(Not that crazy to imagine, actually.) Swords are a practical weapon against guns. Metal Gear Rising envisions a parallel, alternate history from our own. From an early battle on top of a speeding train to a gigantic American senator-piloted Metal Gear shouting, "Fear the wrath of the USA," Metal Gear Rising feels at once too-crazy and, weirdly enough, politically prescient. The bosses in Metal Gear Rising are all insane and improbable, but they stick out in your mind over its short and sweet campaign. While Metal Gear Rising fell more in the middle of Vanquish and Bayonetta (it was neither as fast as Vanquish nor as mechanically deep as Bayonetta), the game still paved its own path to adoring fans, whether they were already invested in the world of Metal Gear or not.Ī lot of that, I think, comes by way of its humor and attitude. It was prime time for PlatinumGames, who owned the genre with their games' signature silliness and propensity for action. It came towards the end of PlatinumGames' reign over the character-action game genre, three years following the action-shooter Vanquish and four years after the first Bayonetta. Metal Gear Rising was released five years ago on February 19, 2013. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance defiantly became just like any other character action game, and honestly, was probably all the better for it. Gone was the dream of players being able to avoid combat entirely gone was the original idea of acrobatic stealth. PlatinumGames' vision for Metal Gear Rising couldn't have been more different. In early 2011, Kojima met with PlatinumGames producer Atsushi Inaba, who he later asked to work on the game. In late 2010, the game was quietly cancelled by Kojima Productions. The only real glimpse people got of the game for some time was of Raiden slicing watermelons. Instead of hiding under tables or in cardboard boxes, Raiden would have been able to quietly and quickly stalk foes, and then slip out of sight acrobatically. Metal Gear Solid: Rising had a different design element than what PlatinumGames' version of it would bestow: the game still had stealth, though it was theorized as a different sort of stealth than previous games. Before even that, the game was teased during a panel at the 2009 Game Developer's Conference by Hideo Kojima. The game was first unveiled at E3 2009 under the name Metal Gear Solid: Rising. Senator is hellbent on " America great again," among other nefarious deeds.
It's still a game about politics too, only instead of a deep military conspiracy, a U.S.
If anything, the Metal Gear name propels the game forward into its nonsensical beats.
And by most accounts-mechanically, tonally, but maybe not narratively-Metal Gear Rising is its own zany thing, never held back by the series name plastered in front of it. As someone who's hardly played any of the Metal Gear games aside from dabbling in a couple, this throughline is still lost on me. Metal Gear Rising takes place in the distant future of, um, 2018, four years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, making it the last entry in the chronological canon of the Metal Gear series. Metal Gear Rising is a Metal Gear game technically, starring Raiden, the bait-and-switch star of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
It's all sliceable-and it all feels ridiculous in the process. Anything, except for that damn white cat that does backflips with every sword sliced their way. You can slice almost anything in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.