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.
The ABC's of Gaming 