Metal Gear Rising Revengeance Retrospective - Standing Here, I Realize 

It's kind of ironic how 7 hour games, which used to be the bane of criticism back in the PS3/360's days is now an actual good thing thanks to games as a service making games last forever, just to release another installment on the next year

Other games : *"Why won't you die?"* MGR : *"Memes, son! They hardened in response of the internet"*

The chin scenes are essentially running joke that spans the game like Courtney and the mug. He keeps getting hit on the chin, and it glows hot. It gets brought to notice at the end.. When Armstrong punches him, he checks it to see if it's hot or not and smirks before getting hit and sliding his chin across excelsus. I loved to see that part.

i see this constantly and it's a pet peeve of mine so i have to mention it: the reason why sundowner doesn't kill the president immediately is so that raiden and the rest of the soldiers dont just open fire immediately, his goal from the start is to kill him but he's delaying it so can get out relatively safely its actually a subtle piece of characterization, showing that while sundowner presents himself as a super-soldier cyborg he is actually kind of a coward that mostly wins because the odds were always in his favor (it's also no coincidence that one of is weapons is a explosive shield) it also directly contrasts with sam, they both are smug at the scenes at the beginning of the game but for different reasons, sam is smug because he knows that he's the most skilled at fighting so he doesn't register raiden and the soldiers as serious threats, sundowners is smug because he enjoys the suffering of the helpless since he knows that raiden can't do anything but watch him kill the president

There's a universe where a Revengeance sequel exists instead of Survive, and that's the timeline we're supposed to be in, but somewhere along the way somebody fucked it up for everyone to divert us on this hell path

I usually don't give a shit about representation in fiction, but I gotta say, as a brazilian, Sam being a brazilian as well as being a badass does put a smile on my face

“You’ve got this twin-bladed sword” That’s less of a sword and more of a giant pair of scissors pretending to _be_ a sword.

“Doktor asks you to cut them off to satisfy his uh.. arm thing” This really do be a Yoshikage Kira moment.

I"ve reach the point of age when i saw Metal Gear Rising Revengeance Retrospective . the flow of time is cruel

When it comes to Ripper mode, I like how they made it so that you can start it and then cancel it anytime. Like, "oh there is this one hard as heck enemy who ruins my life" quickly enables ripper mode, kills everything you need to kill and disable it. Reminds me of DMC5 where you could do temporary demon attacks using your demon power gauge

I still remember how I was showing MGR to my friends and they A) didn't care for it back then, B) when I ran Rules of Nature on my phone in 2020 they were like "What is that?" and after I said that it was Metal Gear Rising, people said "Ugh, we're not that nerdy". Nowadays it feels that we finally have proper karma reset and justice being restored.

The surge in popularity happened because of a series of extremely rare circumstances. 1) The Memes. The game lauds the concept of Memes, but not Memes the way we understand them. Most of us know that "Meme" is an anagram for Memetic Mutation. The Patriots used Memetic Mutations as a method of information control - basically by making Fake News "catchy" and it spreads from there as a common fact. Much like Falling Down = Pain or Funny dependent on perspective. These Memes gained large amounts of traction because they resonated perfectly with the world at the time because of: 2) The 2016 Presidential Election. The Meme-heaviness of the game, the Meme-heaviness of the American political landscape at the time and the jarring juxtaposition between the two was a perfect mixture of fuel and oxygen. 2/4 things you need to start and maintain a fire. The Memes of the Game and the Memetic Concepts OF the game spread rapidly on the internet fostering interest for the source. Usually these things fizzle out because the attention span of the average human post Millennial generation is fairly short, however, there was plenty of time to devote to Meme Research thanks to: 3) The Covid 19 Pandemic. This provided both the heat and the spark for this Revengeance Explosion. With large swaths of the population having a huge amount of time on their hands, many of which earning more money to stay home than they would have if they returned to work, pushed a lot of people towards Social Media and their respective echo-chambers. Since these Memes never went Mainstream there was nary an opportunity to kill them and they continued to cycle unchecked spurring more and more interest in, of all things, a simple video game that was far too relevant to the current global climate. Regardless of your political outlook, anyone and everyone was looking for an outlet and what better way than a video game that allows you to play as a suped up cyborg ninja going head-to-head with a brash, cocky, over-the-top cartoon clown of a politician. Metal Gear Rising's meteoric rise in popularity far beyond its scheduled obsolescence was dependent on these factors happening exactly the way they did. Without any one of those three things this game would have been a foot-note in the Metal Gear franchise. That this would happen to a Metal Gear game which contains The Patriots whose largest contribution to society was intentionally engineering circumstances EXACTLY like this. Is that coincidence.. or.. are we all Sons of the Patriots, now?

