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| Source // Konami |
Not too long ago, I said when looking back to the Grand Theft Auto series, I'd want to go back and play GTA IV before any of the others. It's not that it is the 'best', but it is the title that called to me the most.
There's another long-running series with games that ought to be returned to more than once, and another game with a '4' stuck on the end, but this one, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a lot more going on.
If GTA IV is something I want to go back to and relive, MGS4 is something I'm not sure I do want to go back to - not sure to the point of having spent the last few days watching some 7 hours of YouTube video essays on the game instead of actually putting it into my PS3 for the first time in years.
Metal Gear Solid has been my top-rated game on this 1001 list since its appearance and is unlikely to be moved. MGS2 and MGS3 are up there too, the latter still sitting in the top ten. MGS4... well, MGS4 has a lot to unbox and I'm not sure where to begin.
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| Source // Konami |
Fond Memories
Metal Gear Solid 4 was something I was hyped for, for sure. A new console, the first new Metal Gear on it, radically different looking from any of the previous entries. I devoured as much information on this game as I could get my hands on. I pre-ordered the edition of the game that came with an action figure of Snake, for no real reason other than it was cool. MGS4 was cool. I was cool.
On the day of the release - I kid you not - I got an email saying "Your refund has been processed", and almost kicked off at how that could only mean that the small online store I ordered from had decided to pluck a random order from the list and give it to someone who worked their instead. As far as conspiracies go, it was pathetic, but it was the only reason I could think of.
A few emails later, and not too long afterwards, to be fair, the store sent me my order and I was in the near future, in the middle east, where war had changed.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // Moby Games |
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| Source // Moby Games |
Where once there was Metal Gear REX, there are now autonomous Gekko, many of them, roaming the streets, mooing like cows, defecating something, for some reason, while various rebel factions war against nanomachine enhanced private military companies.
In the midst of this sun-bleached backdrop is an artificially ageing hero of the people, none of whom probably even know what he does day in, day out for them, Solid Snake himself, now known as Old Snake. Because he's Old now. Fitting.
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| Source // Moby Games |
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| Source // Moby Games |
Frustrations
He's got an iPod now, too. Less fitting. Metal Gear Solid was always based on this world of ours, certainly, but MGS4 wants to root it into our world just a little more with some Apple product placement. It's not the only Apple product, either, and it's not my opinion towards Apple that makes me say that it feels wrong to see this, in a game that can't even pick a country for any of its set pieces to take place in.
I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little. Let's take it back to the Middle East, a proxy set of levels where the in-game proxy wars between various factions are taking place. Snake is old but there's a mission to do, and he won't stop until it's done.
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| Source // Konami |
Fun Times
Luckily for us, his appearance is mostly skin deep, as his ability on the battlefield isn't that of an eighty-year-old veteran, save for the occasional back pain when you crouch walk too often. Yes MGS fans of the past, you read that right. The legendary Solid Snake can walk while crouched now, and actually has a fair few new moves to make use of all the neat technology he has picked up in the years since his last outing.
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| Source // Konami |
MGS4 plays more similarly to MGS3 than you might remember, continuing to improve on the weird control scheme by tearing it up and mapping most of the buttons somewhere else. Firing a weapon is now on the R1 button, rather than the square button, and pressing L1 to aim brings your view into a more common over-the-shoulder angle that action games have been doing for a while now.
The controls aren't the only quality of life improvement over MGS3, as the camo system returns as well, only this time you don't have to dive into the menus and look for the best number every five minutes - the OctoCamo will do it all for you, if you give it a minute to adapt to its new surroundings.
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| Source // Konami |
It's a neat little thing, accompanied by a weird sound effect that I can't mimic, nor write down, but still know in my head. Lay on the floor and you'll become part of it, stand up next to a wall and you'll merge into it. Sometimes you seek out new textures just to see what your OctoCamo will do, and if you like the result you can keep it for use whenever you like.
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // Konami |
You can roll around in barrels (and subsequently throw up from dizziness), you can crawl so slowly that you do a tiny version of the worm, you can roll around like a sausage, you can lay on your back and hoof grenades overhead, and if you don't like doing anything at all, you can get your little robot buddy to do it for you as you control the Metal Gear MkII with its stun whip into the danger zone to get shot at instead of you.
Metal Gear Solid 4 has expanded the toolbox even wider, and when you look back on it with the knowledge of what was to come in MGSV, you can see ideas that carry through even to that game.
