A Change in Tactics for Metal Gear Rising

You know how modern action games work; surely you've played a few. You move into position to start wailing on a bad guy, he winds up for a response, and you either hit the evasion button or the block button to avoid taking damage. I don't recall exactly when this style of action became the standard -- maybe God of War canonized it? -- but just about any action game worth its salt has some sort of get-out-of-jail-free button to keep players safe and ensure your victory as long as you can master a modicum of timing to roll out of a slow-flying missile's splash damage radius in time.

But not Metal Gear Rising. Platinum Games has elected to take a different approach to player defense for their action-game take on the Metal Gear universe, and it'll take some getting used to. My session on the TGS show floor ended in horrible failure, because I kept trying to figure out how to break away from foes with the one-button block or defense skill. Why wouldn't Raiden hold up his sword to protect himself, like Ninja Gaiden's Ryu? Why wouldn't he simply roll invincible away from danger, like Kratos? And I wasn't alone in my consternation; every other game writer I spoke to who had tested the new TGS Rising demo observed the same experience.

Eventually, to my chagrin, I had to give up midway through the demo because a simultaneous encounter with two Metal Gear Gekko mechs proved to be too difficult to overcome. In the time it took to take down the first, the second would circle around and stomp me. Even using Raiden's gruesome energy replenishment skill -- which sees him enter the blade equivalent of bullet time, mince a bad guy, and finish with a QTE that allows him to absorb his victim's health -- couldn't keep me alive long enough to finish off both Gekkos and the soldiers accompanying them. The one person I spoke to who made it to the demo's end managed to perform a stealth kill on one Gekko, freeing him to take on the second solo, a tough but doable challenge.

As it turns out, we were all doing it wrong. Raiden doesn't have a simple defensive technique. Instead, his survival requires finesse. When fighting foes like a Gekko, it's nearly impossible to dash away from an attack move; Rising's AI doesn't aim at where you were when it began its wind-up and revealed its tell but rather where you are when the actual attack begins. For something like a Gekko, which attacks with limbs longer than Raiden is tall (and which appear to distend like rubber for extra length when striking), that makes for alarmingly accurate attacks that almost always connect. He can't roll, and he can't simply hunker down and soak it up. Instead, a Konami representative told me later as I lamented my lack of skill, Raiden's survival depends entirely on the player's ability to parry.

Defending against enemy attacks in Rising is a matter of timing. You block attacks by pressing up and attack the instant an enemy begins to strike at you -- no sooner, no later. Handily, they flash orange as a tell, but the window of opportunity is small and unforgiving. But it works. I went back to Rising's TGS booth to watch other gamers play (the lines were entirely too long to wait for a second hands-on trial for myself), and the handful of action savants with whom Raiden's play style clicked showed how Rising is meant to be played: Aggressively, yet precisely, with an eye always on the lookout for enemy attacks and the self-control not to get so caught up in button-mashing that you leave yourself open to hits.

In practice, Rising's defensive technique reminds me a lot of Street Fighter III: Third Strike's parries, albeit not so finicky they require players to function at a frame-by-frame level of precision. There's a touch of Team Ninja about the feature, too, as it works somewhat like Ryu's counter-attacks in Ninja Gaiden or Samus' dodge in Metroid: Other M. The difference is that mastering Raiden's parries appears to be the only way to survive in Rising.

The Rising E3 demo left me feeling somewhat ambivalent due to its extremely low difficulty; for a game focused so heavily on action, the lack of challenge on display seemed like the makings of a pretty boring game. Clearly, though, Platinum has re-tuned Rising with the intent of giving players a set of daunting obstacles to overcome: The double-Gekko encounter took place in what clearly represents the first proper chapter of the game following its prologue (in which, I gather, Raiden ends up getting savagely brutalized by an enemy, hence his transformation into a more advanced cyborg with a missing eye). That suggests it only gets worse from here... and the title screen even featured two additional difficulty levels that were unavailable to play at TGS.

On top of that, it seems combat alone won't be the sole challenge to overcome in Rising. The second enemy encounter in the demo allowed me to approach a sort of courtyard from my choice of directions, as a pair of ground-based soldiers held a civilian hostage while another, armed with a rocket launched, stood on overwatch. I chose to take out the rocket trooper first, as he seemed to be the greater threat, but that allowed the other soldiers to execute the civilian before I could reach them. Clearly the need to protect innocents will factor into the game to up the stakes.

Even if my failure to fully understand Rising in the blur of TGS left me feeling uncertain at first, I can see where Platinum is going with the game. And, to be fair, the "cut everything" mechanic actually is kind of amazing. While you can't destroy level-boundary objects or most buildings, a surprising number of objects are susceptible to Raiden's blade. I actually found myself momentarily thwarted right at the start when I accidentally cut down a set of stairs attached to a platform leading into the first mission. After trying in vain to navigate the rocks at edges of the area, I decided to try cutting down the supports for the platform itself. The leading edge of the platform dropped to ground level as the supports splintered away, and I advanced into the game courtesy of a makeshift ramp.

Between the game's unapologetic difficulty level and the potential for emergent creativity with its sword mechanics, Platinum may have a real winner on their hands -- quite a turnaround for a game that seemingly lingered in development hell for years.