### Metal Gear Ripped

A simple mod that overwrites all in-game story cutscenes with 'low quality'/'reduced quality' ones with the purpose of lowering the absurd space requirement.



### -- Installation:

Simply extract the files and drop them in this path:

%steampath%\METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE\GameData\movie\


%gogspath%\METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE\GameData\movie\

I'd recommend you to backup your original gamefiles, but since this mod's files change ALL CUTSCENES of the game (22 Gb), the best way is to just revalidate your files in Steam or redownload/reinstall GOG's setup instead of backing them up because they're just heavy, thus the purpose of this mod to exist.



### -- Explanation:

As you all probably already know, Metal Gear Rising is actually only around 4 Gb, with around 23 Gb of movies/cutscenes in badly compressed file type: usm.

I tried a bit when I had time to extract the original files from the game's .usm's and repack them using those tools:

yt-dlp
Ffmpeg
Scaleform Video
VGMToolBox
VGMStream

And managed to be able to extract them all, but couldn't repack videos and audios with reduced quality because Scaleform Video wouldn't allow, showing some weird errors.

What I did then was this:

Downloaded all the cutscenes of the game from a Youtube playlist using yt-dlp with high quality with those parameters:

- yt-dlp -f 140+136[ext=mp4] <playlist link>
Then I converted all the .mp4 files to .avi and .wav formats using Ffmpeg using those parameters to also reduce the video Bitrate, which is the culprit for them having such big file sizes:

- ffmpeg -i <mp4-file-name>.mp4 -b:v 4M <new-file-name>.avi <new-file-name>.wav

-b:v 4M = This command makes ffmpeg reduce the video bitrate to 4000 kbps, which is good enough and produces little to none artifacts in low end resolutions like 1024x768 and 800x600. Videos still in vanilla game resolution, which is 1280x720.
Don't worry, they scale pretty well in low resolutions in full screen.

Then I used Scaleform Video to unify both .avi and .wav files into one .usm file for each cutscene.

Gladly, I managed to reduce the overall game size from 27 Gb to 8 Gb.
Yes. Game size which was 27 Gb with unoptimized and badly compressed video files now is reduced to 8 Gb.



### -- Known Issues:

- The videos I used to do this had subtitles on, so even if you disable your subtitles in game, you will see them in the cutscenes, because they were recorded like this.

- Because they're static recorded videos, you may find their quality to be reduced from the overall quality of the game, but this is to be expected. Compressed video/audio always lose quality, so don't expect 4K quality here. All I tried to do was to maintain the minimum acceptable quality to save space.

- Because I used Youtube videos from a playlist, not all cutscenes are completely synced with ingame audio. This happens because .usm files use many channels (6+) of audio while .avi and .wav files converted from a .mp4 youtube video have only 2, therefore, it may happen that some cutscene have two streams of audio happening at the same time, music from the video and music from the game playing at the same time.



### -- Credits:

Kim Merta (youtube.com/@KimMerta) for posting this playlist years ago, which has exactly the same duration of each .usm file for ingame cutscenes and this helped to ease the process a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6c7jk4KwaEUTNz7G913IOOS2RgAdLQu0

Give the guy a sub if you will.
He has some fun videos. :)



### -- List of changed files and new sizes:

%\METAL GEAR RISING REVENGEANCE\GameData\movies\


- Dummy event movies/files used by dev team for tests:
├── [1.8M]  _dummyEvent.usm
└── [5.4M]  eva200.usm


- Raiden campaing cutscenes:
├── [212M]  ev0000.usm
├── [128M]  ev0010.usm
├── [ 50M]  ev0020.usm
├── [105M]  ev0030.usm
├── [ 73M]  ev0040.usm
├── [115M]  ev0042.usm
├── [155M]  ev1000.usm
├── [ 75M]  ev1010.usm
├── [ 67M]  ev2000.usm
├── [106M]  ev2010.usm
├── [114M]  ev2020.usm
├── [ 55M]  ev2030.usm
├── [ 75M]  ev3000.usm
├── [ 29M]  ev3010.usm
├── [ 79M]  ev3020.usm
├── [ 87M]  ev3030.usm
├── [ 77M]  ev3050.usm
├── [174M]  ev4000.usm
├── [108M]  ev4010.usm
├── [ 50M]  ev4020.usm
├── [ 55M]  ev4030.usm
├── [155M]  ev4040.usm
├── [ 22M]  ev4050.usm
├── [ 68M]  ev5010.usm
├── [ 43M]  ev5020.usm
├── [168M]  ev6000.usm
├── [122M]  ev6020.usm
├── [ 77M]  ev6021.usm
├── [120M]  ev6030.usm
├── [ 26M]  ev6050.usm
├── [ 39M]  ev7010.usm
├── [220M]  ev7020.usm
├── [ 85M]  ev7030.usm
├── [271M]  ev7040.usm
├── [190M]  ev7050.usm
├── [ 79M]  ev7060.usm
├── [146M]  ev8000.usm
├── [ 21M]  ev8010.usm
└── [ 17M]  ev9020.usm


- Samuel campaing cutscenes:
├── [112M]  evc000.usm
├── [ 69M]  evc020.usm
├── [ 44M]  evc030.usm
├── [ 53M]  evc040.usm
├── [ 90M]  evc050.usm
└── [ 16M]  evc060.usm


- Wolf campaing cutscenes:
├── [ 62M]  evd000.usm
├── [ 41M]  evd010.usm
├── [ 52M]  evd020.usm
├── [ 53M]  evd030.usm
└── [ 94M]  evd040.usm