Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Metal Gear Solid: Rising is an upcoming game set in the Metal Gear series. Announced at E3 2009, the game will be released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. The game will star Raiden. Hideo Kojima and Kenichiro Imaizumi will be producing the game, though it is currently unknown who is directing the game. The series' former tagline, "Tactical Espionage Action", has been replaced with "Lightning Bolt Action", a play on Raiden's name. The title Rising is also a play on Raiden's name; the Japanese pronunciation "raijin" is a word play on a mythic Japanese storm god, while the word "raiden" (雷電) means "thunder and lightning" in Japanese. Hideo Kojima has also confirmed that it will be a stealth game, just like its predecessors.

Plot
While the story is still unknown, the game will feature Raiden as the main character. Concept art for the game featured Raiden standing atop what looks like Crying Wolf, resulting in rumors that the game will take place before or during Metal Gear Solid 4 and may explain how Sunny was saved from The Patriots. Originally, concept art featured Raiden with brown eyes rather than blue, which was his eye color in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, but more recent concept art has corrected this error. Concept art also shows him wearing a slightly different robotic suit than he has in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Development
Hideo Kojima officially announced the game at Microsoft's E3 2009 press conference, after running various countdowns for the announcement on a Konami website. Both Kojima and Kenichiro Inaizumi will be producing the game. Kojima stated that he became involved with Rising because "it's a completely different kind of action than what has appeared in the series so far" and also stated that he will be more involved in the development of the game than a normal video game producer would be.

Kojima refers to both Rising and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker as Metal Gear Solid 5, while specifically calling Rising "the next generation MGS5." Kojima has specifically said that he would not be directing, as he and the team behind Metal Gear Solid 4 would be busy working on Peace Walker.

At the end of a teaser trailer for the game shown at E3 2009, the words "Sneak In" are shown, a reference to both Metal Gear Solid 4 promotional art which used the tagline "Sneak Out" and the Xbox 360 advertisements that use "Jump In."

Sean Eyestone, the host of Kojima Productions's podcast, stated that the game will feature an entirely new game engine. He also stated that the game will "be a big project like Metal Gear Solid 4. The entire team is serious about making it look as good as possible on every platform." Regarding the term "rising" in the game's title, Eyestone also said "[the game is] raising the Metal Gear franchise up to the next step." At the 2009 Tokyo Game Show in late September, Kojima stated that the game is "far from completion." In late January 2010, Metal Gear Solid: Piece Walker, a flash-based jigsaw puzzle game, was released. Players who completed the puzzle obtained a new concept art of Raiden that gives him his correct blue eye color as well as some other minor changes.

It was confirmed that the development team behind Peace Walker (who also worked on Metal Gear Solid 4) is now starting to work on Rising.

Trivia

 * Metal Gear Solid 5 was foreshadowed in the release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. In one of the Secret Theater short films, titled Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser, Raiden travels to the past to kill Big Boss which would prevent Solid Snake from ever existing and allow Raiden to be the main hero of the series. It ends with Rosemary stating "...there is going to be a 5, right?" It should be noted however that at this point in time Metal Gear Solid 4 was still in development, and there were no concrete plans to continue the series.