In any creative marriage of this sort, it's important to understand what each party brings to the banquet. Bring the two outfits together into a single game and you're guaranteed a neologism. If Metal Gear neutralises its foe with a sleep dart fired from a darkened air vent slit, Platinum Games rides into the mess hall on an armoured stallion wielding a readied bazooka on each shoulder like a vision plucked from a Michael Bay cheese dream. If not the greatest Japanese developer at work today, Platinum is certainly the most creatively boisterous, hurling explosive titles such as Vanquish and Bayonetta out of the door to enthral players and disrupt rivals with their noise and muscle.

The Osaka-based Platinum Games – creators of Metal Gear Rising – by contrast, is a video game developer known principally for its swagger and volume. Sure, the tense scuttles past armed guards under a roomy cardboard box are usually followed by a soliloquy on the nature of contemporary warfare, but Metal Gear's quiddity was always to be found in its shadows. Hideo Kojima's long-running series has always been a game of military hide-and-seek: creeping in khaki, sneaking with silencers. The game is something of a novelty itself – a new kind of construct, one fashioned from a blend of alien ingredients.

I t is fitting, perhaps, that Metal Gear Rising should be subtitled with a neologism.

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