Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (part 10)

More upgrades are available now, thanks to the points I racked up throughout the last level. In addition to health and stamina upgrades, I improved the damage of both Raiden's sword and the cuckstaff we reverse-engineered from Mistral's. There's also a new move I shelled out for, that lets you make a downward stabbing attack with the staff if you're in the air over an opponent. That looks like it'll be very useful against tough, cumbersome enemies, like the mastiff.

These purchases mean that I can't afford the "be bulletproof from all directions while speedboosting" upgrade just yet, unfortunately. That'll have to wait for next level.

So, mission four! Open on the highway, leading into Denver. Looks like the madlad is doing it already! I was expecting at least one more mission of preparation and exchanging favors and stuff to prep for the World Martial raid, but apparently not. It's not nearly as jarring as the jump between missions 2 and 3, with Pochita suddenly being restored and on my team, but still jarring. Once again, I wonder if there's cutting room floor material that was originally meant to go here.

As he drives, Raiden answers a videocall from George. Looks like things weren't actually quite as neat and clean as they looked at the end of that last cutscene. Despite him dodging and throwing the surgeon off at the last second, George was injured (either by the surgeon's pistol or by Raiden's blade, it's not clear) and required some level of cybernetic patching to get him on his feet again. He's on his feet now though (how long has it been, exactly?), and wishing Raiden had brought him along.

Actually...is that some weird thing he's wearing, or is the entire lower-right quadrant of his body now synthetic? Heh, well. If the latter, then it was definitely the sword that got him.

Apparently, Doktor told George what Raiden was up to, despite Raiden not having wanted people to know. Which also implies that Doktor is the one who treated George. I doubt he did that pro bono, from how he's been characterized so far, especially if he needed to use expensive cyborg parts to do it. Did Raiden pay for George's treatment himself? Seems likely that he did.

Wonder what happened to all the others. The intact boys, and the disembodied ones? If the cutscene doesn't touch on them, then I assume this level's codec conversations will.

Anyway, Raiden once again admonishes George for wanting to become a warrior. It's not something he should aspire to. Killing is wrong, and it's bad enough that Raiden himself is doing it even just so that people like George don't have to.

-____-

Raiden. Just...don't. Seriously man, this is a very dangerous philosophical path to tread.

George apologizes (which he really shouldn't need to) and just wishes Raiden well and tells him to give 'em hell before they end the call. Raiden murmurs some curses toward Herr Doktor, and then has a little silent brooding session as he continues the drive. Remembering his and George's exchange of words, Raiden obtaining George's permission to take his life to save the others before he lunged. Then Jetstream Sam's bullshit speech from the train tunnel fight, about how Raiden is allegedly holding back and preventing his blade from feasting on the blood of his enemies like he knows it wants to do, and how this is apparently weakening Raiden.

Hmm. Well. I still think Sam's speech was bullshit, but the proximity of these two replayed conversations does call attention to the way Raiden's voice sounded after George gave his permission. Raiden's voice didn't sound sorrowful, when he thought he was going to sacrifice George's life to take out the surgeon and save the others. He sounded excited. Like he'd been done a favor.

Is it implying that Raiden actually got some amount of satisfaction out of hurting George along with Dr. Meximengele, or just that his joy at getting to kill the latter outweighed any of his remorse at having to harm the former? I think it's the latter, but I don't know. In any case, I think I see what the game's story is meant to be about now.

I'll wait and see how it plays out before talking about it.

For now, Raiden's brooding session is interrupted when a police cruiser drives up alongside him and its occupants start shooting.

All law enforcement in the Denver municipality has been privatized, and the contract holder is World Martial Incorporated. It's their company's own hometown, after all, so surely they can be trusted to police it.

...

Dystopian though this setting might be, at least this one little part of it is better than IRL. From what I've heard about the Denver Police Department, this is just a straight-up improvement.

...

Not sure how they knew Raiden was coming, but I suppose if Doktor has been blabbing about it ever since he came back from Mexico then that might have something to do with it.

As Raiden starts the whacky car chase scene and the 2000's shakycam sets in, he gets a poorly-timed videocall from Boris. Apparently, Raiden sent him a retirement notice by email. Less than an hour ago. Boris demands to know what the fuck. Raiden tells him that the only alternative would have been a Maverick employee going on a highly public rampage against a well-respected and very powerful corporation in the middle of downtown Denver. Between those two options, Raiden figured that Boris would probably prefer this one. To which Boris' response is, essentially, "You're not wrong, but also what the fuck?"

