Revisiting Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Kojima has always been rather shaky on just when exactly the Metal Gear series would end. At different points in his career, nearly every game has been conceived at some point as the last. But the almighty dollar is the true decider of these things and the success of Metal Gear Solid 2, both commercial and critical, would ensure that a sequel be made, even if Kojima had originally intended for the series to end there. The question for Kojima was, “Where do I go from Metal Gear Solid 2?”

Metal Gear Solid 2 only works once. Another sequel tackling the same themes is doomed to fail so the series would have to evolve in a different way, even after just deconstructing itself. No simple task to be sure, as Metal Gear Solid 2 left players with questions than it did answers. Rather than having to confront the mess of a plot that had erupted from Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima instead decided to reel back on the insanity and bring the story back to its roots and quite literally so. Before going forward, Kojima looked back to where his universe all began: with a Cold War and the greatest soldier who ever lived.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is, chronologically speaking, the earliest game in the series. It begins with the Virtuous Mission, where Naked Snake, the man who would become the villain of the series and the genetic father of series protagonist Solid Snake. Is sent on a mission deep into the heart of Soviet Russia to rescue a Russian scientist named Sokolov who is developing a top secret weapon capable of launching invisible nuclear missiles. Everything goes smoothly until Snake’s mentor and consultant on the mission, a legendary soldier named The Boss, defects, injuring Snake, taking back Sokolov and teaming up with a rogue Soviet unit led by Colonol Volgin. The Boss gives Volgin a portable nuclear weapon, which he then fires upon his homeland, making it look like an American attack. Krushchev, under pressure from his advisers, gives President Johnson one week to obtain proof that the attack was unauthorized by the US government, pin the blame on The Boss, recapture Sokolov, and stop Volgin’s weapon from going online. In just a short time following the failed Virtuous Mission, Snake is sent back to the same place for Operation Snake Eater.

Prequels are usually rather dull affairs. Unless given enough distance from the material they come from, they serve only as an exercise in reaching a foregone conclusion, the ending predetermined. And while it is fair to say that the journey is more important than the destination, in the case of prequels the interesting story is usually the one that was told in the first place. Lifting on the veil on certain elements of a story or narrative can actually serve to hurt it, see the Star Wars prequels.

Video games, however, don’t have to strictly follow the same rules and can instead rely on gameplay refinements and innovations to help carry what might otherwise be a weaker entry, especially for games that are less concerned with narrative than they are with just being games. However, Metal Gear Solid is a game concerned with narrative, so it must be taken into account as well. Fortunately for Kojima, he decided that the convolution of MGS2 should be reigned in to allow for a simpler, character-driven story that is equal parts spy-thriller and anime zaniness. For whatever reason, whether through some cosmic alignment or sheer random chance or anything in between, this idea worked. It worked like a charm.

I’ve never really organized a “Top 10 List”, but if I had to Metal Gear Solid 3 would be on there somewhere. Realistically, the same Kojima problems are all there: the bad writing, the juvenile humor, the overwrought and overlong cutscenes. But this time it all came together near perfectly, managing to make what is essentially a James Bond homage and turn it into something a lot more. I was worried when I began this replay of the series that it wouldn’t hold up nearly as well since the last time I had embarked upon it seven years ago, but, disregarding the first game, which hasn’t aged well, so far my replay has reminded me of why I loved this series in the first place.

Much of this resides on the fact that Kojima, for once in his career, manages to make an emotionally resonant story, built on the relationship between characters rather than the a grander theme of “Gene” or “Meme”, like his previous games did. Having the game take place in an alternate history help to ground it just a bit, rather than the techno-babble future of the other games. Most importantly though, and one of the reasons this game is remembered as fondly as it is, is the character of The Boss, both her relationship with Snake and country, along with the general “badass” vibe she gives off in every single one of her appearances. Though Snake may be the protagonist of the story, Boss’s actions are the ones dictating the flow of the game. She’s not a particularly well written character — no one in this series is, though she gets closer than the rest — she manages to give a multidimensional performance, playing equal parts soldier, traitor, mother, mentor, and patriot, all in an effortless manner. When the twist ending, one that is focused around characters rather than giant conspiracies, reveals that the Boss willingly allowed herself to be branded a traitor and a war criminal in order to prevent nuclear war, sacrificing herself as well as her legacy for the betterment of both the world and her country, you can actually feel the impact on Snake, an actual story development with actual weight.

Though Boss may be the most prominent of the reasons this game works better than the rest, she isn’t the only thing. Ocelot, who appears as his younger self in this game, manages to have probably the most development of any character in the game, shaping him to be the villain he will eventually become. Seeing his transformation from a Soviet-loving lackey to idealizing Big Boss to revealing himself to be a planted CIA agent, Ocelot gets to have a lot of fun beating up and being beaten up throughout the game. Volgin is also a fantastic villain, a bisexual, sadomasochist who can channel electricity for some reasons and actually looks like a physical threat. The Shagohod, the earliest incarnation of Metal Gear, is also a really fun design and is the centerpiece of the series best on-rails segment.

