Get Technical With New Metal Gear Rising Concept Art

Platinum Games' artists Kenichirou Yoshimura and Cho took to the company's blog to detail a bit of the process in creating two of Metal Gear Rising: Revenegeance's bosses.

The Metal Gear franchise has been home to some of the most dynamic and creative characters in video games, and designing a whole new set of people to follow the line frequent Kojima Productions concept artist Yoji Shinkawa established was no doubt a daunting task for Platinum Games. In fact, it was so demanding, Kenichirou Yoshimura actually put off a move to freelancing to stay on with the company to help with Revengeance.

According to his post detailing the creation of Sam, Yoshimura was motivated to stay on with Platinum because of how far other artists had deviated from Shinkawa's influence. "Three days before I was about to leave Platinum to go freelance, without much left to do, I strolled over to the nearby Rising team to see if they needed any help," Yoshimura said. "'I could design something small, if you wanted,' I said. Then I saw their designs – the art style could not have been further from the Metal Gear universe. Immediately, I slammed my fist on the director’s table. 'You cannot put this in a Metal Gear game!' I told him. Before I knew it, my last three days at Platinum turned into over half a year."

Cho's post wasn't quite as telling, but still revealed plenty about what it takes to follow in the footsteps of arguably one of the most revered and respected artists working in the industry today. Mistral, one of the bosses Cho was responsible for, definitely has all the hallmarks of what you'd expect from a Metal Gear villain, and should be quite awesome to behold in the final game.

We've included a small sampling of each artist's work below, but you can view even more at the above links.