I really am still at a loss to understand why they couldn't publicize the veritable mountains of physical, digital, and eyewitness evidence from Mexico. They wouldn't even need to frame it as implicating World Martial; just using the baddies' own charade against them and saying this was a Desperado operation and getting that much smaller and more poorly regarded PMC in the media's spotlight would probably be more effective than targeting WM directly at disrupting their operations. You could do that and then still do the vigilantism, if you wanted.

Unless World Martial literally owns all the news media or something. Which, I guess maybe it does? But then, if they were that powerful, there'd be no need for them to jump through all these international hoops to make their plans go unchallenged. They'd be cutting children up in broad daylight, instead of having to hide it in the sewers and outsource the dirty work to fronts like Desperado.

Hmm. Well, thinking about it more, World Martial might retaliate for a move like that by fabricating some other legal troubles for Maverick. In which case the person who runs out of money last wins, and World Martial has all of the money. Hmm. Okay, fair enough.

Anyway. Raiden points out that Maverick has bent the rules in the past, in the name of profit or satisfying a powerful client, or to grease the wheels of neighbouring governments to let them operate. Is Boris really going to judge Raiden for breaking them to save innocent lives? Okay, that's a much better argument on Raiden's part, well said. Boris retorts that he doesn't even know how Raiden DOES plan to save innocent lives by storming World Martial's HQ. Does he really think he'll be able to stop the orphan-harvesting operations just by killing a bunch of people in an office building? Raiden says yes.

And I mean...yes, he is right. Killing the people who are chopping up orphans will indeed stop the orphans from being chopped up. Boris is not making a very good case for his position, heh.

And also, he's left the highway and entered Denver city limits, which gives the cops enough open space to hit his car with an RPG. Cutting the conversation short and leaving Raiden to wriggle out from under the wreckage of the driver's chair, while the hitherto silent Pochita slithers out from the back.

I guess Pochita also quit Maverick? Or, um...did they ever actually hire him in the first place? I mean, I guess Raiden used his own money to have Doktor repair and unshackle him, but after that...yeah the story really is suffering for glossing over so much of Pochita's subplot.

Anyway, Potchita wall-jumps off across the urban landscape, telling Raiden he'll scout ahead and try to avoid getting into fights. The squad of heavily armed World Martial rent-a-cops who have surrounded the car's wreckage seemingly have zero interest whatsoever in this talking robodog that arrived with Raiden and just went Goat Simulator-ing off into the skyscraper jungle. None of them even acknowledge it verbally. Odd choice on their parts, but we know World Martial are a quirky lot.

They tell Raiden that he's in violation of state and federal law by entering the municipality as a military-grade cyborg without notifying anyone or being approved to enter. Which...you know, I never thought I'd see the day when Metal Gear of all things would have more sensible superhero-tracking laws than anything else I've seen. Credit where it's due.

Raiden tells them to go ahead and arrest him. The officer gets the message, and tells everyone to shoot to kill. I mean, they already shot him with a rocket launcher, so that's not actually a meaningful order, but you know. Anyway, as the crowd of legless World Martial cops mutter their curses and engage their cloaking devices, Raiden moves ahead on foot following Pochita's nav beacons.

I kind of did a double take when, just a few dozen meter deeper into downtown Denver, I had a pair of those giant transforming Ukrainian "Grad" mechs come gliding out of nowhere and start opening fire without even giving me the chance to attempt stealth.

I thought I had to be mistaken, that this was just a similar-looking enemy. But nope, they're the same. Same size. Same moveset. Same armament. Just, only about 25% as much hp.

...

I'm actually quite fond of early game bosses reappearing as late game normal enemies. It gives the player a real sense of progression and empowerment, and also does a lot to sell the dramatic escalation as the game's antagonistic force starts going all out. If the game mechanics require it, I'm also totally okay with tweaking that enemy's stats behind the curtain to make it function better as both an early boss and a late elite mook. I enjoy it when it happens in video games. My DnD players always get a thrill out of it when I do this as a dungeon master.

Thing is, there haven't even been two full minutes of actual gameplay between me beating the boss grad and me encountering the mook grad. I know that I've only bought Raiden a couple of upgrades in the meantime, and fighting those soldiers just now let me know that these upgrades have only made him incrementally tougher than he was before. The memory of how long it took to grind down that first grad's hp is still fresh in the player's mind, so there's no room for developer sleight-of-hand. There's no ingame explanation for why these ones would be weaker.

