This review contains spoilers
Han Solo is one of the most famous characters in the western film canon. It's easy to see why - he's one of the most appealing variations on his archetype that there is. A mysterious gunslinger and scoundrel who eventually warms up to the people around him and begins to value the connections he's made over the course of his adventures. Simple, but effective. We don't need to know anything more about Han than that.
Come 2018, and Star Wars decides that no, we do need to know more. While backstories for Han Solo have always existed, they've always been in tertiary materials - never given the same weight as the main movies until this point. Solo is a mediocre film, not particularly offending in its badness, but it's very unnecessary. Han Solo is a character that is effective without backstory and to give him one ruins some of the allure. There's a mystique to his past that evokes classic western heroes that's taken from us in that film.
Seeing as he was inspired by similar origins, those being the samurai movies which were the basis for the western genre, it's hard not to feel the same about Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising.
Sam is even less complicated than Han Solo is in his initial outing. He's essentially just a rival for the main character, a foil for you to reflect on and in some ways respect. He's a cyborg samurai to rival the player being a cyborg ninja with a classic duel at sundown in the middle of a desert to top it all off. His confidence in his ideals is what drives the player to have their big breakdown at the halfway point. It's pretty fun, and it doesn't overstay its welcome in the original game.
Unfortunately, though, the developers decided there had to be DLC for this game. While Jetstream is a better DLC than most by offering an entirely new narrative to play through, that narrative is of little substance. It both tells us too much about Sam and too little - just enough that his mysterious allure is lost and just too little to actually say anything meaningful with him. It's a story that makes little sense. Sam joins the people he's trying to kill because... they beat him up? It's a decision that's not given the proper weight or reasoning it should have. This entire level, Sam is fighting against these people and insists that he's been fighting against people like them his entire life, and at the end he just decides to join their side. Why?
Knowing this makes Sam a less compelling character in Rising itself. Gone is the confident man who has total belief in his actions, now just a man who spontaneously changes sides because he lost one fight. Sam's backstory didn't need to be explained, and explaining it made him worse. It's a symptom of the much larger problem of stories feeling like they need to overexplain everything that is plaguing art right now. Not everything needs to be a known quantity.
A lack of an artistic choice is still a great artistic choice.
Come 2018, and Star Wars decides that no, we do need to know more. While backstories for Han Solo have always existed, they've always been in tertiary materials - never given the same weight as the main movies until this point. Solo is a mediocre film, not particularly offending in its badness, but it's very unnecessary. Han Solo is a character that is effective without backstory and to give him one ruins some of the allure. There's a mystique to his past that evokes classic western heroes that's taken from us in that film.
Seeing as he was inspired by similar origins, those being the samurai movies which were the basis for the western genre, it's hard not to feel the same about Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising.
Sam is even less complicated than Han Solo is in his initial outing. He's essentially just a rival for the main character, a foil for you to reflect on and in some ways respect. He's a cyborg samurai to rival the player being a cyborg ninja with a classic duel at sundown in the middle of a desert to top it all off. His confidence in his ideals is what drives the player to have their big breakdown at the halfway point. It's pretty fun, and it doesn't overstay its welcome in the original game.
Unfortunately, though, the developers decided there had to be DLC for this game. While Jetstream is a better DLC than most by offering an entirely new narrative to play through, that narrative is of little substance. It both tells us too much about Sam and too little - just enough that his mysterious allure is lost and just too little to actually say anything meaningful with him. It's a story that makes little sense. Sam joins the people he's trying to kill because... they beat him up? It's a decision that's not given the proper weight or reasoning it should have. This entire level, Sam is fighting against these people and insists that he's been fighting against people like them his entire life, and at the end he just decides to join their side. Why?
Knowing this makes Sam a less compelling character in Rising itself. Gone is the confident man who has total belief in his actions, now just a man who spontaneously changes sides because he lost one fight. Sam's backstory didn't need to be explained, and explaining it made him worse. It's a symptom of the much larger problem of stories feeling like they need to overexplain everything that is plaguing art right now. Not everything needs to be a known quantity.
A lack of an artistic choice is still a great artistic choice.
Biglightning
1 year ago
This is why his confrontation with Raiden is so important, because Raiden does have the resolve to follow through. Throughout the game you learn reasons why all the main antagonists chose to fight. In Sam's case, he only fights now because it's what he knows best. He mocks Raiden earlier for him lying about why he fights, when Sam practically has no reason to fight at all. Unlike Sam, Raiden did have the resolve to not only beat Armstrong, but challenge World Marshal as a whole. It was through this resolve that he was able to beat Sam and the rest of the Winds of Destruction. Sam recognizes early on that Raiden could be the one to finish the job that he couldn't bring himself to, which is likely why he challenges his beliefs before the Monsoon fight and lends Raiden his sword during the finale.
I never interpreted him as a "confident man who has total beliefs in his actions" even before playing the DLC simply because of his theme, which gives us a lot of insight into his character. Verses like "I don't know the season or what is the reason I'm standing here holding my blade," "it's me that I spite as I stand up and fight," and "losing my identity wondering have I gone insane" definitely hinted at something deeper. I think that's what his main change was actually, he was confident in who he was before in the DLC, but is simply a murder machine in MGR who only finds fulfillment in cutting someone down.
I don't know if this helped clear anything up but that's kinda just my take on it. Like I said, quite a bit of it is left to interpretation, but while I don't think a lot of interpretation is needed so we can still get a clear picture, there are quite a few different ways to actually interpret it.