I’m playing through Metal Gear Rising again and it’s just now really hitting me how effective the game’s aesthetics and naming conventions are. Even without bringing up the plot you can look at the logos and names of the game’s rival PMCs and derive everything you need to know about them in terms of how they’ll conflict. Look at the logos. Look at how simple and clean Maverick’s looks compared to the complexity of Desperado’s. Think about how the word ‘security consulting’ makes you feel and about how the word ‘enforcement’ makes you feel.
Just the names are enough. We have Maverick Security Consulting Inc. and then we have Desperado Enforcement LLC. There are no wasted words here. There’s no fluff, there’s no distractions. Every single thing about how these two corporations are named reflects on how they are portrayed in the game. It’s perfect to me.
Metal Gear Rising is a game about a maverick versus a band of desperadoes. What’s a maverick? Let’s look at the word’s etymology for a second. The name comes from Samuel Maverick. Samuel Maverick was a Texas rancher and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. His name, however, entered the English language because he refused to brand his cattle. This was seen as extremely eccentric. Samuel professed that he didn’t want to brand his cattle because he didn’t want to inflict pain on them. Rival ranchers, however, sometimes accused him of only saying that so he could collect unbranded cattle by automatically saying that they must be his (the inverse could also be true, however, as other ranchers could simply take Maverick’s cattle and brand them for themselves).
This all sounds a lot like Raiden to me. Samuel Maverick gained a reputation as a stubborn, independently-minded person. A maverick is an unorthodox freethinker and the word is usually used in a positive connotation. Both Raiden and Samuel Maverick claim they don’t want to inflict harm and are accused by others of something darker. Raiden wants his sword to be a ‘tool of justice’ and he wants to ‘protect the weak’, all while working for a PMC in a world in which they’re generally seen as simply opportunistic warmongers. Raiden fits the term ‘maverick’ to an absolute tee, as do the other members of MSC.
There’s another part to this though. ‘Maverick’ not only came to mean and independently-minded person, but also to the rancher’s unbranded calves themselves. Raiden, in an allegorical sense, can be seen as an ‘unbranded calf’ at the beginning of the game in comparison to, say, Jetstream Sam. The reason for Raiden’s defeat at the beginning of the game wasn’t simply a lack of a more advanced cyborg body, it was because of his lack of worldly experience and his lack of certainty and conviction in comparison to Sam. Sam, no surprise, also fits the term ‘Maverick’ in certain ways. He’s definitely an independent-thinker and he has a powerful influence over Raiden partly because of that.
Anyway, in opposition to this we have the word ‘desperado’. What’s a desperado? It’s sometimes used as a catch-all term for a bandit or a criminal but looking deeper into its etymology you can see how it truly describes the game’s antagonists. The word desperado, in its original usage, means a person who is driven to do reckless things because of despair. From overwhelming despair, a desperado commits dangerous acts. I don’t want to talk about every single member of Desperado so let me just bring up Mistral, a character who was driven to vengeance by the death of her family and then turned to life as a hired killer upon finding that she was both talented at it and had become hardened to its gruesomeness. She’s a desperado.
The words maverick and desperado perfectly encapsulate the core of the game’s struggle. Both mavericks are desperadoes are driven to do extreme, unorthodox, independently-minded things. The difference lies in their motivations, in what they’re fighting for. A maverick is a person who refuses to brand their cattle because they don’t want to inflict harm. A desperado is a person so overcome with despair that they are driven to recklessness and destruction. There’s the game’s conflict.
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