Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a title thats pretty weird for me to talk about or form thoughts on. Even before I was out to play and go through the Metal Gear franchise, its sudden resurgence at the start of the 2020's sorta spoiled a large part of the fun that it is to go through this wacky game somewhat blind (It didn't help that it was one, if not the most widely available non-numbered Metal Gear game out there that everybody could run fairly well) so overexposure definitely took away some merit. But needless to say a lot of it was still fairly fun and enticing to go through as a first-time player coming from the rest of the Metal Gear games.

Rising is a weird little hack 'n slash video game supervised still by Kojima Productions but developed by beloved PlatinumGames and, man, it shows. Fundamentally the gameplay experience from this to other games in the series (besides the obvious shift in genres) is pretty darn noticeable, and while I think it's cute that they made it out to be a wannabe mainline game using different elements from Kojima-led games such as Codec calls and their characters, Alert systems, the way to use the few items that they give you through your inventory and a mixture betwen Metal Gear and Assassin's Creed-like parkour-stealth-assasination system that just barely keeps this game sort of in line with the rest of the series, but for its core gameplay mechanics it really felt like a very easy-to-get-into hack 'n slash with a high skill ceiling and some very inventive boss fights, with great music and aesthetics... For that part I think I am able to understand the relentless fanatism towards the title, and honestly it's a bit of the silver lining when it comes to it all from the studio that brought games like Bayonetta into the mix. It's a pretty sound game playability-wise and also fuels a lot of replayability considering all the things you can do (VR Missions, aiming for S-ranks on higher difficulties, fully upgrading Raiden and learning combos) so it really is not at all bad...

Except for the story.

So, Rising is pretty much the legacy and last ever look at a world post-War Economy after the Guns of the Patriots Incident, it's also the last ever look at the "present" timeline of Metal Gear being the title that takes place the furthest in the chronology, it is a weird one regarding that. We don't even know for certain what was this game supposed to be before all the changes they had to make during development too and for some time Kojima himself didn't even acknowledge it as part of the canon "Metal Gear Solid Saga", but it pretty much is now kinda. And we just have to deal with it.

Raiden comes back as the protagonist in this one after his MGS4 appearance where he was already kinda different to the guy who infiltrated the Big Shell (I like to call this the cishet/straightification of his character) and well, if MGS4 already felt a bit like character death for him, Rising straight up feels like character burial. Raiden is NOT the same character he was a couple entries ago, he is significantly edgier and he kinda has a roundabout all the way to the thing he swore to move forward from in MGS2, which is undoubtedly a shame considering how great his character was in that game. I get that with the whole plan to make VR-trained cyborg soldiers for private militaries is pretty much supposed to be full circle from his backstory as a child soldier, but regressing him back to Jack the Ripper was definitely not the way to go about it in my opinion. Pretty unimportant feeling characters too, there's at most three bad guys who are kinda relevant and considering the amount of exposition and depth Metal Gear usually goes for even some of the less important ones it's kind of a shame that most of them are that irrelevant.
And then there's also some issues with the pacing of events and the levels those events partake in, the duration of some of these isn't very well balanced across the board so there's legitimately a couple of them that last very little or go too fast for its own good making the game significantly shorter at the cost of integrity in its storytelling and also an actual connection between the game and the player, most of it is saved up for the Kool Action Momentz™️ and not much else to actually nurture a more than decent story.

And well, that's pretty much it for this game. It really has a lot of badass-ery and it genuinely has cool moments that make you go like "Hell yeah", but sometimes I think I'd rather have a good foundation instead of over the top mindless action, and this game has a whole world of that. I would've loved to see the reality where it was Gray Fox instead, that guy deserved better.

If you have a friend who is planning on playing this before anything else Metal Gear, please do them a favor and guide them to the light, this game kinda ruins a little bit of the surprise and uncertainty of not knowing who Raiden is in MGS2 and I feel like that has affected way more people's perception of his character as a whole, which is undoubtedly really sad.