Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (pt. 11)

The next stretch of gameplay consists of rooftop-hopping action straight out of a Marvel or DC comic. Or, more accurately, a Marvel or DC videogame adaptation; most superhero comic action sequences don't have the hero crossing quite as many skyscraper roofs with quite as many mook swarms waiting atop almost all of them, but the games typically do. Of course, since Raiden can't fly or shoot webs or anything like that, he needs to be choosier about which buildings he leaps to and at which specific points.

Ah, construction equipment. Foiling videogame villain defences since 1981.

Although, speaking of superhero movement methods, and things that are in local abundance; I've got a question for you, game.

How come I don't get one of these?

Nobody found it suspicious that an ostensibly middle-of-the-road PMC like Desperado had enough of these flight suits that they were willing to burn several of them on a schmuck like Dolzaev, so they can't be that expensive. This level would be the exact type of situation where Raiden would want to make use of one. I want. Gimme. Why u no gimme?

What the game does gimme is a new item in the form of...metal barrels to hide under. They're exactly like the cardboard boxes, only they can also block the bullets that are almost zero threat to Raiden at this point anyway. Meh.

A couple of rooftops in, the game introduces another new enemy type. A cyborg in superheavy armor wielding a big sci-fi sledgehammer.

It's basically just the next logical step over the heavy cyborgs with greatswords that first started showing up in late mission 2. Even more armored hit points that you need to burn through before you can dismember or kill them. Unparryable attacks with longer reach and wider arcs that you need to avoid. A bit more damage and knockback on a hit, with a very high stun chance.

That said, they're not nearly as mobile as, eg, the mastiff robots, and they don't have quite as much health as those either. Just as I suspected, the new downward-stab move I shelled out for after the previous mission turned out to be the perfect counter to this type of slow bruiser. Leap over the hammer dude, downward-stab to stun and injure him, and then button mash to land a bunch of sword hits while he's stunned. One or two cycles of that will be enough to destroy at least some parts of his armor, at which point you can go into blademode and amputate whatever's been exposed. Just don't get cocky and try to hit them while their own attack is clearly on the way, because they can fuck you up pretty quickly if they manage to land a blow. Especially if there are other enemies around to gang up on you while you're stunned from the hammer blow yourself.

It's not a super exciting new enemy, since they're basically just an exaggerated version of the greatsword dudes, but they still shake the tactical equation enough to be well worth the inclusion, and they keep the soldier-type enemies dangerous even as Raiden accumulates upgrades. They're good. They do the job the game needs them to do.

More rooftops. A mixture of choppers and soldiers that's surprisingly stronger than the sum of its parts. Then, to my surprise, rounding a terraced corner brings me in sight of another imperilled civilian. So much for Kevin's assertion that the US has laws and civilization and stuff that prevent mercs from doing whatever they want there like they can in the developing world.

From the sound of things, the World Martial cops have declared this part of the city a no-go zone for nonessential workers. I'm not sure how much forewarning they could have possibly given the citizens without Raiden himself being alerted; if they only just declared it during the car chase, then the civilians have had, what? 15 minutes? 20 minutes? Yeaahhh. Anyway, this guy apparently didn't leave the financial district fast enough for the "police," and now they're trying to decide if they should just kill him and say that Raiden did it so that they don't need to bother escorting him out.

Luckily for the civilian, experience has taught me exactly which tools I need to surgically neutralize hostage-takers without collateral damage.

I truly do not understand why this keeps working, but it keeps working.

There's a heavy cyborg who survived being thrown back across the terrace by the rocket, and some other guys - including some assholes flaunting their flight suits at me - who were outside of the blast radius, so a short battle ensues, fortunately well away from the civilian. Oh hey, the heavy had all his armor removed by the explosion, looks like his legs are going bye bye. Fuck, he just crawled up and punched me while I was distracted with the wingalings, I'll just take a moment and...oh wow.

He's...he's still...he's still trying to...what? Bite my foot?

Dude, seriously?

I'm just standing here. Use your cloak. Seriously.

He's flopping his limbless torso against Raiden's ankles. No damage. No knockback. Not even inconveniencing me. But he's still doing it.

How much fucking PCP do they put these guys on?

I walk away. He wriggles after me.

I walk further away. He finally, finally cloaks and deletes himself from in-game existence while muttering a curse at Raiden. The developers really, really should have used the "merely a flesh wound" line for this specific condition, but oh well.

The civilian was too busy cowering and shielding his ringing ears in the wake of the RPG blast to see the physical comedy. Which is too bad, because once I snap him out of it he seems like he would have been really amused.

Don't worry, I won't. If you don't mind doing me a favor in return though, Earthworm Eddy is still flopping around invisible somewhere on this rooftop, so if you could grope around for him and then roll him down the stairs where an ambulance can get to him I'd appreciate it. Sure, yeah, you can make fun of him as you do it, just get him down there alive, I'm a good guy and I don't want people to get killed uwu.

Anyway, roofhopping has been fun, but Pochita speaks up over comms to inform me that World Martial's air support has been fully mobilized now so I'm better off heading back down for the last leg of the trip. Ground level isn't any better, but fortunately there's an old subway tunnel accessible from the sublevels of this tower that passes fairly close to World Martial headquarters. They probably haven't bothered to secure the subways as well, so that's Raiden's best bet for now.

Unfortunately, World Martial has gotten around to shutting off the elevators now, so the only way to make it down there quickly enough to not get swarmed is to cut some cables. Which annoys me, in context. See, when Raiden cuts the elevator cables, what happens next is this:

Raiden free-falls all the way down passed ground level before slamming his feet into the elevator box again in the subway network.

There were some annoying jumps in the rooftop sequence, and failing to make any of them results in Raiden slow-motion plummeting down to the street while his support staff scream in anguish over the Codec before the "game over" screen appears.

I trust you all can understand why this irritates me.

Well. Next stage of the mission now, and it's as lame as the rooftop section was awesome. The gimmick here is that the subway tunnel is pitch dark, so you need to use Raiden's sensor mode to find your way around.

While you're in sensor mode, you can't attack, speedboost, or use items.

Most of the stretch is finding Raiden's way through a narrow tunnel filled with train cars that don't leave enough room to move alongside them and that are arbitrarily unclimbable except for a few specific, not-remotely-obvious spots. It's been a long time since the last instance of "GRAB THE FUCKING LEDGE RAIDEN!" but here we are now.

The tunnel is also patrolled by mastiffs. Who you need to be in sensor mode in order to see, but you need to be either hiding under a box (which is an item) or moving quickly (by speedboosting) to actually avoid. If you aggro one or more of them, then the lights of their eyes and sparking joints and such make them fightable despite the darkness, but like...avoiding them is ungodly tedious, and fighting them in these tight quarters is challenging in the cheap frustrating way rather than the fun engaging way.

It's bad. It's just bad.

Fortunately, it's also short. The end doesn't come quickly enough, but it does come quickly, so that's a relief when it happens.

Pochita tells me to make a right from the subway entrance and keep going that way to get to the little commercial district adjacent to the World Martial tower. Thanks Pochita, the completely linear level design wouldn't have been enough to guide me on its own. There's a bunch of soldiers waiting for me, as well as a grad positioned up on a skyway with obviously collapsable support columns within reach from the street below, so it's hard for me to tell exactly what I'm meant to do here. I manage to figure it out eventually, but it was a real intellectual puzzle.

Collapsing the skyway doesn't kill the grad, but it does damage and stuns it so you can get a quick kill in afterward, assuming you don't let the soldiers get in your way. Which is fair.

The entrance to the commercial park has a bunch more cops guarding it. Boris warns me of this, and tells me that I should avoid combat with them if at all possible. I'm not sure why he cares about me not fighting this particular group of cyborgs when he didn't say anything about the ten previous ones, but okay Boris, I respect you enough to make an attempt at stealth here.

Attempt failed. Oh well. Limbs grow back. Unless you're Annabelle or Patrick, of course. Sorry you two, my stamina ran out. I'll call whatsisname and have him relay the bad news to Earthworm Eddy, I guess losing all his limbs was only the second worst thing to happen to him today after having to cancel that wedding.

