I played through this game one other time back in 2017 (I had originally found it while looking for games similar to
Dante's Inferno, which wasn't available on PC outside of emulators at the time; it has since been released on PC a couple years ago so maybe I'll have to pick that up and give it a revisit as well). I had beat the game once and then never revisited it; it was a fun little way to kill a few hours but the almost comically edgy aesthetic of the game wasn't super appealing to me (Just look at the name. Apparently naming it
Metal Gear Rising: Revenge or
Metal Gear Rising: Vengeance wouldn't have been edgy enough, Kojima needed to invent a whole new word for even more edge factor).
Anyways, I was looking through games in my Steam library trying to decide what to play and I stumbled across it and decided to give it another shot. I noticed there's an achievement for completing the game on the hardest difficulty with an S-Rank score in every fight (usually meaning you can't take damage at all, and may need to do some additional nonsense in some of the later fights) and decided to go for that; it seemed like a reasonable challenge. So I loaded up the game and immediately ran into a problem. On the console versions of you game, you can unlock the hardest difficulty modes by inputting the Konami code on the start menu. On PC, you can't do that without a controller (which I don't own). You need to beat the game on Hard to unlock Very Hard, then on Very Hard to unlock Revengeance. So I had the beat the game twice before I could even start trying to go for that achievement.
So a few hours and two runs of the game later and I could start my challenge, and I immediately ran into another problem; my own total lack of knowledge about this game. While you can brute-force everything on the other difficulty modes as taking damage matters significantly less, on the hardest mode nearly everything one or two-shots you, and I needed to not take damage to get S-Rank scores anyways. I spent about half an hour on the second set of enemies in the tutorial mission, trying to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to kill 2 robotic railgun dogs and a rocket cyborg without taking damage while all my equipment and upgrades are unavailable, including my ability to dodge (yes, dodging is an ability you have to unlock in this game, despite being necessary to beat some enemies without taking damage), before eventually realizing that that this fight isn't even scored and I don't
have to worry about taking damage. Well, except for the attacks that flat out one-shot me, which includes most of the railgun dog's arsenal. Then I spent another half an hour or so remembering how to actually play the game against the first phase of the boss fight (it took me a very long time to remember I can parry his charge attack, during which I had to restart multiple times due to trying to slide away from it and getting hit at least half the time).
The next few levels were pure suffering as well. At the end of the second level, you have to fight two GRADs, large mech-like robots that literally skate around the arena and love to spam rocket attacks that deal splash damage and can't be blocked. This is the first fight that felt like a whole lot of luck to me. I had to do my best and try and keep one of the GRADs in between me and the other GRAD, and pray that while I was attacking it, the other GRAD wouldn't decide to swing off to the side and start spamming rockets at me or there wasn't really much I could do about it. The third level sees even more obnoxious mechanics, including my first fight against what would come to be my most despised enemy type in this game; Sliders. These are basically flying bat-like robots with machine guns and rockets. Usually they fly out of reach of your attacks, waiting for the most inopportune moment to start shooting you in the back as you deal with another enemy, or fire homing missiles at you. When there's multiple of them, jumping up to attack one is risky as it's likely one of the others will attack you mid-air, during which you are completely vulnerable to all of their attacks. They don't even deal much damage, but them hitting you at all is usually enough to cost you a S-Rank score.
At the end of the third level is the boss Monsoon, and holy damn did he take me for a ride. Monsoon alone forced me to actually learn how to play the game properly and parry rapid attacks from every angle. It must have taken me nearly a hundred attempts (I'm not even exaggerating), but by the end of it I had that fight nearly down to a science. I figured out one huge and yet subtle thing I was doing wrong near the end that had probably cost me dozens of runs previously; Monsoon has an attack where he magnetically picks up a bunch of APCs and helicopters and throws them at you, which you need to cut. The amount he throws increases each time he uses it. The first three times, it's no big deal, but during the fourth and beyond, he throws so many things at you that cutting them all is genuinely difficult and inconsistent and you usually get hit. Well, it turns out you can deny him the opportunity to even use the fourth throw by being very careful with how much damage you deal to him after the third, then using a big burst of damage from the pincer blades weapon to bring him straight to the threshold that triggers the end of the fight, skipping the fourth throw entirely. It's a good thing I figured this out, because I actually had to redo this entire freaking level as I had gotten an A-Rank instead of a S-Rank score in a previous fight and not even noticed. The second time I fought Monsoon I didn't have nearly as much trouble.
The fourth level wasn't super bad in comparison (there's one annoying sequence at the beginning when you have to hold back an onslaught of various enemies using a turret, but it's one of the few sequences where you can actually take damage and still get an S-Rank score so it's not so bad) but I ended up having to redo it again, because it turns out killing Sundowner without taking damage isn't enough to earn a S-Rank score. You also need to either farm a high hit combo score, or let him use the attack where he jumps to the side of the arena and starts casually swinging a 30-meter long light pole around (this game sometimes...) and glory kill one of the cyborgs that spawns before he does it for you with the light pole. Either I got lucky or that second part isn't actually as difficult as it sounds, but I did manage to get it pretty quickly the second time around.
