We’re not done celebrating Metal Gear Rising’s anniversary yet!
We’ve been giving away some goodies to our fans to celebrate MGR turning 1 year old (Congratulations to everyone who won!), but now it’s time to sit down and have a talk with the people behind the curtains.
First up, we got a message from Yuji Korekado (creative producer at Konami’s Kojima Productions)!

It’s been a whole year since the release of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. After being announced in 2009 as “Metal Gear Solid Rising,” it went through various ups and downs, before eventually being released as “Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance” thanks to the people at PlatinumGames.The goal of MGR was to create a new kind of Metal Gear game that, while still clearly inheriting the bloodline of the series, was more oriented at delivering exciting “cutting-edge” (haha) combat.Thanks to the support of all of our fans, we decided to release the “Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – Ultimate Edition” last year, with all of the DLC included in one neat little package. We’re very happy to know that, even now, new players are still discovering the MGR experience.

Another goal we had when we created this game was to get people to understand the potential of the Metal Gear franchise to give birth to completely new types of games in the series. I think MGR did a good job of making this point.

The development process saw frequent and heated (in the positive sense!) exchanges of opinions and brainstorming sessions between the staff at PlatinumGames, with director Kenji Saito at the forefront, and our staff at Kojima Productions. It proved a very educational experience for all of us.

In the year since its release, we’ve had a variety of feedback from the people who played MGR. Some of it was music to our ears, and some of it made us lose some hairs, but that in itself was an educational experience as well. We learned a lot of things that we will surely be able to use for our next game.

If you’ve only just started playing MGR, or if you’re thinking of picking up the game soon, rest assured that we’ve put lots of mechanisms in place to give the game a lot of replay value. And above all else, remember that MGR is a game that’s all about exciting combat, so if you ever find yourself frustrated by something, just pick up this game and slice the stress away!

I hope you like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and I hope you’ll continue to support the Metal Gear series in the future!

Yuji Korekado, Creative Producer at Kojima Productions

Konami Digital Entertainment

We asked our very own director Kenji Saito for some comments too!

Q: How do you feel when looking back on the past year?

Hey everyone! It’s director Kenji Saito. When we started producing MGR, I decided to cut my hair really short and shaving out some lines as an expression of determination, but nowadays it’s pretty much become my default hairdo.

Man, has it been a whole year!? Looking back (and this may be because it was my first job as a director), the entire process of deciding on how the system would work and how the game would play was just a long string of trial and error: creating and testing, creating and testing, over and over. I was buried under such a pile of work I thought I’d never be done (I didn’t even get to go to regular PlatinumGames events for two years straight…)

The thing I remember most is the Tokyo Game Show that was held in September of 2012. I got to watch a lot of people try out the game, which led me to rebalance the difficulty once again. I was even granted the chance to get on stage at the Konami booth (first time in my development life!), but I got so nervous that I just completely shut down, so it was a TGS full of humbling experiences for me.

Prior to the release, there were advertisements in magazines, on TV, and on internet media that were on a much larger scale than anything I had previously worked on, so I really felt the passion that Konami’s Kojima Production group puts into their promotions.

And after the release as well, I was touched to see how many players responded to us, and I learned a lot from all the feedback I got.

I still can’t believe it’s been a whole year since then…

Now that a year has passed, I’m sure there are lots of people who have already finished the game, but I hope you’ll still be picking up the game regularly, just to get that experience of being a cyborg ninja who goes around chopping enemy robots up into little pieces. I daresay there’s not many games that let you do that.

Never forget about “Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance,” everyone!

Q: As a fan of the Metal Gear series*, is there anything you’re looking forward to for “METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES” (released in March 2014)? Can you tell us what you were talking about with Korekado-san on Twitter the other day? (*Kenji Saito is a huge fan of the Metal Gear series 😉 )

To tell you the truth, I’ve been playing MGSV GZ ahead of everyone else. This game is another completely new Metal Gear experience. There’s a lot of things you can do and a lot of ways you can tackle the stages, so it’s made me even more excited about the upcoming “Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”!

Did you know that Raiden will make his appearance in a special mission called “Jamais Vu” on the Xbox One / Xbox 360®? The Raiden in “Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” is going to be a bit different from the one in MGR, and he’ll definitely be a sight to see!

Kenji Saito, director at PlatinumGames Inc.

Sorry everyone at Kojima Productions! We were just so excited about this game we couldn’t help ourselves! 😀