Reply With QuoteThat was interesting to read, thank you for sharing. Strange to think that the NES Metal Gear I enjoyed so much was a mangled version of the original.
Metal Gear (1987)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
The first game to be directed and designed by Hideo Kojima was 1987’s Metal Gear for the ASCII corporation’s home computer, the MSX2. The game wasn’t Kojima’s idea — he took over development of a game called Intruder from one of his seniors at Konami. This was only his second project, after assistant directing on a runner game called Penguin Adventure — it’s impressive that he was allowed to lead a project so quickly. Intruder was originally intended to be an action game, but due to the MSX’s framerate limitations, Kojima decided to pivot to stealth, inspired by ‘The Great Escape’ (cinema would remain a huge inspiration for him throughout his career). He wanted to ‘form the tension of hide & seek’, turning into something more like Pac-Man when the player is discovered.
The result is Metal Gear, a 2D top-down game that popularized the stealth genre. While the game is quite rudimentary compared to the titles which followed, a surprising amount of the hallmarks of the series are introduced here. Many of the major players in later titles appear here — Solid Snake (who is not yet modeled after Kurt Russell), Big Boss, Foxhound, Gray Fox. Big Boss is the commander of special forces unit FOXHOUND. The game begins when Big Boss sends his newest recruit, Solid Snake, into a South African ‘fortified state’ called Outer Heaven founded by a ‘legendary mercenary’. Boss had already sent Gray Fox, his top operative, into the base to stop a nuclear threat, but Gray Fox went silent. Snake is sent to find Fox, and explores Outer Heaven, which consists of 3 buildings, each with multiple floors.
Along the way, he finds keycards, unlocks doors, and rescues hostages (causing him to increase rank and thus get more health and inventory space). He gets help from local resistance members, who each have a specialized area they can provide help with over your codec, and battles mercenary bosses with goofy names like Shoot Gunner, Machine Gun Kid, Bloody Brad, and the boomerang-wielding Coward Duck. He navigates mine fields, and also singlehandedly fights a tank and a helicopter and wins, which became a running gag in the series. He finds Gray Fox, who explains that the nuclear threat is in the form of a bipedal walking tank called a Metal Gear which can launch a nuke from anywhere in the world.
Snake finds the engineer who designed Metal Gear (who of course did it against his will, as his daughter was being held hostage) in order to learn how to destroy it. Big Boss’s orders become increasingly erratic, leading Snake straight into dangerous situations. Snake manages to destroy the Metal Gear, only for it to be revealed that the ‘legendary mercenary’ running the compound is in fact Big Boss, who wants to become the greatest global superpower and bring down the West. He was using his position in the US government to gain a tactical advantage in building his own mercenary force. As his name indicates, he becomes the final boss. Snake defeats him, but has to escape before the base self-destructs.
In essence, the core of the series’ plot formula was already established here, albeit in an extremely simplistic way. The same is true of the gameplay mechanics. Codec calls are present, complete with a bit of fourth wall breaking near the end when the final boss tells you ‘STOP THE OPERATION — SWITCH OFF YOUR MSX AT ONCE’. The game opens with Solid Snake infiltrating a base by swimming to it, at which point he has to avoid guards and security cameras. Exclamation points even pop up over guards’ heads when they catch you. You can hide in a cardboard box and damage your health by smoking cigarettes.
It’s surprisingly advanced for its time in a lot of ways — you can attach a suppressor to weapons, you can use a remote control rocket to blow up electrical boxes and turn off electrified floors, you can equip a gas mask to move through rooms filled with poison gas, you can use explosives to blow holes in walls after punching them to find weak spots… As with MGS 1–4, it’s a very dynamic game filled to the brim with ideas. With that said, there are also many ways in which it is clearly of its time. Guards are utterly blind unless they’re staring right at you, which gives it the feel of a puzzle game. You need to find the correct route through a given room which will allow you to either avoid guards or sneak up behind them and knock them out with a punch.
It is, of course, a brief game — it can be cleared in 90min, if you know what you’re supposed to do. However, because the points at which you can save are limited, it’s going to take you a hell of a lot longer than that. As with many games of the 80s, it compensates for its short duration by being extraordinarily hard, mainly due to the aforementioned save system — but also because it can be frustratingly difficult to figure out what you’re supposed to do next. It’s filled with backtracking as is, so it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of wandering around aimlessly. The game clearly wasn’t made to be played without a manual — key information is hidden in codec calls on frequencies that can only be found listed in the manual. To be honest, I only made my way through it by heavily abusing the emulator’s save feature and consulting walkthroughs, but I feel no shame.
The music in the game is quite repetitive and may drive you batty after a while, but it’s also fun and fits the mood well. I found myself wondering if 90s rock bands were inspired by this music — one of the tracks reminds me a lot of ‘Those Damn Blue Collar Tweakers’ by Primus, while another reminds of ‘Wake Up’ by Rage Against the Machine. You’re likely to get it stuck in your head.
Due to the relative unpopularity of the MSX, the game was ported to the NES for its English release. Unfortunately, the port was developed without the consent or involvement of the original development team, with a 3 month deadline and orders to make it different from the MSX version. The level design was heavily revamped and many gameplay elements were changed, causing Kojima to disown it (understandably, as it seems to be a butchered mess). A proper English port of the MSX version wasn’t released until 2004, first for phones and then as a bonus on the Subsistence version of Metal Gear Solid 3.
Nonetheless, the NES version was hugely successful — enough to spawn an NES sequel only for Western audiences called Snake’s Revenge. Once again, Kojima had nothing to do with that game — he didn’t even know it was being developed until one of the developers told him. This inspired him to start work on his own sequel, which ended up only being released in Japan on the MSX2 until the aforementioned Subsistence release finally introduced it to the West. As for Snake’s Revenge, Kojima couldn’t seem to make up his mind as to whether it was ‘a crappy game’ or a decent one which did a good job capturing the spirit of the original, as he made public statements in both directions.
Several prequels to this game were developed down the line, so Kojima proposed remaking the Metal Gear games to address plot discrepancies that were introduced later. This obviously never ended up happening on account of his firing, but given how much the scope of his vision expanded since this humble beginning (this game is extremely thin on plot even when compared to the next game in the series), I can only imagine that they would’ve been radical re-imaginings.
https://medium.com/@froghawk/metal-g...7-baad307a2ed7
That was interesting to read, thank you for sharing. Strange to think that the NES Metal Gear I enjoyed so much was a mangled version of the original.
Oh wow, I remember playing that, or at least seeing it being played, on my neighbor's MSX. Wild to think it was a Kojima game.Originally Posted by froghawk
I'm here for this thread. Can't wait till we get to Death Stranding.
I remember this game -- it was one of the few games we were allowed to play when we got done with our tasks in the computer class (the other notable one, curiously enough, being Leisure Suit Larry). I never got very far at that time by playing it in 15-30 minute chunks, but later on I played the NES version quite a bit and got very close to the end. From my recollection, aside from some layout differences and a different beginning, they were very much the same game.
Oh, and of course the NES version had some hilarious Engrish, with the guards suddenly exclaiming "I feel asleep!!" before promptly dozing off.
Last edited by Starker; 19th Jul 2023 at 07:18.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990)
Written, directed, and designed by Hideo Kojima
As mentioned at the end of the Metal Gear review, the Metal Gear sequel situation was a bit confused. As the West only got to experience a heavily butchered NES port of Metal Gear, they also got their own NES sequel, Snake’s Revenge. Both of these games were created without Kojima’s input, so his work wasn’t truly introduced to Western audiences until Metal Gear Solid in 1998. Kojima was working on a visual novel called Snatcher. He heard about Snake’s Revenge from a coworker who was working on it, and who encouraged Kojima to create his own sequel — and so Kojima began working on Solid Snake for the MSX (later retitled Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake by Konami’s marketing department).
Metal Gear 2 is very similar to its predecessor, but with everything taken up several notches. The game takes place in a version of 1999 where the cold war is still ongoing and the global oil supply is about to run out. A Czech biologist named Dr. Marv created a species of algae he calls OILIX to solve this problem, capable of producing their own petroleum. Of course, this is a hot commodity, so he is taken hostage by Zanzibar Land — a place which evidently has nothing to do with the actual Zanzibar and instead is an ex-Soviet state in central Asia that had been established two years earlier. Whatever. In any case, they pillaged old nuclear stockpiles meant for dismantling, and planned to use the combination of the nukes and Dr. Marv to control the world’s oil supply by holding everyone hostage.
Solid Snake is called out of retirement to infiltrate Zanzibar Land, rescue Dr. Marv, and foil their evil plan. This naturally happens on Christmas Eve in what is probably a tribute to Die Hard — Kojima has always loved his movie references. The game is much heavier on codec calls than its predecessor, getting much closer to the level of dialogue you’d expect from a Metal Gear title. It also introduces the sort of ensemble cast you’d expect, including two characters that will play heavily into future titles — Snake’s commanding officer, Colonel Roy Campbell, and his drill instructor, Master Miller. Several characters also reappear from the previous game, including Dr. Madnar, Gray Fox, and, in a move that won’t be explained for another 25 years — Big Boss? But wasn’t he dead?
Surprise! According to Dr. Madnar, who has once again been captured and forced to build a Metal Gear, this time for Zanzibar Land, Big Boss is somehow still alive and is behind the whole scheme, and he’s now using child soldiers. And so a series formula is established — Snake must infiltrate the terrorist compound, rescue one or multiple people, stop the Metal Gear, and end the terrorist plot by Big Boss (or one of his clones), all while being helped by a fun cast of characters via endless Codec calls, who you can now call for hints when you get lost. The story is much more fleshed out than in the first game, featuring numerous twists. There’s a love interest in Czech intelligence agent Gustava Heffner, establishing another plot element that gets carried over to later MGS games — Snake is always going to get entangled with a fellow soldier or intelligence agent, if a romantic subplot is present.
And, of course, there is a boss crew — and once again, they’re hilarious. The highlight is Running Man (undoubtedly another movie reference), a ‘former olympic runner turned terrorist’, who just runs around the map in circles, too fast for you to shoot — you have to put mines in his path to stop him. There’s also a ninja, and a boss which uses a total stealth suit — elements that are later combined into the cyborg ninja character in MGS. Another boss, Jungle Evil, hides in tall grass, perhaps laying the groundwork for the final fight in MGS3. And, of course, you have to singlehandedly fight the Hind D helicopter once again, and undergo a timed escape sequence after several final boss fights.
The gameplay is also taken to a whole new level. Enemies no longer have to be directly staring at you to detect you — they have a wider cone of vision, and can now follow you across screens, turn their heads, and hear you. There are now different types of floors that make different sounds, and some will cause guards to come investigate if you’re not careful, so kneeling and crawling have also been introduced. You’re no longer just forced to fight if you alert an enemy — the alerts are on a timer, as in future games allowing you to hide and wait it out, and you’re given radar to help you in that endeavor, as well as a suppressor for your weapons. This all makes it feel much more like a proper stealth game than the first title, which felt more like a puzzle.
Naturally, there is a whole array of new gear to help you with that. You can send a robotic mouse out to distract your enemies or find traps. You can set down a camouflage mat which will mimic the texture of the floor, allowing you to crawl under it and hide. You can improvise a flamethrower using a lighter and spray. You can play a cassette tape with Zanzibar Land’s national anthem to distract guards, who will automatically salute in response (and the tape even gets worn out with overuse). The cardboard box has returned, but now you can use a bucket for the same purpose. Equipping cigarettes will slowly drain your health, but you may find a use for them. As in the first game, there’s a simple leveling system where your health and inventory space increase after each boss.