But there is more to the game than just a competent story on behalf of Kojima, the entire groundwork of the stealth gets an overhaul with this edition as well. Snake now has a camouflage, which appears as a percentage of visibility that can be changed by entering the menu, which adds a new layer to the stealth gameplay. Snake now also has a stamina meter, reflecting the game’s outdoor environments and survival aspects, where he must hunt and kill animals to eat in order to restore the meter. Snake can also now suffer debilitating injuries that need to be cured from the menu as well. Offensively, Snake now uses Close Quarters Combat, a martial art that is absolutely still foreign to me to this day. It’s really not intuitive and the standard Kick-Kick-Punch still did just fine for me throughout the game. Hilariously enough, the changes added here I find all underwhelming or underdeveloped and, especially in the case of the ones that require going into the menu, to frequently interrupt the flow of gameplay.

What is added that has any value is much bigger and more open environments, greater player control, and excellently executed set pieces. The larger environments give more options to players in an of themselves, but players can remain more involved in the game at all times, even in cutscenes. During specific cutscenes, players are prompted to optionally hold a button to see the cutscene through Snake’s eyes and give a limited amount of control. Not only does this help add an interactive element to an non-interactive segment, but it’s unique way to portray more information to the player as well as take advantage of the medium. It’s such a simple thought I wonder why more games don’t do it, but giving players even the most limited control of cutscenes can give a creator more room to work with as well as help keep the player active in the events of the game.

The game truly shines during its boss fights, which are the best in the series by far. Boss’s old WWII unit, the Cobra Unit, is just another collection of nutjobs for the player to fight, but the added vertical and open elements of the game’s design allow for some spectacular boss fights, from an old West shootout with Ocelot to a standout game of cat and mouse played with the squads sniper over three large maps, the bosses really feel as though they utilize the games mechanics and setting well.

I can’t deny that MGS3 isn’t without flaws, they are definitely present. EVA, Snake’s love interest and Bond-girl incarnate, will find any reason to change in front of Snake, even when it is entirely unnecessary and actually conflicts with continuity in certain scenes. Visually, the game shows its age as a PS2 title though it looks fine on the HD edition. Kojima still can’t write a thank you note without it turning into a sophomoric paper on why war is bad. But the good in Metal Gear Solid 3 gives it a lot of wiggle room and there is quite a bit of fun to be had. Who knows, you might shed a tear at the end. I know I almost did.

Revisiting Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

One poster on NeoGAF, who I did not have the foresight to remember the name of, once posted that postmodernism, the prevailing trend of the present, owes its prevalence to the audiences desire to have their smart with their stupid. People want their media — their music, movies, video games, etc. — to make them think “new” ideas while indulging their id with fantastically familiar. Media with irreverent self-awareness and apparent cynicism that attempts to have its cake and eat it to, like trying to mix Star Wars and 2001. Its a difficult balance to strike and more often than not fails to live up to its high concept in narrative or thematic terms.

It is this very reason that Metal Gear Solid 2 remains the most divisive of the entire series. An entire sequel predicated on the very idea that sequels are a fool’s errand, a waste of time that only serves to offer more of the same with diminishing returns. An not wholly original idea undermined by the series continued existence, for sure, but an intriguing one in AAA game development, even to this day. Additionally, and even more so than the rest of the series, it explores the relationship between the game and the player, the director and the audience. But this is all diving in a bit too early, so perhaps a bit of introduction.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was originally released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, being the highly anticipated sequel to Metal Gear Solid, which had released three years prior. The game takes place two, and later four, years after the events of Shadow Moses, with Solid Snake and Otacon now working for a rogue anti-nuclear group Philanthropy. The game begins with Solid Snake sneaking aboard a tanker said to be transporting a new form of Metal Gear, attempting to gain access to it.

This, however, is all a ploy. Minutes after finding the newly-christened Metal Gear Ray, an old enemy returns in the form of Revolver Ocelot, capturing Ray and sinking the tanker with Snake aboard, purportedly killing him. Immediately the game shifts to two years later, where a familiar scene of a man scuba dives his way into a base, being debriefed on the mission he is about to embark on. The Big Shell, a base built to clean up the oil spill from the sunk tanker two years prior, has been taken over by a terrorist group named The Sons of Liberty, who know that the true purpose of Big Shell is to house the new Metal Gear project. This man is Raiden, initially named Snake as well, who has been tasked with rescuing the President, who has been kidnapped, and assessing the terrorist threat of a nuclear attack and stopping it.