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| Source // Moby Games |
Further Frustrations
But open-world adventure this is not. MGS4 is much more linear than you may be lead to believe. Sure, it gives you freedom to explore and plan your own route through a level, but those routes are largely in the same direction, either side of an obvious bit of cover.
No, MGS4 is a story-driven linear affair for a number of reasons, one of which being the mandatory installation of the level and cutscene data before each act. There are five of them over the course of the game, with the first install taking just under 10 minutes. The result is that you don't need to worry about load times for a while, but having just got your interest, to be sat in front of a smoking Snake for ten minutes does sap some energy from the room.
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // Moby Games |
Equally sapping are the cutscenes. This particular one, pieced together from various sources, is the introduction to the Beauty and the Beast unit, four female soldiers whose minds have been warped to the extreme to function as terror inducing warlords capable of unimaginable horrors. In terms of cutscene length, it's pretty short, and because it happens in-game, it's not too jarring to switch from gameplay to a cutscene like this.
Unfortunately, MGS4 is full of a whole load of cutscenes that aren't interesting, taking place on an airplane for twenty minutes at a time, with characters talking nonsense and your only escape to be to fire up the MkII and explore the area while it's all going on, looking for items and iPod tunes. No, really.
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| Source // Moby Games |
When you buy MGS4, you know you're buying into a story that wants to be cinematic. It'll have tactical stealth action gameplay, but it'll have a ton of video to sit through as well, and here, it's both on the long side, and the stupid side.
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // Konami |
We're in the Middle East to chase this guy, familiar to Metal Gear fans as Revolver Ocelot, or Liquid Ocelot, or whatever he wants to go by these days. Also present are a returning Meryl Silverburgh, still a soldier, now in charge of a small team of mercenaries which include Johnny "Pant Shitter" Sasaki, and Dr Naomi Hunter, with a new accent.
The events of MGS2 clearly weren't enough for the world to learn from, so Ocelot returns to teach everyone the lesson that sticking nanomachines into every soldier on the planet to suppress the horrors of war and enhance the capability of the human body isn't a good idea, and he seems to be succeeding.
There are other things going on, of course, but here is where I tell you that even as an MGS fan, even after watching hours and hours of critiques of this game, I can't tell you what the Hell is going on.
What I can tell you is that Hideo Kojima didn't want to direct this game. He has a history of not wanting to direct MGS titles, insisting that he is done and will leave it to his team, who he has surely taught well by now, but no. Some subset of 'fans' aren't happy with that. Some of these 'fans' are so desperate to see more Kojima-lead MGS that they'll write death threats to get their way.
How and why MGS4 really came to be, I don't know, but what I do know is that it is a mess, and it's a mess because of both the writing, and the fans that wanted to read this fan-fiction.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
Hands up, who honestly wanted to know what became of Johnny Sasaki, last head crapping himself in a bathroom in MGS2, last seen on the floor, naked, in the first MGS? Who wanted to see Meryl again, after she canonically rode off into the sunset on a snowmobile with Snake? Who wanted to see Vamp again, last seen, what was it, sinking in that strut of the Big Shell? Or did he come back after that bullet in the head for another MGS2 cutscene before bowing out? And who the hell wanted to see Raiden, last seen questioning who he was in the middle of New York after Arsenal Gear buried itself into Manhattan, also in MGS2?
Some of those characters might have had some grounds for a revisit. But not like this. MGS4 falls into the trap of having to appeal to the 'fans' the only way it knows how: by reusing the same characters again and again, despite none of it making sense. It's the problem with the majority of Star Wars stuff. It has to involve a character from the films otherwise there's no point in making it. Even when Knights of the Old Republic was set thousands of years before the films, it had to involve the tropes 'fans' go mad for.
Blimey, this is a tangent. My point is that Meryl and Johnny are soldiers because we need soldiers, and Raiden is the new Cyborg Ninja because the old one is clearly very dead, and we need to make Raiden cool, and you can't get much cooler than this. But he needs a rival, and the closest we've ever had is probably Vamp, but he's dead, and Olga wouldn't make sense at all, especially because her daughter, Sunny, is going around the world with Snake and Otacon, so let's bring Vamp back from the dead with the explanation 'nanomachines'.
Ugh, it's sad. MGS4 is tasked with following on from the already bonkers plot of MGS2, but it has to use all the same puzzle pieces to make it work, and it just can't. Even when all the pieces from MGS3 are brought in as well. All of them.
