THE FOLLOWING REVIEW WAS RECOVERED FROM THE <LALILULELO>'S DATA BANKS UNDER "R3 PLAN"
ANALYSIS DEFINES "R3" AS 'RADIANT REVIEW REPRISAL" IhearitsamazingwhenthefamouspurpleERRORstuffedworminflap-jawspacewiththe tuningforkdoesarawblink ERRORon Hari KiriRock. IneedERRORscissors! 61!
Author's note:
R3 stands for Radiant Review Reprisal... It's a development program to artificially reproduce Brad Shoemaker's DmC Devil May Cry review, the perfect glowing review for a character action game. The result is a GIANTBOMB user review. When GIANTBOMB no longer exists, a simulated Brad DmC review shaped by CTRL+C/V regimen. Sound like something you know about, Jack? [plagiarism?]
The reborn Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance from Platinum Games exemplifies what it is to really get down in the dirt and reimagine a cancelled project from the ground up, bringing back only the broadest concepts and associations but leaving behind everything else about the old that gets in the way of creating a singular, cohesive new. Names like "Raiden" and "Metal Gear RAY" return, but the world they inhabit and the roles they play out are only passingly similar to what you knew of them back in MGS2. Everything in this new game exists in service of making it a great game in its own right, while also stoking your nostalgia for the games you played over the last decade. As a character action game, it hits all the notes--fast, robust action, marvelous visuals in 60 FPS, and a tremendous sense of 'holy shit'--you could want in this type of game.
To be fair, on paper, everything about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance sounds like the tritest video game pap: a bloody war between a cyborg ninja and a bunch of other cyborg ninjas, endless hordes of robotic enemies straight from your favorite '00s Metal Gear and Yoji Shinkawa designs, and all of it punctuated by American composer Jamie Christopherson's guitar-shredding soundtrack. And then there's Raiden, remade in the image of an action hero who's so broodingly self-conflicted yet over-the-top he defies any attempt you might make to identify with him. I pretty much went into the game consciously expecting to hate all of this, or at least view it as the sort of eye-rolling embarrassment video games are usually so good at delivering.
Then, oddly, I started feeling a guilty pleasure at how much I was actually enjoying the spectacle. Then later I gave up the guilt and just flung myself wholeheartedly into the cyclone of nonsense. I think it became easy to like MGR: R because it seems somewhat aware of itself; the game is so damn committed to having fun with its absurdity, you can't help having fun along with it. Raiden may be an unrelenting badass, but his lines are ridiculous enough and delivered with so much flair, you quickly grow to like him anyway. And he makes a great foil for his partner Bladewolf, who's more of an uppity, monotone robot questioning the tough questions of human nature. Raiden sometimes talks some shit to Bladewolf and just about anyone else who gets in his way, and there's something uncomfortable and a little dissonant about a hulking bald middle aged man in a cyborg suit screaming "I'M FUCKING INVINCIBLE! " right back at him. The best sort of dumb fun is the kind that knows how dumb it is, and I consistently got the sense from Metal Gear Rising knew that the entire time I was playing it.
The game knows when to go balls out, though. After the bombastic triumph of Platinum's last major character action game, Bayonetta, it shouldn't surprise you that I'm back to devote another paragraph to the scenes in this game, which do so much to sell what, again, probably should have been a complete joke of a storyline. Where Bayonetta had a lot of sexiness, Rising offers an equal amount of brutality, but it still manages to lend an appreciable level of gravitas and some occasional poignance to its tale of saving the world from a sinister plot involving, among other things... human brains. As before, the success at selling you on the plot simply comes down to all the not-so-subtle missile-jumping and sword-clashing and skilled fight coreography that add up to unreal, unbelievable performances, the kind of thing you get when you go into a performance-capture facility and fill it with stuntmen who are connected to wires. That the part where you're not controlling Raiden does so much to uplift Rising's spectacle is a testament to both the capability of Metal Gear's wacky DNA and Platinum's use of it.
Lest we forget this is also a video game: Metal Gear Rising is in fact a greatly entertaining character action game, as fast-paced and diverse as I could have wanted. The game starts you off with Raiden's familiar HF blade, but you gradually collect additional weapons, which replace the heavy attack. Switching between these require going into a menu for a second, which may bother some. You have two attack buttons that both use your sword by default, and you change how your heavy attack works by equipping one of these new weapons. The game finds a lot of interesting ways to make you stay on your toes, with enemies that test your ability to block and parry their attacks, or enemies that will try to grab you, requiring an evade move. More importantly, if you're skilled and timely enough, it's possible to execute a devastating combo and blade mode finisher on your foes without taking any damage , and the game rewards you with up to an S rank at the end of a section and chapter as well as Battle Points.
The more BP you rack up, the more upgrades and unlockables you can purchase, and since you earn more BP for playing better, you're incentivized to play as cleanly as possible. The combat isn't overwhelmingly hard on the default difficulty, though it isn't a cakewalk, but if you're really serious about this kind of game, play it on hard from the outset. There are another two more difficulty levels waiting for you to unlock them after that unless you use a certain legendary code in the title screen. The game is built to be replayed repeatedly; you can jump back into any mission on any difficulty whenever, and there are plenty of places and opportunities to get an achievement, collectible, or title (for playing the game a certain way) that you will miss your first time through. All of your completion totals as you play get rated and slapped onto a score screen for you to look at in shame and desire Revengeance on the ranking system by being better at the game. In short, the between-mission rankings, the glue that holds the levels themselves together, feels like an obstacle to happily overcome in this game.
Since all the action takes place in a variety of difficulties, the designers get to go wild with the sorts of things you're fighting, and the game on Very Hard mode and above is constantly turning your expectations (and the difficulty) upside down by placing you in skewed, exploded, or otherwise deconstructed versions of encounters in city streets, sewers, underground facilities, and a few more environments I'll leave to you to discover. While this sort of design has started to feel a little played out since games like Devil May Cry 3 made it popular ages ago, I was constantly surprised and delighted by the sheer, over-the-top inventiveness of the action in this game. There's also a degree of slow motion badassery, and a few creative moments that emphasize the relationship between Raiden and his sheer power, that make the game feel like more than a constant stream of enemy encounters. And the game is absolutely awash in dazzling 60 FPS visual presentation. I won't go too deep into that, because it's better absorbed firsthand, but the smooth as butter speed, the ways the enemies and objects can be sliced into pieces, the AR overlay that pops up on the screen during Augment Mode and conversations, all combine to make this game a great venue for its artists and programmers to display their talents.
I brought no personal baggage to Platinum Games' take on Metal Gear Rising, having watched and enjoyed the original trailer way back in E3 2010 but then steering clear of the title after its poorly received VGA 2011 trailer. Whether you're a longtime Metal Gear fan (with an open mind) or a total newcomer just looking for a solid character action game, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling overly dissatisfied with this new game. It's almost wholly successful at what it tries to do, and seems like the start of a promising new direction for what was otherwise a nearly cancelled title.