Zero Punctuation: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

[MB202]

I recall hearing that Hideo Kojima purposefully made every Metal Gear game after Metal Gear Solid bad because he was continuously pestered into doing more games in the franchise.

But Snake Eater is a modern classic so that can't be true!

Maybe because it was a prequel, and not an actual continuation of the story.

 

[xPixelatedx]

Really? You really tried to make objective sense of what was obviously a traditional anime-style story and game? If such a thing could be done those games wouldn't be so ******* awesome! I don't expect to relate to Raiden as a human character, but I also don't want to if this is the kind of game everyone says it is. Not every game should play out like a western movie. Games can just be about having fun to!

Talking robot dogs, Incomprehensible final boss.

Haha, I have to play this now. it sounds Wonderful XD XD XD

 

[DougallDogg]

I know I should take everything Yahtzee says with a pinch of salt and not too seriously but was left a little dumb struck about his moaning about the bosses. Complains that bosses have become nothing more than big spectacles with health bars than a challenge of the games mechanics up till now, like in his DmC video recently but when confronted with actual testing and challenging bosses in Rising he complains they're too hard and that he hasn't learned it's quirks.

1st boss tests you can lock-on, 2nd you can parry, 3rd precision blade mode, 4th parry with perfect timing so to counter and the final boss makes sure you have leaned all of these skills and ramps it up. He got what he wanted and moaned lol. Oh well there's no pleasing some people. Maybe spectacle fighters aren't for Yahtzee.

 

[Kallindril]

I loved this game. And I loved the review too, except I couldn't disagree more about the music, I thought it was great, especially for the boss fights. I haven't played any other MG games, but I played Revengeance for exactly the same reason I play the Ninja Gaiden series - for a tough-as-nails combat game with great mechanics, and I wasn't disappointed. The story doesn't matter and in fact it's probably more fun the more ridiculous it gets. It was a bit short though, and I didn't see the point of the stealth sections either, because the combat is so good. The final boss is so crazy they obviously aren't taking the story too seriously, but it was really fun too. I've tried to explain what happens in the last boss fight to a friend, but words can't so it proper justice. Nanomachines, son!

 

[Zetatrain]

The way I understood it the only MGS game he tried to "sabotage" was 4. MGS1 and 2 were both what he wanted with MGS taking Metal Gear to 3D and MGS2 deconstructing MGS1. He wanted to pass it off there and as I understood it leave MGS2 as it was so that people could interpret the events as they saw it. However fans whined, so he worked on MGS3, a prequel, to give people more MGS and expand on the story without compromising MGS2's ending. However they still whined. So Kojima relented and made MGS4, nanomachined everything that he wasn't ever actually going to explain before and killed off Liquid, Ocolot, Naomi, Big Boss, Solidus and Snake so people would finally shut up.

Yeah MGS4 gets brought up a lot on that topic though even after reading supposed evidence that he tried to sabotage it I'm still not seeing it. Maybe, its because I actually liked the game and thought it ended on a satisfying note, despite its flaws. Regardless, I'm not concerned about future releases, because it seems Kojima is committed to seeing Big Boss' story through to the end.

Good review Yahtzee, and lol at the few jokes you've made about The sneaking around. Our guy cuts everything up like it was nothing and he just runs with noise echoing the halls.. How can he even sneak period let alone have to in the first place?

Eh, there really is only one section where you have to stealth and it's easy and very short. While there are sections where you can opt to stealth you don't have to and there's really no penalty to getting caught, unless you consider all the enemies coming to you so that they can get sliced and diced a bad thing. Like yahtzee said it's probably only there because this is a metal gear game. At worst the stealth option is a harmless nuisance.

 

[Porecomesis]

I didn't actually like the combat. Say what you will about the Metal Gear Solid combat but, at the very least, it was about survival. Let me put it this way: while the boss fights of Metal Gear Solid games was about making an opportunity to attack or waiting for an opportunity to attack (please refer to Snake Eater's The Fury), Revengeance is mainly about wailing on the enemy until they attack, which is when you parry before doing it all again. Yes, parrying takes skill and I got smashed many times before figuring out how it works but, when I did, it's very simple to do.

