I tried to start writing this about half a dozen times in my head, and
each time, I stopped and started over.
Each time, I tried to tackle it from a new angle, and each time, I had
to give it up. Eventually, I threw my
hands in the air, said “fuck it!” and decided to have a beer. The throwing my hands in the air and saying
“fuck it!” were figurative. I tend not
to do things like that when my wife is around, as I think she’ll start worrying
if I’m talking profanity and gesticulating to no one in particular. The beer was entirely factual.
Really, what can I say about Metal
Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that hasn’t already been said a hundred times
over? That hasn’t already been observed
with more depth, and the benefit of more disciplined and motivated research,
study, and applied thought than I have the will to muster?
And the fact is that, at this late date – some thirteen years after the
game first came out – there really isn’t much new ground to cover. You can view the plot of Sons of Liberty as a deconstruction of the tropes and story beats
of the previous game, or you can view it as a reflection of those tropes and
story beats. You can say it’s director
Hideo Kojima’s attempt to troll fans of the series in the name of getting out
from under the behemoth he’s created (he’s said on several occasions that he
wants for the love of God to stop making Metal Gear Solid games, but can’t seem
to stay away; it’s his baby, after all, and even if he wants nothing more to do
with it, he cares too much to let it go wrong in someone else’s hands). You can say that it’s clever, that it’s
overwrought, or that it’s wrought just fine.
You can say that it’s stupid and pretentious and silly, or that it’s
serious and deep and turgid with meaning.
You can, in fact, say pretty much any damned thing you like about Sons of Liberty, and that’s really the
whole problem I was having at the beginning of this writing. One of the really interesting things when it
comes to talking or writing about Metal
Gear Solid 2 is that no matter what you do eventually wind up saying, you
will inevitably and without fail find someone, somewhere, who will agree with you completely. Few games have engendered so much discussion,
from forumites shouting profanities at each other (and their respective
mothers) to intellectuals dissecting the narrative, the meta-narrative (that
word rubs me the wrong way), and the structure of the game itself. Most of the other games I can think of off
the top of my head tend to inspire a sort of general consensus of opinion, with
usually a dissenting minority. At the
very least, the opinion on a given game tends to break down along certain types: More casual fans of first-person
shooters, for instance, tend to like Halo,
while hardcore fans of the genre (especially on PCs) tend to loathe it. But opinions on Sons of Liberty tend to be pretty scattershot and without any real
consensus, even within an otherwise like-minded group.
And whatever I might say, the
plain fact of the matter is that someone else will have said it first, better,
and with more effort put into the facts and the reasoning. And let’s be honest, here: I do this because
it’s fun, because I like to write, and I need to keep writing on the regular. I also do this because it’s a great way to
articulate my thoughts and feelings about the various games and other assorted
media that I have thoughts and feelings about.
It’s why I’m mainly positive in these write-ups. I tend not to keep things I dislike, and I tend not to dwell on them very
much.
But when it comes to Metal Gear
Solid 2, there’s one thing I think I can say about it that I think most of
us can agree with:
It was one of the first – perhaps the
first – major block-busting, system-selling title for the PlayStation2. For a lot of people, it sold them the system.
* * *
The original Metal Gear Solid
had been a runaway success, as I believe I might have mentioned. It was one of the titles that cemented the
original PlayStation’s status as the system to own for serious players who
wanted to be at the leading edge of the evolution of the medium. Not that that other systems of its time
weren’t worth owning – there are plenty of worthwhile games that came out on,
and were exclusive to, the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. But if you could own only one system, and
weren’t an absolute Nintendo or Sega diehard, the choice pretty much made
itself.
For evidence of Metal Gear Solid’s
deep and lasting success, you have only to look back to the last time you had
to grit your teeth and sweat through an ill-advised and poorly devised stealth
section in a game that otherwise has no use for stealth. There is no praise quite like imitation, even
if the imitation is sort of pale and bland (if not just plain sloppy) next to
the original.
Of course, when talking about the PlayStation2, it’s questionable how
much help Sony needed to sell their system.
Coming off the success of the original PlayStation, Sony’s PS2 didn’t
have a lot in the way of stiff competition.
The Dreamcast was an admirable machine, and a forward-thinking one in
many ways, but Sony was destined to crush it.
