The history leading up to this was dramatic for how the game turned out. PlatinumGames was on a roll since their departure from Clover Studios and Capcom. Bayonetta and Vanquish were such strong games, and Anarchy Reigns is a great time in multiplayer. I was also a long time Metal Gear fan who'd been looking forward to Metal Gear Solid: Rising when it was announced and shown off. It seemed like the best-case scenario for one of my favorite devs to let another of my favorite devs finish a game I was interested in.

All that goodwill aside, the actual game isn't very interesting. It was my "proper" introduction to Plat's B-team (Anarchy Reigns works because it's multiplayer and activities with your friends can really carry sometimes, but nothing else that wasn't Mikami or Kamiya directed). Saito's debut is essentially a game where you mash light-attack and parry. You have combos, but they don't seem to matter. They don't matter when going for S-ranks, they don't matter on Revengeance difficulty, they don't matter when S-ranking Revengeance difficulty. You just parry what's parry-able, and mash light-attack. The scoring-system does nothing to discourage this. I'd usually farm my combo-count by just slashing a bunch of times in blade-mode because everything else was a waste of time.

Something of note about me is that I have no appreciation for creativity in my action-games. I don't care about stringing together cancels and weapons and moves in the interest of making a combo that "looks" cool. I'm mostly looking for an enemy that's hard to fight.

The game gets an extra half-star for Jetstream Sam's DLC which I did find significantly more fun than Raiden's to play through.