If this is at all sounding familiar, it is a plot lifted wholesale from the game’s predecessor and intentionally so. In fact, disregarding the mechanical elements of the game, which are a marked improvement over Metal Gear Solid, the entire plot hits the same beats and attempts to reproduce the same storytelling path. Major Campbell, Solid Snake’s handler from MGS, reprises his role as operation lead. The Sons of Liberty stands in for the FOXHOUND unit from MGS, the President stands in for DARPA Chief, there is a Harrier instead of a Hind D, a torture scene, a ninja, and a nuclear threat is present throughout.

I suppose I should take a second to acknowledge that while revisiting the series for the first time in almost a decade I came to a realization that I hadn’t before but many others had. Metal Gear Solid cutscenes are bad. I had always known the writing was terrible and MGS 2 is among the worst — a title that 4 also competes with — but I had always stood up for Kojima’s direction. In regard to MGS 2 at the very least, I have to admit defeat. These cutscenes suck. Long extended cutscenes that spend just as much narrating over stock footage as it does in motionless, CODEC dialogue sequences. I love Metal Gear Solid 2 but I was flat out bored watching many of the game’s cutscenes.

But back on point, MGS 2 shows its true colors at the end of the game and I mean that in more way than one. After the game’s torture sequence, Raiden is aboard a floating ship that houses several dozen Metal Gears when the facade begins to fail and what were once normal instructions given by Campbell have become cryptic, random, and disturbing messages from a faulty computer system. It is revealed that the entirety of the game, from the beginning of the Big Shell chapter onward, has been a live test run of a plan set in motion by the Patriots, an Illuminati-esque shadow organization that has been controlling the world. The so-called S3 plan, which stands for Solid Snake Simulation, was to accurately recreate the conditions of the Shadow Moses incident to see if it was possible to use the data to train a new generation of soldiers via virtual methods to become as good of a soldier as Solid Snake. The game not only serves as a simulation for Raiden, an unwilling pawn, but for the player, a far more willing one.

Then the game pulls the rug out from under the player again to get to the core of its theme. In s twist piled on top of a twist, the Patriots, acting through an AI, reveal that the S3 plan had nothing to do with Solid Snake and that it was actually put into place to see whether or not they could continue to exhibit control over the populace in the age of digital information. You see, the Patriots were always able to easily hold control over the people through ignorance, but with the rise of the internet era information became free-flowing and openly available, so much so that they feared that people would actually become more ignorant and forget meaningful and important information while being inundated with “junk data”. The S3 plan, which ultimately stood for the Selection for Societal Sanity, proved successful with Raiden’s killing of the leader the Sons of Liberty, former president and Big Boss clone Solidus Snake, meaning the Patriot’s control of the masses could continue to be exerted.

For someone who has never played this game or series before just read the previous two paragraphs, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to understand. I’ve played the game and it’s a lot to take in, especially having to sift through all the inane elements hallmark of Kojima’s style. But there is no denying that after getting through the fat, the meat on the bone is enticing through and through.

Firstly, you have the idea of the sequel, a re-visitation of a world or universe that seems ripe for further exploitation that usually results in the same but more. MGS 2 revels in this at every opportunity: Raiden performs aerials instead of Snake’s simpler somersault; Instead of fighting a helicopter you fight a fighter jet; Rather than combating one Metal Gear at the end of the game, you fight multiple. It fails intrinsically to live up to what people loved about the first game so much but uses that to great effect. The game literally has you beginning the game as Raiden following Solid Snake’s footsteps. MGS 2 manages to succeed in making the iterative jump thanks to a focus on expansion, less so mechanically than world-building.

More importantly, you have Kojima’s startling accurate predictions for the future, always a good sign in Science Fiction (when the game actually decides to be). Kojima intended for the theme of the game to be “Meme” and now more than ever is that particularly relevant. In a world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever other flavor of the month social media is making the rounds, information is easier to obtain than ever. Even then, most of what you see it being used for is sharing silly internet videos, “profound” messages to simple to be so, repetitive pictures with words attached to them for comedic effect, and masturbatory fads that do little more than bring people together in a general nodding of agreement or create massive divides over the most minor of disagreements. Almost all human knowledge is at the fingertips of so many on this Earth, most of whom would rather read about “26 Commercials Only Nineties Kids Will Understand”.

It’s one thing to have a sympathetic villain, its another to have a villain that seems right, even if the Patriots are only self-serving with their goals. Even I may harp on Kojima’s bad writing, but I honestly feel he hit it out of the park with the Patriot’s monologue (Script taken from IGN):

Colonel    : You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All
             rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The
             untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and
             accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value
             systems.

Rose       : Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid
             of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking
             whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society
             at large.

Colonel    : The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is
             invalidated, but nobody is right.

Rose       : Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is
             being engulfed in "truth."