The PS2 was an overall more powerful system, and had the benefit of
functioning as a DVD player at the same time that the DVD format was really
beginning to take off. It didn’t hurt
that the system was actually priced somewhat lower than DVD players at the
time. It also had the benefit of not
requiring you to forsake your PS1 library, since there were only a very small
handful of PS1 games it couldn’t play.
Which was good, in hindsight, since that first year of the PS2 was
honestly kind of dire. Not that it
probably mattered in the long run, but Metal
Gear Solid 2 existed in some way as a sort of announcement to let everyone
know (in case there was any question) that the next generation was here, and there was far, far more to it
than having a better polygon count, smoother textures, silkier animation, and
better lighting effects.
* * *
When I think about the ways in which technology improves games, there
are two main ways I look at it.
First off, there is vertical
improvement. More colors possible, more
objects on-screen, better music, etc.
This was essentially the sort of upgrade we saw from pretty much the
beginning of video games up to the NES generation, and then again up through
the 16-bit generation. The graphics in
games began to be less representational (where perhaps a stick figure, or a
square, or an @ sign, or a vaguely humanoid lump of single-color pixels stands
for your character) and more really depictive (the player’s character actually
looks immediately evocative of a human being, with a unique appearance and
maybe even a distinct sense of identity), the animations were more detailed,
and the music (when present) became worth listening to.
Then we have lateral
improvement. These are improvements that
widen the amount of options and broaden our idea of what is possible. Nintendo introduced lateral improvements with
their games for the NES. Prior to them,
the market was largely (this is not to say exclusively) dominated by games that
were either created as home versions of popular arcade games, or designed in
that mold. Nintendo recognized that home
systems were better suited to games that were longer, deeper, more thoughtful
and challenging to more than the reflexes, and they and their third-party
developers began making games accordingly.
The move from 8-bit systems to 16-bit systems was more of a vertical
one, but then gaming changed laterally again with the introduction of 3D
systems like the PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, and the Nintendo 64. This was a rare moment when lateral change
was an actual necessity. Systems
designed around providing 3D graphics pretty much required 3D games, and as we
all rapidly discovered, what worked in 2D games did not necessarily work in 3D
games.
Sons of Liberty seems to
have sought to improve in both directions.
The vertical improvements weren’t hard to believe – in fact, they were
pretty much expected. Even aside from
the fact that vertical improvements always occur when we move to a new console
generation, you have to remember that these were the early days of the PS2. Sony wanted desperately for all of us to
believe that the PS2 was going to change how we interacted with our
entertainment media – would, in fact, change the very nature of video games and
interactive entertainment altogether. There
was a sort of breathless sense of wonder in the way industry pundits talked
about the system’s two USB ports
(which, ultimately, were rarely used), and all the possibility those
represented. It was as if they feared
that having a really great gaming machine (for the technology of the day) that
was also a fully functional DVD player, at a price well below what we might
reasonably expect to pay for both of those things separately, might not be
enough for some people.
This was, by the way, the system that went on to dethrone the NES – which,
you might recall, came to America in what was basically a vacuum, and had the
market all to itself, uncontested, for several years running – as the
best-selling console video game system of
all time.
So, no. Nobody had any trouble
believing that the graphics and sound of Metal
Gear Solid 2 would knock our socks off.
There’s a Penny Arcade strip that comments on this rather memorably.
But this was more than a longer, better-looking version of Metal Gear Solid. Some of the improvements, we could
expect. Enemies might be smarter? Oh, sure.
It was a given. Hell, it was an
unspoken plea, really. The enemies in the original game were dumber
than brickbats. Naturally, this was
nothing more than a system limitation, but it doesn’t change the fact that the
enemies were difficult only because they had unlimited firepower which the
player lacked, or moved in routines and numbers that compensated for the relative
idiocy of individuals.
This is not to say that the enemies in Sons of Liberty put on a stunning display of intellect. No, no, that would be overselling it by
several orders of magnitude. They are
still fundamentally lobotomized creatures.
They will, after all, fail to notice that they have been shot with a
tranquilizer dart in any place that does not cause immediate unconsciousness
(and upon waking, they will have no memory of having been shot, or that
anything might be even slightly amiss).
