LogFAQs > #895837289

6. Raiden (Metal Gear Solid series)

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"They -- they built us from the ground up, into killing machines... We were fed once a day. I can still taste the gunpowder they mixed into the food."

Raiden is kind of a schizophrenic character. He's gone through many changes over the years as the series has continually re-tooled him to fit the purposes of each new game. In Metal Gear Solid 2, he was a vehicle for the story, subverting the player's expectations of playing as the Legendary Solid Snake in order to further the game's narrative. Then people rebelled against the character, so in Metal Gear Solid 4 he was turned into a flippy cyborg ninja trying really hard to be stoically cool and spouting off awful/amazing one-liners. Then Platinum took the reins with Metal Gear Rising and changed Raiden again to better fit that game's atmosphere of fun, high-energy action, making him into a more lighthearted, sarcastic version of his MGS4 self...who is also trying not to go crazy with gleeful bloodlust. Yeah. Considering how jerked around Raiden is both in-game and out-of-game, it's amazing that it all comes together to make a great of a character as he is.

My favorite 'version' of Raiden will always be his MGS2 incarnation. It's the one I first got really attached to. While I can understand why Raiden on release would have pissed people off - the degree to which they hid him from the marketing was frankly impressive - but I played MGS2 well after the fact and knew that he would be kicking Solid Snake to the curb fairly soon into the game, so the twist didn't bother me. If anything, I was looking forward to what Raiden was going to be like. What kind of director would sideline their iconic, beloved mascot/protagonist of their series in favor of a character that probably wasn't going to go over well with their established fanbase?

Kojima's given a lot of varying reasons for why he made Raiden the way he did, but one of the more consistent ones is that he wanted Raiden to be more a player surrogate than Solid Snake, which is supported by how you get to type in your own name at the beginning of MGS2. On that front - at least for me - he failed. I never viewed Raiden as being any more similar to me than Solid Snake was, and not because I thought he was lame like a lot of people did on-release. Raiden interested me from the start as own person from the moment he changed his codename away from Snake. His conversations with Campbell were stiff and far too formal, even when taking into consideration that he lacked the same relationship with Campbell that Snake did in MGS1. He was described as a rookie with nothing but VR training under his belt but clearly knew what he was doing, outpacing elite troops and even Snake himself at times. His relationship with Rose was corny but actually kind of sweet and gave Raiden something to live for outside of the mission. And while there were some iffy lines like "Did you say nerd?" and "We've MANAGED to avoid DROWNING!", I though Quinton Flynn did an excellent job portraying him. Raiden was different, and Raiden wasn't Snake, but that was okay. Raiden just had to be Raiden.
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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.