Sam calls him out on his bullshit before he’s even declared it “Your sword yearns to bathe in the blood of its enemies, but you hold it back!” Since he’s sold out his ‘justice’, the only thing Raiden really fights for is to be the prevailing power. This gets reflected in his theme ‘Rules of Nature’ which, as the name and the hook might imply, shows that Raiden sees conflict as a constant in the world and that his only choice is to prove his side as the strongest. Raiden adopts the ideology of his employers, believing that his side is always in the right regardless of what it is he’s actually doing, and that as long as he can prove that he’s the stronger then ‘his’ ideology will always be the right one. The problem with this is that, as an employee of Maverick, his ‘justice’ is open to the highest bidder, determined by powers outside his own. In his first encounter with his rival Jetstream Sam, Raiden describes his weapon as “a tool of justice” – not an actual sword per se but rather the necessity that he must live with in order to better the world as he sees fit. The only thing at stake is himself and his own body – parallel with the responsibility a player has in progressing the story of a character-focused video game by evading the possibilities of death and defeat. By Revengeance he has a life and a personality but he has to shelf it in order to participate – his son along with his wife, Rose, are delegated to being background characters who never appear, ensured safety in civilian life and kept separate from his duties as a private armed contractor. Raiden is specifically a video game hero – in his first appearance in MGS2 his entire purpose was to Do The Same As The Last Guy, he had no real personality to call his own, he was shackled to the control and identity of the player through his nametags. This switch in tone works extremely well in its favor – while MGS4 used Snake to question the legitimacy of heroic war narratives, Revengeance is focused heavily on the question of violence itself in a video-game context. While MGS4 was a far more sombre game, dealing with Snake at the end of his life fighting a war he had no choice but to fight, Revengeance is (as the incredible subtitle implies) near-infamously bombastic in the same way that many of PlatinumGames’ other developed titles are. Having fought his whole life, Raiden slips back into conflict under the employment of Maverick Security Counseling, hoping that he can use his abilities for good this time. Despite the fact that Metal Gear Solid 4 ends on a positive note, having ended the stranglehold of the Boss’ legacy over the world, Revengeance‘s post-Patriots world has become a much more libertarian dystopia, where in place of one overarching privatised military monopoly is an entire market of competing PMC forces, all vying for the attention of national governments and anyone with enough money. By the time we meet him for the third time in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, he has already tried to escape it twice once after the Big Shell incident in which he was thoroughly manipulated to act in the exact manner that Solid Snake before him had on Shadow Moses, and again after the Guns of the Patriots incident in which, after being converted into a cyborg, he was ostracized from civilian life due to his appearance and forced back into conflict. Raiden is a character for whom conflict seems to be impossible to escape.
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