…or Tony Damn Danza.
Why, it’s the Kid. The Kid Nick B.
Dot Com.
My close friend — who happens to be couch surfing at the crib to get a taste of that Holly-Hollywood — just had to accomplish what the Rev didn’t: beat this damn freaking game. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had to reset the game 2-hours in, after finding the “Hard” difficulty to be that much more extreme once I stepped up to LQ-84i, the asshole of a wolf that later becomes instant dogmeat once you change it up to Normal.
Even more humorous is that Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance actually has the Konami Code! Yes, you got it: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make Raiden (nice, original name Konami — though you, thankfully, do pronounce it Rye-Den) any more invincible. Instead, the code allows gamers to try this already tough-as-fuck game on two harder (!!) difficulty settings, No Way Bro and Get the Fuck Outta Here.
The problem with many of these Japanese-made games — こんにちはカプコン、コナミ — is that many of them are still stuck in that Sega Original/Neo Geo mode of gaming. To many, this is a positive since many of their games are often more difficult than today’s very typical, movie-inspired next-gen games. Most will eventually beat the Halos, the Gears of Wars, and the Call of Duties on the normal and even more difficult settings. That’s no surprise. But these games from Japan?
Good luck.
There’s a fine line between the fun and challenging, and the terribly frustrating, however. Borderlands 2 was a real ball-buster of frustration at times. But at least the game offered a wide-array of challenges, modes and solutions to many of the in-game migraines. There were more difficulty modes than just Easy, Normal, Hard and a lot of American games offer challenge sliders to customize your own difficulty. This button-masher of a Metal Gear, which certainly doesn’t reflect the Solid Snake-based paramilitary stealth of Metal Gear tradition, is a real treat on the Normal setting ’til you meet the Senator.
Almost too easy.
Rising‘s Senator — who you face three subsequent times — may be the most challenging, thwarting end boss in a long time. Sure beats the one-button finish of Halo 4. Certainly. Sure beats the final boss of Darksiders II, which took a quarter of the time to figure out after hordes of toughies throughout. The angry political monster (aren’t they all) also sizes up nicely with that morphing bastard of a boss in Borderlands 2.
Don’t get us wrong over here at GHG. Having a tough challenge is a good thing. And if you time the slice-and-dice of that huge debris the hulking middle-aged menace at you repeatedly just right, the rest of the final fight should be a breeze. It also shouldn’t take you the 1:59:31 it took Nick and I to can this Rush Limbaugh on steroids. So long as you handle those giant rocks, health-replenishing nanites will start to appear, and bam!
Smooth sailing.
Which, reminds me; didn’t the also recently just released Devil May Cry have a similar boss with its republic Anchor Man-iac?
Another comparison between the two games is the combat. DmC’s duel-wielding, whip-and-axe, shoot-and-slice techniques are that much more fun, especially since finding a secondary weapon in Rising means replacing combos with the original for something much clunkier. It takes more than button-mashing to slay enemies in that game, too; all the while, you can go full “beginner Street Fighter” in the much harder MGRR to run through the lot of ‘borgs. Rising‘s only harder on the Normal Difficulty due to its “cheating” AI, when the DmC Hard Mode gives you the feeling like you accomplished something more than mere mashing.
It’s all relative, I know.
So why should you actually buy Metal Gear Rising? Because it’s a solid, high-octane tour through the cybernetic section of the Metal Gear universe, and offers a fun alternative to all of the shooters out there on the market. Just in the last 2-weeks alone, peeps could purchase Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, and Aliens: Colonial Marines.
All three of those games have to do with shooting aliens.
In Rising, you get to tear down, combo kill and “Blade Mode” slow-time choreograph (think: Max Payne/The Matrix bullet-time) through rocket-launching cyborg ninjas, stalking robotic cow towers, and transforming, metallic grandstanding baddies. Sounds much cooler than aiming at extraterrestrials, right?
While that’s arguable, the primary reason your favorite Rev chose to play/review MGRR over the others is the back-story: I’ve got none. And since I deserve extreme punishment for not yet getting through the first two Dead Space or Crysis games, this review made a tad more sense.
Even if the constant parrying, spine-ripping and Zandatsuing (that’s the close-up horizontal and vertical slicing sequences) opponents over and over for 6 hours won’t make gaming history.
Metal Gear Rising‘s graphics and music definitely amp it’s replay value on those surface statistics alone. In fact, Konami did such an astounding job at maximizing the most of this last gen’s look that if you told me this was from a PS4, I wouldn’t argue. Rising is downright gorgeous. The traditional, enthusiastic Tokyo Pop-induced tunes won’t fail to hypnotize either, though this reviewer is not quite sure all of that makes up for the game’s piss-poor camera angles. It becomes incredibly irritating when you’re specifically aiming your katana at limbs and miss by inches, or when you can’t quite get the camera to find the boss before they do.
The story itself is also a bore. Nick and I didn’t even care to listen to the ending narrative because we could instantly predict it. Throughout, the cutscenes take over much of your 4-6 hours, look nice and say little. Also, be cautious that many of these lengthy animations require you to be involved ala QTE’s (quick-time events), so you may miss an X button alert while the lackluster voice acting throws you in a trance.
But, hey. If you’re tired of shooters and looking for something else to jump in and out of, it can’t be much worse than this month’s other “splash,” Aliens: CM — easily the biggest disappointment since Resident Evil 6. In fact, it’s getting some of the worst reviews in years and, you know…
Ain’t no gamer got time fo’ that.
