Who Did Kojima Originally See As The Star For Metal Gear Rising?

IGN recently sat down with Metal Gear Franchise founder Hideo Kojima to discuss the Anniversary of the franchise, and also discuss the upcoming Metal Gear title, "Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance" which is set to hit U.S. stores, February 19th.

In the interview he discusses how different the game will be comapared to the norm of the Metal Gear Solid series where we first saw Rising's protagonist, Raiden. He confirms that the series will still fall under the same world element and will still have past references to the Metal Gear franchises, as it still falls under the Metal Gear umbrella.  But he insists that this game will deviate from the norm and bring us something that is completely different from any other Metal Gear game fans have played thus far.

During the interview, he did state though, that he wanted Gray Fox to be the Protagonist and main star of the new Metal Gear series. It was his staff that insisted that they would make Raiden the star of the game, to which he reluctantly gave the nod and go-ahead to the producers.
He based this decision on the importance of trust to the younger developers at Kojima Productions. Could this be his way of passing the torch? Is Kojima putting too much of his trust on the line?

Below is a quote from the interview conducted:

“It was my staff in Kojima Productions that insisted on Raiden, and I respected their idea,” Kojima said. “In my personal opinion, I wanted to go for Frank Jaegar or Gray Fox. But if we had gone with that, I would have had to write the script and then be really committed to creating the game.”

“I want to pass game development to the younger generation in my team, and have been trying to do so for quite some time. Before I never could give complete responsibilities for other games, but for Revengeance, they are fully in control. Besides, if I had created the game and directed it, it wouldn’t have been this game.”

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