After playing through over three levels in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Siliconera sat down with Atsushi Inaba, Producer at PlatinumGames, and Yuji Korekado, Creative Producer at Kojima Productions. We asked the team about the game’s defensive system, the no-kill mode, and what they want to with Raiden after Rising.
In Bayonetta, the main way to evade enemy attacks is to dodge. Why did you want to make parrying the central defense mechanic for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance?
Atsushi Inaba, Producer at PlatinumGames: The core concept behind the character in Rising is that Raiden is always moving forward. We don’t want him hiding, dodging attacks, or rolling away. We always want him to meet attacks head on and move into a combo. Even if he’s running towards enemies he is getting rid of bullets, even getting hit by them, but he is always moving forward. As a character, we didn’t want him to move back on anything. It was because of this direction of the character we went with this game design.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance seems to have Kojima Productions style humor. There’s a scene in Denver where you turn around while a boss is lecturing Raiden about war and a soldier is petting a cat and there are those 3D cubes which reference the girly magazines from other MGS games.
Yuji Korekado, Creative Producer at Kojima Productions: You might think that it’s very Kojima Productions-esque, but all of the humor came out of PlatinumGames. We collaborated with them, but it usually came forth from their team. My favorite gag, you might have seen it in the realtime demo, where Raiden tries to put in a USB drive. [Laughs]
AI: If you’re talking about some of the items maybe you have to look around and find, I like the one in the Monsoon battle that you just talked about where the enemy is petting the cat. [Laughs.] Also, in the first scene where you land on the beach there is a cat there, but you can’t cut it. No matter what, the cat dodges Raiden’s attacks.
If you’re talking about cutscenes, there is a part in Mexico where Raiden thinks he’s completely blended in wearing a pancho and mariachi style outfit. [Laughs.] Raiden pretty much thinks nobody thinks he’s a cyborg and he’s in stealth mode. The fact that everyone is focused on him and Raiden thinks he’s totally blended in is the kind of ironic humor I like.
Speaking of stealth, Raiden can also sneak behind enemies to take them down and hide in cardboard boxes. That’s quite different from the concept of always moving forward, which you talked about earlier. Was it difficult to design levels for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance with two different play styles – stealth and action?
AI: The concept moving Raiden forward was the core design, but we wanted to give players options. We didn’t want players to say this game is only cutting, it could get dull after awhile. At PlatinumGames, when we were thinking about level design we wanted to give players an option if you go down this street you’re going to run into cyborgs and there will be heavy action with Raiden cutting them up. But, if you go this way you might be able to do stealth kills.
There are a lot of options per stage and there are things you can receive, items and whatnot, deepening on what route you go through. That adds replay value and we’re proud of that, as well. The path you take doesn’t matter, but in the end we hope our design offers a lot of play styles and will add to the value of the entire game.
Speaking of cutting down cyborgs, Raiden seems rather conflicted about his role and the "Ripper" inside of him later in the game. I remember you mentioned a "no-kill" mode too where Raiden can use a wooden sword. Can you tell us more about this?
AI: There isn’t any message behind the wooden sword. It’s just another item for players to use and add value for replays. It’s a different play style and adding options is always great for an action game, so we thought it would be great to add this too.
YK: There is a story when you play through Rising, but the story of Raiden turning into Jack the Ripper doesn’t change if you use different weapons. Moving Raiden forward is the root of the game, so we wanted to add the no-kill mode as additional gameplay mode for players.
When developing Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance how did your view of Raiden, as a character, change and where do you see Raiden going in the future?
YK: In Rising, we got to see Raiden grow as a character and develop as a person. Beyond that, within the Metal Gear universe there are a lot of characters and stories. Within that we were able to show the value of the universe and expand on it. We were able to prove we can create branches to explain more deep stories within the universe.
AI: I really think I was able to see Raiden grow independently and strong as a character and as a man. To be part of that was an honor. Moving forward, if Kojima Productions feels that another Raiden game is needed I would love to be a part of making Raiden’s next growth.
Published: Dec 10, 2012 07:30 pm