Part of the resurgence is that it's a great Streamer game. It's only 8 hours and it's just always entertaining. There's little downtime and how over the top it is becomes a strength when you're streaming it. It's also weirdly accessible for such a technically deep game.

Another banger! But a quick note: blade wolf never got his memory wiped. It would only get wiped if he disobeyed an order which he technically never did, plus he was able to recall past events to raiden and even speak to sunny about his past

Devil may cry 5 and metal gear rising have some of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in all the games I’ve played. They’re just so good

My theory is that reading "Push in the direction of an enemy attack" might have led many people to push the stick backwards because that's the direction of the attack. And because it's a parry it would make sense that you have to get away from the attack. I think the parry tutorial issue would be solved if it said "Push towards the enemy" instead of "in the direction of the enemy's attack"

About dynamic music, I feel Rising was only the prequel for their next game. Nier Automata. That game changes music so flawlessly it's crazy.

Memes, making america great again… This game was clearly ahead of its time

An example of dynamic music in game is literally from one of your favorite games, Nier Automata. Granted, it's also by Platinum Games the same people who made this game

My hope is that this games reappearence will bring some much needed new blood into the fanbase. I urge everyone to go ahead and play the mainline games as well, because they are not only as but sometimes even more insane than Rising.

It’s been so wild seeing this game’s resurgence in popularity when I, like you, played it on release and adored it. Nobody spoke about it despite it being reasonably popular when I thought about it all the time. People looked at me funny when I said it was my favorite Metal Gear game but now I get the feeling that that’s not even an uncommon or controversial opinion anymore. It’s so nice to see people finally appreciating this game as much as I did.

I really love this game, and this recent resurgence (revengeance?) has been awesome. I can’t remember where, but I saw someone describe its popularity cycle as extremely interesting and potentially of the rarest variety: instead of being a huge hit and then being forgotten about pretty soon after or being decently popular and just sort of being somewhat ever-present from then on, it planted “seeds” to be harvested at a later time, at which point its popularity would skyrocket to obscene and unnatural levels. My personal favorite is Collective Consciousness btw

The stealth in this game is great. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not even yourself.

Sekiro and Elden Ring solved the "Stealth in an Action game" problem for the most part. Sometimes it really helps, rarely it's completely useless.

THE MEMES, THE DNA OF THE SOUL That's it, that's the whole reason it's back.

Making the mother of all retrospectives here, Jack. Can't fret over every meme!

Holy shit you perfectly summed up how I feel about so many of these AAA games at 57:11 . Games like Doom Eternal and DMC5 are some of my absolute favorites the last few years.

Here's my problem with the parry tutorial: I thought "in the direction of the enemy attack" meant you had to match the enemy's angle, since they already had blade mode where you can slash at any angle. This lead to confusion, since I wasn't sure if, for example, an attack coming from above needed me to press forward or back to match the angle. I got it eventually (in the Monsoon fight funnily enough), but for a lot of the game I just didn't know how to block or parry, and relied on the Defensive Offense move to avoid attacks instead. That was my source of confusion, and likely was a lot of others as well. Now, MGRR was my first character action game, and the closest comparison I had to it was Dynasty Warriors, but still the dialogue and translation is needlessly unclear. Just say push in the direction of the enemy who is attacking.

I'm like 18% sure the chin thing is like an 'iron chin' joke, which is a term used in boxing n mma to describe someone being hard to knock out, on account of Raiden's tough and hardy nature. Also his chin is iron

I'm still advocate for "spectacle fighter" as the name for the genre. "Character Action" always sound weird to me.

Automata has the most dynamic music I can think of. at least 3 tracks per song: quiet, normal, battle, vocals, 8-bit. one song is even integrated into the boss' attack pattern

I did originally dislike Red Sun, but it has grown on me over time to possibly also be my favorite. Lyrics and how they sound alongside the music, matters a lot for me, since when they kick in, they functionally _become_ the main instrument. And by the token, I really don't like Rules of Nature, I'm so glad people have mostly moved on.

I will champion for the BrandoCord forever! Can't miss the Brando Updates. It's gotta happen someday my dude!