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| Source // Moby Games |
There's a question the Internet asks that goes along the lines of "Which game would you love to replay were it not for one thing?", and I'd always reply "MGS4 for Act 3."
Act 3 is set in Eastern Europe - again, no specific country to help set the scene further - and for reasons you don't need to worry about, Old Snake gets to roam around the streets as Young Snake, wearing a trench coat and slowly following a member of the resistance to his hideout, keeping him safe from patrolling PMCs while not being seen, and so on.
I hated the level because I considered it to be an example of a stealth game with an enforced stealth section that doesn't work and is boring. Upon further retrospection, I can see arguments for it actually being better than I remember it to be, but it is still a jarring departure from the two stealth-action packed Acts before it. I still don't really want to play MGS4 because of this gameplay.
After it, though, is the almighty nonsense that is the MGS3 story shoe-horned into this one. That up there isn't just the leader of the resistance, fighting against... something... It's not enough for the leader of the resistance to be a woman. That woman has to be someone we're familiar with. It can't be the Boss, for obvious reasons. Who else was there, I wonder...
It is, of course, the return of Eva, and that's not the end of the bullshit that comes out of these character's mouths. What needed a womb? The Les Enfants Terribles Project. Who has a womb? Eva. Who is Snake and Liquids mother? Eva!
Who was technically minded in MGS3? Sigint. Remember him? Guess you didn't call him on the codec too often, and now you'll never be able to call him again, because he's the DARPA chief Donald Anderson. Yes, that DARPA chief. The dead one in MGS.
Who was a quirky young doctor there to teach you about fungus and movies and whatever else Para-Medic spoke about - oh, I've given that away, Para-Medic. Who turns into a monstrous doctor who doesn't care about her patient's wellbeing and created the Cyborg Ninja, yes, give yourself all the points, it's Para-Medic, completely contrary to the person she portrayed in MGS3, but we'll ignore that because we need a reason to make these people evil, because they - Major Zero included - are the Patriots.
The Patriots? Those MGS2 folks? The very bloody same.
Does all that hurt to read? Here, stare at some tits.
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| Source // Moby Games |
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| Source // Moby Games |
The new characters don't fare much better. The BB Unit are all models with near-identical childhood traumas involving lots of death and irreparable mental damage. For some reason, these survivors were strapped into mechanical monstrosities to reflect their nature, or something, as well as evoke memories of the past with each being based on a boss or two from MGS.
Laughing Octopus here is based on Decoy Octopus and fights you in a ramshackle laboratory in the middle of South America, wherever that could be. She uses here own OctoCamo to turn into medical dummies or wall paintings, or - inexplicably - giant versions of MkII.
Upon their death, all these ladies break free of their robotic shackles to shamble across the floor to try and hug you, accompanied by pervy camera angles and even photo shoots where they take kawaii poses. It is off the chain stupid, and you feel nothing for them.
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| Source // Moby Games |
In MGS, the bosses were larger than life, but they were fundamentally human and relatable. Yes, Psycho Mantis was a levitating freak, but he might - just might - have been capable of doing something different with his life, had things gone a different way.
Sniper Wolf may have tried to kill you twice at very impersonal distances, but she was a soldier who grew up knowing nothing but war, and was treated with respect by both Snake and Ocelot in a death scene that still has an impact today, twenty odd years later, through all the blocky jank that was present on the PlayStation.
When you wade through all the bollocks in MGS4, you're able to reflect on just how good the first game was, for whatever reason. Probably the writing. You yearn for it. You don't want this world-hopping rubbish about nanomachines and AI and Patriot influence. You want Snake, in a sneaking suit, on a mission, just doing his thing.
That screenshot up there isn't from MGS, but a playable dream that Old Snake has on his way to Shadow Moses for the first time since Metal Gear Solid.
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| Source // Moby Games |
Further Fun Times
Oh boy, now we're talking. As MGS4 was Hell-bent on referencing everything else in its history, the fact that it would go so far as to bring you all the way out here to pick up Metal Gear REX is something special, for some fans at least.
All the ridiculous fan-service that has taken place so far is shoved aside for a little while as Act 4 drops us into an abandoned Shadow Moses for some nostalgic looks to the past, and to what could have been. "The Best is Yet to Come" floats in the howling wind, as screenshots from MGS and voice clips from The Twin Snakes come back into Snakes memory.
Shadow Moses is falling apart. Snake is falling apart. This is what will happen to us all. We'll look back fondly at the times that made us who we are, and reminisce about who and what we've lost along the way.