I enjoyed the music in the first title, but it’s even better in this game — the music and art design combine to make it feel surprisingly moody at times, in a retro way. There’s even some fun odd time stuff in the soundtrack. The level design is more varied than in the first title, and like the later MGS games, the gameplay is kept very dynamic, throwing new ideas at you all the time. The MGS mechanic of a key that transforms into a different key based on temperature conditions started in this game. You’ll have to find ways to lure a carrier pigeon, sneak into a ladies restroom, fly a hang glider, figure out codes from someone tapping on the wall, stop a snake from eating all of your rations, and trick a guard using an owl.
Not all of it has aged well — at one point, you have to navigate your way through a swamp, which swallows you up if you don’t stay on exactly the right invisible path. Unfortunately, this is determined by trial and error. As with the first game, there is plenty of backtracking, which unfortunately includes said swamp — you have to traverse it numerous times. I once again abused the emulator’s save state to make my way through moments like these — they’re simply too frustrating otherwise.
This game is simply bursting with ideas — ideas which still felt radical and exciting when many of them appeared in the West for the first time 8 years later in Metal Gear Solid. It feels like Kojima really found his voice here, so to speak — he may have inherited the first title in the series, he really made the sequel his own. The result is a game that has stood the test of time remarkably well — it’s still incredibly fun to play, despite some frustrating sequences, and features a really properly fleshed out story.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was initially released only in Japan. The MSX never took off in the West, so Konami never bothered to create an English localization of this game. There was already an NES sequel, so I guess a port didn’t seem necessary to them, either. Unofficial fan translations appeared on Western markets around 1996–7, but the game didn’t officially make its way to the west until it appeared in the Subsistence reissue of Metal Gear Solid 3 with many quality-of-life updates in 2006, 16 years after its original release. The first game has been available on PC through GOG for a long time, but MG2 is about to appear on PC for the first time ever as part of the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection, Vol. 1.
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Metal Gear Solid (1998)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima and Motoyuki Yoshioka
Written by Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
It took Kojima 8 years to return with the third game in the Metal Gear series, and its first 3D title, Metal Gear Solid (because, y’know, 3D=solid, opening the door for a perfect pun). Metal Gear Solid was the true introduction of Kojima’s vision to the West, and it was hugely successful, receiving high critical praise, selling over seven million copies, and kicking off a franchise (whether Kojima wanted that or not!). The game is now considered an all-time classic, and for good reason — the world had never seen a game like this before.
Metal Gear Solid takes place 6 years after the events of Metal Gear 2. It begins exactly how you’d expect, based on previous titles. Solid Snake (who is now modeled after Jean-Claude van Damme’s body and Christopher Walken’s face) infiltrates a terrorist-occupied remote compound (this time in Alaska) via water in order to rescue civilian prisoners and stop the terrorists. He’s once again accompanied on his codec by Colonel Roy Campbell and Master Miller, plus a few new characters. Naomi Hunter gives you medical advice, Mei Ling helps you with the radar system she invented and tells you famous quotations when you save your game, and Nastasha Romanenko informs you about the items and weapons you find in the field. More characters are introduced along the way, including the fan-favorite otaku scientist Otacon.
You can call these people whenever you have a question, and there are hours and hours of recorded dialogue with them — far more than appeared in the earlier titles. It’s considerably more story heavy than its predecessors — over a third of the play time is spent in cutscenes or codec calls. This was the first Metal Gear title with voice acting, which makes sitting in those calls considerably more enjoyable. David Hayter’s gritty, slimy voice acting brought Solid Snake to life in a whole new way. The sound design is also excellent — the tritone that plays when you get spotted became an iconic staple of the series. The music is filled with memorable themes, and its synths are often icy in a way that perfectly reflects the chilled Alaskan environment. The visuals are similarly moody. All of this comes together to create a strong atmosphere.
Kojima felt that ‘if the player isn’t tricked into believing that the world is real, then there’s no point in making the game’. As such, he brought the team on field trips to California to visit military training centers and work with SWAT teams and weapons experts so the team could learn how guns, explosives, and vehicles really worked. All of this made it into Romanenko’s dialogue, which surely featured the most excessively in-depth explanations of weaponry to make its way into a game yet — a level of gun fetishism that was surely meant to be ridiculous parody. This became part of the series formula, as the next few titles also featured characters whose primary purpose was increasingly excessive explanations of the features and applications of the game’s arsenal.
It’s interesting how much this feels like a 3D update of all of Kojima’s ideas from the 80s games. Alert states with a countdown timer? Check. Lasers that set off alarms? Check. Guiding a remote control rocket to blow up an electrical panel in a different room in order to turn off an electrified floor? Check. Keys that change shape and turn into different keys when exposed to different temperatures? Check. Running around under a cardboard box, battling a crew of mercenary bosses, singlehandedly fighting a tank and helicopter, using radar to sneak around enemies with narrow vision cones, avoiding security cameras, using cigarettes to reveal hidden lasers, waiting for alerts to time out… all present. Even the plot has some similarities — the scientist who designed the Metal Gear plays a major role, an ally betrays you, and the big bad presenting a nuclear threat to the world is Big-Boss-adjacent… It really is just Metal Gear 2 remade in 3D, but with a new setting and levels and a much more complex plot.
Of course, there are new elements as well. Part of this is the camera —the perspective is still fixed, and largely overhead, but it’s a bit more dynamic now. You can look around your environment in first person (but not move or aim) and peek around corners (though it takes quite a hefty combination of buttons to truly take advantage of this function). There are new gameplay mechanics, like needing to take a drug to steady your hands while aiming a sniper rifle. Then there are the inventive boss battles — most notably, the Psycho Mantis fight, which breaks the fourth wall. First, the boss reads your memory card, commenting on what other games you’ve been playing — then the game requires you to change which port your controller is plugged into to do any damage. Sadly, this causes difficulty with certain modern systems, and was altered for the PC version, but it blew many minds at the time.
Sometimes it almost feels like the game was simply a ploy to make kids watch archival footage-laden educational videos about nuclear proliferation. The text before the credits roll gives you the main takeaway: ‘In the 1980’s, there were more than 60,000 nuclear warheads in the world at all times. The total destructive power amounted to 1 million times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb. In January 1993, START2 was signed and the United States and Russia agreed to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 3500–3000 in each nation by December 31, 2000. However, as of 1998, there still exists 26,000 nuclear warheads in the world.’
Of course, those statistics have changed today — less than half that amount of nuclear warheads still exist in the world, mostly owned by the US and Russia. But that’s still a truly massive amount of destructive power! I first played this game in high school, and it truly was an educational and chilling experience. I felt particularly compelled by the game’s ideology and intent to educate — I’d never experienced an activist game, and was glad such a thing existed (and still am!). It showed me that games could be more than a mindless diversion.
You could argue that this game is like the Watchmen of video games — it introduced philosophical ideas to a genre that was formerly largely devoid of them. Like Watchmen, Metal Gear Solid is all about tearing down the idea of the action hero, asking what we’re really glorifying with that trope and why we’re doing it. To get this point across, it leans heavily into ludonarrative dissonance. It’s possible to stealth your way around the grunts, but the player is forced to kill the bosses and then chastised for doing so. Instead of letting you forget the brutality of what’s being simulated, it leans into it. These characters aren’t just pixels on a screen — they’re actual people, and you just hurt them.
The plot is also an examination of the roles of soldiers and scientists — what it means to be these things, how they affect the world, and what their responsibilities are. Ultimately, it’s all about human connection, and how many of the people in these roles are avoiding it in a way that ends up doing huge harm to others. The message to the players is clear: turn off your console, go outside, and connect with people. Actually live your life! All of this is delivered in the context of a ridiculously over the top action story involving cyborg ninjas, nanomachines, psychics, and giant bipedal robots. Does it work? Mostly. There are certainly a few eye-rolling moments, but it’s easy to forgive them given the age of the game and how much it gets right. Overall, it’s a remarkable success.
An expanded version of the game entitled Metal Gear Solid: Integral was released the following year. The most notable addition was the inclusion of a ‘VR Disc’, which was also issued as a standalone title under the name Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions. It included a VR training mode with 300 missions divided into four categories: Sneaking, Weapons, Advanced, and Special. The first 3 categories are relatively rote tests of the game’s mechanics, and are quite welcomed given how sparingly many of them were utilized in the actual game (in fact, it takes longer to complete these missions than it does to complete the campaign). The ‘Special’ category gets a bit more creative, including encounters with flying saucers and giant soldiers. Integral also featured a retooled version of the main campaign with different enemy placements, developer commentary, and even a first person mode.
1998 was the year the stealth genre took off in mainstream gaming. The first 3D stealth game, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, came out a few months before Metal Gear Solid, but the latter quickly surpassed Tenchu in popularity. The year was rounded out by the first ever first person stealth game, Thief: The Dark Project, firmly establishing the genre as viable and opening the door for franchises like Hitman, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and Deus Ex to appear in 2000. Metal Gear Solid remains the most successful and widely celebrated of these early 3D stealth titles.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (2004)
Directed by Carey Murray
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Yoshikazu Matsuhana, and Dennis Dyack
Kojima was a fan of developer Silicon Knights, who had most notably worked on Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, so he had them develop a remake of Metal Gear Solid for the Gamecube in the Metal Gear Solid 2 engine. He was also a fan of Japanese action director Ryuhei Kitamura, so he had Kitamura direct the cutscenes. The result followed the design and script of the original exactly (albeit with an extended intro sequence), and Yoji Shinkawa returned to do the art design. The English voice acting was all re-recorded using the same actors (as the increased audio quality of the Gamecube revealed defects in the original audio), replacing the regional accents of several characters with American accents. New music was also composed for the game.
Nonetheless, the new graphics and gameplay mechanics changed the feel and tone of the game considerably. Many mechanics were brought over from Metal Gear Solid 2, including first person aiming, hiding in lockers, hanging off railings, holding up guards, and allowing enemy soldiers to communicate with each other. However, the levels in Metal Gear Solid 2 were designed with all of this in mind, often focusing on tight corridors to utilize all of these mechanics. The unchanged levels here were not, meaning that these changes made the game considerably easier than the original version (aside from its oddly frustrating opening area), especially in some boss battles. The new AI mechanics compensate for that just a little bit, but not sufficiently.
Given that the game is really all about the story, this isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself. The tonal changes present a larger problem. Kitamura initially tried to imitate the original cutscenes, but Kojima instructed him to remake them in his own style, which ended up being extremely over the top and heavily reliant on bullet time, which was all the rage in the wake of The Matrix. The original game was already teetering on the edge of absurdity, but this change pushed it straight over the edge. In addition to that, the new sterile grey-heavy graphics and more ‘epic’ soundtrack feel less moody than the original — it loses a lot of the original’s appealing atmosphere. As such, I don’t think this remake has aged particularly well — there’s little reason to play it over the original, which holds up just fine.
https://medium.com/@froghawk/metal-g...4-59acd8c8b915
Good stuff! Also answers the bit where henke had trouble with TTS's opening.