There's a stair-filled plaza leading upward from that opening, with soldiers patrolling all up and down its length. I try some smoke bomb and box tricks, but there's just too many of them and not enough space to manoeuvre. When it devolves into a fight, it ends up being a surprisingly tough one. Just normal soldiers for the most part, but when they all have the high ground advantage and are shooting down at you along a narrow pathway with minimal cover, and a bunch of them have RPG launchers or heavy melee weapons to block your attempts at speedboosting up through the hail of bullets, well...I'm not even ashamed to say I died a couple of times.

Most of the way up the steps the path widened a bit and included some little bits of side-street, but here the game had a new surprise in the form of a standard LQ "Fenrir" unit. Like Pochita, but with a much simpler mind more along the lines of the other common synths. And with a much more dignified railgun mounted on its tail/back/whatever instead of that stupid chainsaw.

When consulted further on the matter, Pochita explains the difference between himself and a Fenrir, and also the difference between himself and a human for that matter. Basically, it comes down to the number of potential neuron connections a given brain (organic or synthetic) is capable of maintaining at once. The Fenrirs, like most other robots, can only form about as many pseudo-neural patterns as the average reptile (in Pochita's words, an actual dog would be smarter and more capable of individuality than a standard LQ-F). A human brain can maintain an order of magnitude more pathways than one of these robots. Pochita's synthbrain, meanwhile, can maintain an order of magnitude more pathways than a human.

Notably, Pochita isn't necessarily smarter than a (smart) human right now. When he said he had "intellect beyond human comprehension" in his introductory scene, what he meant was that it was potentially beyond human comprehension. His life experiences and exposure to knowledge so far have been limited, and his total subjective lifetime has been short, so he has a lot of unused brain capacity. Basically, he's still in what could be described as a childhood.

Dang. It's just child soldiers all the way down, isn't it?

Alright then. Gotta make sure Pochita has a balanced and well-adjusted rest of his upbringing after this campaign against World Martial. We don't want our future AI god to be even more misanthropic than he already sort of is.

Granted, it's virtually impossible that one or more groups aren't already doing this with their own Pocchita-grade synthbrain constructs in secret. Both realistically speaking, and in terms of Metal Gear's themes and track record. It's unlikely that the franchise will ever continue pushing the timeline forward at this point (Konami still owns the IP, and um...well...let's just say it ain't happening), but if it did, the next game would necessarily have to start getting pretty damned psychedelic. Would human-brained entities even be relevant enough to merit playability once there are multiple fully realized, fully independent superhuman intelligences shaping the world to their wills?

Frankly, I don't know if anyone who has ever so much as had a conversation with Hideo Kojima is up to the task of exploring such a future.

Anyway, railgundoge is a pain in the ass. Less health than Pochita as a nonboss enemy, obviously, but other than that there are surprisingly few differences. Same mobility. Same brutal high-speed pounces. No multi-part melee combos, on account of lacking the chainsaw-tail, but the railgun is arguably even harder to deal with since it can fire sustained volleys of shots that each throw you back a long way and stun you. Speedboosting doesn't auto-parry them either; you can actively block them, but it's harder to time than any other parry-able attack in the game so far. Add in the fact that the fenrir also has mook soldiers supporting it and getting in your way when you try to close the distance and, well, I died yet again before managing to break through.

I think this staircase might have killed me more times than any nonboss gameplay sequence besides the helicopter QTE chase in Abkhazia. And that one only killed me a lot because it plays so badly with the mouse and keyboard controls. It's a bit frustrating, but it's the good kind of frustrating. There's nothing cheap or badly designed here. It doesn't pull the rug out and throw a bunch of shit at you that you don't know how to deal with. It's just a really difficult, but also scrupulously fair, gauntlet, and it's rewarding to eventually overcome.

Nobody else has anything particularly interesting to say about the Fenrir. Apparently Boris and Kevin had never even heard of them before now, so they've only very, very recently started being fielded, and probably only by World Martial and maybe one or two other organizations. I'm guessing this was originally a bespoke body form for Pochita (combat capable, but lacking anything even remotely like fine manipulators in order to keep him under easier control), and after giving up on him they decided the body type still had merits on its own. Probably something like that.

Anyway, I finally tear out the Fenrir's nanotank to heal myself with and move on passed the stair-filled plaza. The holographic ad-forests of the commercial district fill the streets up ahead, and World Martial's skyscraper looms up behind them.


I think this is a good stopping point. Next time on MGRR: fucking magnets how do they work?