They’ll go looking for the cause of a disturbance if they hear a noise
(or, again, if they’re shot non-fatally, or in a way that doesn’t induce
instant unconsciousness). But they fail
to immediately associate being shot with the possibility of a saboteur or
espionage agent in their midst. But they
will call for assistance if something seems awry. There’s a command center that checks in with
their patrols regularly, so you have to be careful about taking out enemies,
since if the commander doesn’t get a report back, he’ll be more than happy to
send in a squad of soldiers with shotguns and riot shields to check the
situation out.
The game does still makes dealing with enemies trickier overall, though.
Once an enemy is down, he doesn’t disappear as in the previous game (or
as in video games generally, which would cause enemies to disappear as much for
system limitations – each enemy the system has to keep track of is one more
drain on the memory, after all – as for any other reason). They just lay there, unconscious, evidence to
any other enemies that might pass by that something was out of the
ordinary. Nine times out of ten, if you
just knocked the enemy out, the KO’d enemy would be kicked awake by his
comrades, and upon awakening, would have no memory of being shot by a
tranquilizer dart. Or, you know, punched
several times in the face, depending on how you handled it.
Dead enemies, on the other
hand, can be even more trouble than live ones.
Once discovered, dead enemies will cause their compatriots to call for a
sweep of the area, at which point you will be reintroduced to the guys with the
shotguns and riot shields if you don’t stay out of sight and move quickly. You can try to hide bodies by shoving them
into out-of-the-way places (most often lockers), but God help you if you leave
a trail of blood, which the enemies are at least smart enough to follow to
wherever you’ve stashed their unfortunate comrade.
Worse yet, God help you if you leave a trail of blood leading to your location, because you’re bleeding
yourself (from being shot, see), or if you’ve been out in the rain, or
swimming, and left a trail of wet footprints right to your hiding space. Or if, while hidden in your locker, you make
too much noise. Or if the enemy saw you
go into the room, and the locker was the only possible hiding place.
This was mitigated somewhat by the addition of first-person aiming,
allowing you to look around, and target enemies and obstacles, beyond the range
of what is otherwise readily visible while you indulge in the normal running
and sneaking about (despite being in amazing-for-its-day 3D, Sons of Liberty still set the camera so
as to give you a bird’s-eye view mostly, which is fine for small sprites on a
screen, or even relatively simple PS1-level 3D models, but not so great for
when you’re dealing with larger and more detailed character models and more
intricate environments). It allows you
to fire on your enemies with precision so that you can kill them or knock them
out instantly by targeting vital areas.
It also allows you to target objects in the distance that might cause a
distraction. For instance, you might
shoot at a fire extinguisher down the hall from your enemy, causing it to go
off, and causing the enemy in turn to go investigate it.
In short, the world is more wide open than it was in Metal Gear Solid. This seemed almost unthinkable in a way; Metal Gear Solid itself was a pretty
wide-open game compared to its contemporaries, and Metal Gear Solid 2 upped the ante in pretty much every way.
* * *
It must be said that, occasionally, the Metal Gear series baffles me
with its treatment of what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, military
paraphernalia.
The game’s opening mission tasks you with infiltrating a tanker ship
carrying an experimental weapon called Metal Gear Ray. This unit has been built by the Marine Corps,
and designed to take down other Metal Gear units such as Rex, which you dealt
with in the previous game. You belong to
an organization called Philanthropy, which is dedicated to stopping the
proliferation of Metal Gear units throughout the world. You have to take four photos of this one,
from different angles. One of these
photos needs to show the Marine Corps logo on it, to expose the underhanded
dealings within the U.S. military that led to its creation. Which is all well and good, except,
well… It was 2001 when the game came
out, and this section of the game was set a few years in the future from that
point (2007; now well in the past). Even
in 2001, we had Photoshop, to the extent that photographic evidence could be
convincingly faked for a variety of purposes.
So photos showing the Marine logo coming from a fringe NGO like Philanthropy
could be easily dismissed as a hoax even then.
The other thing that bugged me was another scene (also from this
section of the game) wherein a Russian mercenary commander shows up to begin
the operation of hijacking the ship for nefarious purposes. Solid Snake, our hero in this part of the
game, sees him and immediately identifies him as Russian not, as you might expect, by the fuzzy brown hat with the star on
it, or by his uniform (or the uniforms of the soldiers he commands), but by his
haircut.