Also, about the awakening of the Ripper: So Raiden is confronted by the fact that his opponents have, for the most part, been regular people just trying to scrape by for a living and he's been killing them viciously (I loved that part, by the way). Raiden, emotionally torn, is almost killed but comes out of his funk by... embracing his killer side and going wacko. He's been trying to fight off his bloodlust for ages and is still haunted by his past and, when he's confronted by his actions, he responds to it by essentially shouting "YES" and decapitating everything he can find like a psycho? Are you kidding me?

 

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

Saying Haydn was a pianist is like saying Bach was a church organist... both true, but both miss the bit those two guys are actually remembered for: Being composers.

 

[Silver Patriot]

The way I understood it the only MGS game he tried to "sabotage" was 4. MGS1 and 2 were both what he wanted with MGS taking Metal Gear to 3D and MGS2 deconstructing MGS1. He wanted to pass it off there and as I understood it leave MGS2 as it was so that people could interpret the events as they saw it. However fans whined, so he worked on MGS3, a prequel, to give people more MGS and expand on the story without compromising MGS2's ending. However they still whined. So Kojima relented and made MGS4, nanomachined everything that he wasn't ever actually going to explain before and killed off Liquid, Ocolot, Naomi, Big Boss, Solidus and Snake so people would finally shut up.

Yeah MGS4 gets brought up a lot on that topic though even after reading supposed evidence that he tried to sabotage it I'm still not seeing it. Maybe, its because I actually liked the game and thought it ended on a satisfying note, despite its flaws. Regardless, I'm not concerned about future releases, because it seems Kojima is committed to seeing Big Boss' story through to the end.

Good review Yahtzee, and lol at the few jokes you've made about The sneaking around. Our guy cuts everything up like it was nothing and he just runs with noise echoing the halls.. How can he even sneak period let alone have to in the first place?

Eh, there really is only one section where you have to stealth and it's easy and very short. While there are sections where you can opt to stealth you don't have to and there's really no penalty to getting caught, unless you consider all the enemies coming to you so that they can get sliced and diced a bad thing. Like yahtzee said it's probably only there because this is a metal gear game. At worst the stealth option is a harmless nuisance.

Hell if you want an S rank you can't stealth. You need to be in every available battle.

Spoiler

That includes the pre Monsoon section where you are messed up. You STILL need to kill them all.

Also: That why I put "sabotage" in quotation marks. He basically ended the game in such a way that it would be very hard to continue the MGS series. That dosen't mean he tried to make a bad game, he just made it so that there were no questions left to answer, no story to continue, no battles left to fight.

 

[Tohuvabohu]

Yahtzee seemed to be grasping at straws here, and said surprisingly little about the gameplay itself and forgot entirely that this was created by Platinum Games, with very little actual involvement from Kojima.

For the guy who coined the accurate and agreeable "spectacle fighter" term to sum up this genre, he seems to have a pretty poor grasp on it.

Was I the only person who was slightly offended A) By Raiden's costume when he went to Mexico, or B) Every word or phrase that "George" (The only young character in the game), said. The translation and the broken english was a bit much. Way to be a solid stereotype...

Sterotype? He was anything but that. Also Sunny is another young character.
Now if you want stereotypical.
As for the costume those still exist.

Man... that was great! It managed to be hilarious yet I legit found myself drawn into their argument and hyped up for the battle between the two. Which is more than could be said for the base game itself when I played through this part.

 

[DanHibiki]

something tells me that Hideo has gotten really bored with metal gear and really wanted to make a Devil May Cry game.

 

[Waffle_Man]

Yahtzee was sorta reaching for reasons to dislike this one, wasn't he?

No. The entire point of the video was that Metal Gear as a series is so inconsistent that he can't comment on it.

He complains about Hideo Kojima's writing in a game that Hideo Kojima didn't write. He has trouble understanding the tonal shifts despite the fact that it's pretty in league with typical MGS tone, and is made by the same bunch of folks who made games like Bayonetta and Viewtiful Joe.

