

To get the visual details out of the way, it looks like Herr Doktor and his colleagues gave Pochita a new, more biomimicking, face when they rebuilt his body. It's not the most expressive design they could have gone with, but at least he looks slightly more like a living thing and slightly less like an impersonal machine than he used to.

With that having been said though: huh?

He's just on the team now? We've confirmed that he actually is what he says he is? And that we can trust him? And, um...he wants to work for Maverick, now? Going by the dialogue he isn't leashed or exploding collar'd at this point, and it doesn't seem like they forcibly reprogrammed him or the like, so I guess they just befriended and came to trust him to go on field operations for them now?

This needed to have...I don't know, a cinematic, at the very least? Maybe a level in which he watches and talks to Raiden from HQ during another mission? This is a lot of development to happen completely offscreen between cuts. For both Pochita, and for everyone at Maverick. Raiden with his mixed feelings and wariness borne of past experience about the AI in particular.

Then we get the mission summary from Kevin, and apparently we're going into Mexico to hunt down a rumored secret laboratory linked to Desperado. A client is mentioned as existing, but there's no detail about who the client is or why they care about finding this secret lab.

Are we fighting some kind of guild war against Desperado, now? Deliberately looking for clients who will pay us to go after Desperado assets specifically? If so, why? They fucked up one of our jobs in Africa and tried to kill Raiden. We fucked up one of their jobs in Eurasia and killed Mistral. Pettiness achieved. I guess it could just be coincidence that we're facing off against them again already, but the focus of the mission briefing is very much "we're looking for a Desperado lab," rather than "our client wants us to find a lab, and will you believe it but it's these Desperado fuckers again."

Between this and the Pochita situation, it feels like there's a chunk of the game missing.

On the bright side, there's a very funny bit where Kevin is worrying into the phone about whether Raiden will be able to make it into the city center without the enemy noticing, and Raiden assures him that he knows how to blend in. Cue this:

He even tips his giant sombrero goodbye to some confused civilians as they watch him and his robot dog monster get out of the car and climb down a manhole into the sewers. The comedic timing and well-placed Mariachi guitar strums are all perfect.

That said, while this little scene did have me busting a gut, it also makes me wonder anew what the game wants me to think about Raiden. Did he decide that his cyborg body and companion would attract too much attention regardless, and thus decide that taking refuge in ridiculousness would make witnesses dismiss it as a stunt rather than an operation? That's cool and irreverent, if so. Did he actually think that this would help him blend in? That's embarrassing and stupid (in the exact same way as him repeatedly getting ganked by the first boss due to refusal to look at explosions), if so. Is he supposed to be omgawesome, or is he supposed to be a moron who compensates for it by happening to be really really good at fighting?

To be clear, I don't dislike either of those concepts as a protagonist for this sort of game. They're both good. I just don't know which he's supposed to be.

So, gameplay! Level starts with Raiden and Pochita in the Guadalajara sewers, looking for a connection to this secret laboratory that is suspected of doing some illegal toxic waste disposal into said sewers.

Is our employer the Mexican government, then? Not sure why they'd need to hire mercenaries to search their own damned sewers for illegal construction. Is it another rival of Desperado's? Seems like they would just do it themselves. It FEELS like Maverick is just going vigilante against Desperado because of the shit they did in Africa, but the voiceovers insist that there's a client paying for this, and while Raiden has a personal beef against them for reigniting the wars that he himself had to grow up in I don't think the rest of Maverick's leadership would be willing to do this pro bono.

Again, it really feels like there's a piece of the game missing. Like a level had to be left on the cutting room floor, and they only mostly managed to stitch the rest of the story back together around it.

I scrounge the available codec conversations for more information. With mixed, but generally unenlightening, results.

Boris mostly just fills Raiden in on stuff he should already know by now about the aftermath of the Abkhazia mission. Short version: Maverick came out of it looking really good, with Dolzaev's suicide-bombing of the oil refinery being deemed the unpredictable and thus unpreventable act of a madman. Our reputation still isn't quite back to what it was before the Nonspecific African Nation thing, but it's significantly better. The Russian and Georgian governments are even hiring local labor to rebuild the plant, so a lot of Abkhazis might have ended up benefitting from Dolzaev's failure to liberate them (at least in the short term, within the larger scope of exploitation, but better than nothing I guess). We still don't know who was bankrolling him, though, or whether or not that mystery mastermind is also behind Desperado's other recent activities around the world. He says nothing about why we're in Mexico, or about Pochita.

Kevin gives me a little bit more local detail (Desperado has been involved with Mexican criminal organizations' human trafficking activities, and it's possible that this secret sewer lab might be using victims for experiments of some kind), but nothing about our client or our main objective besides just "find lab." Adding to my sense of there being something missing, Kevin and Raiden also speculate on who Mistral's visionary leader sempai figure might have been, and decide that it probably isn't Sundowner.

