It's week six of the Metal Gear Solid 4 Character Countdown! A month and a half has just flown by and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is so close we can almost smell it. We've gone through such saga icons as Liquid Ocelot, Vamp, Otacon, Roy Campbell, and the women of Metal Gear in the last few outings, and this week, we've got a special treat for all of you.

Some of you may love him, those with a distaste for the androgynous may hate him, but there's no denying that he'll be crashing through MGS4's gates in a big way. To punctuate all the clamor we've received about him during the past weeks, here's the hero of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Raiden!

Character history: Raiden, whose original nationality and ethnicity is unknown, was a former child soldier in the Small Boys Unit formed and trained by Solidus Snake during the Liberian Civil War of the early 90s. He was orphaned during the conflict and was taken in by the villain as an adopted son of sorts.

Jack - that's Raiden's real name, btw - showed tremendous talent in learning the ways of the warrior, acquiring assassination skills far faster than his peers. It was revealed that he got to the point where he was taking out adult soldiers by the dozens every day, earning him such nicknames as "White Devil" and "Jack the Ripper." After the chaos of the war, he was taken by The Patriots to the USA where he eventually got his citizenship and joined the military.

Raiden was eventually taken in by the Army's Force XXI regiment, where he was immersed in the cutting edge of military training and technology. It was talked about in Codec conversations that he went flawlessly through Solid Snake's past missions in VR, prepping him up for a master plan by The Patriots.

Raiden was later assigned to become part of a reinstated FOXHOUND Unit where he was appointed the title of Snake. It was also during this time that he met his love interest Rose, who was revealed pregnant in the ending cinematic of MGS2.

The events between Raiden's FOXHOUND training and his entry into the Big Shell part of MGS2 are unchronicled. What we do know is that Revolver Ocelot and The Patriots put together an elaborate plot to simulate the events of Shadow Moses in order to gauge the efficiency of their S3 (Selection for Societal Sanity) program.

Raiden entered the Big Shell under orders from a man whom he communicates with via codec and refers to as "the Colonel." It's in this entry that he was given his code name, and the other one, Snake, is discarded. Raiden is given some tall orders for objectives: Rescue President James Johnson and deal with his terrorist captors if necessary.

Things, however, were not as straightforward as they first seemed to be. Not only are Dead Cell members Fatman, Vamp, and Fortune a handful to deal with, they were later revealed to be under the direct orders of Solidus himself. To complicate matters, it was revealed that Johnson himself had his own agenda, while Ocelot and Olga were sent in by the Patriots to make sure everything went according to plan.

It's also here in the Big Shell that Raiden met MGS hero Solid Snake who was under the disguise of Iroquois Pliskin of the US Navy SEALS. With Snake's help, Raiden survives the ordeal and finds the one man in that structure whom he can trust.

Things came to a head as The Patriots gradually revealed themselves to Raiden. It was here that the hero was told that he was nothing more than a weapon to them. Case in point is his codename Raiden and his "real" name Jack. The codename was taken from that of a Japanese World War II naval interceptor, which the Western world nicknamed "Jack."

Even with Raiden's full knowledge of what was happening, The Patriots still had enough bargaining chips to manipulate him. Using Olga Gurlukuvich's child as a remote hostage, they were able to convince Raiden to live on and dispose of their enemy Solidus.

The Patriots ultimately succeeded in that objective, recreating the events of Outer Heaven where Solid Snake disposed of his genetic father Big Boss. Raiden was able to take out Solidus in a katana battle which was unprecedented in the series.

The only hitch in the Big Shell incident for The Patriots was the unexpected takeover of Liquid Snake in Ocelot's body. Just as Ocelot was about to kill the characters involved in the finale, Liquid dominated the battle of the psyches and fled the scene in search of the Patriots whom he intends to kill.

