The origins of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a complicated one. Originally, it was the first Metal Gear title not designed by Hideo Kojima, but was still his studio and people. At some point, they decided the project wasn’t fun and cancelled it. Kojima though, met with Platinum Games to see if they could bring in some fun. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a third-person action game in which you play Raiden, Metal Gear Solid 2 protagonist and MGS4 badass. The gameplay is styled after Devil May Cry or God of War with the standard. On its own, the combat isn’t too exciting: It’s got X for light attack and Y for heavy, air juggles, launchers, and unlockable secondary weapons – nothing we haven’t seen in a hundred other games.
Combat begins to truly shine with the introduction of the Zan-Datsu system. If you get an enemy’s health low enough, or you’re fighting a sufficiently weak one, you can slice them to bits at any angle and then pull out their “healing unit” (read: spine) to restore your health. Being able to cut enemies a dozen times, any direction, is immensely satisfying. The free-cutting Zan-Datsu system works very well, and feels like an extra neat little way to finish off enemies beyond a boring button press accompanied by a fancy animation.
Nowhere does Rising deviate further from its origins than in boss fights. Gone are the intricate, strategic designs. A few are good fun and give the player a taste of how absurdly strong Raiden is; lifting and throwing a huge robot, for example, feels appropriately epic. On the other hand, there are more frustrating bosses than fun ones. Instead of an interesting strategic quirk, most encounters are little more than “dodge, attack, Zan-Datsu” repeated three times and finished with a quick time event. Some fights feel special and interesting, but they’re an underwhelming minority. The closest thing I’ve found to a Kojima quirk is throwing a certain kind of grenade at a specific boss. Maybe there’s additional layers to some of these fights I never discovered, but if there’s anything deeper I certain couldn’t see it. That isn’t to say boss encounters are all awful, but there’s only one or two that were truly enjoyable. The rest were very “meh”.
If there is one part of the series that has been retained though, it’s the plot devices. Only in a Metal Gear game are you trekking across the globe to find cyborg brains held captive by a bloodthirsty Private Military Companies (PMCs). Only in Metal Gear is there a 10-year-old aerospace engineer. And, of course, only in Metal Gear do you fight a boss that looks like the hulk thanks to nanomachines. Usually the story of a Kojima game focuses on something important, like information control, or nuclear deterrence and proliferation. Rising doesn’t seem to have any real message besides “violence is bad.” The closest thing I can come up with is how it revisits and extends MGS4’s critical look at PMCs, but even there it doesn’t add much to the conversation. It has elements of a Metal Gear story, but without a new message beyond “war is bad” and “PMCs are probably too powerful.”
On a more personal level, much of Rising is dedicated to expressing Raiden’s internal struggle at the constant violence he’s inflicting, balanced against his wish to protect people. It’s great to see a game trying to deal with this, but the way they handle it doesn’t really pan out. He has an epiphany about the kind of person he is and instead of changing, he embraces the darkness in him. But, instead of this having any real bearing on the game or story, it leads to him doing the same things as before except now the player can activate “Jack Mode” where attacks are stronger.
There’s nothing particularly excellent about Metal Gear Rising: Revengence. The combat is fun enough, and the story is pretty interesting, but none of it excels beyond a baseline of “just alright”. Rising doesn’t feel like a Metal Gear game, but the absence of those elements isn’t what makes this so very middle of the road.
7.5/10
