Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-189.25.157.183-20130724230531/@comment-1210805-20130728150729

When you say Kojima, do you mean the man or the company? Because the company will always be involved in Metal Gear, they wrote and oversaw the story, they made the cutscenes and they have the final say on everything. They moved it to the future to better suit Platinums approach to the game, designs and enemies but it is still a Kojima Productions story.

As for Kojima the man, I'm going to have to disagree with just about everything you said. For a start, Rising is a canon Metal Gear game. Canon does not mean "made by Hideo Kojima". And his involvement just isn't going to happen. The only reason he offered to write a Gray Fox game himself is because he wants to see it happen but no one else in the studio feels comfortable taking on that character without him. He has said time and time again he wants to leave Metal Gear to someone else and move on to something new, the last thing he's going to do is helm the spin off series.

Here's the thing, we've seen Raiden at the end of MGS2, where he was clearly still trying to cope with a hell of a lot, we see him in 4 where all of that has taken its toll on him and we got all the information we needed to put it together ourselves in 4, and concisely written down in the database (by the guy who wrote both MGS:R and MGR:R). Basically the story would be:

"''Raiden began living together with Rosemary, but the tragic memories of his days a child soldier started to resurface, causing tension in their relationship and leading him to leave her.

Raiden learned that Olga's daughter, Sunny, was being held in Area 51. Free of the Patriots' bonds, Raiden set out to rescue Olga's daughter.

He successfully rescued Sunny with the help of the anti-Patriots resistance group, the Paradise Lost Army.

After hearing of Rosemary's miscarriage and subsequent remarriage to Roy Campbell, Raiden became despondent. He left Sunny in the care of Hal Emmerich and Solid Snake, then began work on retrieving Big Boss's remains from the Patriots for the Paradise Lost Army, leading to his capture.

As a prisoner, the Patriots used Raiden as a subject for experiments in exoskeletal enhancement surgery. Raiden was treated as a test subject in the Patriots' research into creating the perfect soldier, just as Gray Fox had been made into the enhanced and heavily drugged Cyborg Ninja before him.

With help from the Paradise Lost Army, Raiden managed to escape his captivity. After undergoing surgery to clear his body of nanomachines, he was successful in reclaiming Big Boss's remains from the Patriots. The enhancements implanted throughout Raiden's body, however, were too severe to allow him to live again as a normal human. He elected to disappear from the life of his fiancé, Rosemary.

Left to wander the earth, Raiden studied scouting techniques under a Native American shaman living in Alaska, also learning to hunt.

Upon receiving orders from Big Mama to assist Solid Snake and lead him to the Paradise Lost Army, Raiden set out into battle once more.''"

There's your story. Raiden would be freed by Big Mama's group and sent to retrieve Big Boss' remains. It's all covered. Anything else would be trying to shoehorn a story into a detailed area of the canon. It's not like Big Boss where he had no back story followed by thirtyish years of "so what lead to X". It's not even like Gray Fox where he was turned into a cyborg, killed someone and then had three years of empty space. Raidens few years between 2 and 4 have been detailed and trying to keep to that story would be quite underwhelming to say the least.