I've been having a ton of fun for the last 6 months or so as I make my way through the Metal Gear series for the first time. MGS 1 plays pretty well for such an old game, and I was absolutely blown away by the HD collection versions of 2 and 3. MGS4 was absolutely incredible as well, despite an ending that was a bit too long. Through the course of playing through MGS4 I came to a sudden and unexpected realization. One that many may be surprised about. Now I'm ready to admit it to the world.

I like Raiden more than I like Snake.

I totally like Snake, don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with him whatsoever. Raiden though, wow. I liked him just fine in MGS2. Sure he was a little bit of a whiner, but can you blame him with all the nonsense going on? His presence in MGS4 is nothing short of absolutely incredible from start to finish. So imagine my excitement to start playing Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where you play as MGS4 Raiden the entire time. On top of that, the gameplay looked is similar to the new DmC: Devil May Cry, which I loved. I was REALLY excited for this.

Unfortunately, I found myself not enjoying Revengeance as much as I had hoped. The story, and more importantly the spectacle, is certainly unique and has that signature Metal Gear craziness. It's just not presented in as cohesive and interesting a way. The main bad guy, or the guy I assumed was the main bad guy is completely uninteresting to me and feels really poorly imagined. He looks less like a murderous force and more like a drunk 45-year-old from your softball team that found a combat suit and decided to try it on. You fight him at one point in the game and he gets away, setting the stage for him to reappear in the final battle.......except he doesn't. That's the last you see of him. The actual end boss kind of just drops into the story out of nowhere near the end.

Some of that might be slightly inaccurate. I'm not 100% sure to be honest because I found the story in this game really boring. I didn't skip cut-scenes because I thought those were pretty well done, but I was starting to skip a lot of in-mission dialog by the end. It was just so slow and uninteresting, and really wasn't contributing to a compelling narrative. With most MGS games I care deeply about the story, but can't always figure out every detail. Revengeance is exactly the opposite. I'm able to understand it, I just don't really care.

I mentioned the gameplay as being similar to DmC and it is....sort of, but that's giving Revengeance too much credit. The key to the combat is definitely the parry mechanic. If you don't get very proficient at parrying very early in the game, you're going to be in for a great deal of trouble. This became very frustrating because parrying was very touchy and inconsistent. The timing and directions didn't work the way you expected, and attacks chaining multiple strikes were almost impossible to properly defend against. This all came to a head about 30 minutes into the game when you square off against a robot dog similar to Crying Wolf from MGS4. You've barely finished being tutorialized at this point, and you're thrown into a battle against a very fast enemy you MUST parry consistently to conquer.

A unique gameplay mechanic is the sword-time slow motion slashing. You manually control where you're slashing Raiden's sword with the analog sticks. It's pretty fun, but not when you need to do it quickly and with precision. The final battle features multiple such moments where screwing up results in an instant fail-state. Failing on a boss fight over and over again on what amounts to a poorly laid out quicktime event is really frustrating, especially when that quicktime event comes more than halfway through the fight, making you start all over again every time you mess up.

On the other hand, Revengeance is a game featuring Raiden kicking ass swiftly and consistently, and that's pretty great. The spectacle definitely reminds me of DmC, and I imagine it would remind me of Bayonetta if I had ever played Bayonetta. That's probably the best I can say about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance in general. I really like getting to play as a badass Raiden, and it makes me really want to pick up a WiiU to play Bayonetta, so I can see this sort of thing done properly.