I thought MGS1's overall theme about genes as something that determine who you are, but not control who you can be, was a pretty good through-line for it, even if the game was very 90s Hollywood in its delivery. It's definitely the bit that made the story work beyond the geopolitical facade and Kojima's obsession with the military-industrial complex. His gift is being able to weave together disparate threads into something entertaining and immediate while making (often, unfortunately laboured) incisive philosophical points about people, society, and video games all at the same time. I don't think I'd like his games half as much if they weren't as playful with their headier concepts, though, giving you exposition and infodumps but also ensuring it didn't all take itself too seriously at times, and that your playthroughs were rewarded for experimentation with the unexpected joy of discovering a different approach or easter egg. The MGS games are special to me most of all for always, reliably delivering that frisson of, 'oh whoa, they thought of that too!?'. You get the sense that there's real personality behind their design, where fun-loving and batshit silliness coincide with an incredible amount of nerdery that Kojima, like the best nerds, can't stop talking your ear off about.
Last edited by Sulphur; 20th Feb 2024 at 09:31.
Despite everything I still really enjoyed twin snakes back when it came out. While it can never compare to the original, part of me does hope for a switch remaster/rerelease at some point.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty / Substance (2001)
Directed, produced, and designed by Hideo Kojima
Written by Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima
Music by Norihiko Hibino and Harry Gregson-Williams
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
After updating and expanding on the ideas of his ’80s Metal Gear games with Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima felt like he’d said what he had to say and was ready to do something different. Unfortunately and fortunately for him, the game ended up being hugely successful, and so there was demand for a sequel. In 1999, he finished a design document for a sequel on the new Playstation 2 platform. He worked on realizing it with a budget of $10 million dollars and a 100-person team. The events of 9/11 almost prevented it from being released, as there were scenes of New York being destroyed near the end. Kojima was ready to take responsibility and resign, but lawyers were consulted and 300 changes were made right at the last minute to make it more palatable, allowing the game to make it out the door after all.
The resulting game has a deeply engrossing atmosphere, with moody music and a unique visual aesthetic. It’s a very different atmosphere than the icy claustrophobic cold of the original title — it feels more futuristic, shiny, and… orange. The gameplay builds off the previous title, introducing new elements like first person aiming (though the camera still has a fixed perspective), closets to hide in, and the ability to hold up enemies. The level design feels a bit tighter, as the core of it is based around a hub which opens up as the game goes on.
As with the original game, at least a third of the time playing it is spent in cutscenes or codec calls — possibly even a bit more this time around (the man’s twitter tagline is ‘70% of my body is made of movies’, after all). I’d almost say that it’s more of an interactive movie with some excellent gameplay segments than a proper game, but that sells the gameplay short. Regardless, I will mostly focus on the plot here, as that’s what differs most from the first title.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is famous for its bait-and-switch. Kojima didn’t feel like it would make sense for a veteran like Solid Snake to go through gameplay tutorials, plus he wanted a character that would appeal more to women, and so a new lead character was designed. However, this was kept a secret — the trailers for the game only featured Snake as a playable character. The game was divided into two episodes — an intro segment on a Tanker, and the bulk of the game, the Plant. The tanker section gave fans exactly what they wanted — a next-generation sequel where they got to play as the beloved Snake (accompanied by Otacon, who humorously tries to deliver quotes like Mei Ling but always gets them wrong) with updated gameplay mechanics.
The Plant segment starts just like the first game, as the briefing makes clear — a group of superpowered terrorists (who of course later serve as bosses) have taken over a facility (this time it’s Big Shell, an environmental cleanup facility off the coast of New York City). Colonel Roy Campbell tells you it’s your job to stop them before they do something horrible. And so ‘Snake’ infiltrates big shell in a diving suit — only his voice doesn’t sound quite right.
The rug was then pulled out from under fans’ feet. When ‘Snake’ gets inside the facility and takes off his mask, players were introduced to the skinny, effeminate, bumbling, and inept Raiden, who sounds like an angsty teenager and falls over when he runs into things. The fans were largely enraged. After a while, Snake reappears, calling himself ‘Plissken’ (a blatant admission that he was copied from Kurt Russell’s character in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, in case anyone wasn’t totally convinced), and the player is forced to watch Snake be badass from the sidelines while they ineptly bumble around as Raiden.
As is the perpetual curse of parodies of toxic masculinity, many fans missed that Metal Gear Solid didn’t want you to like Snake — he was a trope exaggerated to absurdity. What better way to drive the point home than to shift the perspective and make them play the sideshow rather than the main event? Fans were left frustrated that they didn’t get to play out their power fantasy, but Kojima wanted to show them how that fantasy is absurd, and how characters like this should not be glorified. Alas, many fans missed the point the second time around, as well.
Metal Gear Solid was a parody and critcism of action movies, and so its sequel is a parody of action sequels — ok, you wanted more? Here’s the same thing, but bigger, shinier, and also worse! It reminds me of The Matrix: Resurrections in that regard, as that title explicitly called out Warner Brothers for demanding another sequel. However, the game slowly takes on its own identity over its duration, and ultimately becomes far more complex and meaningful than the original title. The first deviation from action sequel parody territory comes halfway through the game, when the plot suddenly delves into the personal stories of these characters and their traumas.
This begins with the introduction of Otacon’s sister, a computer programmer named Emma Emmerich. The plot explores their family story, which enters some surprisingly taboo and moving territory. This lens later extends to Raiden, who was hiding some very serious childhood trauma from his girlfriend, who had been roped into helping him on his mission. These revelations are shocking, and the way the plot takes a detour into this territory in the midst of an ongoing terrorist situation is destabilizing. It’s clear that these characters feel powerless under the weight of the baggage they’re carrying — and yet they’re expected to save the world. The lack of player agency in the game is reflected by the lack of character agency in the story — just as Kojima only gives you a single linear path through the levels and plot, Raiden has no ability to create his own life path.
The design document reveals that Kojima wanted to explore ‘a series of betrayals and sudden reversals, to the point where the player is unable to tell fact from fiction’, where ‘every character lies to someone once’, to blur the line between ‘what is real and what is fantasy’, and to explore ‘digital simulations, digitization of the military, operational planning, everyday life, and the effects of digitization on personality.’ It does all of this and more, escalating from the personal to the political. To quote Wikipedia:
‘Metal Gear Solid 2 is often considered the first example of a postmodern video game... The storyline explored many social, philosophical and cyberpunk themes in significant detail, including meme theory, social engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence, information control, fifth-generation warfare, conspiracy theories, political and military maneuvering, evolution, existentialism, censorship, the nature of reality, the Information Age, virtual reality, child exploitation, taboos such as incest, sexual orientation, and the moral dilemma between security and personal liberty… The game is often considered ahead of its time for dealing with themes and concepts, such as post-truth politics, fake news, alternative facts, synthetic media, and echo chambers, that became culturally relevant in the mid-to-late 2010s.’
The plot then escalates further from the political into the transpersonal. As described above, the climax of the story features a seemingly endless string of recontextualizations and reversals. This eventually reaches a point where a new big piece of information recontextualizes all of the preceding plot every five minutes, for what feels like a couple hours, until the whole thing becomes so absurd that it intentionally undermines its own relevance. Bits of fanservice (like a recreation of the first title’s torture scene, or the return of a beloved character) ultimately become part of a meta-narrative. The plot becomes unreliable, irrelevant noise, making everything feel increasingly surreal.
This destabilization is more than just a commentary on the post-truth age. It gets at something much deeper, as it’s an excellent illustration of the process of personal deconstruction. At the start of the story, Raiden doesn’t know who he is — he’s an inferior replacement for someone else, following orders, running from his past and watching who he wants to become from a distance. In essence, he is a stand-in for the player, who is imagined here as an un-self-actualized person playing a game to escape themselves and their problems. His commanding officers are manipulating him in the same way that the game is manipulating the player. He’s then forced to confront his personal trauma instead of escaping into a mission that isn’t about him at all.
This is the point where I remember that psilocybin-containing mushrooms were legal in Japan until 2002. The way the plot escalates from here imitates the personal deconstruction that happens in a deep trip, as your whole worldview and sense of self is shredded to pieces. The meta aspects, reversals, and revelations escalate into chaos and confusion, with constant zooming out via new perspectives from multiple parties, until finally all the illusions and boxes collapse. Raiden is left with the capacity to shape himself and his life on his own terms, without being held back by unresolved trauma, and without letting others dictate his experience for him. The stage has been set for him to self-actualize.
The game seemingly ends on a cliffhanger ending, which left fans clamoring for another sequel. It introduces an inhuman force that controls the world known as ‘The Patriots’ — a sort of illuminati stand-in — and leaves a lot of questions about them unanswered. My interpretation is that they aren’t meant to be taken literally — they represent the final boss of what is internally controlling you, something which feels so far beyond you that it’s incomprehensible. These are the toxic social ideas that everyone internalizes, and that allow each individual to be controlled. Raiden overcame their hold over him by escaping their constructed reality, and so the story the game was telling was complete. Fans who took it literally were of course demanding answers, but I don’t think anything here was meant to be taken literally.
After doing the kind of deconstruction process this game illustrates so well, you always have to return to your everyday life. The game takes away any reason to continue being invested in its plot by removing your ability to make sense of it or hold onto anything, but then the process ends and you return to earth. What is real? What really happened? It doesn’t matter anymore because all you’re left with is the present, and the moment-to-moment decisions. You’re left with the things you can control, and are no longer wasting energy on the things that are far too big for you as an individual to impact, like the invisible forces which covertly control the world.
In the first game, Kojima was telling players to quit escaping into games, go outside, and connect with other humans. That message is reiterated here — ‘You don’t need another action sequel — you need to stop running’- but it’s also taken a step further, encouraging players to do the hard work of dealing with their issues and discovering who they really are. Raiden’s arc demonstrates what is necessary to achieve self-actualization: opening up, becoming vulnerable, accepting help, facing down your shadow, letting yourself feel as if you’re momentarily going insane, and getting to the other side of the storm, stronger and more self-aware.
All of this reminds me an awful lot of Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion series, which may have been a big influence here. Anno also created deeply psychological work in the mech kaiju genre, often giving fans the finger and telling them to stop escaping, deal with their issues, and go outside. The ‘End of Evangelion’ film in particular has a lot in common with Metal Gear Solid 2, and the Evangelion series in general is about the Shinji’s personal process and self-actualization, much like Raiden’s arc here.
Once again, all of this is delivered with the tone of a goofy action movie, so it’s easy to miss what it’s all about if you haven’t already initiated the process I’m describing in yourself. I think it’s a bit of a shame that most people experienced this game in their teen years — they likely missed the entire point, hence all the outcry about Raiden. I’m quite glad I wasn’t able to experience it until adulthood. It’s equal parts brilliant and ridiculous, and has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time — it may have the most fascinating game plot I’ve ever experienced.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is such a huge statement that it left me wondering where the series’ plot could possibly go from here. I didn’t expect that anything could continue these themes in a satisfying way, and indeed — none of the subsequent games really tried. Kojima bypassed the problem entirely with Metal Gear Solid 3, making a prequel which didn’t have any of the meta or ludonarrative engagement of the Solid Snake titles and instead focused on actually being a video game. With Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima tried to give the fans what they wanted — which unfortunately meant he had to take the intentionally convoluted mess he’d created here entirely literally. But we’ll get there later…
The ‘Substance’ reissue of the game included many bonus modes. There’s another round of 350 VR missions which can be played as either character, again doubling the length of the game. There’s also a series of missions called ‘Snake Tales’ which take place in the Plant. These are basically non-canon fan fiction without any voice acting — the plot is all conveyed via text. The PS2 version of the game also included a skateboarding mode which takes place in the Plant, using the Evolution Skateboarding engine. As HD edition of the game did not include that mode, I haven’t been able to try it. I’ve barely explored either of the other bonus modes, but I’ll get around to updating this review if I do.