Why is Sundowner more likely than Monsoon or Jetstream? Are they above the other three in the hierarchy? Do we have reason to think they're more influential than the others? The game is acting like I'm supposed to already know who Sundowner is beyond just "another name on the list of bad guys" but it never told me anything about him. I'm guessing that he's the Texas-accented guy who killed N'Mani, the one who I nicknamed King Kong at the time, simply because we've had some introduction to that one, but he wasn't named at the time. It's yet another thing that feels like it was explained in a level that's missing.

Kevin also warns Raiden about there being urban legends about "black crocodiles" lurking in the Guadelajara sewers lately. It might be coincidence, but it also might be inspired by sightings of Desperado guard robots.

Or maybe the lab is a genetic engineering facility, creating different coloured crocodiles for the black market exotic pet trade. And human trafficking provides cheaper crocodile food than any of the alternatives. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until forced to do otherwise.

One other thing from Kevin, though; he mentions something about "emotional suppression" being in common use by cyborg troops while on duty. Is that supposed to be why they're so unwilling to retreat or surrender? Maybe? If so...I dunno. Mixed feelings about the moral ramifications of killing them.

Courtney just talks about Dolzaev's suicide bombing. Which prompts Raiden to go on another tangent about samurai. Raiden why.

Doktor just chats about technical cyborg stuff some more.

There's also a new contact in Raiden's phone, listed simply as "Wolf." I guess I can walky-talky chat with Pochita while we're in the sewers together. Even he doesn't fill me in on what the hell happened between him, Raiden, and Maverick after last mission and before this one, though.

He just tells me some of his origin story. He was part of a secret project (by whom? Which country? Which corporation? He doesn't say. Did they never tell him who they even were?) looking into replacing cyborgs and unmanned gears with an all new type of fully-intelligent artificial life form. He was three years in development from a blank slate neural net into the identity he now possesses, and at the end of those three years they decided the project was a failure. Why was it a failure? Because, in Pochita's own words, he lacked brutality.

Huh?

He fought pretty dang viciously, in his boss battle. Was that not "brutal" enough for his creators?

Maybe he meant that he just didn't want to fight, and that keeping explosive collars on an unwilling army of him would be much too risky? That makes sense. "Brutality" is just an odd choice of words for it, in that case.

Then again, he also describes this brutality he's missing as an "innately human quality," which...wait, hold on a second. Doktor and Pochita have both told me now that he has a physical, pseudo-neurological brain, not a virtual one. Making him just a (much) more advanced version of existing UG robots in that regard. Other UG's are explicitly patterned off of animalistic behaviors. This does indeed give them brutality, as both demonstrated both by their aggressive ingame combat behavior and acknowledged by various characters in the dialogue. Why could they not give this to Pochita?

Did they not use a pseudo-animal base, for him? I guess that would explain it. Why wouldn't they build up from that, though?

Well. Anyway. Project was deemed a failure. Pochita was shut down. Next thing he knew, he was reactivated by Desperado. He doesn't know how they got ahold of him. Sundowner was apparently amused by this machine having more concern for his "fellow" man than actual men did. I'm pretty sure Sundowner is King Kong now, yeah, he seemed like the type who would find that hilarious. He got along better with Sam and Mistral, though. Apparently Mistral really liked dogs, and was too stupid to tell the difference between an actual dog and a robot that happens to be shaped a bit like one. She was the team female.

So, that was a little bit interesting but mostly just kind of baffling.

Anyway, off into the sewers we go. Pochita scouting ahead, Raiden following up to handle the obstacles as he is notified of them. Naturally, these sewers consist of arched tunnels twenty feet across and fifteen feet high at the centers, smattered with scaffolds and catwalks that don't lead to anything, random light sources, and crates full of health packs and grenades laying around, none of which merits comment by the people looking for signs of suspicious activity. I've been to Mexico, but I never went in the sewers, so I can't comment on the accuracy of this. I'm totally willing to believe that Mexico has Video Game Sewers though. In fact, I declare it real life canon. After a bit of exploring and scavenging, Pochita warns me about unmarked UG's guarding the tunnels up ahead. A room later, and Raiden comes face to face with the game's newest and most challenging enemy.

This thing makes quite an entrance, opening fire on Raiden with its heavy armcannon from the ceiling it had been clinging to, then dropping down with a bestial roar and rushing into close quarters.

Boris is familiar with these. They're called "mastiffs," not because of their appearance (obviously) but rather their intended function as perimeter defenders. More humanoid than most UG's, but not actually any smarter than most other zooform robots. They are stronger, though, which means their two-handed punches and body slams are unblockable. Good to know! I quickly learn the hard way that their armcannons are heavier than most guns Raiden has had shot at him in the game so far, having higher damage output and a higher stun chance than even the sentry turrets in the oil refinery. Their armor is thick, and it's hard to get in a counter when half their attacks are unblockable.