You know, I will never be able to understand Metal Gear fandom. I would agree that every bit of Metal Gear is off the wall crazy, which is what fans use to defend the writing in the series. However, it doesn't explain why there are websites dedicated to dissecting every single nuance of the series?with serious discussions of the philosophical content with in, why many fans of the series can prattle off twenty different (often contradictory) themes that appear through out the series, or why every single thread on any forum that even remotely deals with story in games will be inevitably filled with incoherent drivel about Metal Gear.

I really dislike it when the fandom of something I like is mischaracterized and dismissed. I also know there are some people who never refer to Metal Gears writing as anything other than goofy. Lastly, I know some individuals that like Metal Gear that I would consider quite intelligent. Therefore, I'm going to assume that there is some coherent explanation for the huge disconnect between how Metal Gear is described by fans defending the series and by fans praising it. Until I know that reason, however, my gut instinct will always tell me that Metal Gear is the video game equivalent of a David Icke rant.

He even wastes a line in the review to poke fun at the title of the game "not being a word", and a simple internet search shows that it actually *is*....and even if it wasn't, it could easily be pointed out that it's probably an intentionally cheesy combination of "revenge" and "vengeance" played up for giggles.

I'll give you this one. Revengeance is a real word. Feel free to ignore and dismiss the three seconds of the video that complain about it.

This review was alright, but it just seemed a lot like Yahtzee doesn't get the game, rather than the game itself having flaws.

You know, probably the most unqualified and clueless criticisms of any critic (aside from perhaps criticisms that suppose *why* a critic's misguided thought process) are they ones that say something along the lines of "you don't get it." He may not get it, but he also probably doesn't "get" Twilight or terrible slash fiction. Many people obviously get those, yet I see no end of shallow criticism of those by denizens of the internet when there are much more insightful criticisms of them.

 

[Colt47]

I think Yahtzee had a bit of a hard time with this one. The game is innovative in the way Gravity Rush was, having a unique mechanic that hasn't been scene before combined with a gametype we are all familiar with. It's not a perfect game by a long shot, but it does something that makes it interesting to play, and that puts it higher in my book than the other game competing for peoples time at the moment (starts with a T and ends with an R).

 

[Undeadpool]

I think Kojima takes these games the LEAST seriously. Also he had next to nothing to do with this game (he even KINDA threw it under the bus saying "Ehh, I'd have used Gray Fox" a WEEK before it came out.

 

[snave]

I'll admit this review prompted me go to Youtube and watch the ending sequence of events. All 40 minutes of it. I have no intention of playing the game and feel no loss, but I also felt skeptical any game could field a surprise left field ending as bizarre as the review implied.

Nope, the review is 100% right: it's downright bizarre in every way imaginable. Not in just how testerone-pumped, J-rock fuelled "out there" the design sensibilities were, or the whole "surprise!" aspect at the start, but what struck me was that the final boss didn't even have one ideology or motive for his rampage, but kept switching them between phases of the battle. Like a bizarre political perversion of the ridiculous "Now I'll show you my TRUE form!" trope.

"Now I'll show you my TRUE political ideology!"

Err... sure mate. You do that.

 

[Vicioussama]

I think it would have been fair to mention that this game was originally not supposed to be Raiden, but instead Kojima wanted it to be about Gray Fox and it was his team that wanted it to be about Raiden.

 

[cikame]

Game of the year.

 

[ThatDarnCoyote]

Man I loved buffed Ron Paul. What a great villain.

Er, Ron Paul is an isolationist, he's famously opposed to military adventurism - to the point that he criticized the Bin Laden operation as an affront to Pakistan's sovereignty. Armstrong more closely resembles how Ron Paul's most feverish disciples picture any politician who isn't Ron Paul.

Quite a vivid character, though, isn't he? It's not every day you see a caricature of Americans who's so over-the-top that even Yahtzee is a little taken aback.

 

[Hammartroll]

Armstrong may very well be based off of the US ambassador to Finland

 

[Shirokurou]

Yeah, the last boss I felt was too stupid. Any of the Winds of Destruction should've filled in that spot.

But actually surprised how much he mentioned Kojima, when Kojima tweeted that "Even though I'm listed as Executive Producer, I totally did nothing for the game"