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Last edited by froghawk; 21st Oct 2024 at 13:51.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, Kazuki Muraoka, and Yoshikazu Matsuhana
Written by Hideo Kojima and Shuyo Murata
Music by Harry Gregson-Williams, Nobuko Toda, Shuichi Kobori, and Kazuma Jinnouchi
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
Once again, Kojima declared that he was done directing Metal Gear games after Metal Gear Solid 3. Once again, he was not allowed to stick to it. The fans clamored for answers to the questions posed by their literal interpretation of Metal Gear Solid 2, and so a fourth title was announced. Kojima didn’t intend for the series to end—he just wanted someone else to take over directing the games. He appointed his co-writer Shuyo Murata to direct the game, though his name was not announced at the time (the director was announced as Alan Smithee). The mere thought of Kojima not directing a new mainline Metal Gear Solid caused so much outcry in Japan that Kojima received multiple death threats.
And so, essentially at gunpoint, Kojima gave in and took over directing the game. He decided to ‘indulge’ the fans by creating a game that’s pure fanservice. Of course, that doesn’t mean he changed his tune and stopped flipping off his fans — instead, he gave the fans exactly what they thought they wanted in order to show them that they didn’t really want it. Or perhaps he was simply trying to answer all their questions in the most obtuse and unsatisfying way possible, just to stick it to them. You see, Metal Gear Solid 4 is the final Solid Snake game, just like the fans asked for — except Snake is old now — or at least appears that way. So old that you’re forced to wonder why, exactly, he’s still in the field, mirroring how Kojima was probably feeling about making the game. Even the game's washed out grey-brown visual aesthetic reinforces this.
The roles from Metal Gear Solid 2 have been reversed — now Raiden is the cool and competent one, but he isn’t a playable character. You‘re made to watch him do the most badass stuff in the game from a distance while Snake crawls along, about to keel over at any minute. Snake now has a ‘psyche meter’, which is evidently increased not only by killing, attacks, and alerts, but by bad smells and temperature extremes. As the psyche meter gets higher, Old Snake’s aim and back pain get worse, and he is likely to vomit or pass out. Snake only has a year left to live, but it turns out he isn’t actually old here —the game only takes place five years after Metal Gear Solid 2, after all. He’s just aged prematurely, thanks to the nanovirus he was infected with in the first game. As a result, he’s become a danger to everyone, as the virus will likely become a pandemic when he dies. He’s become a walking time bomb.
The whole thing feels more than a little bit passive aggressive, but you can’t really blame Kojima — anyone would be rightfully mad over getting death threats, and doubly so when related to something as ultimately frivolous as video games. And thus, yet another Metal Gear Solid title ended up being highly contentious. But really, the fans were essentially asking for something impossible — to answer questions that Kojima never intended to answer, and to make literal sense out of a meta-narrative which was never meant to be taken literally, somehow tying it all up with a nice bow. To make matters worse, Kojima’s writing partner Tomokazu Fukushima (who was largely responsible for fleshing out all of the codec calls) left the project, leaving only Shuyo Murata to help with the writing. This led to a large and quite noticeable change in the writing of these games from here on out.
The result was a game in desperate need of an editor. Whereas Metal Gear Solid 3 was actually trying to be a video game for once, Guns of the Patriots goes full tilt in the opposite direction. It’s the most cutscene-heavy game in the series, probably because Kojima finally had the budget to live up to his cinematic aspirations. Roughly half of the game’s runtime is devoted to cutscenes. Granted, this choice of direction was probably at least partially due to the fact that Kojima reportedly wanted to make the game open world, but found the technology of the time unable to execute his vision. (He was later able to execute that vision with Metal Gear Solid V, but only after open worlds had become a trend.) As such, he wasn’t very excited about the game side of things here, and instead decided to make an occasionally interactive movie.
The codec calls have been reduced to such a minimum that it makes me wonder why that feature was even left in the game (though it does allow for some psychotherapy sessions in the field with Rosemary from Metal Gear Solid 2 — a nice touch). The content that would’ve been explained in codec calls in previous titles has now been translated into fully animated cutscenes, which certainly makes the experience feel more cinematic. The problem is that these cutscenes are very poorly paced, filled with long awkward pauses and excessive repetition. A good chunk of the experience of this game is listening to a bunch of awkward slow talking where people endlessly repeat the same points with no music — especially in the mission briefings. Perhaps Kojima was actively trying to make it aggressively non-entertaining.
This would be all well and good if the narrative here was even close to being as interesting as that of Metal Gear Solid 2, but it isn’t. The blatant meta and ludonarrative elements of that game are gone. I was personally hoping that all of that wildness would get dialed up, and the intro video seemed to point in that direction. The game opens by showing you what TV is like in this game’s vision of 2014 (that’s aged well), allowing you to flip through the channels, with each channel showing you a different program followed by an advertisement. It’s surreal and bizarre, and clearly took a ton of effort to make. I was very much hoping that it was setting the tone for the rest of the game — but that was not the case (aside from new enemies called geckos, which are basically medium-sized metal gears which moo like cows).
Instead, the game opts for maximal ridiculousness. It’s really remarkably coherent for what it’s trying to do — it somehow manages to cram in every possible nostalgic fanservice nod it can muster without totally falling apart. Every former character that can possibly be reprised appears here — Otacon, Naomi Hunter, Eva, Vamp, Mei Ling, and more. Some of these reprises are executed in a totally absurd manner — for instance, Meryl returns, now commanding her own military unit. She is in a relationship with Johnny, the recurring character whose primary trait is his irritable bowel syndrome. Here, he is a woefully incompetent member of her unit, but he’s also made into a perverted misogynist, making their relationship utterly puzzling and their climactic scenes together doubly ridiculous.
Liquid Ocelot returns from the second game, and is the primary villain here. His main goal is to obtain the body of Big Boss. There’s an obligatory return to Shadow Moses from the first game, featuring a sequence where you pilot a Metal Gear (for the only time in the series) and fight an Arsenal Gear (the Metal Gear model from the second game, here piloted by Liquid Ocelot). The final sequence takes place off the coast of New York, calling back to the setting of the second game, and ends in a preposterous extended fist fight, calling back to the first. And, of course, many unexplained things from previous games (like Vamp’s powers) are explained away by good ol’ nanomachines.
Nonetheless, all of this fan service essentially undermines the plot and messages of Metal Gear Solid 2. By caving to the fans and giving into a literal reading of that title, it encourages fans to disregard its metaphorical elements. Raiden’s character arc is particularly undermined, making it clear that he was unable to escape the cycle he was in, despite seemingly breaking out of it in his prior appearance. In essence, Metal Gear Solid 4 intentionally misses the point of Metal Gear Solid 2 because fans demanded it, and in doing so, it almost encourages them to further miss the point of the whole series. It’s as if Kojima had given up here — he didn’t even care if anyone saw the point of what he was trying to say, or if the fans even saw that he was giving them the finger. The resulting plot is still plenty convoluted in its own way — how could it not be?
All of that aside, however, Metal Gear Solid 4 does still have something to say. The central theme of the game is that Private Military Companies have taken over warfare and become the backbone of the world economy. War is constant, because without it, the economy will fail. Soldiers that work for these companies have all been enhanced with nanomachines, giving them increased abilities, and all of them are controlled by an AI called the Sons of the Patriots. This focus on the war economy is reflected in the gameplay — there’s now an arms dealer who periodically shows up to sell you weapons and buy ones you’ve picked up off corpses. Despite the warfare, it is possible to play through the game without killing anyone, just as it was in the prior two titles.
What little gameplay is present here is mostly fantastic, with the exception of some forced cover shooter sections which feel out of place, generic, and surprisingly unimaginative. Otherwise, the game takes the gameplay innovations of Metal Gear Solid 3 to the next level, streamlining and refining them. A crouch walk function has been introduced, significantly speeding up the gameplay. The camouflage system has been streamlined — it now acts like a chameleon, blending with whatever surface you’re pressed against (and there’s even face camo). There are loads of new toys to play with, including a mini Metal Gear (based on the design from his 1988 game Snatcher) which you can send into battle as a scout. I wish the game gave players a little bit more time and real estate to play with all of them, but what’s here is incredibly fun.
Instead of largely taking place in a single location, like the previous games, it switches up the series formula and takes place in five different places across the globe, each with extremely generic location names like ‘Middle East’ and ‘South America’. The first two locations are war zones, and feature the most chaotic gameplay in the series as you sneak through active battlefields. The Middle East setting where the game begins felt especially topical at the time. The gameplay is very diverse, with each location focusing on a different gameplay style — for example, the game’s third chapter (in ‘Eastern Europe’’) is largely a stealth chapter, based around tailing someone. This variety keeps things fresh, but it can also leave each section’s gameplay feeling a little underused, leaving you wanting more (with the natural exception of the tired cover shooter sections).
The bosses here are clear gameplay highlights. Once again, there is a crew of bosses set on killing Snake — in this case, they are a group of traumatized women who have been brainwashed into being obsessed with killing Snake. They are all wearing battle suits which make them resemble animals and give them special abilities. They’re loosely named after the bosses from the first game, but with descriptors drawn from the third game’s bosses— Screaming Mantis, Laughing Octopus, Raging Raven, and Crying Wolf — and weapons drawn from the second game’s bosses. Their inhumanity relative to the bosses in previous titles is a further reflection of how mechanized war has become in this game. These fights are quite creative, and each fight has its own conceit. The first battle, with Laughing Octopus, is especially notable, as she blends into her surroundings and forces you to play a deadly game of hide and seek.
Many have spoken about how disturbing it is that the game objectifies these bosses so heavily, putting them in skintight outfits after you defeat them, with the camera lingering on their assets, after which you are told their traumatic backstories. I would argue that is exactly the point. Remember how I said the goal of this game was to give the fans all their fanservice and show them how they don’t really want it? By putting this objectification in a really messed up context — these women are severely traumatized, have been through truly horrific events, and then have been brainwashed to the point where they no longer resemble human beings — a sense of intense dissonance is created in order to make the player uncomfortable. It’s as if Kojima is saying ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED, RIGHT? STILL LIKE IT?’ Of course, it’s hard to say for sure — it’s not like Kojima hasn’t shown similarly perverted tendencies without any commentary in the past, and I certainly don’t want to erase or minimize that.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving the benefit of the doubt here, but the whole game operates like this. ‘OH, YOU WANT MORE? OK, HERE YOU GO. YOU WANT EVERYTHING TIED UP NICELY? HERE IT IS!’ You hated that Raiden wasn’t a badass before? Ok, now he’s a way over the top super-badass! You wanted to know who and what the Patriots are? Ok, they are AIs — and not only that, but the entire cast of MGS3 gets tied into their creation for extra fanservice. This was especially contentious, as what is done with those characters here seems to cast them as villains, whereas they seemed fun-loving and goofy in that game. However, this game isn’t really casting them as villains — it’s more nuanced than that, as subsequent titles make clear. The central conflict in the post-Snake Eater Big Boss games is that everyone who knew the Boss is trying to enact their interpretation of her will in the world, and everyone has a different idea of what that is. No one is truly bad, but everyone is a bit misguided.
As such, this game once again makes it abundantly clear that Kojima had already said everything he had to say in the first two titles and was ready to move on. Metal Gear Solid 3 got away with having nothing new to say on account of being a proper video game, first and foremost, and a very fun one at that — but since half of Metal Gear Solid 4’s duration is cutscenes, it can’t get away with that in the same way. Not to mention that, while there have been some gameplay improvements, the shooter segments of the game arguably feature the worst gameplay of the entire series. Despite all of that, Metal Gear Solid 4 is a good time on the whole. It certainly isn’t boring, despite some iffy pacing. It’s fun to play, it has some interesting ideas, and it’s over the top in a highly amusing way. It may be far from being my favorite title in the series, but it’s still worth a visit.