The game ends on an open note, with Solid Snake telling Raiden that the future is his, that change is possible but that it needs to start now. A rather rote message to give after all the insanity preceding it, but one that feels earned because of it.

I can understand why people wouldn’t like this game. It’s messy, maybe a bit too ambitious for its own good, and overwritten to a fault. But without a doubt there are few games, even modern ones, that broach any of the subjects discussed with this one and definitely fewer with the flair or style of Kojima. And understandably his approach of “stupid first, write a book later” can be cumbersome and, frankly, bad, but few can deny there is as unobstructed a vision as his in the gaming industry and this was the first — and to date, best — example of it at work. Metal Gear Solid 2 may be not be the best game in the world, or even the series, but it is the most important one, not only for its historical value in video game history but for its thematic value in video games and the greater culture they are but a sliver of.

Revisiting Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes

With the impending release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I decided to replay through the entirety of the numbered MGS series leading up to it, Peace Walker as well if I have to the time. Finally having enough foresight to give myself a decent amount of time to do what I set out to do, I spent most of last week completing the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid, subtitled The Twin Snakes.

It should be mentioned that I am a huge fan of the series, warts and all, and find it one of the last bastions in artistically-driven AAA video game production, even if that dream is dead now. And let’s just get this out of the way now, but yes, the game is horribly over-written and its cutscenes are far too long and self-indulgent for a rather simple anti-war message. Hideo Kojima’s humor can be quite juvenile and I can totally understand why someone can’t stand this series. It’s overwrought, preachy, and so hilariously over-the-top its difficult to take the series seriously. But through the grimy surface, there is a sea’s worth of gold, both in through the use of game mechanics and ludic presentation.

As an aside, I myself have never played the PlayStation original of Metal Gear Solid. My introduction to the series began with playing the Tanker section of MGS 2 repeatedly which convinced me to pick up the Gamecube remake. So the game is a bit simpler given the added first person mode and even goofier given the dated Matrix-esque cutscenes.

But before the over-emphasis on nanomachines, indestructible vampires, ninja Raiden, and La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo, there was just a little event called Shadow Moses and man named Solid Snake, heir to the greatest soldier who ever lived, who needed to stop a bipedal tank from launching a nuclear missile. Given what this series would eventually become, it is fitting that this be a more straightforward game, but even that feels wrong. This is the game with a gas-masked wearing psychic who reads your memory card and can’t be hit by bullets without changing the port your controller is plugged into. Even then, this game is tame by Metal Gear standards, probably one of the reasons why it is still held in such high regard, along with just how groundbreaking this game must have felt all those years ago on the PlayStation.

The problem is, the game just doesn’t hold up. My defense of this series has always relied on its game mechanics and their presentation, but as with most early 3D games the game is just completely rough around the edges, especially coming off of the wonderful control scheme provided in Ground Zeroes. Movement is laughable in multiple senses. For starters, Snake gets caught up easy on any uneven piece of level geometry, awkwardly flattening his back against invisible walls when he should be running for cover.

That is if the need ever arises. For a stealth game, its mechanics have aged incredibly poorly compared to contemporaries like Thief. The vision cones provided by Soliton Radar almost completely encompass what an enemy is capable of sensing in the game, disregarding certain sounds. Footsteps only create noise on certain terrain or floors, making running at full speed almost everywhere completely viable. I was only playing on normal for time’s sake, so its possible on higher difficulties that the stealth elements are a bit more involved, but the controls are far too finicky to want that. Worst comes to worst, Snake can always run in and out of a location, thereby loading a new area and resetting the Alert status.

It’s also a far shorter game than I remember, or at least I got smarter playing it. The game plays less like a stealth title and more like a “run past the enemies” simulator. Most of my time was spent weaving through enemy patterns, only getting caught up in very specific rooms. And even though I didn’t want to harp on it, the writing is also worse than i remember it, allowing for reiteration that if you are the kind of person who cannot get past bad writing these games are not for you and I don’t blame you for it. A shitty movie’s worth of cutscenes should not come required, though all the cutscenes are entirely able to be skipped.

But for all its shortcomings and inability to stand up to seventeen years of advancement and refinement in the gaming, Metal Gear Solid still seems like an important footnote, one worthy of greater consideration than its ludicrous premise would presume. As far as the 3D games are concerned, this is the baby of the series. Kojima’s trademarks are being explored now, not established. Looking back at it now, knowing just how much further the series will come, Metal Gear Solid feels like a series in infancy, despite being the third in the series. We are impressed by things its accomplished because of its age, not because it particularly works well. It got first place, but at a T-ball tournament. What now exists is only potential and the twinkle in parent Hideo Kojima’s eye of just what this series is capable of. Soon, it will graduate to baseball.

The most mad and ingenious game of baseball ever played.