“No Marine barber touched that head
of hair,” Snake says. To which my only
reply is: bullshit.
I was in the Army. I am not
saying this to brag, but simply to support my point. I met or ran across more than a few Marines
during my job training and joint force exercises. I have seen Marines with that exact haircut. I’ve seen soldiers with it. You know what I haven’t seen? Soldiers (or
Marines) with beards, or with unbloused trouser legs, or sleeves rolled up to
their forearms (it’s either up to the biceps, or all the way down), because all
of these things are against uniform regulations that have been in place for
years – probably decades – and don’t
look likely to change any time soon. Yet
these are all things that appear in Sons
of Liberty.
I mean, these uniform issues don’t actually bother me. It’s fiction; I don’t exactly have a stick up
my ass about this sort of thing in and of itself. But if you’re going to have characters make
pointed observations about the finer details of another character’s appearance,
and draw conclusions from those observations, it behooves you not to indulge in
a practice I like to think of as making
shit up.
It happens a few other times, too.
A character presenting himself as a member of Seal Team Six approaches
the player (this time a character different from Solid Snake, code-named
Raiden), and at one point in the conversation quotes what is apparently the
motto of the British SAS: “Who dares, wins”.
I’m assuming that’s the SAS motto, anyway; Sons of Liberty tells me it is for the purposes of its story. But who knows? The game has shown a willingness to fabricate
facts (“facts”) in the service of its story.
Anyway, the point is that after the character who says it leaves, Raiden
is warned that this character might not be who he seems (spoiler: he’s not, but
this being Metal Gear, no one is, not even said main character). His use of the SAS motto is given as
proof. Because, naturally, it’s
impossible that he might have heard it elsewhere and quoted it because he finds
it to be insightful, motivating, and encouraging; or because maybe he
cross-trained with the SAS or was on an operation with SAS operatives (as
special forces soldiers sometimes do); or for some other mundane and perfectly
understandable reason like that.
The kicker is that in the last example, we hardly need any warnings
that the Seal Team Six operative, who gives his name as Iroquois Pliskin, is maybe
not on the up and up. His initial
appearance is pretty suspicious, as is his cover story (glib, and given well,
but still a little dodgy all the same).
The additional admonishment is completely unnecessary and overdone. The same is true of the Russian commander in
the early part of the game. There are legitimate details the game could
highlight to make its observations, but it prefers to resort to bullshit
instead, and the only reason I can think of is that someone, somewhere, thought
it wouldn’t properly showcase the characters’ knowledge of military minutiae
(and therefore their being consummate warriors) if they did it any other way. Which is asinine, but… here we are.
* * *
Speaking of asinine, I may as well get around to talking about the
story.
Sons of Liberty doesn’t just
go off the deep end. To say that it goes
off the deep end would be so understated as to be a lie. What it does is dive gleefully into the deep
end, head-first, mad-cackling, from a great height (possibly from orbit).
I may be overselling that.
Somewhat.
Truth be told, calling the story asinine is probably pretty
disingenuous. Really, I tend to waffle
on my opinion.
Some days I think it’s stupid, and gets in the way far too much for its
own good, and why won’t these people shut up, can’t they see I just want to get
back to the running and sneaking and shooting and into-locker body-stuffing?
Other days, I feel as though it’s perfectly clever, and can’t applaud
it enough, and that even at its worst, the harshest criticism you can really
level at it is that maybe it’s too ambitious.
In comparison, the plot from Metal
Gear Solid is pretty straightforward. Though, really, so is the plot of Sons of Liberty, at first. Oh, to be sure, it’s a little more out there,
a little more oddball. Things don’t seem
to make quite as much sense, and there’s a feeling right from the beginning
that everything is ever so slightly off. On top of this, the game’s story hits many of
the same beats as the previous game, and has some of the same motifs here and
there, though there’s often a new and different meaning to them, as dictated by
the different context of the game. It
becomes noticeable to the player – hell, it becomes noticeable to the characters, even the hero, Raiden, who
has “played” through the scenario of the previous game in a VR training
simulation.