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| Source // Moby Games |
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| Source // Moby Games |
Sadly, for us in MGS4, this section is less about a trip down memory lane and more a statement about how times change, as the base is stuffed full of robotic guards and Gekko on the hunt for intruders, before having another sniping boss fight in the snow, though much worse than it ought to have been.
MGS3 had that sniping boss fight, and all the ways it could be dealt with, including before it even happened. What can the power of the PlayStation 3 do for sniping duels? Lots of snow, your scent gets carried downwind, and that's about it.
You've got a psyche meter below your health bar, and a stress level below that. The more stressed out Old Snake gets, the harder it'll be to recover health, the shakier your aim will be, and so on. In true MGS3 fashion, it's a system that I didn't pay any attention to while playing, and had far more little nuances than anybody would have spotted. Snake gets stressed in the baking sun, but relaxes a little when sat in the shade. Nice touch. Why would I need that, again?
Boss fight out of the way, bunch of stupid cutscenes involving Vamp, Raiden, and Naomi out the way too, and we can finally do what some of us have wanted to do for many a year.
We're here for once reason: REX. And you know that if this is going to work, someone else needs to be here as well...
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // Moby Games |
Ocelot pilots a Metal Gear RAY once more as you two duke it out to see who has the biggest dick once and for all. Well, you don't, the game doesn't finish here, instead going a bit more bonkers and having a final Act to torture us all with, but here, after all the weirdness that has come before it, is a reason to crack a smile.
It's a short fight, but you get to stomp around in the very machine that might have given you a tough time all those years ago, now a trusty steed that you're relying on for your life. Gatling guns, lasers, rockets, and context specific melee bites and kicks all make for an enjoyable set piece that marks the last time MGS4 will feel cool - it's all downhill from here.
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| Source // Moby Games |
Your final showdown at the end of Act 5 seems to be a fight 'just because', but it pays a little homage to the control schemes that came before it, as you punch Ocelot in the ways your younger selves would have battered each other.
It is a fight for reflection, between two old men who have seen too much shit and just want it to be over. Indeed, MGS4 tends to feel that way in places. None of this should have happened, but because it has, it has to be dealt with.
In amongst the waffle that most of the cast speak is the underlying tone that Snake, no matter how old he is (or isn't), has to fight. It's his purpose in this world. Not in the same sense as his father, though. Old Snake has no choice but to fight, and once he's done fighting, what's left?
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| Source // PlayStation |
Final Word
What's left is a legacy of video games that gave birth to the stealth action genre, gave life to some of the greatest characters, both hero and villain, that video gaming has seen, and gave millions of players a damn good time in many different ways.
But to me, MGS4 is that game that I struggle to go back to because it just doesn't work. The story is even more batshit insane than previous entries. The cutscenes are even longer, or certainly feel it. The gameplay, while improved, is nowhere near as fulfilling as it was hinted at being.
Do you help the rebels by giving them supplies? Do you just let them fight it out while you sneak through the middle of no man's land? There's no open world where your actions count, no changes to the story or gameplay. It just doesn't matter. The idea isn't fully formed, for one reason or another.
It's hard to sum up MGS4. It feels like failed fan-fiction. It might give you some excitement along the way, but when you sit back to think about it, it's just not right. MGS was an action-adventure I likened to Con Air. MGS2 was a philosophical textbook. MGS3 was a muddy playground which somehow had the mother of all stories buried within it, and MGS4... MGS4 was alright.
It's the worst of the mainline series, but it isn't a bad game. It's probably impossible to get anything out of unless you know at least some of the backstory, but as a game clearly made for fans - even if they say the controls were made for newcomers - that's not too much of an issue.
You know what you're going to get, as I've said for too many games now. I know what I'm going to get and I'm still debating whether I even want to stick the disc back in again, it's that kind of devisive game.
If anything, looking back at MGS4 allows us to look back at all the MGS games before it. It is - or maybe hopes to be - a fitting send off to the series, or at the very least, a final chapter to it. The conclusion we can gather from this is that some stories and characters are best left alone.
Fun Facts
The original ending was for Snake and Otacon to hand themselves into the authorities, who would convict and execute them for the crimes of... philanthropy? Saving the world? I mean, sure, you can make a statement about all sorts Mr Kojima, but can you make a sensible plot?
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, developed by Kojima Productions, first released in 2008.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2008, via memory.
Version watched: PlayStation 3, 2008 (Steak Bentley, Matthewmatosis, Super Bunnyhop)