Raiden’s character design is one of the many high points of Revengeance it’s a sort of fusion of stereotypical Japanese anime visual style with some of the more advanced prosthetic limbs you see, but the thing I like about it most is that Raiden does not look like a typical videogame hero. The prologue has him in a more or less human-looking chassis, but after events he swaps it out for a much more machine-like cyber-body complete with metal lower jaw and an Adam Jensen-esque combat visor that snaps in place during boss battles (and which becomes something of a running joke throughout the game).
This specific cyborg ninja is former Metal Gear Solid 2 protagonist Raiden, who at some point between now and then has undergone a full-body cybernetic swap and now kills things in ridiculously gory fashion with a high-tech nanoblade that can cut through pretty much anything in the game. Maybe I’m not playing the right games, but I think it’s telling that Revengeance looks at the idea and instead of thinking “No, that’s too much, a cyborg ninja would be too powerful as a player character,” it just goes “Fuck it, let’s do it,” and then proceeds to execute it so well I’m wondering why the hell it’s taken me so long to play a game like this.
A cyborg ninja as a concept should be a super-cliché, something I’d expect games developers to have done to death years ago because it’s the definition of a videogame hero, and yet casting my mind back I can’t think of a single game past the 16-bit era that’s done it at all.
They’re one of the biggest clichés in gaming. The cyborg ninja thing itself is an example. The last Metal Gear Solid game I played was Sons of Liberty ( which was over a decade ago now that I come to think about it) but even I can tell Revengeance is taking the piss, as well as the opportunity to have your cyborg ninja engage in some truly ludicrous boss battles. It’s a different approach that’s not usually seen on the PC, and Revengeance is at least knowingly stupid, chuckling along with the player as it breaks the fourth wall several times and gently parodies its own source material. To be sure there is a lot of stuff in the game that is stupid, but then one of the reasons that Revengeance strikes me as incredibly console is that it isn’t afraid to be stupid if that leads to a boss fight where you beat a giant robot to death with its own severed blade-arm. Everything about it is absurd, even its name however what you need to keep in mind here is that “absurd” is not the same thing as “stupid”. Revengeance has not ever heard of the phrase “over the top”. It’s pure distilled action from start to finish that takes the developer’s experience with action games (Revengeance was made by Platinum Games, who were previously responsible for the reputedly-excellent Bayonetta) and Hideo Kojima’s wonderfully off-kilter Metal Gear Solid universe and pursues the resulting combination to its logical conclusion to produce something that’s almost beautiful in terms of how insane it all is. By contrast after playing Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for an hour I physically have to uncurl the fingers of my left hand from their claw-like grasp because I’ve been clutching the controller so hard, such is the intensity of this game. Most of the time my controller is used for Spelunky Daily Challenges, and while that’s pretty much the opposite of a chilled out experience my hands come away from it feeling rather relaxed – limber, almost. Sure, modern ports are usually good enough that you can wrangle the mouse and keyboard into some semblance of an acceptable control scheme (unless they’re Dark Souls), but I do think they lose something unless played with a controller. I use a controller to play my console ports these days.
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