About the perry mechanic poorly expalined, i kind of agree The problem is that the way the text explains you how to block/perry can be confused (i am one of those guys in my first playthrought, i thought that i had do put my analog stick depnding on the trajectory of the attack (if the truncheon trajectory is up-down, then analog up; if the truncheon trajectory is left-right, then analog left), and not by the direction where the attack was coming (kinda like wii sport resort style) the fact that the enemy cyborg when first attacking jumps at you by swinging the truncheon from upwards, got me confused

I feel like this games resurgence is a combination of two things. Its memes, and platinum games gaining more popularity leading players to look at what other projects they worked on. For example Nier automata could have left a good impression on someone and upon checking who developed it brought them to Revengeance.

I'll throw in my experience as someone that was new to the game recently in regards to the Parry system. I felt like it was explained very well, and despite not being great at games and not having used a controller in about a year and a half I could at least somewhat consistently block attacks by the end of the tutorial chapter. Then again, people will complain about difficulty in learning basic boss patterns and seemingly actively refuse to improve. On the note of subweapons, the EM grenade was honestly super useful with the fact that you can just tap the subweapon button to use any equipped subweapon, and it gives you a bit of breathing room as it stuns the enemies around the explosion.

YES the music transitions are incredible! I would say the only games I've played where music is used with comparable effectiveness and dynamics are the NIER series and FF7 Remake (Airbuster still gets me hype as hell)

I blame Max0r's MGR videos. He posted the first one at the Start of December 2021 and after that the Google search only went up. The memes that came out of that pushed the Hype Train.

5:33 I think its fairly simple actually, psychological warfare. You're on the battlefield, the only way out is to fight your way through one of two otherwise identical walking tanks. Except one of them just straight up roars at you. I know which one I'm sure as hell NOT fighting.

Man i love this game a lot. You inspired me to finally 100 percent this game, the music and gameplay are something i need to indulge in more often D:

Dodge offset sounds a bit like queing inputs in some rpg's or other action rpg's like monster hunter, where you will ready your next input immediately after a dodge, or after launching into an attack to optimise damage. This is especially apparent with weapons like a hammer or greatsword, which have extensive movement options, making use of the terrain, and gravity to your advantage.

So now is an ideal moment to publish sequel and call it Metal Gear Resurgence 😀

Really great review coming from a veteran of the game, and a retrospective and analysis of its popularity on par! In regards to the dynamic soundtrack implementation, Doom 2016 and Eternal are also known for seamless and exquisite implementation. Someone on here also mentioned Nier Automata as well, and I'm inclined to agree - it's even more interesting of a comparison given the gameplay is also more similar.

43:40 The details in the cutscenes are incredibly great, when Raiden was able to dodge without hitting his chin, he smiled, but immediately received an extremely powerful blow for this oversight.

JUSTICE FOR RED SUN it's one of my favourite tracks in any video game ever and I was so excited when I realised that's where the list was going :D It's honestly a crime that there are no full track versions of any of the songs, but that's what happens when a song gets composed for hype.

i really enjoy your content and glad the youtube algorithm recommended your videos. MGRR is also in my top 10 games ever. Thanks for the work you do for these videos man. Btw my favorite track is all of them because this OST is frikin amazing. Seriously, I cannot choose a favorite I love all of them so much.

i recently finished this game, and i need to say that it is one of my favorite games, even though its short, the music is fantastic and so is the story. great game, glad to see you cover it

About subweapons - yes, they are awkward to use - but ONLY if you hold the button down. If you TAP the button instead, you skip the aiming part, and Raiden will use them quickly in the direction of your left stick, without interrupting the flow of combat. This makes them much more useful. For example, you can throw a grenade in the face of a dude that is about to hit you with an unblockable attack, and grenades have a handy property of making enemies flinch, so you interrupt him.

With the soundtrack bit, Nier:Automata, especially when playing as (Spoiler) 9S, switching from the 8bit tracks in the Hacking minigame back to the main track and back and forth are just as smooth as its 2D to top down to 3D enviorenments.

A remaster of this with highly upscaled environmental graphics would be great.

Wow, your one of the only people who has made me watch their whole hour-long review, nice job!

I think the reason it returned was Max0r. Yeah, funni meme man. He was the first (as far as I know) to use the Raiden punching Armstrong meme, he assigned most of the tropes to the characters, like Mistral being an e-girl, Sundowner being a ped0, Monsoon (it was inevitable) being a memer, and others. He brought it into the limelight again, and then, the ball was rolling, and it couldn't be stopped.

Nier Automata got some top tier dynamic music too with 4 versions of most of the battle music. Then again, it's made by the same company so it's pretty much a given.

Actually getting a perfect parry is good against all enemies, usually leading into a ton of damage or a kill. Even on bosses you can take out a huge amount of their health bar when you can time a parry.

I've waited so long for someone to make a video like this

5:39 "I mean.. just because its rad as hell, I can't argue with that." MGR:R in a nutshell.