The next level is practically a freebie. There's one semi-annoying fight involving 4 inaccessible rocket enemies that you need to force to jump down off the balconies they're on, but that one didn't give me too much of a headache. I was practically inoculated against stupid frustrating BS at this point, after enduring the Monsoon boss fight. Well, so I thought. Up next was the fight against Jetstream Sam, and this one was a learning experience. I started out getting absolutely destroyed on pretty much every attempt. Like Monsoon, Sam attacks you with rapid attacks from every angle, but you often have even less time to react accordingly. He has a few attacks that outright can't be parried and you must dodge, and when he runs behind you and attacks you from the back, sometimes the camera angle decides to follow him in the most inopportune way possible, and you must switch from parrying to the back to parrying to the front at exactly the right moment or he will hit you. But after about an hour and much blood, sweat, and tears, I finally beat him without taking damage. And got an A-Rank. It turns out that in order to get an S-Rank in this fight, I need to do that
and pick up a couple of the healing pastes that spawn around the arena in boxes, which are ordinarily useless to me as I can't take damage anyways or I lose the S-Rank score. So yeah, that's 3 bosses in a row that I've had to do twice now. Good thing I'll learn from that and not make that mistake against the final boss, right?
So most of the final level doesn't actually give you a rank, and it's honestly not very difficult anyways in comparison to some of the BS we've already faced. This is a good thing, because the first time I fought Metal Gear EXCELSIUS, guess what? I got an A-Rank. Again, taking no damage isn't enough to get an S-Rank score. I have to do that
and farm hit combos against the boss while he's stunned
and glory kill at least one of the... uh... chicken bull tank robot... things... he spawns during the plasma beam attack (while not taking damage from the beam itself, which involves a bit of luck). I knew that it felt a bit easy when I did it the first time. Anyways, a level restart and a few more attempts later and I managed to get past that part, and ran straight into the next brick wall. In between the EXCELSIUS fight and the final battle with Donald Trum- I mean senator Armstrong (that joke is a bit mean in my opinion; Armstrong is way more likeable than Trump), you are treated to a couple sequences where you fight him on top of the wrecked metal gear. The first one isn't anything special, but holy god damn, the second "fight"...
So, between the two sequences, Armstrong catches your mall ninja sword and snaps it like the cheap piece of chinesium it is, so you don't actually have a weapon during the second part of the fight. This means you can't really parry his attacks; you can, but doing so still causes you to take some damage, which denies you a no-damage score. But in order to advance to the next stage normally, you
have to take at least one attack. Or is there another way...? It turns out, there is. Instead of fighting him or blocking his attacks, you can run around dodging his attacks for two and a half minutes, which will cause him to use a special fire blast attack that doesn't actually damage you, but triggers the transition to the next phase, preserving your no-damage bonus. The problem is, this is easier said than done. It would be frustrating enough normally, as the camera angle on top of EXCELSIUS seems determined to screw you over (there's a couple places where, if you walk near the edge of the arena, the game decides you'd rather look at all the pretty scenery off to the side of the map instead of the deranged psycho trying to juice your face with his fists), but he has one attack that makes it way harder.
I call it his supersonic kick. Basically, he crouches down for a moment, then freaking flies at you at the speed of sound to kick you into another dimension. A normal dodge doesn't work on this attack, you need to specifically dodge backwards, and you have to react to the crouch animation before he uses it as there isn't enough time to dodge it once he's already moving. He also uses that crouch before other attacks, so you need to treat pretty much every attack as a potential supersonic kick incoming. To make matters even worse, the stagger recovery he goes through after missing certain other attacks can sometimes override the crouch animation that telegraphs this attack potentially incoming, and you are basically 100% screwed if you don't predict this happening. Add this to the fact that there's no timer telling you exactly how long left you need to survive and this is a very frustrating experience indeed.
Finally, though, we get to the final battle and it... wasn't actually that difficult. I don't know if it's because I improved so much at this game between Monsoon utterly destroying me over and over and over again and getting to this fight, or just because Armstrong attacks with slow, powerful attacks that are dangerous if you don't avoid them but quite easy to block or dodge, but it took me about 5 attempts to beat this last phase. I even picked up all the useless nanopastes and farmed some hit combo score on him while he was staggered, figuring it might matter for getting an S-Rank score, and it turns out it did.
So anyways, this game was actually quite fun with the added challenge of basically not being able to take damage ever. It can be difficult and frustrating and some fights feel downright unfair, but for anyone accustomed to similar challenges it might be a good way to kill some time. The game in general is honestly not bad, I'd give it a solid 7/10. The plot is a bit out there, the characters are a little generic, the action sequences and cutscenes have an absurd anime-esque disregard for the laws of physics in favor of dumb action scenes (if you're not a big fan of bare-handedly flipping 500 ton robots and dueling them with a blade the size of a skyscraper, this game will probably give you a brain aneursym; maybe stick to Mount & Blade or Kingdom Come or something), and this game has more edge than a razor blade factory. However, it's also got some unintentionally hilarious moments, like when Monsoon decides to monologue about memes, or when Armstrong reveals where Donald Trump got his campaign slogan.
The music is also absolutely on point. I'm a bit biased, being a metalhead/hard rock lover myself, but it's legitimately the only game I can think of where the soundtracks both have lyrics and perfectly fit the scenarios they're used in.
This track in particular is something I would actually listen to out of context, like god damn. I once heard someone describe this game as a $30 heavy metal album that comes with a free game, and that's pretty accurate.
The game play is enjoyable enough. It's a pretty simple hack n' slash at the core and on the main difficulty modes you can honestly get away with just spamming attacks while walking in the general direction of your enemies, but if you want to successfully complete fights without taking damage you really need to learn the combat system, dodge/counter timing, when it's safe to attack enemies and get some damage in, etc., so there's definitely a skill curve, even if the difficulty system kind of buries it.
All in all, worth the money in my opinion.