There was a lot of excitement surrounding the announcement of Metal Gear Solid: Rising at this year’s E3. With practically no concrete details about the game coming from the announcement—besides the fact that it will be the first Metal Gear game on the Xbox 360—message boards and blogs started blowing up with ideas surrounding what this game is all about. To report on all these speculations I searched high and low, digging though console war disputes and half-baked theories to bring you, fine reader, the skinny on what could be happening with Metal Gear Solid: Rising.
Rumor 1: Metal Gear Solid: Rising will be a Devil May Cry-type action game - I’m not exactly sure where this rumor comes from, but it seems to be one of the most agreed upon assumptions about Kojima’s latest chapter in the critically acclaimed, stealth action series. Of course, the trailer does replace the traditional tagline of ‘Tactical Espionage Action’ with ‘Lightning Bolt Action,’ and Raiden’s character in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots shows him kicking butt ninja-style, but definitive evidence pointing to a ‘Raiden Gaiden’ type game is nowhere to be found. Still though, the almost completely widespread acceptance of this rumor is enough to think it is relatively plausible. Plausibility: 70%
Rumor 2: The game will take place before or during the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - This rumor seems pretty reasonable, especially considering the glimpse of Raiden’s ninja suit in the teaser trailer shown at Microsoft’s press conference. With an incomplete, robotic-looking jaw and upper-body, some say that Raiden looks like he is in a more prototypical stage of his transformation into the cyborg ninja you see in MGS 4. Also, Hideo Kojima himself stated that MGS 4 would be the last game in the series. Then again, he said the same thing for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. A few have even proposed theories that the game will take place before the first game, but these are few are in the extreme minority. My guess is that Rising will cover some of the back-story and a lot of the main plot of MGS4, but from Raiden’s perspective so that non-PS3 owning 360 users could get something out of the story without having to have played/know the plot of MGS 4. Plausibility: 55%
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