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Last edited by froghawk; 21st Oct 2024 at 13:47.
I sometimes think I would like to replay MGS4 again. In my never-ending quest to do things the awkward way, it was actually my introduction to the series.
I'd sold my PS1 just before the first game came out, and never owned a PS2. When I bought my PS3, at the time there weren't too many first-party titles available, but MGS4 was one of them, and I'd always been keen to experience the other series that helped define the stealth genre after having started with Deus Ex and Thief 2.
The story definitely had a lot of WTF going on for me, and despite a lot of the characters and story-beats entering the zeitgeist, there was still a lot that at first confused me. But I was able to make sense of it as I played.
That is, when I got a chance to actually play.
Those cutscenes were ridiculous, and had no respect for the players' time. I mean yes, they let you pause them, but rarely were you allowed to skip them. And if you did skip them, you would be even more deeply confused.
It's a shame, because I've been forever left with the impression of a game that had incredible, fleeting glimpses of impressive gameplay, only to be interrupted by hour long cutscenes of teenage girls frying eggs on a plane.
Last edited by Malf; 21st Oct 2024 at 10:33. Reason: Oopsy, typed MGSV instead of MGS4
Oh man, I can't even imagine trying to make sense of this as my first MGS title - it's really not made to be a standalone game. Well, ok, I can, because I tried playing it after MGS1 and bounced off it pretty quick when it came out. Even having the context of the first game was nowhere near sufficient, given how intensely referential the whole affair is. But yeah, as I said, VERY poorly paced lol. Then again, what late Kojima game isn't? I don't feel like any real attempt was made at pacing any of the post-MGS3 titles except Peace Walker.
If anyone's wondering why I skipped writing up 3 - I intend to circle back once Delta drops.
Is MGSV badly paced? I remember the sequence in the hospital trying the player's patience, but that felt like it was on purpose, and once you're past that point, I don't remember the game stopping you from playing it nearly as much as your average Kojima joint. It is possible that I simply don't remember, mind you.
Past the opening hours, MGS5's story doesn't really pop up as often as any other MGS. It's more like Peacewalker in that you choose a mission from the menu and then go do it with the toys you've chosen, so to some degree its pacing is up to you. It's also an open world, so the linearity of the previous MGSes doesn't figure in as much - which in my opinion was an overcorrection, because MGS4 aside, the regular story beats were some of the most enjoyable parts of the previous games. But the focus on gameplay isn't entirely unwelcome. It makes open-world stealth far more interesting than your run of the mill Far Cry game, and I'd say leaps and bounds better than any latter-day Ghost Recon, and that's a massive plus.
Interestingly, while I dearly love Phantom Pain (despite it being unifinished), I actually think Ground Zeroes is the better game, with less opportunity for power creep and a surprising amount of depth squeezed into its relatively small location.
For me, they're very much two parts of a whole, and each has different strengths that are closely linked to their maps. Phantom Pain has a great self-contained map, but that self-containedness also limits what the game can throw at you and what you can throw back at it. I sort of wonder what an imaginary director's cut of MGSV would be like that had you go back and forth between the two. Chances are it wouldn't work at all, but it would've made for a fascinating tighter juxtaposition of the two.
Well, ok, since we're here already... I guess I'll post the big boss trilogy reviews backwards!!! Spoiler: I don't believe it's unfinished...
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes / The Phantom Pain (2014/5)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, and Kazuki Muraoka
Written by Hideo Kojima, Shuyo Murata, Hidenari Inamura, and Etsu Tamari (The Phantom Pain only)
Ground Zeroes music by Akihiro Honda, Ludvig Forssell, and Harry Gregson-Williams
Phantom Pain music by Ludvig Forssell, Justin Burnett, and Daniel James
Art by Yoji Shinkawa and Ikuya Nakamura (Ground Zeroes only)
Kojima was evidently disappointed with how Metal Gear Solid 4 turned out — he had wanted to make it an open world game, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work with the technology available at the time. For the fifth mainline title, he finally got to realize his dream, but only once the world had been flooded with the genre. I guess credit is still due for thinking ahead of the curve, even if it was trendy by the time he managed to deliver it. In order to execute his dream, his team had to create a new engine — the FOX engine. Kojima Productions intended to use the engine for multiple titles, but Konami dissolved Kojima Productions in 2015 and Kojima left the company, finally ending his involvement with the Metal Gear franchise. After that, the engine mostly ended up mostly being used to fuel the Pro Evolution Soccer series before Konami retired it in 2020.
The Phantom Pain was not initially announced as a Metal Gear Solid game — instead, it was passed off as a new IP being developed by Moby Dick Studio, headed up by Joakim Mogren — both of which turned out to be fictional. Evidently, Kojima felt he’d be better able to gauge the public’s response to the engine if it wasn’t initially attached to a popular franchise. The game was soon revealed to be Metal Gear Solid V, and that its release was to be preceded by a prologue entitled Ground Zeroes. Together, they would constitute the third title in the Big Boss trilogy, directly following Peace Walker.
Ground Zeroes is an intro segment, much like the Tanker in Metal Gear Solid 2 or Virtuous Mission in Metal Gear Solid 3, but it was released as a separate product because The Phantom Pain’s development was taking so long and Kojima Productions wanted to have something ready around the PS4’s launch. It’s essentially the end of the Peace Walker story, and a very grim and extreme end at that — it does some absurdly brutal stuff with some of that game’s characters, removing them from the picture. The sole level in this game is inspired by Guantanamo Bay, and the story tackles themes of torture and forced rape. It’s all too brief to say it really earns these topics, and it definitely feels a bit edgelordy. Thankfully, that is its worst quality.
Many were upset about the $30 price tag for one map, but it really is incredibly replayable. The game is designed to allow player choice, giving you a massive variety of potential ways to approach its main mission. If that’s not enough, there are unlockable side and hidden missions which give you different goals in the same map, and at different times of day. It’s quite easy to spend 10–15hrs on just this one map. Players were thus understandably expecting more of that from The Phantom Pain, only to find that it contained only a few areas which were comparable in design to the Ground Zeroes map. Instead, its gameplay was focused mostly on capturing small outposts.
The Phantom Pain mostly takes place on two giant open world maps (Afghanistan and South Africa) with very few indoor areas, making the experience of the game feel very different from Ground Zeroes. While I generally tend to prefer the Ground Zeroes design of a small open area that you can learn inside and out, The Phantom Pain has a lot going for it. It’s a big change in the formula of the series, with very few boss battles or cutscenes, as Kojima evidently felt that long cutscenes had become outdated. Many fans ended up feeling that the game went too far in the other direction — that there wasn’t enough plot or cutscenes compared to prior entries. Certainly the plot feels a bit less significant to the overall story of the series than any of the prior mainline titles, but like the other Big Boss titles, it’s primarily interested in being a game. Luckily, it is truly great at that.
The Phantom Pain brings back the enemy capturing (via balloon) and base building mechanics of Peace Walker. Capturing enemy soldiers and making them become your soldiers feels even stranger now that part of the game is set in Africa, making for some… awkward moments, to say the least. (The game also tackles the issue of child soldiers, as it needed to in order to explain how Big Boss started using them in the first Metal Gear, but it doesn’t take any particularly bold stances on the topic.) However, Peace Walker’s overall design was the opposite of The Phantom Pain’s. Placing these mechanics in a giant open world with big missions makes it all feel quite fresh.
Every mission in the game is designed to feel like an episode of TV, complete with opening and ending credits. This acts as an excuse for Kojima to plaster his name all over the game — Konami may have removed his name for the box art and fired him, but he wasn’t about to let anyone forget who was really responsible for the game. It also provides an interesting insight into the process by allowing you to see which writer was responsible for each mission. Kojima and Murata wrote all the missions which actually advance the plot, while newcomers Etsu Tamari and Hidenari Inamura were tasked with writing all of the filler missions.
On one hand, The Phantom Pain is an odd proposition. Its purpose in the wider plot of the series is somewhat preposterous, as it exists to fill in a ‘plot hole’ from 25 years ago, explaining how Big Boss returned as the final boss in Metal Gear 2 when Solid Snake had already killed him in Metal Gear. I have no doubt that the original reason for this was just goofy 80s video game convention, and that this entire plot is some sort of retcon. Nonetheless, the solution it proposes is as convoluted and wild as you’d expect. It also exists to explain how Big Boss became a villain in the first place, given that the tone of its predecessors (Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker) was surprisingly fun.
On the other hand, it’s a game about language. The plot is about vocal cord parasites which can wipe out entire groups based on the language they speak, but the game plays with language in much bigger ways than that. Many of the characters in the game are either silent or barely speak. After the events of Ground Zeroes, which undid all the work that Snake and Miller did in Peace Walker and sent them into a state of deep depression, there is a sense that they’ve descended deep into shame, and now live in a fallen world. Something has been taken away from them that they can never get back, and they feel that pain every day — a phantom pain.
The light and fun tone from Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker are gone, replaced with a strange darkness (despite the bright illumination of all of the game’s environments). Almost everyone in the cast is either a villain or someone who is going to become a villain. Everyone on screen is being manipulated by someone off screen or even by someone dead, to the point that they can’t even tell what any of their actions mean anymore. This makes the whole affair feel like a side plot being directed by forces that don’t even appear in the game.
As I mentioned earlier, the previous games were filled with plot and cutscenes and light on gameplay, but this one is the opposite. Big Boss barely speaks, and when he does, his voice is wrong (series staple David Hayter has been inexplicably replaced by Keifer Sutherland as Snake’s voice actor). Three villains return from previous games. Two of them don’t speak at all, and the third barely speaks. There’s a new character named Quiet who lives up to her name, as she is mute. Miller is now filled with deep rage, and his former jovial chattiness has been replaced by a foreboding air. Most of the plot advancement has been relegated to cassette tapes, which you listen to as you play the game.
This started in Peace Walker, which replaced the codec calls of previous titles with cassette tapes for a few reasons. Firstly, the levels were very short, so there was no space to stick all of the required dialogue in them. Secondly, the game was handheld, so you could listen to the tapes while doing other things. As Metal Gear Solid V is a large open world game, none of these things apply anymore. By allowing you to listen to the tapes during gameplay, their role has changed — it divorces the plot from the action onscreen, creating a feeling of disconnection. As for the content of the tapes, they delve into intense and excessive levels of detail around political context and plot mechanics while leaving the overall plot of the game somewhat obscure.
The open world feels quite empty. It doesn’t feel like a true open world game — the game is designed around its main missions and side missions, and all there is to do beyond that is collect the occasional plant, rescue some animals, and capture some guard posts. It almost feels like the open world is simply there to give you something to do while listening to the tapes — now you can occupy yourself by traversing the landscape. The same is true of your Mother Base, a gigantic and ever-growing structure which you can now traverse (unlike in Peace Walker, where it was simply a menu screen)— but there is nothing to do there except in one room, aside from the occasional target practice. All of this contributes in a big way to a larger feeling of emptiness which pervades the game.
There’s also a sense of displacement. Afghanistan is inhabited soley by Russian soldiers, without a single Afghani in sight — it’s unsettling. Snake, Miller, and their crew have also been displaced — they are expats living on the open sea. The new home Snake and Miller attempted to build for themselves was destroyed, so their attempts to rebuild are permeated with paranoia. The sense of safety they established was destroyed in Ground Zeroes, and nothing can ever be the same again.