I think what would have worked much better is if a Grad served as the game's first boss, taking the place of the metal gear ray (the huge dragonlike robot in the first mission). They're conceptually similar, being both big, fast-moving robots that make clumsy-but-powerful melee attacks and spam cluster missiles. Enough time has passed and enough upgrades have been obtained since the Africa mission that if you had to tweak the Grad to make it play well in its new role, you can do so without it being nearly as obvious to the player.

On top of that, as a much larger and more intimidating foe armed with a more futuristic heavy weapon mounted on it, the MG-RAY would then be able to appear as a boss later in the game, where it would be allowed to pose much more of a challenge to the player. Seriously, it's weird how the level one boss is so much bigger, more futuristic, and more spectacular than anything else since then, especially when so many of the smaller, less "out-there" opponents are also far more challenging.

I get that the MG-RAY serves to sort of "pass the torch," being a recurring boss from throughout the series. It's presence in the first level was probably meant to reassure longtime fans that MGRR is still a Metal Gear game, despite being so different from the others. It probably also was meant to be sort of a tech demo, demonstrating what kind of omgawesome sequences this game could provide and how hard it would expect you to drop your controller on the floor and make the soyjack face at the screen while playing through them, hence it being way more over-the-top than it needed to be. But, in a spherical frictionless development environment, I really think it should have been saved for the midgame.

On the positive side: these two grads together are a challenging fight. I died to them a couple of times, which is about right for the role they serve. This battle informs the player that graduating from fighting Desperado in the third world to fighting World Martial on its home turf will indeed constitute a difficulty spike. So yeah, the problem isn't these two grads now, the problem is the boss one appearing right before them.

...

So. It takes me a couple of tries, but the big synths eventually go down, and Raiden gets to follow Pochita deeper into the city. MGverse Denver is quite a bit more build up than its real life counterpart. Probably a consequence of it apparently being the mercenary capital of the world. I'm sure Kevin and Boris would tell me all about it, but opening the Codec menu reveals that they are no longer reachable. Raiden doesn't have access to Maverick's comm channels anymore.

...oh wait, earlier Kevin said that Armstrong is a Colorado senator, didn't he? Okay, yeah, that definitely fits. He's probably planning to point to all the shiny new office buildings and conspicuous absence of homeless people in Denver as proof that his policies would be good for the whole country. Makes sense.

Well, I do still have Doktor and Pochita on speeddial, at least. That's one way to tell who your real friends are. Anyway, let's see what they've got to say.

Doktor fills me in more on the state George is in. And yeah, Raiden actually did cut the kid in half along with the man holding him, and was only able to save him afterward thanks to there being a medical cryostation right on hand. Damn. Anyway, Raiden is annoyed at Doktor for telling George about what he's doing, but considering that Doktor is going out of his way to make caring for him and the other rescuees easier he can't complain too much.

The topic turns to the mutilated boys' future prospects, and...apparently cyborgs are only ever hired as soldiers, for some reason. Despite some form of the technology being decades old. Only just now, super recently, are people starting to accept a few lucky cyborgs in civilian society.

Even though this cybernetics technology is apparently the go-to solution for dismem...

Wait wait wait, and apparently - thanks to artificial blood chemistry management - cyborgs have the potential to be SMARTER than baseline humans as well.

But they still only are accepted as soldiers...huh?

Okay, yeah, no, I don't buy this. Too many industries would have too much to gain from hiring cyborgs for this to have not been normalized by now. If anything, I'd expect there to be poor people being economically pressured into BECOMING cyborgs to serve those very industries.

I try talking to Pochita now. Nothing terribly interesting. Oh well. Onward!

Following Pochita's advice, I use the nearby skyway sections that didn't get knocked over by the grads to sneak passed the next group of soldiers and light robots. After he guides me into the lobby of a nearby building and tells me that I'm better off taking the elevator up to the rooftops next, I get a surprise videocall from Boris. Maybe not that much of a surprise, now that I think about it; the only reason our previous conversation ended when it did was "rocket launcher."

He tries to talk Raiden down one last time, but even if it might have been possible to do that ten minutes ago he's in way too deep now. And, frankly? This whole "soldier for hire" thing was already eating at Raiden's conscious to begin with. Even though Maverick has mostly done a good job of keeping itself on the side of the angels, it's still fundamentally a PMC. Still an organism that craves and feeds on war (or at least on the possibility of war, in the case of their training services).

Boris sighs, and tells Raiden that Maverick has henceforth renounced all ties to him, condemns his criminal actions, and will cooperate with the law to the full extent possible if called upon in any upcoming police actions. Then he wishes Raiden good hunting, and gives him access to a maximum-security encrypted channel if he wants to keep in touch with his support crew. Looks like the reason he didn't make better arguments against Raiden's position is because he agreed with it.