Ok now you have to do a Zone of the Enders retrospective especially #2. Can’t just drop a tidbit like that and leave us hanging.

I feel like after the release of Maxor video "Incorrect summary of MGR" was partly the reason for it sudden return. There are other videos before his, but those videos didn't leave a mark as his. His video came out 6 months ago and this correlate to the increase player count on steam. If MGR can come back after 9 years I can hope for ZOE to come back.

Just found your channel yesterday! Love the content, especially nier stuff! Keep it up!!

Making the mother of all compilations here, Jack. Can't fret over every meme.

Killer Instinct also had a great dynamic music implementation.

37:45 dude I FUCKING LOVE Red sun and the Sundowner bossfight, having Sundowner yell I'M FUCKING INVINCIBLE while Red Sun blasts gives me chills to this day

I have a very short attention span, so the fact that I watched this entire video in one sitting says two things: 1. Your commentary and opinions were nice to listen to 2. METAL GEAR RISING IS ONE OF THE BEST GAMES EVER MADE AND I COULD LISTEN TO PEOPLE HYPE IT UP TILL THE END OF TIME

Metal Gear Rising after the advent of meme culture: "You merely adopted the memes. I was born in them. Molded by them..."

I feel that Nier: Automata has also a pretty good implementation of dynamic music. They did multiple versions of most songs so that they could transition between them very seamless and it's a joy to experience. I guess it's more noticeable on playthrough B when doing the hacking minigames but the dynamic music is present in almost every section of the game.

Watching the FF videos, I felt myself liking you more and more, but now that I am seeing this? Yeah, have my sub, I'm looking forward to the ride to come.

A bit late to this but Hades is one of those games with a great soundtrack and the ability to seamlessly make hype moments from the music changing the energy based on the current situation. When the drop hits for something and you say "Oh my god it's not over" is probably one of the most hype moments ever.

The combat is still better then most at the time, but action games have progressed alot since

God i want a sequel to this so bad. Why do you have to be the way you are Konami?!?!

Good video and i really liked Raiden birthday mention :D

Max0r with his metal gear rising videos is 100% why this game just suddenly came back

I been replaying on the series s always a great time running and slicing and here and there awesome STEALTH KILLS ! , Music killed it ,the slice mechanic was the best and haven't seen it in any other game so far, being the complete opposite of what any mg fan would want it pulled it off to be amazing, story wise hit and miss but kinda serious played multiple times off and on for years since release great game awesome game for anyone new to seeing this please give it a try you won't regret !

It's pretty typical Japanese practice to just make up a word to mean something that you want it to mean or represent a concept you invented in your manga or whatever. When I studied in Kyoto we had a pretty interesting linguistics class where we just spent time inventing words and looking at how the meaning changes depending on which character we were using. Probably not a good example, but stuff like Initial D (頭文字D) is just read and spelled out as "Initial D". The actual Japanese pronounciation (かしらもじD）I've never actually seen or heard used. In this case 頭文字 is read as イニシャル - it's just a Gikun reading. It's very much not how you read it but the language allows for this kind of liberal modification and artists always take advantage of it when they can. The people localizing this game probably made the correct choice in not trying to translate zandatsu - it's not something that would work out well considering English doesn't exactly have this sort of liberty of design. You could translate it as cut and take or whatever, but no matter how good it gets at carrying across the meaning of the word/concept it won't do much to translate the nuance of "this can be done with our writing system, we made up this word and it is fucking awesome". EDIT: Forgot to say, I always considered this game to be an interactive album experience thing more than a game. Moments when the music syncs with a good parry or you finish a combo or something like that are just *mwah* _chefs kiss_ Also, I think Raiden getting his chin sliced to a hot red is just an in-game joke. Courtney has a cup that is always dangerously close to getting bumped over the edge (and it does in the end). It's kind of a comic tease? Sam also has a close call with the chin slice iirc. I really think it's just a weird joke they decided to use again after the Wolf fight and it more or less became a wilhelm scream.

Fun fact to a fun fact, Vodomerka means literally "water measurer" - a bug that can stay on the surface of water usually found on lakes!

To answer your question about why a robot tank needs to roar, my best answer is psychological warfare. Same reason we used to scream while charging into battle

I been a fan of this game since 2013, and played it a lot in the last two years. It’s interesting reading the comments here as if it’s just now being popular again. I guess I don’t follow Western social media, and have always seen a pretty steady line of fanart post on it on other sites. That even includes talk about it in Discord servers I’m in. I assume the recent spike in Western social media popularity is due to one guy I watch who became popular for his humorous videos on it. He’s also working on an abridged series of it.

