Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013, PlatinumGames)
The Metal Gear Solid series has been defined in part by a fairly consistent defiance of convention: its first entry brought into the mainstream a fuller developed version of its 2D predecessors' stealth action, and showed that an action game can liberally incorporate long cutscenes and interactions between characters without boring the audience to death so long as the story is interesting and some care has been put into production value. Sons of Liberty gave us a bait-and-switch protagonist and a complicated, mind-bending and fourth wall breaking mess of a plot that borders on self-parody, though with kind of shockingly prescient themes. Snake Eater, considered by some (including myself) to be the best of the series, dodged the question of how you follow any of that up by giving us a prequel instead. As a trilogy, each entry unique and a masterpiece in its own way, it tells a complete story in as compelling a manner as any action games of their period could possibly muster. But fans wanted more, and Konami knew this, so in return they released Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, an overall good though uncommonly conventional sequel. Here Solid Snake returns, though not quite the first recurring protagonist of the Solid series on a technicality, as he slogs through cutscene after cutscene tying in a bow every possible loose end left behind in the previous three games in frequently incredulous fashion. It's exactly the kind of sequel that caters to fans rather than the artistic whims of its creator, and represents the end of MGS proper as the few following games would differ wildly from the previous ones in various ways. One of which is the spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which was pawned off on PlatinumGames after Konami couldn't figure out how to make it work, a more or less direct followup on the character Raiden's story after Guns of the Patriots.
Revengeance is an action-ass action game in terms of modern gaming. It's about as simple as it gets structurally, with the absolute briefest of excursions into platforming surrounded almost exclusively by fights against mooks and bosses in rigorously linear sequence. It's basically a beat 'em up. I want to say that it's all mechanics, which isn't really the case, but all I can say about the world is that it's frequently quite pretty, made up mostly of arenas as it is. A particular highlight is a segment in which you're running along the tops of skyscrapers; the cityscape seems appropriately expansive visually even if you're just hopping on a handful of rooftops before going back inside. For what the game goes for, which is extremely refined combat against multiple foes at once, this isn't a bad thing. Its simplicity works to the game's advantage with its action movie-style plot and laser-focus on fast pace and linear progression. The combat relies heavily on guarding and parrying telegraphed enemy attacks by tilting the stick toward the direction of the enemy and pressing the attack button; do this at the right time and you get a parry, any time before that you'll guard instead. During combat you can lock onto enemies to focus the camera on them, which generally works fine, though the camera does sometimes like to get buried in the level geometry at really inconvenient moments. Battle here already achieves a wonderful flow when you come to grips with guarding and parrying, and the cherry on top is the "Zandatsu" technique, in which you hold down a button to slow down time at the expense of an upgradable energy meter and you're given free reign at a close-up perspective to slash your sword at whatever angle you wish. Slash the right spot and press the requisite button to pluck out an enemy's energy core, which kills them and gives you an instant full health and energy restore. This might sound cheap at first blush but it's made necessary as fights become increasingly dense with big damage-dealing enemies. It's accompanied by an incredibly satisfying animation during which the hype is so critical that I can't help but dorkily yank the air in front of me in exuberant imitation.
So the big divergence from the main series here is that stealth is relegated to a side mechanic, another tool in your toolbox. You can creep up behind dudes and kill them instantly with a button press, and there are a couple of areas that are designed around this, but most of your time will be spent in active combat. Other tools at your disposal consist of a variety of subweapons and side weapons, as well as "Ripper" mode, in which you'll deal extra damage and have much higher chance of staggering or dismembering your enemy with standard attacks at the expense of a rapid drain on your energy. The game does a good job of making useful all of these; playing on hard mode (the middle difficulty) I threw myself at one particular section of the late game over and over again, bereft of healing items, cursing and wondering frustratedly aloud at how I was supposed to get through that particular combination of heavy hitting bad guys in such a tight space, before I finally recalled that I have Ripper mode and can take out at least two of them in a near-instant. This doesn't say much for my skill in this game or ability to remember basic techniques but it does speak at least a little to Revengeance's follow-through on the mechanics it introduces. Of course, some of these side mechanics may fall by the wayside as the player gets better at the core of the game and starts being able to parry more effectively and take less damage, and indeed, there are plenty of reasons to replay here. Almost every encounter is graded, which contributes to your overall chapter grades, which themselves contribute to a total playthrough grade, and there are five total difficulty levels culminating in the brutal "Revengeance" mode. The campaign is brief, but the combat feels so good that you'll likely want to go back for more.
