By now I imagine most people know there's an unlockable sword that will allow you to beat your enemies into unconsciousness instead of brutally murdering them, but this thread isn't about that. It's about the non-lethal option available to you from the start of a new game, and it is, quite simply, just disarming your opponents (Or dislegging, or even both if you prefer) and then letting them retreat from battle using optic camouflage. They'll require you to back off a bit, or else they'll keep crawling and/or stumbling at you, but rest assured your enemies will get the hell out of there when they realize how screwed they are.

I've been doing it for a few chapters now, and it's a blast; the battles get far more technical when you're trying to avoid splitting everyone in half, aiming to land non-fatal injuries while you're being fired at by rockets and swarmed by vicious cyborgs and the like. It means that you've got to be very on the ball when it comes to your swings, constantly aware of where the enemies are, and you're going to be passing up on all those delicious healing organs tucked away in your enemies' midsections.

It's not all bad, however, because successfully no-killing a section of a level scores you points towards your battle ranking- roughly as many as you'd get for not taking damage, in fact. There's also a bonus applied at the end of a chapter, if you've managed to make it through without slaughtering anyone, and the Unmanned Gears (UGs, if you weren't using your codec) don't count- Slice them to bits and use them to heal yourself all you want.

I just thought I'd let people know that there's a non-lethal option available even without tracking down the Men In Boxes to claim your wooden sword. If the game is feeling a bit too easy for you, give this a shot- it's fun, and hey, maybe you'll feel better about yourself knowing that no lives were lost in your pursuit of an S Rank.

That sounds excellent. I imagine this requires a more finely applied use of Zan-dastu then playing for the combat alone. I'm still waiting for my copy of Rising to arrive but this sounds right up my alley, I swear I had more fun in the VR tutorial room than in the actual missions while playing the demo. I can't wait to give this a shot, Thanks man.

Interesting set of house rules there. I prefer to turn my enemies into chunks of dog food though, personally though.

@demoskinos: Well, it's not so much house rules as "I wanted to do a no-kill run and missed the same guy in a box on my first two runs through the game". So I decided to do it without the wooden sword, and it's actually pretty fun. There's something really cool about non-lethally winning a mission through the precision removal of body parts.

@reisz: It's not so bad to start with, but you have to really watch out when you decide to swing- nothing worse than removing someone's arm only to realize that the end of your swing hit the head of someone who you'd previously taken the legs off of. Or lining up a perfect shot to take someone's legs off and not realizing someone was closing in to the side... You've gotta be careful if you want to be a combat surgeon. And that's not even getting into the battles where guys decide to toss explosives around like crazy, or when you've got a mix of Unmanned Gears and Cyborg Troops.

@make_me_mad: Do even the larger UG's retreat? How's that gonna work with the wolves once you get some of them?

@demoskinos: The UGs won't retreat. They also don't count towards your "Human/cyborg Kills" number, which means you'll have situation where you'll have "Kills: 3" in the results and a shiny golden "NO KILLS" bonus right below that. They really should have used a different word to refer to the actual human/cyborg casualties... make it a "No Fatalities" bonus instead, maybe.

Essentially, when you're doing a no-kills run like this, the UGs and such are your source of health and energy so you can afford to keep non-fatally cutting down the rank and file Desperado cyborgs and/or robocops.

@make_me_mad: Oh really? The game actually doesn't count slicing up a UG as kill?

@demoskinos: It counts as a kill for scoring purposes, but not for "Hey you killed a person" purposes. Which the game keeps track of. I've heard unconfirmed reports of alternate dialogue at the end of the game if you can burn through it in 3 hours while also not killing anyone, anyone in this case translating to "Actual human people, be they converted to cyborgs or not".

Because UGs aren't people, at least until civil rights catches up with them.

But no seriously man they're robots.