Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6512-20130424131635/@comment-8245466-20130521005612

I'm going to try and be as fair to this game as I can- it is mediocre at best, and a horrible, muddled, partially broken mess at worst. First, the secondary complaints. Raiden's character starts out as a nice contrast to Snake. He recognizes that he's a killer, but he justifies it by upholding justice and having a personal code of honor. That's different from Snake who loudly proclaims that there's nothing right about murder, ever, and then clams up anytime someone mentions how many people he's killed and whether or not he enjoyed it. Throughout the story, Raiden's value system is put to the test, and he realizes that this whole time, everything he's been talking about is a lie- he secretly enjoys killing people, regardless of whether or not it's for a greater good, and he's only too happy to engage in mindless carnage. I agree wholeheartedly, this serves the game's purpose to give the player little choice but to mindlessly hack and slash their way through the game.

Now, we could have expected the game to be a little lax on story. After all, it's not written by Kojima himself. It creates a very interesting world overrun with cyborg technology, and does a good job speculating on the implications of this technology. It's nice to see how things have turned out without the Patriots, and Armstrong's speech at the end of the game, when he says "We're all Sons of the Patriots now!" is very compelling and fits in nicely with the Metal Gear mythos. The bosses are interesting and very unique characters, more entertaining than fighting tanks and helicopters or squads of enemy soldiers a la Peace Walker. But the Winds of Destruction are sadly underdeveloped, with little in the way of interesting back story or personality. This is especially true of Sundowner. Armstrong is a rather ridiculous Big Boss rip-off complete with cigar, spouting the usual "men should fight for themselves, for what they believe in", although he's probably meant to be hammy and over-the-top. Still, I wish Sam would have been the final boss, waiting in the shadows to see how things turned out before engaging Raiden in a final duel. Sam would have been a more worthy opponnent than a crazy senator with nanomachines (son!)

The major problems with Rising (and they are major fucking problems) are the camera and the controls. The camera is horrible, think 2003 era PS2 horrible. It is absolutely fixated on Raiden, to the point that you can't see where any enemies or their attacks are, and you frequently get your ass handed to you from shit you didn't even know was coming. The same thing happens on the rare occassions where the game awkwardly forces you to use stealth- you're trying to sneak around, scope out the enemy positions, and the camera snaps back around to focus on Raiden. It doesn't let you look. Instead, it shoves Raiden's heavily augmented cyborg body in your face as if to say "Look! We put a lot of detail into this character! Check it out!" The next biggest problem is the controls themselves. This is meant to be a hack-n-slash, Devil May Cry-esque game where all you do is run around and stab and slash the living shit out of everything. The game tries to be unique and interesting with the zandatsu skill, but the execution is awkward and flawed. To adjust the angle of your blade AND slash uses the same joystick. This makes it incredibly difficult to do so, especially when bossess such as Monsoon and Armstrong lob fucking rocks at you that kill you in one blow, and you have no choice but to zandatsu slash them. If the joystick adjusted the angle of the blade, and x was used to slash, you wouldn't have as many problems. Moments like that make the game frustrating and difficult for all the wrong reasons. Your tempted to throw the controller across the room in anger and self debasement, feeling like you are the one who is incompetent for not being able to pull this off. When the controls of a game make the game needlessly difficult, and make the player feel disempowered and unskilled at the same time, it is a big problem.

One last point, this game is meant to be lightning-fast action. You get used to the fast paced, frenetic fights. So why in the hell does there have to be sections that force you to slow down, and sneak by like Snake? You're not Solid Snake, you're cyber soldier Raiden. These sections seem tedious and boring in comparison, and feel like they were tacked on solely to pay tribute to the rest of the series. They probably were. It would have been better to make stealth a viable alternate option throughout the whole game, but often this is just too damn difficult and you can fucking charge through enemies anyway, which is the complete opposite of the Metal Gear ethos where recklessness and heroism often got you killed and sneaking by unnoticed was a must. If they wanted to create a game that was a stylistic departure from the series, that's one thing. But painfully tacking on segments that force you to play like this was any other Metal Gear game just hold the game itself back. Besides, if you trigger an alarm it's not like you have to run and hide like Snake, you just go back to hacking and slashing. So why not just let me hack and slash in the first place?! All in all, this is a mediocre game that fans of the franchise might enjoy but will probably have even less appeal outside the core fan base, a shame because it really doesn't do the fans justice.

(ps.) How dare they leave it ambiguous as to whether or not Snake died, or how he died. Also, where was Otacon? Sunny's adoptive father, and she couldn't even get him a job working at Solis? And we couldn't even have a came appearance of Rose and their son? Come on people!