After the Big Shell incident, Raiden found himself confused by everything that went on in the past hours. Left with nothing more to believe, he questioned his identity and purpose. Fortunately, Solid Snake and Rose were there to talk some sense into him. You can see all that and more in the video below:

Post MGS2 appearances

It's no secret that Raiden drew mixed reactions in his takeover of the MGS2 spotlight from the rugged Solid Snake. While series creator Hideo Kojima and company aimed at appeasing the female demographic with the "beautiful man" model, the masculine side didn't take it quite as well. How Kojima Productions reacted to the jeers, however, was a class act.

Instead of going to the defensive, the devs joined in and made fun of Raiden, too. A spoof version of him was inserted in MGS3: Snake Eater in the person of Ivan Raidenovich Raikov who apparently was Colonel Volgin's lover. In MGS3: Subsistence, another Raiden parody was shown off to promote the upcoming MGS4. The video was titled Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser and it featured him going back to the past in an attempt to assassinate Big Boss and take over the lead role in the next game.

Raiden was also featured in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops +  as one of three special characters in the expansion. In this cameo, he still donned his MGS2 Skull Suit and ran some missions on the PSP.

On the more serious side of things, Raiden looks to be one of MGS4's biggest draws. Trailers of the game have revealed him to be the new Cyborg Ninja, and he kicks some serious butt as seen in E3 trailers of the game.

In E3 2006, he was seen single-handedly battling a gang of GEKKO Metal Gears. While even Solid Snake had to resort to escape when faced with these mini-monsters, Raiden took them out with ease using his high-frequency blade.

It's in this trailer that we all noticed Raiden having almost all his body parts replaced with bionic prosthetics. According to lead character designer Yoji Shinkawa, Raiden went through a traumatic experience that resulted in the transformation. The only parts that remain human in him are apparently his head and spine, with the rest being cybernetic and endowing him with superhuman abilities.

In E3 of 2007, we saw Raiden squaring off against Vamp in a battle of two super fighters. In this highly stylized fight, Raiden is seen as more than capable of holding his own now against the vampiric villain. This is a stark contrast to their first fight in MGS2 where Vamp almost disposed of Raiden if it wasn't for Solid Snake's rescue.

The climax of the Raiden-Vamp battle has to be when Vamp grabbed the Cybernetic Raiden in a chokehold. Instead of struggling, Raiden stabbed himself with his own katana and the blade went right through to Vamp. In a later trailer, Old Snake is seen holding a ravaged Raiden while he coughs up white blood.

For those of you who don't know, Raiden is so pale in MGS4 because his human blood was replaced with the white fluid. The move by Konami to integrate the Raiden and Cyborg Ninja characters has been seen as an attempt to win back the male fans who were turned off with Raiden by making him look cooler and manlier than before. In the second part of the video below, you'll see what we mean:

Some quick thoughts

• Kojima Productions seems to be roadmapping Raiden as the next Gray Fox. This has been pretty obvious not only because of the Cyborg Ninja parallelism, but because their childhood backgrounds have been made similar. Both were child assassins before and both were taken in by villain father figures.
• We're not sure if you noticed, but the headpiece of Raiden's ninja suit bears the Tokugawa Heavy mark. This is the same company behind Gray Fox's exoskeleton in the first MGS.
• We've established a correlation between Gray Fox and Raiden, but are they linked in some way to MGS3's Major Zero? Null happens to be Gray Fox's old codename, and zero is a synonym for null. That said, how about the Raiden fighters of Japan in WWII? They were loosely referred to as "zero fighters" because of their rising sun marking. Could Raiden be connected to Big Boss's old officer?
• How about the fact that "the man with the same codename as Null" is an Ocelot ally and a Patriots member? Could Raiden be involved with them more directly? He does have nanomachines with their traces in it inside his body, and The Patriots are the faction letting loose all the Cyborg Ninjas.
• Olga's child has appeared and it's a girl. We all know that Raiden and her nanomachines are connected. If Raiden dies, the nanomachines will kill the girl. Will this mean Raiden will ultimately live on? We'll see.

Originally posted May 24, 2008 at 09:05AM