What Happened to Raiden? June 2, 2012

In 2001, after about twenty minutes of gameplay, players of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty were thrown a curve ball.  The game’s protagonist shifted from the series staple character, Solid Snake, the hero of Shadow Moses and probably one of the most popular main characters of all time, to a new, unknown character who was the polar opposite of Solid Snake, Raiden.

In the United States at least, this was met with a pretty critical backlash.  Raiden was nothing like Solid Snake.  He was inexperienced, younger, and his appearance was completely different.  He had acrobatic capabilities that Snake did not have, but he also had really long hair.  His hair was so long in fact that some people (players and NPCs alike) originally mistook him as a woman.

However, over the course of the game we learn Raiden was not a completely inexperienced solider.  He had a troubled past he had blocked out of his memory.  In fact we learn as a boy he was a child solider who served under George Sears, better known as Solidus Snake.  Solidus was the only perfect clone made of Big Boss and was the leader of the rogue group DEAD CELL, the villains in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.  By the end of the game, after defeating Solidus, Snake told Raiden he needed to find his own path.

In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the developers shifted the protagonist back to Snake.  Well, mostly, as the game was a prequel taking place thirty years before the events of the first Metal Gear Solid.  The character of Snake in that game was called Naked Snake.  While Naked Snake was identical in appearance and in voice actor to Solid Snake, it turned out he was Solid Snake’s father, Big Boss.  There were references to Raiden in the game, however.  With very little explanation you have the chance to wear a Raiden mask throughout the game if you choose to, in fact if you tell the game at launch you liked MGS2, Snake will wear that mask in the game’s opening cinematic.  You will also get the chance to wear it in a later scene in the game, as one of the top men working for the bad guys had Raiden’s appearance.

Then, in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Raiden returned, and he was a whole new person.  After the events of MGS2, it became clear that Raiden had upgraded himself in order to continue his fight.  Probably inspired by the sword given to him by Snake and Olga in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Raiden was now sporting a powered exoskeleton and a sword.  Very little about what had happened to him in the intervening years between the second and fourth game were told to the player, and we are mostly left to determine that for ourselves.

Metal Gear Solid Rising, when it was originally announced in 2009, was supposed to explain this story to us.  Powered by the FOX Engine by Konami, the game was designed to tell the story between MGS2 and MGS4 and explain the backstory about what happened to Raiden in the years between those two games.  Two years later, the game was re-revealed to the world as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.  It had a new engine, a new developer and a whole new story.  The game was now a sequel to MGS4, and would follow Raiden after the events of that game.

So what happened to him?  Konami released this video series that hopefully may shed some light on that.  Take a look for yourselves.

Is it just me or does that sound exactly like Solidus is talking in that last video?