34:55 I’ll be honest, Bomber crew had a pretty good way they do dynamic music. Especially how it turns directions as the missions play on. Such as when you’re stealthy avoiding radar and get detected. The calm, yet somewhat tense music changes tone as the German fighters are scrambled to intercept you. Also the themes for the different aces fit in quite well

Great video man ! Just wanted to add that another video game series that does dynamic well is God of War. Its not noticeable because it's not in English, but there are moments in the game where the music is speaking about characters. For example, in God of War 2 during your first encounter with the Colossus of Rhodes the music is saying "Colossus save us, kill Kratos" (something along those lines) and thats so damn cool ! In God of War 2018 in the famous scene that I won't mention by name to not spoil anyone, its a very emotional moment for ol Kratos and the music reflects that by chanting things like "Fallen god". That's just my two cents lmaoo. Anyway, enjoyed the vid, especially the music ranking

It warmed my heart when I saw MGR make a return a few months ago. It’s been going strong since. This game was so much fun when it launched in 2013. I’ve replayed it like 9 times from start to finish over the years. I’ve beaten all difficulties. It’s a work of art.

Because this game did the unthinkable to Raiden, and reversed his character Arc from MGS2 (which GotP already did tbs) I always avoided it. But because I love your content so much, I may watch your review despite that. Thank you sir.

This game NEEDS a remake or a sequel

Another banger vídeo 🔥

Thank you for this

last

“It’s not really a detriment to raiden’s character…” Yes… yes it is. Rising completely ruins everything mgs4 set out to do with Raiden. And it’s “fine” because it doesn’t have to be “canon” but it still completely ruins the “growth” he had in 2 and 4. I absolutely love this game, but not because it plays nice with the rest of the series lol

Dynamic music in Devil May Cry V feels awesome. You are given only 4+1 tracks but damn, it feels so cool when you reach SSS rank and you hear "I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING!!!".

I found it funny that you uploaded this video when you did. Believe it or not, I actually played Metal Gear Rising: Revengence (it being the first and only Metal Gear game I've played in my life) for the first time back in February of this year, though I played it via Playstation Now and it actually included all the DLC you mentioned. Having played Bayonetta and Nier Automata (both games by Platinum), the combat itself was very familiar and I managed to pick up the gameplay pretty easily. I was a little disappointed with the game being short, but I thoroughly enjoyed my experience playing it. If anything, your video basically covered everything I've experience, not just game-wise, but the main takeaway when it came to the story that game presented. I enjoyed the music, and though your number one pick on boss theme was what most considered their least favorite, the song itself was neither my least favorite or most favorite (if anything, it was around a 3 or 4 for me if I were to rank them). The music is still good, and I still sometimes listen to it every now and then because of how catchy the tunes are. Anyways, great video and retrospective! I can't wait to see more!

When you mentioned that you quoted it often irl hit with me a lot. I say "Let's dance" whenever I'm in a 1v1 in any game.

personally, i think that the reason sundowner moved the president outside of the city before killing him was to make it seem like there were motives behind his assassination beyond just stirring up conflict: "not while hes still useful". the reason he doesnt try to keep up the act with raiden on the train is because he fully expected sam to kill raiden, which very nearly does happen.

I was watching this video in the background while playing MGR and when you started talking about the Rules of Nature moment at 35:30 that's exactly where I was in the game

As a fan of both Metal Gear Rising Revengeance and The Legend of Dragoon I can only say... Welcome to Purgatory, maybe some day we'll get something.

29:00 Also Monsoon's bossfight where using em grenades stuns him, allowing you to deactivate his magnetism making him vulnerable again, and you can just tap the bumper to quickly use sub-weapons.

Just picked this up on the summer sale, I’ve never played a metal gear game but I’ve been obsessed w it since launch. Glad this popped up in my feed :)

One of my favorite games on the PS3! Thanks for the video.

I was so hyped and picked this up day one. Glad to see it coming back. I do wish we had gotten the original planned story but I absolutely adored what we got.

Red Sun transition still gives me chills!

0:13 based, I remember getting Plat on MGR back in 2013, I actually bought it for a friend on Steam back in December 2021 as well

I replayed it a few months ago just before it started showing up all over youtube and it was way better than I remembered.

It’s worth noting that Armstrong doesn’t actually want a kraterocracy, or system where the physically strong rule by beating the current ruler in a fight. He wants a system ruled primarily by strength of conviction.

Oh, the ZOE/metal gear rabbit hole you sent me on with that 3 second bit