The gameplay in Metal Gear Solid V is the best the series has to offer — it’s a sandbox that gives you endless tools to play with in extremely well-designed levels which allow for endless possible approaches. Unlike the first four games, which largely underused their gameplay mechanics and left you wanting more, Metal Gear Solid V drives its gameplay loop into the ground with filler missions and side missions. It gives you a perfectly designed triumph of gameplay and then throws it at you until you absolutely can’t stand it anymore.
Some have proposed that this is commentary on Konami’s demands, and the way they isolated Kojima and cut off his internet during the development… but I think it’s more than that. It feels like a reflection of the world we live in today. We are all villains (‘there is no ethics under capitalism’) — all complicit in the exploitation, oppression, and destruction that is essential to the operation of our society, and all being powerlessly manipulated by unseen forces. The amount of entertainment and distraction available to us is at an all-time high, but it ultimately all feels empty, unable to mask the depression and disconnection underlying everything we do. The world feels fallen, corrupted — as we stare down the impending apocalypse, we know we are past the point of no return. Everything starts to feel a bit purposeless. That is exactly the feeling this game creates, and it does so in a brilliantly subtle way, through the intersection of many smaller elements. Many of these elements individually seem like they may have been accidental, but when the bigger picture arrives, the intent becomes clear.
In a way, the world on display here feels like the inevitable outcome of the themes of information manipulation that Metal Gear Solid 2 explored. Kojima was concerned back then, but all of his fears came true — the post-truth age is in full swing, and no one can tell who is steering the ship anymore. There’s no need for him to warn us about the future anymore — instead, he simply held up a mirror and showed everyone where we are. It’s no surprise that many people didn’t like it. To me, it feels like the most purposeful Metal Gear Solid title in quite some time.
The portrayal of the character Quiet has led to much criticism. On the one hand, it fits right in with this larger narrative — this is a male-dominated and male-destroyed world, and the only prominent female character in the game is a scantily clad woman who never speaks. This feels like it could be part of the commentary — both a criticism of how women are portrayed in games and of the patriarchy itself, in the same way that Metal Gear Solid 4 tried to make you uncomfortable by objectifying severely traumatized and broken women. I’ve drawn parallels with Evangelion in the past, and I think Evangelion 3.0+1.0 was making a similar statement. However, given Kojima’s own history of portraying women in deeply questionable and objectifying ways, one must ask when the criticism becomes the thing it is trying to criticize, especially when your audience is prone to missing the point. He is always teetering on the edge with this one, and the game’s camera will give you plenty of reason to argue that he’s gone way over it. In other words — even if that is what he’s trying to do, he can’t have his cake and eat it, too.
Many also complain about the way Kiefer Sutherland replaced David Hayter as Big Boss’s voice actor — and while there could be good plot justification for that, two things get in the way of it. The first is that the Japanese voice actor did not change. The second is that Hayter would’ve had to voice Snake in Ground Zeroes for this to really make sense (though I will not explain either of these things further to avoid spoilers). In any case, given that Big Boss had a British accent in Metal Gear Solid 4, there is no consistency whatsoever as to what Big Boss sounds like. It didn’t make whole lot of sense to give him the same voice actor as Solid Snake to begin with, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go back on that now, either. Nevertheless, it contributes to the uncanny nature of the whole affair.
Another source of controversy is the popular theory that the game is unfinished. Indeed, a bonus disc with some making-of materials contained a video of a partially-finished level which wrapped up the last major open plot point, leading many to speculate that Kojima Productions did not have time to finish the game due to pressure from Konami, but Konami claimed it was scrapped early on in development. With that said, the game is called ‘The Phantom Pain’, and given the way the rest of the ludonarrative in this game functions, I would not be at all surprised if content was cut specifically to make you feel like something is missing, as the absence of that contributes to the overall feeling on display. There’s also a good chance that it was being saved for DLC, but that plans for that were thwarted when Kojima was fired, though the game’s community manager has refuted this.
As is, the game already has 3 different consecutive ‘endings’ which cut to rolling the ending credits, only for the game to continue after — adding a fourth would’ve been preposterous. The last of those endings has you play the entire opening mission again — and while that mission was excellent the first time, it feels tedious the second time around. It’s a fitting whimper for this game to end on — instead of fighting the giant flamethrower-dicked boss robot again, as was originally planned, we get more excessive rehash. This would not be the first time Kojima intentionally made part of a game frustrating and unenjoyable, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. There can be no redemption in the world of this game — trailing off into nothing feels like the most fitting end.
There was also a title screen for a third chapter (entitled ‘Peace’) found in the game’s assets. While many have speculated that the game was missing an intended third chapter, it turned out that this was part of the game’s multiplayer mode, which allows players to invade each other’s ‘forward operating bases’. In that event that full nuclear disarmament is achieved in a multiplayer server, chapter 3 will occur — however, the game makes this literally impossible. It is indeed a meta-chapter.
As is, the second chapter largely consists of harder versions of earlier missions — versions that require total stealth, ‘subsistence’ versions which drop you in with no gear and expect you to procure everything you need on site, and ‘extreme’ versions with the difficulty dialed up (which I will surely never try for the already insanely difficult final boss battle). Indeed, this is yet another way in which the game feels bloated with filler content. Giant open world areas with only a few really fleshed out level areas, filler missions, rehashed missions, endless side quests… there’s far more of this sort of thing than there is substantial story and level content. But, as I said, that all feels like part of the point. The Metal Gear Solid story had already been told.
In short, I find Metal Gear Solid V to be the most thematically compelling entry in the series after Metal Gear Solid 2, as well the darkest and most hopeless. If nothing more, Kojima finally found some new things to say with Metal Gear Solid V, which is something I can’t say for the previous decade+ of the series. Perhaps the novel open world format inspired some new story ideas, or perhaps he’d finally resigned himself to being stuck with the series and thus found a way to bring in new ideas. It’s got a big statement to make, but it does so in a nuanced and subtle way and from multiple angles.
As a game, it’s the most polished and well-honed entry in the series. The plot is thin enough that it’s easy to write off, but try looking at it from a different angle and you may be surprised what you find. It’s a flawed game by design. There are plenty of things I could nitpick (why the hell do walking, riding a horse, and driving a vehicle all have different control schemes on a controller?), but the big picture is there. I’m glad Kojima was finally able to be free of the franchise. His final entry is a fitting ending for a corpse constantly reanimated past its due date. Konami has only made one attempt to continue the series without Kojima — the widely-maligned Fox engine zombie game, Metal Gear Survive. Thankfully, they quickly got the message and have made no further attempts at anything other than remasters and remakes.
As this game is enormous — much bigger in scale than the past titles — there’s a whole lot more I could talk about here. However, I believe I’ve said what I uniquely have to say about the game at this point, and will thus leave my review ‘unfinished’.
https://medium.com/@froghawk/metal-g...5-587960a3d00a
Wait till you get to Death Stranding.
Having just been to Iceland, I should finally play Death Stranding.
I'm still not over the Princess Beach line. I don't think I ever will be.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, Kazuki Muraoka, and Yoshikazu Matsuhana
Written by Hideo Kojima and Shuyo Murata
Music by Nobuko Toda, Shuichi Kobori, and Kazuma Jinnouchi
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
Peace Walker is essentially Metal Gear Solid 5. The only reason it didn’t get a number is that it was designed for the Playstation Portable. Because of that, this game changes up the series’ formula in a big way, ushering in a new era. The games are much longer from here on out, with a lot more gameplay content (including what is arguably a good bit of filler). Following in the footsteps of Metal Gear Solid 3, these games actually care about being games now. It’s odd to see such long titles from Kojima, who was very insistent in his previous titles that gamers need to go outside, interact with people, and stop living their lives inside video games — but here we are.
This is actually the fourth Metal Gear game for PSP, following the two Metal Gear Acid titles and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops — none of which were directed or designed by Kojima, only produced by him. This game started its development as Portable Ops 2 — Kojima gave the team his ideas, but they weren’t quite getting what he was trying to do, so he decided to helm the development of a portable title for the first time. And thus, Peace Walker became its own thing, inspired by Monster Hunter and the genre it spawned. It still builds on many of the mechanics introduced in Portable Ops — both games feature only-slightly-animated comic book style cutscenes and base-building mechanics, but the latter has been massively streamlined.
Peace Walker barely engages with the plot of Portable Ops — there’s a single throwaway line about being ‘glad that San Heironymo nonsense is over’, and that’s it. While Portable Ops was based on Kojima’s plot ideas, he characterized the result as only partially canon. Peace Walker, on the other hand, is a mainline canon title which serves as the center of the prequel trilogy, which is centered around Naked Snake / Big Boss. The three titles in the Big Boss trilogy each take place a decade apart — Metal Gear Solid 3 took place in 1964, so this game takes place in 1974.
Peace Walker definitely suffers a bit from middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome. The purpose of the plot is mostly to further process the events of Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 and to set up Metal Gear Solid V. Big Boss is still reckoning with The Boss’s end a decade later. He has forsaken his country and decided to start his own nation in the form of an off-shore militia, called MSF (Militaires Sans Frontières), as a way of acting out his interpretation of The Boss’s will. The overall plot follows the standard Metal Gear Solid formula. It lacks the meta elements of the Solid Snake games and follows more in the footsteps of Metal Gear Solid 3 (right down to the jungle environments), featuring numerous flashbacks from that title. Nonetheless, it really drives home the emotional impact of Metal Gear Solid 3’s ending and may make you tear up all over again.
Because it’s a portable game with tiny levels, filling each level with codec calls wouldn’t really work. As such, the codec is now one-way and only used to give hints to Snake. Instead, all of those conversations have been separated out from the missions into cassette tape recordings that you can listen to in the menus as part of the mission briefing screens. There are hours upon hours of these tapes — I assume the idea was that you could carry the PSP around with you and listen to them while you do other things, but that doesn’t translate so well to the PS3 HD remaster I played.
The game is set in Costa Rica, and it puts a lot of effort into fleshing out the history, politics, and biodiversity of the region in the tapes. A lot of effort goes into educating the player about the situation with Somoza and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the local birds, legends of Unidentified Mysterious Animals from around the world, French cuisine, and other entirely random topics. The core topic that this game addresses is nuclear deterrence — which feels a bit full circle for the series, as it hasn’t been fully focused on the nuclear angle since the first game.
Snake has a fun cast of characters around him. Master Miller from Metal Gear Solid 1 is his right hand man, only with a retconned twist — while Miller was named McDonell Benedict Miller in the first game, here he is the half-Japanese Kazuhira Miller, raised in Japan. The game uses him to teach the player about Japanese culture. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two names, but they’re clearly meant to be the same character. Miller is constantly cracking jokes, womanizing, and causing trouble around the base.
The game begins when an unlikely duo, Professor Galvez and his 16yr old peace-loving student Paz, bring Snake and Miller a mission for their militia. Snake and Miller immediately smell that something isn’t right, but Galvez plays them a tape with the Boss’s voice, which convinces Snake to pursue the mission and discover the truth. Snake teams up with the Sandinistas along the way. He earns the trust of Amanda Valenciano Libre by rescuing her younger brother Chico, and so both of them join the MSF. Chico is obsessed with the aforementioned Unidentified Mysterious Animals, or UMAs, like Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster. He essentially serves the role here previously occupied by Para Medic’s movie obsession in the third game, or MeI Ling’s quotations in the original.