If I can make a potentially controversial assertion, the boss fights are the worst part of traditional Metal Gear. The mechanics so well-suited to sneaking around guards and surreptitiously taking them out fall to pieces in hand-to-hand combat; there's a good reason you're generally supposed to avoid all of that, after all. In Revengeance, with a system tuned from the ground up specifically for combat, stealth takes a backseat in normal play and battle replaces it. Why be stealthy when you have all the tools you need to take everything head-on just fine? Accordingly, boss fights are just a culmination here of everything you've already been doing, rather than a sidebar as in other Metal Gear games. It sidesteps the difficulties of the older games of having wild and interesting bosses with satisfying combat in a game primarily about stealth by flipping the focus around, and brings ideas of the same caliber now to full aesthetic and mechanical fruition. In short, boss fights are absolutely killer across the board. They're occasionally somewhat puzzle-y, though never in arbitrary ways as the methods required to get the upper hand on them link up nicely with techniques you've long since mastered. Each one gets its own BGM which syncs beautifully to crucial moments; overall the music and the implementation of it is stellar.
Really all of the aesthetic elements in this game converge in a very intentional way to enhance the action. Most of the story is told in bitesize cutscenes within chapters with longer ones bookending them, and mandatory story-forwarding codec calls are often delivered as you're moving about the stage. In terms of storytelling it feels more distinctly American than the MGS games, being a bit more crass and off-the-wall and incorporating more overt humor, as well as the lightning fast pacing effecting more of an action movie feel. The game often feels a bit silly and goes completely off the rails by the end, and I can't place exactly how much of it is tongue-in-cheek, though some of it definitely is. I can at least say with certainty that the gruff tough guy voice that Raiden sporadically puts on is impossible to take seriously and is an endless source of amusement. I get the impression, though, that the game doesn't really want me to take it all that seriously, so in the end it's all in good fun.
Not to say that the game exactly skimps on story. I was surprised to learn that there are a ton of optional codec calls throughout the game that you can pause and listen to if you so desire, just like in MGS. However, in a game so laser-focused it feels wrong to do this in a way that it doesn't in the equally linear but slower paced and more wait-heavy source material. The urgency of the narrative and the fast pace make it seem more odd and out of place to engage with any of this; when a game is so packed with enemy encounters and so many of them carry both the mechanical and aesthetic weight of an MGS boss fight it's hard to find the time. Ultimately the game feels somewhat less cinematic than its forebear, as a result. This isn't to knock it though; what I mean to say is that Revengeance isn't really a Metal Gear game, in a sense analogous to the way mainline sequels Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain aren't Metal Gear games. In the latter we have a drastic, but mostly lateral rather than incremental, change in structure and storytelling, and in the former we have a drastic, and again, lateral, change in pacing and mechanics. Lateral in the sense that in both cases those changed aspects don't build off of the core series and instead represent almost a change of genre, though in my attempts to avoid the vagaries of genre designations as much as possible my first inclination is to broadly refer to all of them as "action games." What I want to say is that Revengeance is a perfect spinoff. It carries over striking elements (though not the essential ones) from its parent series and implements them into a brand new game, feeling both of a kind and entirely distinct, and most importantly, great in its own right divorced of any preparation. In other words, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a fantastic game that anyone who hasn't even so much as looked at a screenshot of a Metal Gear game could get into and have a ball.
Final rating: 5/5 (Great)