Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

                                               

And here we are: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: the last MGS I'm reviewing for now: the culmination of a series of reviews so weird I've used four colons already and it's only the first sentence. But why are you here, reader? No, reader, *WHY* are you *HERE*? Regardless, I appreciate that you are, cheers.

So yeah, the opening cinematics in MGS4 are weird to say the least. I got the one with the beauty and the beast corps and the mantis security one, I believe the David Hayter interview was patched out because Konami. The game prepares us for the weird stuff that's about to happen with the strange cinematics and although they don't directly relate to the story they make for great world building early on. A lot of shooters were set in the middle east around this time, weren't they? The shooter mechanics have changed too, there's much more stress on score-based multiplayer killing rather than narrative experiences, we're all just mercenaries and statistics. Shooters have changed. Or so Snake says at the beginning of the first level. Anyway, the first level happens, set in the middle east, you're given plenty of weaponry and ammo and two interchangeable conflicting sides. The levels have the openness of MGS3 but are even bigger this time and Snake has a wider array of gadgets at his disposal. The Solid Eye is the one I used the most, it analyses the battlefield for you spotting enemies and items lying around. It comes in the form of an electronic eye-patch and adds another similarity between Solid Snake and Big Boss. I feel that the Solid Eye is a commentary on Big Boss' own eye situation since with it Snake sees everything a lot clearer and Big Boss in similar fashion learned the plots and subplots going on around him after losing his eye. Losing sight to see truly isn't that alien a concept, in recent memory alone I've seen it in Dune and American Horror Story. It also inspires a different approach to what is shown to the player in the game, you must abandon your conventional shallow vision and peep between the proverbial lines, best done with one eye. It's a speculative approach and Kojima's games really lend themselves to it.

Each video game has several separate but deeply interconnected facets: the audio-visual, the narrative and the interactive. Ideally, they should all inform and compliment one another in such a way that the game comes together as a whole. Kojima's team have been pretty good at attention to detail in all three aspects throughout the series but I've overlooked the sound design in my previous reviews, mostly because who want a to read a 25,000-word essay that isn't about how awesome they are? The first game had a mixed bag of voice acting, three songs I remember (main theme, sad theme, danger theme) and some clever splashing and knocking noises. The second game had terrific outdoor ambience both on the tanker on the roof of the plant and clinical silence indoors, all fitting into the narrative perfectly and some more cringey voice acting, which fitted even better. The first game is a masterpiece in terms of sound for me, every bit of music underlines the setting and the subject, the main theme makes me feel like I'm in a Bond movie, the jungle sounds very much alive and it is. If you hear something moving, singing or roaring in Snake Eater, you can hunt it and eat it. The Boss is an excellent addition to the cast of voices with her level-headed and subdued tones. Now, MGS4 follows that path and only strays off it a little. The Old Snake theme is sombre and carries sadness as well as strength and determination in its tones. The song's placement continues a tradition of terrific sound direction from Kojima's team and all the other songs work in a similar way to impose feelings on the player and compliment the visual. The final trick with the music is nostalgia, the game culminates in a fan-service boss fight with a transforming Ocelot featuring HUDs and theme songs from the previous games right up until MGS4. On the one hand, it's a nice reminder of what's gone on in the series but on the other, Kojima backhandedly reminds us we've been playing basically the same game for a decade. Except war has changed.

There is a bigger emphasis on guns and a bigger selection, though not necessarily variety, of them. One of the main characters is a gun launderer in a world where guns really need to be laundered. All weapons in the MGS4 universe are controlled via nanomachines and are ID specific to a user's DNA (a player login?) grantic the Patriots ultimate control over the battlefield. The battlefield becomes more commercial in this way, every soldier a commodity much like the weapons they're wielding and it is up to Snake to change that. Interestingly, during the first level we are treated to a cut-scene involving the monstrous Geckos, bi-pedal cow monsters and a cardboard box. The Geckos are hunting Snake and the camera pans towards a cardboard box with the phrase “No place for Hideo” on it, implying Snake is hiding in there until the Geckos smash the box to only find watermelons (red herrings? I know, I'm really stretching it now). Is Kojima suggesting he's outsmarting the industry, his critics or the players themselves here? Most easily acceptable line of thought would be that the Geckos represent the industry and gameplay informs that since these two-legged twats are indestructible here. And through this leaping and mooing segway we get onto gameplay. MGS4 is more arcade than arcade stealth and although a stealth approach is encouraged, you can easily get through most of the game being trigger-happy. Stealth is enhanced with the octo-camo which helps Snake blend in if he remains still for a moment, lending to a slower, more careful stealthy style of play. Or you could just grab a machine gun and a rocket launcher and destroy everything in your path. The game progresses through 5 acts and each one presents the player with a different challenge and in my case required a different playstyle. I ran through the first level all guns blazing, playing up to the modern military shooter stereotype. The second act takes place in a jungle and is reminiscent of MGS3, so I sneakily knocked guards out and freed the resistance soldiers who offered a good distraction. Act 3 is the one I can't quite place in terms of a meta-narrative, though I suppose it's Kojima's attempt at a 'bad spy game' and it certainly is bad. It's not so much that the level is difficult as that it is incredibly boring until Eva does her thing again and drives Snake around but then ALL of the challenge disappears and we get a quick rails on section. Maybe this section serves as a segway of its own distinguishing the war-themed MGS3 from the more Espionage, post-war MGS and MGS2? Then we reach Act 4 – Shadow Moses. I needn't mention that this Act reflects the original and chronologically second game of the series. We're even treated to a little bit of the PSX MGS which Snake experiences as a nightmare, an idea since stolen for Wolfenstein: The New Order. This section forced me to be stealthy since the little security bots are surprisingly durable and overwhelmingly numerous. This is the section I gave up when I first played the game a few years back and none of it meant anything to me. This time around I stuck it

