This review contains spoilers

When creating gameplay systems, most developers focus solely on how fun it is or could be. How the mechanics make the player feel and how those systems can be further tweaked in order to make the player feel empowered. It's considered Game Design 101 in most circles, and it's a big part of the reason why people take games less seriously than other artistic mediums: it's assumed that they shouldn't be anything but fun.

In this aspect, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance succeeds. It's very fun to play - as it turns out, running around and chopping stuff up as a cyborg ninja is really sweet. That might be the coolest mechanical premise for a game that I've ever heard of. But it starts to lead to an issue when the rest of the game doesn't seem to be on board with it.

The underlying narrative here is commentary on the War on Terror and how capitalism breeds war, which is all well and good. The final boss is a corrupt libertarian senator funding proxy wars to gain political power so he can make the world a survival-of-the-fittest hellscape and it works well. It all starts to ring hollow, though, when this anti-war message is paired with incredibly fun and inspired combat and music that gets your adrenaline going.

Undertale comes to mind here. A big part of that game's ethos is that killing people is wrong. This is represented through the gameplay in a pretty simple way: the game is just really boring if you decide you want to kill people. Killing people is less fun than sparing them and gets you less cute interactions, and a genocide route has you walking back and forth for hours on end just to get enough kills to move on to the next area. It completely hollows out the game of any of its life and makes it a miserable experience - and I love it.

Metal Gear Rising tries to do something similar at one point. The main protagonist has the ability to absorb the fuel cells of his enemies, which makes their memories part of his own. Due to his emotional inhibitors this usually isn't a problem. In one scenario, though, he's goaded into turning them off by one of the villains and he hears the voices of every person he's killed. This section starts just the same as the rest of the game, but slowly he becomes weak, and combat becomes a chore. It's a rare moment of pathos for him, where he truly questions his motivations and why he's killing so many people and for once the gameplay is on board, too.

Of course, the game has to go on, so he eventually gets over it and continues slicing and dicing through people. He even acknowledges that violence is fun for him and that he can't justify it - which is a bit of a bold choice, but they then ignore it for the rest of the game.

What we're left with is a game unsure of its own message. It wants to condemn violence, and says some insightful things about the capitalist war machine, but is too insecure to follow through on that when it comes to gameplay.

The game ends with a monologue from a little girl the main character saved in a previous game talking about how he's not the monster that he used to be. Throughout the game, he's been taunted with his past as "Jack the Ripper", and she says that he's moved past that now.

But does the gameplay agree with her?

Reviewed on Jun 25, 2022


2 Comments


1 year ago

This comment was deleted

1 year ago

This comment was deleted

1 year ago

This comment was deleted

1 year ago

Homophobia in bio, opinion discarded.

1 year ago

This comment was deleted

1 year ago

Comparing a game to Hotline Miami only really makes me like it less lmao