The main villain is a CIA operative named Hot Coldman. No, I’m not kidding. Kojima continued this naming strategy in Death Stranding with characters like Die Hardman and Heartman, but we’ll get there later. Hot Coldman is responsible for a new Metal Gear ironically called Peace Walker, which he had scientist Huey Emmerich design as a nuclear deterrent — only now, he plans to use it to demonstrate its power, and so Snake must stop him. There are, of course, multiple twists and betrayals along the way — it all gets very convoluted in classic Kojima fashion. You’d never see a plot like this in an American game — it’s incredibly refreshing to play a game where the CIA is a villain (just like real life!).
Because the Snake-Otacon dynamic was so popular in the Solid Snake games, they decided to reprise it here. Huey Emmerich is Otacon’s father. They’re very similar characters in a lot of ways, even voiced by the same actor. The main difference is that Huey is paraplegic, which explains his fixation on creating bipedal walking robots. He is partnered with a lesbian AI researcher named Dr. Strangelove, who he has an unspoken crush on. She is obsessed with The Boss, and puts all of her energy into trying to recreate her via AI. (This game may be a bit more normal than previous titles, but it’s still a Kojima game!) Both eventually join your base and work together to develop a Metal Gear for the MSF, thus bringing them further towards becoming the villains.
Because Peace Walker is a portable title, it’s scaled down in some ways. The graphics are worse than Metal Gear Solid 3, but they get the job done just fine. Enemies are practically blind and very easy to sneak around. You can no longer hide in grass, as prone sneaking has been removed from the game, which makes the pace a good bit faster. You have to set your camo and choose your weapons before each mission, and cannot change them during the gameplay (but camo is less important than it was in Metal Gear Solid 3). There are QTEs in some of the cutscenes, which naturally reach their height in the inevitable torture scene, forcing you to mash the controller so hard and fast that you feel like you might break it.
The game has a mission-based structure and the levels are designed to be bite-sized. Each level consists of a few small interconnected areas. The goal here is to expand your militia, which entails not only rescuing Sandinista hostages, but also capturing as many enemy soldiers as possible. To do this, you knock them out, attach what is basically a helium balloon to them, and a helicopter comes and picks them up (note that this can inexplicably also be done indoors, where they zip through the ceiling with no problem). If they object to being part of your army, they get thrown in the brig until they agree. Pretty messed up! In any case, this is a big improvement from the base-building mechanic in Portable Ops, where you had to tediously drag every soldier you wanted to recruit to a particular spot in the level.
And so the basic gameplay loop is a bit less dynamic than in past games — you basically go through each level, knock everyone out with a tranquilizer pistol, and ‘recruit’ them. There are plenty of other toys to play with and possible approaches, but the game incentivizes this one play style so heavily that it’s likely going to be the only one you engage with for the most part. All of this is pretty easy, but the challenge comes from the levels where you can capture vehicles to add to your army. Snake doesn’t just single handedly fight one tank or helicopter this time around — he does it over and over again with a wide variety of large military vehicles (though he can also enlist the help of his militia in the form of co-op).
These vehicles are always protected by a team of heavily armored infantry, plus several rounds of reinforcements. You can always treat these encounters like boss fights and blow up the vehicle, but the real aim is to survive multiple waves of infantry until the driver of the vehicle gets frustrated and pops out to try and attack you, at which point you can knock him out and commandeer the vehicle. These encounters can get frustratingly difficult at times, and there are quite a lot of them in the game. You may also end up having to replay them if the vehicles you captured get destroyed later, which is probably my least favorite thing about this game.
The proper bosses this time are no longer a crew — they’re a series of AI vehicles. Metal Gear Solid 3 already minimally fleshed out its bosses, and this game found a way to avoid having to flesh them out at all. The AI theme is a bit anachronistic for 1974, but here we are. These bosses are designed to require you to call in supply drops to defeat them, where cardboard boxes with ammo and health items are dropped by helicopter onto the field — there’s no way to enter the fight with enough ammunition. You can also call in airstrikes, but calling in too much support will cause your heroism level to drop. This isn’t something you need to be worried about — the only benefits of having a high heroism level are that it causes more soldiers to volunteer for your army (you already get more than enough without volunteers) and that it unlocks new battle cries for the game’s online mode.
Only around half of the play time is spent on the actual gameplay. The other half of the game takes place in menu screens. Listening to cassette tapes and base management are the main events here. You assign all the soldiers you’ve, uh, ‘recruited’ to different departments (combat, R&D, mess hall, medical, and intel). Each soldier has a skill set which makes them better suited for certain tasks, so you want to assign your soldiers to maximize the level of each department — but you can also use the auto-assign function if you don’t feel like doing that for every individual soldier. You can then send your soldiers and vehicles (later including your Metal Gear) on work-for-hire militia ops for extra money. These are not interactive, but you can watch a very boring 2D replay if you want — you’ll probably do it once and then skip it every time after that, especially since the game tells you which troops and vehicles were killed/destroyed in action afterwards. You then use the money you raised for the R&D department to develop new gear.
This basic loop takes 10–20min, and then you basically just do that over and over again, which makes sense for a handheld title. I don’t necessarily love how it breaks up the main plot — I definitely preferred the more continuous approach of the previous games rather than constantly interrupting the flow of the levels and plot with menu games and side ops. It’s a fun loop, but it can get grindy in a way I don’t love if you let it, especially when it comes to capturing vehicles. Thankfully, the grinding is mostly optional, but you can really let it stretch things out if you want to. Despite the short levels, this is by far the longest Metal Gear Solid game thus far — I quit after 35hrs, but howlongtobeat.com says it will take 95hrs to finish everything.
There’s loads of side content here which gets more interesting and diverse as the game goes on — shooting galleries, ghost levels, dating simulators, Monster Hunter crossovers, and more. The dating simulator parody leads to an awkward moment where Snake gets inside a cardboard box with a character who claims she is 16, and then the box bounces around a bunch. There’s also one where Snake does the same thing with his right-hand man, so I guess it’s just a weird sort of parody that is lost on an audience that doesn’t play all the dating sims that are so popular in Japan but never make it to the US.
The game was designed as an interesting single player / multiplayer hybrid. I didn’t get to explore the online aspects, as there’s not much of a player base left. Part of my difficulty with the vehicle battles is that they were really meant to be played co-operatively with up to four players. Most of the game can be played with a second player. I bet this was incredibly fun and made the frustrating bits a lot more enjoyable — I wish I could’ve experienced it, as there are whole sets of squad actions which can be executed in co-op, including multi-person cardboard ‘love boxes’ to sneak around in.
As such, Snake isn’t the only playable character this time around — each mission can be played using any member of your militia. You can trade militia members with other people, as well. There’s also a 6-player versus mode with the usual array of deathmatch and capture missions. The PS3 HD version I played also includes a ‘transfarring’ feature, allowing you to move your saves between the PS3 and the PS Vita. The HD collection also includes the second and third titles, which both also include this feature, though Peace Walker is the only one truly designed to utilize it.
Overall, Peace Walker is an excellent game. Unlike the Solid Snake trilogy, which were half cutscenes and barely wanted to be games at all, the Naked Snake/Big Boss trilogy are truly games, and very fun ones. It’s easy to get a bit addicted to this one. While the overall plot is less compelling than previous titles, and the game feels like it has less to say, all the details make the game and its cast come to life. As a portable title and the middle of the trilogy, it’s not going to be as memorable as Metal Gear Solid 3 or Metal Gear Solid V, but it provides an important piece of the story — Metal Gear Solid V doesn’t make any sense without it. As such, it’s an essential part of the Metal Gear Solid canon.
https://medium.com/@froghawk/metal-g...0-fd7a060c3a37
Death Stranding (2019)
Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, James Vance, and Ken Mendoza
Written by Hideo Kojima, Kenji Yano, and Shuyo Murata
Music by Ludvig Forssell
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
Kojima was supposedly fired from Konami due to budgetary concerns over the development of Metal Gear Solid V — not to mention the secret development of his Guillermo del Toro collaboration, the Silent Hill entry PT (Playable Teaser), without Konami’s consent, using funds meant for Metal Gear Solid V. Perhaps he was trying to get fired! Finally free from the Metal Gear Solid series, Kojima founded his own independent studio (also named Kojima Productions) and worked out a publishing deal with Sony. The new studio began work on a game using the Decima engine (formerly used for Horizon: Zero Dawn). The resulting game, Death Stranding, is the most Kojima game ever made in every way possible (aside from the horniness, which, while still occasionally present, is quite toned down — the game is mostly too depressed to be horny).
Death Stranding shares a lot of DNA with Metal Gear Solid V, from the stealth elements to the open world, but it’s very much its own beast. It was an attempt to imagine a new type of game — a TRUE walking simulator. While there are combat and stealth segments, they aren’t the central focus, and instead are mostly used to provide some variety from the main mechanic. Said mechanic is traversal and delivery — Death Stranding is basically a futuristic amazon delivery simulator, and it’s every bit as nightmarish as that sounds. If Metal Gear Solid V was about our world today — a disconnected world on the verge of apocalypse — then Death Stranding is the logical next step. Many artists have given their visions of the post-apocalypse, but I’ve never experienced one that looks quite like this.
It takes place in a post-collapse America where everyone has become truly disconnected and isolated (far beyond what was displayed in Metal Gear Solid V), with a plot centered around attempts to re-establish some sort of connection between people. (While many saw this as a commentary on the pandemic and lockdown, the timing was coincidental.) It’s unclear what is going on in the rest of the world. All we’re told is some sort of apocalyptic event called a ‘death stranding’ has occurred, leading to this state of disconnection. In the wake of that, an organization called Bridges loosely took charge of the country (inasmuch as anyone could truly be in charge), and began attempting to reconnect the country into the ‘United Cities of America’ by bringing cities across the country into their ‘chiral network’. The few people remaining in this desolate countryside are preppers — people who built underground bunkers pre-emptively, before the apocalypse, and who are now extremely isolated.
Despite being labeled ‘America’, the land itself is actually modeled after Iceland — which means it’s gorgeous and cold. The map displays a picture of the USA which the player traverses from end to end, but the game world is comically small relative to the actual America (though that’s not a bad thing, as an actual America-sized open world would be way too much). In addition to the land you’re traversing seemingly bearing no relation to what’s displayed on the map, the weather and terrain remain pretty similar across the country, so even the sense of progression is minimal. With all that said, I think the decision to make this America have no relation to the one know today, from city names to cultural markers, was intentional. This is a country that has completely lost its identity. The sense of dissonance created by seeing that map with something completely unrecognizable plopped on top of it is one of the driving forces here.
Kojima finally got to fully indulge his inner movie nerd with this game, as he cast multiple big-name actors and directors in the game. Sam is played by Norman Reedus (of Boondock Saints and Walking Dead fame), and he isn’t just a voice actor — he also did the motion capture, and the character looks like him. Similarly, Margaret Qualley (of The Leftovers and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) plays a character named Mama, Léa Seydoux (of Wes Anderson, James Bond, and Dune fame) plays a character named Fragile. Many of the preppers Sam visits along the way are celebrity cameos, from Conan O’Brien to Edgar Wright.
Kojima also got the likenesses of two of his favorite directors — Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn — to appear as main characters named Deadman and Heartman, though they did not voice those characters. Yes, the names in this game are preposterous. Jersey Boys actor Tommie Earl Jenkins plays a character named Die Hardman (actual name: John McClane — no, I’m not kidding, but he’s also one of the only characters that has an actual name). As if Hot Coldman from Peace Walker wasn’t bad enough, Kojima had to go and create a whole game’s worth of similar names. The antagonists (played by Mads Mikkelsen and Troy Baker) also have punny names, though it may not be obvious why until late in the game in one of their cases.
