Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Part 1: Prologue

Tactical Thematic Action

This series is being played using the game’s Steam release, on a new game on hard.

Hey all! Welcome to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance! There are few games that I can think of that are so downright fun, and the fact that there’s a real story means that I will have so much more to talk about. I, like many of you, found out about this game through the memes, and given its themes, I doubt there’s a better way of discovering it. I got a lot to talk about, so without further ado, let’s get started.

The game starts in a limo ride through the capital of a developing African nation. We are riding with the prime minister, who muses on all the effort that went into the building of this country, before discussing how private military companies were more useful to the common good than he had thought. We, a cyborg super-soldier named Raiden object that we prefer our organization to be called a security company, but before we can continue our conversation, we are interrupted by our car abruptly stopping.

A cocky cyborg soldier from an unknown organization attacks our caravan, singlehandedly fighting multiple tanks while his reinforcements go after the limo. As we try to escape, we are blockaded and surrounded, so we exit the vehicle to fight the cyborgs while the prime minister makes his exit.

We fight through a few waves of enemies only to find the limo overturned and the prime minister limp, yet still alive, on the back of a particularly large cyborg who wants to upset the peace in Africa to reignite the war economy. Of course, he’s too important to fight us himself, so instead he pits us against one of his minions: a giant, nuclear-powered robot that could easily level a city.

In any other game, this would be the final boss. But this isn’t any other game. This is Metal Gear Rising, a game so confident in itself that it sincerely uses the word “Revengeance” in its title. In this game, we start at 11, and we only go up from there.

Now, it would be easy to just analyze the rest of this scene to see what makes it so awesome: there’s so much going on that I couldn’t cover it all in this post if I tried. But what I’m more interested in is why the game goes for so much spectacle so early on. As we’ll soon see, there is a narrative reason why the fight goes the way it does, and it actually shows a narrative technique that can only be done in a video game. Of course, to understand it, we’ll need to see how the rest of the level plays out.

So, how exactly do we, a tiny cyborg with nothing but a measly ninja sword, fight a 5-storey plasma-spewing death machine? First, we shred the armor on its legs, then parry a thrust from its car-sized head so we can shred the armor up there, too. Once it gets really angry and tries to hit us with a sword the size of a wind turbine, we block that with our regular-sized sword, and then grab the robot by the sword so we can suplex the entire machine. While it is still hurling through the air, we run up its sword and slice off its wing in one fell swoop.

Gameplay wise, this fight is fairly easy. All we have to do is approach its legs while dodging a few heavily telegraphed attacks, then land a few hits of our own and do some low difficulty QTEs. But if it weren’t so easy, the sequence wouldn’t work nearly as well. The fact that we can do so much awesome stuff with so little effort makes us as the player feel very powerful. And it’s this feeling of power that is precisely what this game’s narrative needs. But we still need to go further to see why the narrative needs it.

After another round against the Metal Gear, in which we use its missiles and platforms to run and slice the entire thing in half while running down its back, making us feel more powerful than ever before, we realize the cyborgs are getting away on a train with the prime minister in their grasp. We follow them towards the front of the train, where the big cyborg tells us why he thinks war is good, actually, before stabbing the PM through the heart, and leaving the cocky cyborg to fight us while he gets away.

Well, we just downed a giant robot on foot, so this should be easy, right? Wrong. Jetstream Sam deflects our every blow, and his fast, rapid attacks are too much for us to parry. He quickly melts through our health bar, sending us to the back of the train. And as we try to fight back, he chops our arm clean off. To end the sequence, there is a brief gameplay section where we can only limp around and feebly repeat the same, sloppy swing with our sword. Sam defeats us in one swift strike.

This whole boss fight is designed to make us players feel powerless, and the fact that we had just come from a sequence designed for the opposite makes that powerlessness hit even harder. There is narrative purpose to this utter flip in tone. By making us feel so weak after making us feel so strong, it shows us just how dangerous the bad guys really are. Yes, a well-written cutscene could make the same narrative point, but Revengeance isn’t satisfied with simply showing us. It uses its mechanics to make us the players, not just Raiden, feel the difference in power. This way, we don’t merely see how much of a threat the bad guys are, we feel it.

And this is the magic of video games. By using mechanics to reinforce their narratives, they put the player in the character’s shoes in a way that movies can’t do with their watchers and books can’t do with their readers, because the player is experiencing for themself at least part of the same feelings and challenges that their character is.

I hope I’m clear enough in my point here. I’m already over the time I give myself to write these, and I don’t want to make a habit of going overtime. If there’s anything you think I need to clarify, please comment, and I’ll be happy to answer you.

Anyway, Sam chastises us for not being bloodthirsty enough, and only doesn’t finish us because our backup arrives and he needs to escape. And with the villains making their grand exit and us powerless to stop them, the level ends.

We’ve got a long way to rise to get revengeance.

Video of the Week: In the spirit of this game, I’ll mostly be doing memes, and here’s one that’ll show you what we have in store: