Why the Metal Gears are easy to kill in Metal Gear Rising
Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (MGR) is one of the handful of games I have finished and enjoyed in my short lifespan. This decade old game is still one of the most hype and goofy games you can play right now. The sheer amount of memes, posts, and video essays about the game are a testament to its popularity. When video essayist Jacob Geller compared the game to seed that only grows into a stronger and bigger tree with time, he wasn’t wrong.
If you haven’t played the game, don’t worry, I won’t spoil much of its fun anymore than the memes already have. You should still play the game, it’s like ₹2000 rupees on steam. Less if you wish to sail the pirate life. If you can’t play this game for any reason, you can just watch the exhaustive retrospective video about it by Power Pak or Jacob Geller on YouTube.
What I loved about this game, apart from its gameplay mechanics, charming writing, and overall fun experience, is its story and themes. Ask any MGR fan and you’ll know that the story is barely in the top 5 of the developer’s priority list, but it’s still incredible.
The game begins with a cutscene (for those unaware of the term, it is a cinematic video that tells the story that is mixed with the gameplay) about peace in Nigeria which is being held by brute force. I believe I don’t need to justify why peace at the end of a gun is a bad thing, but this is the reality of our world and the world of MGR. This isn’t surprising, the game is part of the Metal Gear series which is haunted by the horrors of wars both real and not. The only thing more influential in the series are nuclear weapons.
This is where I should mention, I haven’t played any of the metal gear games apart from Phantom Pain and Revengence, so I might not get the intricacies of the story and themes across the series. However, I have talked to people who have played the game and watched countless video essays so I can at least understand this one game that I love.
So, as far as I understand, the metal gears that we face in MGR are stand-ins for nuclear weapons in real life. Nukes exist in the series as evident by Metal Gear Solid V, however, they aren’t mentioned in MGR and so I will not mention them either.
You begin the gameplay by defeating a metal gear, Metal Gear Ray in specific. Metal gears are the big gimmicks of the metal gear series. They possess the ability to launch nukes and can fight in person. They are big, intimidating, dangerous, and we cut it in half at the beginning of MGR with a sword.
Metal gears make a reappearance towards the end of the game, with metal gear excelsus, which we also chop to pieces with one of its own limbs. To put it into context for this article, metal gears are skyscraper sized, with excelsus being the size of a hill. These are big machines, and we are a normal sized human cyborg with a special sword.
However, it isn’t the metal gears that are the threats. Twice in this game, we have easily defeated the metal gears, yet, right after the confrontation, we have struggled against the humans who operate these machines. Ray was an unmanned gear which was working under Sundowner and Jetstream Sam, the latter of which embarrasses us and chops off one of our arms. Excelsus is a manned gear who was operated by the game’s final boss- Senator Armstrong, the fight against whom is genuinely terrifying for me at least.
This happening once would have been a coincidence, twice is a pattern. Metal Gear Rising: Revengence is not so subtly telling us that the weapons of mass destruction are terrifying as hell, but what’s more terrifying are the people who possess them. The Senator Armstrong fight has a large section which is just an ideological verbal battle between him and us. His political views are irrelevant to this article but they are analysed in both the videos I mentioned near the beginning.
It is also of note that we never see the good guys in this game- our private military contractors, possess or use a metal gear. The fact that the bad guys of the game, another private military contractor, possess 2 of these nation destroying machines is terrifying but not new to this series.