out, I took extra care and I was rewarded with a battle of Metal Gears. This is ridiculous and ridiculously satisfying as you watch two humongous Mechas battle it out in a decimated Shadow Moses. This is where the game should've ended but instead we reach Act 5, the MGS2 clone. It probably isn't but I could swear that the ship Snake invades here is the same one he was meant to have destroyed with Raiden at the end of MGS2 but then I might just be going loopy. Anyway, the gameplay encourages more action here again, much like the final stretch of MGS2 and this is the final stretch of all the final stretches – it involves an exhausting button-mashing sequence for which I used both hands. As Snake slowly crawls towards his target, nearing his death with it, we're forced to mash the triangle button at an almost impossible speed in the single greates QTE of all time, one where the gameplay informs the narrative and vice versa.

One cannot simply write about a Metal Gear Solid game without talking about the story. It begins with Snake moaning about war not being what it used to be back in his days and then we find out that he isn't actually 60+, he's just experiencing accelerated ageing so “back in his day” is more like a decade ago or so. Every MGS story is supposed to have a meta-story and Kojima has often used Snake as a mouthpiece so I can only assume that Kojima felt archaic at this point in time despite still being relatively young, just on the brink of turning 46 at the time of release. Snake being old now is kind of the main point with the game serving as a massive cable tie for all the loose ends. See, unlike Ubisoft, Kojima never intended to turn every game he makes into a franchise and he had wanted to stop making MGS games for a little while and at least leave them to others, the irony being even this narrative dead-end wasn't a sufficient escape route and thus MGS V. Anyway, let my train of thought not derail too far – the story's crap, but why is it crap? Vamp returns and again his only interesting traits are immortality and an unusually long tongue, some other characters make a cameo including the colonel and Rosemary, the spice of Raiden's life. Most pleasingly though, Raiden takes over the cyborg ninja duties for this game helping launch his Platinum spin-off. A complete role reversal occurs with Raiden and Snake here, Raiden being the competent character. I'm not gonna do a synopsis of the plot or anything because the cut scenes alone are about 7 hours long and that would just be silly but there are two things I wanna talk about: Snake's age and the fried eggs. The whole point seems to be about Snake being old and useless, people, women in particular because Kojima has some unresolved complexes, repeatedly reminding Snake of his aging – Naomi gasps and cries then bangs Otacon instead, Meryl calls him OLD Snake and bangs Johnny Akiba instead, Sunny calls him grandpa (Okay, that last one is a lie). Sunny takes a few attempts at frying some eggs during the course of the game. The first attempt ends with a good egg and a spoiled egg, the second attempt results in two spoiled eggs, the third attempt produces three good yolks from two eggs, the fourth and final sees two yolks combine into one (as seen here). I've read numerous theories about the eggs and how they represent the clones but I have a slightly different standpoint on this. The common theory is that the first pair of eggs are Big Boss himself and a clone gone wrong, the second pair are another set of clones gone wrong (there were supposed to be eight in total), the third signifies Solid and Liquid being twins with the third egg presumably being Solidous, and the final signifies their coming together or the merging of Liquid and Ocelot. I would like to argue that the egg scenes serve as commentary on the games in the series. Consider the phrase “bad egg”, in the first game, the two main characters, the twin Snakes are a good and a bad egg. In the second game, Raiden works for an oppressive AI against insane terrorists and there truly isn't a traditionally “good” side, even Snake is technically a terrorist and each side has an argument for being pragmatically “good”. The third game has three main characters that may fall on the “good” of the old D&D morality board: The Boss, Big Boss and Ocelot, all of whom serve to protect their country and the world from nuclear war in their own devious ways. And so we come to the fourth game, Big Boss finally meeting and accepting his clone, the AI being overwritten and the world returning to “normal” again. Oh, do excuse the spoilers and the frivolous use of the speech marks. 

Ultimately, I enjoyed my time with Metal Gear Solid 4; though it's something of a let-down in comparison to the other entries and has A LOT of issues, the visual presentation has been polished to a point of incredible shine allowed by the progress in technology. I think the entire series serves as a showcase of what we've been able to do technologically and in retrospect how far we've come in such a short amount of time. We've come such a long way that Solid Snake is an outdated kind of character, the simple soldier who follows orders to fight for his country. We're in dire need of a renegade leader who decides to start his own military state and do mercenary work until his protegé comes to destroy him. 

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is: tying yourself up to a radiator/10 (enjoyable at first but soon exhausting and life-threatening)