The Stranger (Furi) vs Jetstream Sam (Metal Gear Rising)

[Agent Z]

Who wins this?

[BitVyper]

Sam destroys him. This is one of those situations where my feelings run counter to what's actually going to happen. Like the Stranger is supposed to be a walking apocalypse that a seemingly *very* advanced Earth couldn't kill and only just barely managed to contain (for awhile), but his feats are mostly against things that aren't easily gauged and lacking compared to Sam's even then (and he spends most of the game in a prison designed not to die just from being around him). I think if I stretched, I could probably make a case for him being bullet time, and that's just nowhere close to being in range of MGR guys.

[Nik Hasta]

Sam destroys him. This is one of those situations where my feelings run counter to what's actually going to happen. Like the Stranger is supposed to be a walking apocalypse that a seemingly *very* advanced Earth couldn't kill and only just barely managed to contain (for awhile), but his feats are mostly against things that aren't easily gauged and lacking compared to Sam's even then (and he spends most of the game in a prison designed not to die just from being around him). I think if I stretched, I could probably make a case for him being bullet time, and that's just nowhere close to being in range of MGR guys.

Basically my take as well. I never beat Furi but his feats from what I played just weren't that high end.

Certainly not on Sam's level.

[BitVyper]

Basically my take as well. I never beat Furi but his feats from what I played just weren't that high end.

Certainly not on Sam's level.

For my part, I got to The Song, got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, it had given me a nonstandard game over and reset all my progress (happens if you stand in her garden for a couple minutes), so that was enough for me.

He has SOME stuff going for him, and like we know that he has an *extremely* toxifying passive effect on the world around him, enough that one of the early bosses is a horrible mutant in a cartoon-level toxic waste dump that's supposed to resemble what he did to the world by like, standing there. We see toward the end that the real landscape starts to die pretty much instantly for a few metres around him. But yeah nothing that stops Sam from instantly bisecting him.

Re-examining his speed, just because I'm thinking about it now, he dodges a shot from The Burst's rifle. He starts moving after it's fired, but he very clearly starts reacting before. While her rifle is an energy blast type thing, it covers a lot of distance instantly, so I think it's fair to just call it like a rifle if not faster. Anyway, the way he starts reacting before it's fired makes it pretty clear that the mechanic of his super fast dodge moves actually *do* take that instant of warmup. The Burst (who is almost definitely underestimating him, but who knows how significantly) says of him: Graphene composite sword, automatic laser handgun with a 200m range (if we take the laser part of this at face value, speed for everything in the game goes through the roof, but that's pretty flimsy), 73kph speed (presumably this is his non-dodge speed, since that has him actually flashstepping).

He's clearly got a pretty high skill level. I think we can say at least that much both from the gameplay and the cutscenes. His skills seem to live up to what you might need to actually survive in a bullet hell scenario, and he impresses a Musashi analogue.

Durability is basically impossible to gauge, as we're just really lacking much to show how strong the things hitting him are. His guards are supposed to be legends in their own rights, and it took an entire army plus one of the toughest of them to subdue him long enough to get him in the jail in the first place.

Presumably in a rumble he has his "rider" gear, but that's even harder to quantify. He can certainly get to orbit with it very quickly, but no clue if he can attack from there. And Sam would blitz him first anyway. I guess it's at least strong enough that a lot of them together were able to start mass-razing the surface of the earth like a meteor shower.

Edit: To be fair, I think the fact that they couldn't kill him at least suggests Sam can't do that. Like the world was extremely motivated to kill this guy, threw armies at him, built a weird spatial labyrinth to contain him and was very pointedly unable to actually kill him. We don't know WHY (is he durable? Does he heal? What?) or what their attempts looked like, but like probably safe to say that if modern conventional weapons could do it, this civilisation would have been able to. He can most certainly be incapacitated though, so that's not going to help him.

[BitVyper]

Not really about Sam at this point, but because I want to look at some of The Stranger's feats, just pulling as much out of the game as I can.

Amending my earlier comment about him maybe needing a second to do his flash steps, he does a little blitz on The Burst at the end of that fight, so maybe he can just do them and the slowdown was for effect.

Taking some liberties here, but The Strap's prison is stated to have to regenerate itself because she tears the walls down frequently - we see her blast one of the smaller ones (but still quite thick) apart on first encounter. Those walls look a couple feet thick, and this is a setting where a graphene composite sword is something The Voice just has laying around, so they're probably pretty tough. The Stranger can at least take some hits from her, she at the very least blasts him directly in the face at one point during a scripted exchange.

The Line makes it sound like he may also passively mess with time in weird ways, but not anything Rumbles-useful. The Line may also just be being poetic about the destruction he brought. I think some aspects of that fight suggest he's throwing off The Line's ability to manipulate time.

Comments before fighting The Scale pretty much equate The Stranger's initial arrival with a WMD going off. Again, we never SEE what happened, so can't really qualify this, but The Voice says of the devastation we see, "years of evolution, culture, civilisation, great intellect, wonders of nature... BAM! Wiped out in one single impact. One." Given what we see in the red sky ending, I think it's likely that this was a literal impact, but it's a generous interpretation. It could also be saying they nuked the Stranger, but I don't think that makes sense with most of the rest of the dialogue in that scene.

We see a good ~hundred foot leap in his fight with The Edge.

When he gets out of jail, there's a good few metres radius around him where the plantlife immediately dies and the ground dries up and turns cracked and grey the moment he steps near. Black clouds follow him around and the whole atmosphere kinda changes in his immediate vicinity. *People* have been around him all game, but we've also never seen blood, generally more like sparks and electrical arcs when he stabs someone, so they might be cyborgs, and he never had these atmospheric visual effects in the prison, so it might have been "switched off" somehow. When you encounter The Voice with his daughter outside the prison, he pretty pointedly stands outside the gradually expanding "corrupt" area with her while talking to you, and takes her away before it gets to them.

He very clearly does not need to breathe. Probably safe to assume he doesn't need to eat or drink anything either, given that there was nothing for him to eat or drink

I guess one thing we can definitely say for sure is that he can handle an accelerated atmospheric re-entry with zero shielding

Edit: So in the assimilation ending, we only see the Riders as distant falling stars, but they do NOT look like they're slowing down as they impact, and the whole horizon is on fire, like blazing into the sky from end to end. I'm thinking The-Stranger-Hit-The-Ground-and-Instantly-Wiped-Out-A-City may actually be a reasonable interpretation. Perspective. This is The Stranger and his army of identical clones.