It's a sharp difficulty spike, but not an unfair one. The mastiff makes me use one of the health packs I picked up, but it goes down before it can get me too low again after that. It helps that the arms are severable after you've damaged their armor enough with normal hits and/or explosives, and once you cut those off the torso's body slams and kicks are much easier to avoid. Playing around a little, I tried reloading and shooting it with an RPG right off the bat. Didn't stun it the way most enemies are stunned, but it did blow off the limb armor, which is still well-worth a rocket from Raiden's inventory. While the mastiff is fast, it isn't all that agile, and its AI plays very aggressively, so hitting it with explosives is easy as long as you can maintain a bit of distance.

The enemy design continues to be one of the best things about this game. They all feel completely different, are visually distinctive while still conforming to the same aesthetic, force you to play differently from one another, and provide ever-escalating challenge without it ever feeling frustrating or unfair.

A little ways ahead, Pochita warns me of "heavy UG activity" that I should use stealth and verticality to avoid. Sure enough, the next improbably wide open sewer contains two mastiffs patrolling back and forth, and some catwalks that I can get above their field of vision with.

Honestly, for purpose-built guards, these things do not have the best situational awareness.

Gameplay convention, I know. But still, after just getting a speech about how these were built to be perfect sentries it's kind of amusing.

They might take a hell of a lot to bring down in normal combat, but evidently Raiden can one-hit-kill them with a sneak attack. Two mastiffs might be more than I can handle at my current skill level, but drop down on one and stealth-kill it, and you're left with another 1v1 mastiff fight just like the previous one. And this time I know what to do.

...

Reloading this bit, I tried waiting until one mastiff was on the far side of the passageway with its back turned and the other was near me, and then tried the drop-down sneak attack. Sure enough, I killed one of the synths without the other one being alerted. After hiding behind some corners and waiting for the second mastiff to come around, I walked quietly up behind it and sneak attacked it too. Both gorillabots down without a fight, no expenditure of health or ammunition. Kevin even radios in to congratulate Raiden on the elegant work if you do a successful all-stealth elimination of the pair.

Once again, very good enemy design, with the poor peripheral vision being another weakness of this otherwise very dangerous enemy that the player can learn to take advantage of. And the game even congratulates you for doing it!

...

After wasting some time trying to get up onto another catwalk that looked like it had an opening in it and being yelled at by an impatient Pochita, I found the destructible door at floor level in the middle of the hallway I just spent five minutes in and cut through it. Do we need to talk about your mother again? No? Then shut the hell up.

After moving ahead a ways, Pochita relays some much more disturbing news; there is a young boy in the sewers, right in the middle of what seems to be enemy territory. He looks scared, and he's got robots inbound.

Well, that's not good.

I don't think this game actually has time limits for stuff like this, but in the name of roleplaying I have Raiden ninja-run down the next couple rooms and passageways, stopping only to cut open the sealed metal equipment crates that line the walls as they tend to do in sewer systems. I'm slowed down a bit more when it starts raining cuckballs. Turns out there were a bunch of them hanging from the ceiling along here.

Not too many of them. Just a nuisance. They'd be more meaningful if rescuing the kid actually was on a time limit. Honestly, their placement (and the crates' placement) makes me wonder if this was going to be the case at some point in development. Ah well. Eventually I get to the target, just as he's being bullied by a gang of particularly bitter cuckballs.

Those go down in a cutscene. Unfortunately, their reinforcements who apparently were waiting just out of frame do not.

Another new enemy. Ostrich-like robot a little bit taller than Raiden, and seemingly operated by a cuckball plugged into a little socket. Saves on computer parts, according to Dok. Anyway, Raiden tells the boy to stand back until he's dealt with these OmniCucks. The boy is...well, he's not complaining.

And also he makes a pop culture connection that I'm embarassed I didn't.

Sewer ninja. Heh. I get it.

The omnicucks are one of the less interesting enemies of the game, all things considered. They're just weaker versions of the GEKKOs, only without the interesting grapple-tether and ramming attacks and with the addition of an area-effect electrical burst that's more tedious than challenging to avoid and also just doesn't really visually match the creature. There's also the detail of the cuckball emerging to attack you itself if you destroy its ride without doing a special execution strike, but those are so weak in small numbers that it barely matters.

It also doesn't help that these guys were introduced right on the heels of the more tactically interesting and much more challenging mastiff.

Eh, I guess they can't all be winners. Still a good batting average for the game's rogues gallery.

With the cuckballs all CBT'd, the boy who names himself as George comes out of hiding and enthusiastically thanks and praises his rescuer. He doesn't speak Spanish, surprisingly; only English. He's apparently from Guyana. Damn, he was trafficked a long way. The game's subtitles include vernacular English translations of Guyanan slang, but...honestly, I don't think it's necessary. I understood him just fine without that.

He was a street kid, and got captured after accepting the promise of a "good job with good money" from a local mobster. There are a bunch of other prisoners in the lab facility. Mostly Spanish-speaking. All boys his age or younger. Somehow, George managed to escape, but his inability to communicate with the others prevented him from getting any others out with him. Also, he claims his desperation to escape when he did came from him having heard their captors talking to each other in English about harvesting organs.

Feeding orphans' internal organs to crocodiles. Desperado, what the fuck.


Next time, we raid the pet store supplier.