Speaking of names, this game is obsessed with the words ‘bridge’ and ‘strand’ (not to mention all the umbilical cord imagery). The president’s name is Bridget Strand, and she is dying of cancer. Her daughter, Samantha America Strand (known primarily as Amelie, though she goes by other names as well) is thus taking over her effort to reconnect the country. However, she is being held hostage by terrorists on the opposite coast. The main character, Sam Porter Bridges (because he’s a delivery boy who works for Bridges, get it?), is Amelie’s adoptive sibling, and he’s been tasked with rescuing her. He’s a stoic, shut down type, who literally feels pain when people touch him on account of a condition called DOOMS — but more on that in a moment.
Sam’s mission, then, is to traverse the entire country from the east coast to the west coast, bringing cities into the network along the way, convincing locals to join up by delivering them packages, and ultimately rescuing Amelie on the west coast. Much of the game’s challenge comes from organizing all the packages you’re carrying, often on foot, so that you can traverse the difficult, varied, and often rocky terrain without dying or ruining the cargo. You must carefully balance the cargo on your body with how you organize it, and be sure not accept too big of a job on foot. The image of Sam struggling to stay upright while carrying a pile of cargo twice his height on his back is a harrowing one. However, he can also use vehicles — assuming that they’re able to traverse the difficult terrain, not run out of batteries, and stay in one piece.
Bringing the right tools for the job is important, and Sam traverses the environment using ropes, ladders, and special external skeletons to enhance his carrying ability, in addition to many other tools. The game has an interesting form of multiplayer that feels somewhat similar to Dark Souls — players can help each other by delivering each others’ dropped packages in a mutually beneficial arrangement, creating useful structures (like literal bridges, generators, and safehouses) or helping to rebuild roads, leaving gear for each other, and putting up signs that act as power ups for other players. In other words, the game is quite literally about connection, but in a disconnected way where the players never actually see each other.
The terrain may be treacherous and difficult to traverse, including snowy mountains and steep rocks, but that’s hardly the only threat. Chiralium-filled rain known as ‘timefall’ causes aging and disintegration to accelerate, making it dangerous to stand out in the rain — so navigating or avoiding timefall is one of the major jobs of a porter. Due to the timefall, there are few trees or animals in this world — it is truly desolate, despite green mosses that can withstand the timefall covering many surfaces. The greatest threat of all is the ghosts. After the Death Stranding, the spirit world fully infiltrated our world. Everyone has a place in the spirit world that they are able to go to called a ‘beach’. Spectres (called beached things, or B.T.s, which are the souls of beings that died on Earth post-stranding) are able to reach across from their beaches into our world and attack people, but adults cannot sense them until it’s too late.
If a B.T. (made of antimatter) touches a person (made of matter), they will cancel each other out and cause a ‘voidout’ — a giant explosion leaving a large crater in the earth and throwing lots of chiralium into the air, which is a type of matter originating from the beaches which has infiltrated our world after the death standing. This fundamental incompatibility felt to me like a commentary on western empiricism being at odds with the spirit world. Somehow, these two worlds need to be reconciled, but a path forwards is not clear. All corpses need to be promptly incinerated, otherwise they will turn into BTs and run into someone, causing another voidout.
This mechanic is used to discourage killing. Raiders called MULES will attack you and try to steal your cargo, and need to be carefully avoided, outmaneuvered, or fought off. Like Kojima’s previous title, the game takes an immersive simulator-inspired route and give you many tools to deal with combat encounters, and many of those are nonlethal and stealthy — but killing is still an option. However, if you kill someone, you must take their body on a long trek to an incinerator in a limited amount of time, before their body explodes. With that said, since many of the nonlethal weapons are just nonlethal copies of lethal weapons like assault rifles, much of the combat feels like a standard third person shooter, complete with shooting galleries as training for new weapons. It’s a little disappointing from a game promising a break from tradition, and introduces a little of the ludonarrative dissonance the game is trying so hard to avoid back into the proceedings — but I suppose you need to include some concessions to reel people in.
Adults may not be able to see B.T.s, but premature infants are still firmly connected to the other world, so they can sense them. In a horrific act of exploitation, porters often use babies floating in glass containers as a tool to detect BTs, then throw them away when they’ve outlived their use. These are known as ‘bridge babies’ (BBs). While everyone using them is encouraged to view them as inanimate tools, Sam becomes quite attached to his BB, and their relationship is a central part of the game’s story, as is the origin of the bridge babies.
As mentioned earlier, Sam has a condition called DOOMS, which means he has a strong connection to the beaches on the other side. He’s also a ‘repatriate’, meaning he died as a child but somehow came back to life. The result is that Sam became effectively immortal, as he is transported to the ‘seam’ between earth and beaches upon dying, and is able to ‘repatriate’ from there (i.e. come back to life). However, DOOMS ‘sufferers’ are also plagued by persistent nightmares of a more final apocalypse. Indeed, one of the game’s primary themes is the inevitability of the impending sixth mass extinction. There’s a problem with people’s beaches — they’re becoming connected and bleeding into each other. This particular type of connection inevitably leads to extinction.
I’m sure your eyes are crossing by this point from all the jargon and moving parts, and the plot only gets more complicated and convoluted from there — but ultimately, it’s another Kojima story about faith in humanity and connection that’s perhaps a little too simple and on the nose thematically, but it’s at least filled with all sorts of interesting commentary about our world. For example, the BBs seem to represent capitalist exploitation — the sins of our world — and it’s insinuated at times that the onslaught of phantoms in the world is a form of cosmic punishment for that behavior. It explores the effects of globalization and the internet through the chiral network and the beaches — as the world becomes more connected once again, it also accelerates the inevitable end.
With that said, that plot convolution is a real problem. Metal Gear Solid 2 used plot convolution to make a point, and it was done so in a tightly paced and controlled manner — but not so in Death Stranding (and this time, it feels as if you’re supposed to understand it all). There’s so much here that I can barely even begin to encompass it in this article, and the way it’s delivered doesn’t do it any favors. The game throws so many new concepts at you early on that it’s difficult to absorb them all, but most of the game is extremely thin on actual plot development, and instead is taken up by side stories. At lot of crucial information is conveyed via emails and interviews, which aren’t even recorded with audio this time — they’re text, buried deep in a menu.
The pacing is even wonkier than Metal Gear Solid 4. Much of the 40+hr game’s actual plot is delivered in one cutscene at the end, with way too much new information thrown at you at the last second. This information retroactively changes and recontextualizes everything that came before it, but given how long the game is, it’s truly impossible to absorb what it all means on one playthrough. Or perhaps even after several — I’ve read through many plot summaries now, and I still don’t think I get it. There are simply too many concepts, moving parts, recontextualizations, and subplots. The plot even contradicts itself at several junctures! Any attempt to truly understand it all is bound to be undermined.
That’s especially problematic given the pace at which I played the game. This is a rare game that doesn’t feel as if it’s designed to be addictive — I felt encouraged to take it slowly, and it took me an entire year to finish it. This made it extra hard to keep track of everything. It’s divided into 15 episodes, each named after a character in the game. The second and third are very long, taking up the bulk of the first half (hence the skewed plot distribution). The deliveries can get rather repetitive, which encourages approaching the game in small doses. My playthrough took nearly 50 hours, but I skipped quite a bit of the side deliveries. There is some fun side content, like the racing in the director’s cut which was added later via a DLC, but for the most part, the side deliveries get monotonous.
Sam almost never interacts with actual people — instead interacting with holograms — which is potent commentary in and of itself. Most of these interactions take place through delivery terminals, and there are basically just two types of those — the small individual type, and the larger city hub type which includes a private room and a firing range. There is only one private room design, and all of them look identical. This all feels a bit lazy — which is understandable, given the massive scale and ambition of the project, but it also contributes to the repetition. The outdoor environments are absolutely gorgeous — the game’s huge vistas, open skies, and overall emptiness do a great job of conveying a depressing and lonely feeling — but I really feel the game would’ve benefitted from more indoor environments. We visit multiple cities, but we never get to see any of the people in them — it’s just more interactions with lone individuals through holograms at delivery terminals. Perhaps this was meant to increase the feelings of loneliness, but with no contrast to that, it doesn’t fully land.
Part of the monotony comes from the fact that the preppers are all somehow devoid of personality and affect, barely seeming excited at all to connect with another person, thus undermining the game’s message. The stories of the people you meet along the way should be the star of the show here, but instead it all feels a bit jokey and underdeveloped — celebrities playing survivalists with occupations like ‘cosplayer’, ‘junk dealer’, and ‘film director’. Unfortunately, this means many of the people playing preppers are not really actors and deliver their lines with minimal affect. Not that the lines themselves are much to write home about — you’d expect making the interactions with survivalists to be at least somewhat quirky, but most of them feel surprisingly bland. It never feels as if you truly connect with most of the people you make deliveries to — they simply aren’t fleshed out enough as characters.
The game’s cast of main characters is where the interesting stories truly lie, and where the game’s emotional core resides. The backstories of characters like Heartman and Mama are quite strange and unusual on the surface, but at their core they are stories of people trying their best to maintain connections with their lost families. The same can be said of one of the main antagonists, but I won’t spoil that. Reedus gives a nuanced, guarded performance, and the way he interacts with all these characters, gradually letting them in, is one of the game’s strongest elements. The lens zooms way out by the end of the story, encompassing cycles of extinction and cosmic purpose. It reaches some arguably rather pessimistic conclusions within all that, but stays hopeful — even all the wild plot twists and convolutions at the climax come down to Sam’s connections with another person.
Ultimately, any attempt to write about it will fall short. It’s simply too big, too expansive, and too unusual to even try to explain. It took me several months after finishing it to publish this, and I very nearly gave up and deleted it several times. In the end, I’ve barely scratched the surface. What I can say is that Death Stranding is a completely unique title — I’ve never played anything quite like it. AAA video games are generally about destruction, so for someone to intentionally make a game about creation and connection in an alienated world is a strong statement. I have to give it major kudos for attempting to break away from the tired combat-loop oriented gameplay of most big titles, while making a lot of solid commentary in the process.
Was I consistently entertained? Absolutely not, but I also think that’s part of the point. Making traversing a barren post-apocalytic world a purely ‘fun’ experience would introduce ludonarrative dissonance which would interfere with the message. So it isn’t always the most fun game to play — after all, being grim and depressing is a big part of the point — and it isn’t always the easiest to understand, either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth taking the ride. It’s highly flawed, no doubt — Kojima’s ambition got the best of him and I don’t think he managed to assemble all of his ideas into a coherent picture — but I’m glad it was made, and I hope it inspires others to run with some of these concepts.
https://medium.com/@froghawk/death-s...9-cfcb0d087e2b
You have my respect for finishing the game.
Once more combat encounters started appearing, I quickly lost interest, finding it too punishing for my tastes.
I did complete the first "Boss Battle", then put the game down for a while.
I then tried it on Steamdeck, where it actually performs really well. But by that time, I'd forgotten how to play, and after wandering out of a base only to run into Mules almost immediately, I put it down and haven't been back.
A real shame, as I admire a lot of what it does.
Okay, bizarre coincidence, but I was just reading a Quanta Magazine article about exciting advances in superconductive materials science, and the word "chiral" popped up there too!
It may not be news to everyone here (I didn't do physics at school), but a chiral is "A material with a preferred internal direction".
The more you know!
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