Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Overview

Metal Gear Solid: Rising is the sixth game in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, and the eighth game in the overall Metal Gear series announced by Hideo Kojima at E3 on June 1, 2009. This is the first Metal Gear title to be made for the Xbox 360 console. The protagonist is Raiden, formerly the protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and a supporting character in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Hideo Kojima is set to produce the game, but unlike most other titles in the mainline Metal Gear series he is not the director. Kojima has said that this game will be created by some of his younger Metal Gear team staff. During production of this game, Kojima was busy writing and directing the PSP side story, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. It was announced on the Kojima Productions Report that the game will utilize a different engine than the one used in Guns of the Patriots.

Rising is all about slashing and cutting (as described by the Japanese symbol that the game is associated with), a step in a different direction from Metal Gear's usual stealth-action gameplay. The game's tagline is "Lightning Bolt Action", instead of the usual "Tactical Espionage Action." This is almost certainly a reference to the fact that Raiden is named after a Japanese thunder god. In Rising, you take control of Raiden as he fights against PMCs (possibly the same PMCs that Old Snake fought in MGS4). The game has you using Raiden's sword to eviscerate your enemies, and lets you slow down time to make incredibly precise slashes, allowing the player to rotate a 'cutting plane' to show which way he'll swing his sword; Raiden is so skilled that he can cut through nearly anything at any angle, giving the player free reign over what to cut and when.

Kojima Productions released a new picture of Raiden, with a different appearance than he had in MGS 4, most notably now with blue eyes and and a slightly different skin tone.

E3 2010

After a year long silence, Metal Gear Solid: Rising was shown at Microsoft's press conference. Hideo Kojima came on stage and then "passed the torch" to Rising's producer, Shigenbu Matsuyama. He then explains that the game is based on "Zan-Datsu". In Japanese, "Zan" means "to cut" and "Datsu" means "to take". Then a trailer was shown. The first part of the trailer showed Raiden infiltrating an enemy base and cutting a rather beefy cybernetic enemy to shreds, apparently absorbing energy of some kind from a dismembered segment of one of the robot's two spines. Then the trailer showed actual gameplay footage, in which the player takes control of Raiden and fights through a village similar to the one found in chapter two of Metal Gear Solid 4. The gameplay from the trailer suggests that Rising isfar more focused more on action, combat, and melee than the previous Metal Gear Solid games. Also, from the trailer, it looks like the player will be able to control how Raiden uses his sword in different ways, ranging from gorily and efficiently dismembering his opponents to benignly chopping a watermelon (a reference to the famous scene from MGS 4 in which a Gekko confuses a box full of watermelons for Old Snake) into bite-sized slices.