I do enjoy Boris. Definitely my favorite Codec friend.

Also, Boris briefly asks Raiden about how this would effect his wife and son. Oh, right, Raiden was married, I think I knew that. Didn't know he had a kid though, I don't think. Surprised that hasn't come up more. Anyway, Raiden says that they're safe and secure in New Zealand; anything that happens to him, they should be sheltered from. Hmm.

Well, cutscene over. Making my way to the elevator requires dealing with some more soldiers, and a pair of Gekkos that randomly jump into the building through a wall-window to fight me in a surprisingly enclosed space. I'm surprised they don't just break through the floor and plummet down to ground level, frankly. On another gameplay note, the soldiers have the same range of equipment and the same moveset as the Desperado troops in previous missions. A few of them have different character models, being human-looking cyborgs in police uniforms, and the rest of them have WM insignias on their body armor instead of Desperado logos, but other than that it's the same mob.

Understandable, from a production perspective, but kind of disappointing from a gameplay perspective. It helps that I like this enemy a lot with or without the reskin, but still, it would have been interesting to see some slightly different tactics or weaponry from a different PMC.

...unless they actually AREN'T a different PMC at all, I guess. That would explain where all of Desperado's mooks are coming from, if they're really just World Martial contractors with a different logo hastily painted on them. Getting that many people to keep quiet about this seems like a really hard sell, but given who this would be self-selecting for it may be plausible. Hard to believe it wouldn't be at least an industry open secret, though.

During the elevator ride up, Doktor informs me that he's inbound by helicopter to extract Raiden and any brains who he might happen to liberate from this building when his mission is complete. Raiden is surprised that Doktor is coming in person. Doktor kind of talks around answering the questions here, in a way that suggests that Raiden isn't the only one whose been having moral anxiety about their recent career trajectories. Huh, color me surprised. Doktor has usually presented himself as the most amoral and profit-driven of Raiden's contacts, but I guess that those odd anticapitalist comments he made way back when actually did mean something.

Although, on that note, talking to him further on Codec once Raiden reaches the top floor, Doktor fills Raiden in more about the brains liberated from Mexico, and the plans for any others Raiden might discover here in Colorado. His (still-unnamed) company doesn't have the resources to resleeve them even if there was someone to pay for it, but it does have the resources to run VR sims for all of them at least in the short term. And, the ethical barriers being what they are, nobody has ever been able to collect this kind of data on developmental neurocybernetics.

On one hand, whatever VR environment he's been giving them, it's bound to be better than World Martial's war crime educational programme, and much better than just leaving them sitting on racks unable to interact with their surroundings or communicate at all. And hey, if it's what he has to do to afford keeping their life support functions running, then go for it. On the other hand, yeah, Dok still has an angle after all it seems.

Courtney is more informative than usual, continuing on the same subject from a more outside perspective. It turns out that the NGO's Boris mentioned in the previous level are completely unfamiliar with how to care for isolated brains, and the only organizations who DO know how to care for isolated brains don't know the first thing about how to deal with traumatized children.

It's a uniquely hard situation to deal with, unless a billionaire philanthropist suddenly falls out of the sky and resleeves them all.

Also, confusingly, Raiden and Courtney discuss how the children can only interact with stock NPC's for now, since the Doktor's VR equipment doesn't allow that many people to share the same virtual space. It...seems like letting the kids *talk* to each other should be simple enough though? If they can speak to the NPC's using their virtual avatars, then it should be as simple as plugging a microphone and speaker into each unit and putting them next to each other, right? Hmm. Maybe the VR sim doesn't actually allow you to speak if you don't have a mouth in the first place. Maybe their avatars are limited to hand gestures, or selecting dialogue options from a list. That would explain it I guess.

Boris doesn't have much to contribute. He hasn't had the time to so much as read up on World Martial's organization on Wikipedia since finding out about Raiden's little adventure, so he doesn't think there's much he can help with; Raiden will have to rely on Pochita's scout work for local intel.

Kevin whines at Raiden for doing this whole thing, and then gives him some Carmen Sandiego facts about Denver. And...also some Cyberpunk Carmen Sandiego facts about how the city's been transformed due to Armstrong's influence during his stint in state government before running for US Senate. The two are intermixed in a weird way that prevents it from being properly educational, but also doesn't quite sound like natural in-universe dialogue.

Pochita has nothing new to say.

Guess it's time to start leaping Raiden's way from rooftop to rooftop and see how close he can get to World Martial HQ before they mobilize their air units and he has to head back to ground level.


Next time.