Reviews VideoGame / Metal Gear Rising Revengeance

Kojima wasn't involved with developing Rising at all actually. He wanted to give other people freedom to make a game and see what they'd come up with. Which is even more impressive if you think about it.

Is it at all like a Metal Gear game though? That's the question I haven't found anyone who could/would answer yet?

• And I mean apart from obviously sharing continuity and being a different gameplay mechanic. Does it feel like a Metal Gear game? Are there moments like the bit with the Boss in 3 or the microwave corridor in 4? Are there things like having to switch controller ports to beat a boss, or being able to turn the system clock ahead and have another boss die of old age? Can you have long conversations about how wonderful it is to be inside a carboard box? Does the game make you do a hide and seek mission, and then have that person hide inside an entirely different mission

Nothing quite as silly. The plot is fairly straightforward, and the bosses don't have any gimmick that require taking a hammer to the fourth wall. Besides, Metal Gear was a stealth game. Rising is a hack and slash. You can sneak sometimes but it's better, and more fun to just run out and murder everybody.

And yes, you do get a cardboard box.

The lack of sneaking doesn't bother me, I'm not attached to MGS as a stealth game as such, as much as a game that no other human being would design. Metal Gear Rising sounds like a really good game a clever developer would design

Well, there is the bit where you fight evil mutant nanomachine Dick Cheney...

And where Ninja Cambodian Magneto hurls an entire armored division at you.

That ones cool in an in-game way instead of an out game way though. The Dick Cheney one might be interesting to someone whose got no interest in the game but with the armoured division, if you've got no context for the universe it doesn't necessarily mean much

Long conversations... Yes, there's plenty of codec conversation if that's what you mean?

No I mean more the ridiculousness of having a long codec conversation about how safe and secure Snake feels in his cardboard box.

You know, the normal series is full of things which aren't just weird in-universe like tank throwing whatever, but it's weird that anyone would ever think to put that in a game. Like the cardboard isn't cool because it's a cardboard box in a game, it's cool because no-one would ever have thought to put such an absurd mechanic into their stealth game. Now when it's put in other games it's tradition and they're just following the MGS example but when it was first thought up it was genius

Blade mode is unique.

There is a brief back and forth about the box, but it's just a nod to the rest of the series. Most of the codec sequences are about the area, the culture or the bosses.