One of the central themes of the game is the nature of reality. How do we decide what is reality, what is
fiction, and how might an external entity’s control over information shape our
understanding of the world and the very fabric of what we perceive to be
real? How do our perceptions alter our
understanding, and how does our understanding alter our perceptions?
One of the things that’s interesting is that, despite the many and –
let’s be fair, here – accurate claims that Hideo Kojima seems keen to ape
Hollywood in his storytelling, there’s no real denying that at the same time,
he’s perfectly able to tell his story in ways that would only be possible in a
video game. Playing on the theme of the
nature of reality, Sons of Liberty
does some of its storytelling through the very interface of the game. The characters who relay orders, information,
and advice to you through your codec go from giving bad advice, to going off on
bizarre and completely irrelevant tangents, to spouting complete gibberish. The Game Over screen pops up seemingly at
random, in tense firefights, except the game isn’t actually over, and the window
in the Game Over screen which normally shows a graphic depicting the manner of
your untimely demise is instead a tiny screen on which you are still playing
the game (briefly, before things return to what passes in the Metal Gear Solid world for normal). And there are other, subtler signs in the
interface and in the more mechanical elements of the game to indicate that
things are going pear-shaped in a tremendous hurry.
The more superficial, external elements of the plot are practically
irrelevant. After the opening chapter of
the game, you are on a solo mission to the site where Solid Snake supposedly sunk
the tanker containing Metal Gear Ray (except, as the player, you know that this
version of events doesn’t quite square with reality; already, the game’s themes
of truth, information and misinformation, and the manipulation of consensus
perception, are at work). On this site
is now a facility called Big Shell, which is meant to be cleaning up the spill
from the oil tanker (again, as the player, you know it wasn’t oil in that tanker). The President of the United States is being
held hostage there by a group known as Dead Cell, who were previously a unit of
the U.S. military tasked with infiltrating U.S. facilities as a way to test
their readiness. But they’ve gone rogue,
and are now making terrorist demands.
You’ve been sent in, alone, to stop them. There are other efforts in progress as well,
but these are largely diversions, meant to cover your own operation.
The deeper elements of the story have been discussed back and forth,
practically to death, by now. That the
game performed the ultimate artistic bait and switch regarding players’
expectations has been discussed, but I’ll mention it anyway, because it’s an
example of the game’s very existence being demonstrative of the point the game’s
narrative is trying to make. I’d call it
the meta-narrative, if I didn’t feel like a pompous ass every time I even
considered using that word. (Damned if
it isn’t tempting, though.)
So, the first part of the game teases you by letting you play as Solid
Snake from the previous game, then ditches him after that chapter closes in
order to put you into the sneaking suit (here referred to as a Skull Suit, for
whatever reason) of a new character, the comparative rookie code-named Raiden. There was some furor over this, in certain
corners of the Metal Gear Solid fan
community. In part, that’s because screenshots
and videos of the sections of the game starring Raiden were presented with
Solid Snake in his place, making the introduction of Raiden a complete surprise
when the game first launched. But this
is all part of the meta-narrative (there, I used it); director Kojima is
altering the information you receive, building up a false perception of the
game for effect (in this case, to make some kind of artistic statement, no
doubt).
You could, I suppose, have a discussion on whether Sons of Liberty is art or
not, but really, so many of those arguments get tedious in a hurry. In the main, whenever I’ve stumbled into a
discussion as to whether such-and-such video game is art or not (barring a few
places), the primary metric used to judge this is whether the particular neck-bearded,
mouth-breathing, fedora-wearing, unwittingly Comic Book Guy-emulating self-styled
“intellectual” troglodyte in question likes it or not. There will be all sorts of eloquent
circumlocution bandied about, but in the end, that’s what it seems to come down
to in the majority of cases I’ve witnessed.
People who thought Sons of
Liberty was kind of stupid and too clever for its own good (these opinions
seem paradoxical to me, but I’ve seen people argue them both) tend to disqualify
it as art. Meanwhile, those who believe
there’s more to it than the most obvious, seemingly trolling manipulations of
its director – who believe these manipulations have a purpose, are going somewhere – tend to say that yes,
it is art.
I’m most often in the latter camp, I suspect. I believe Metal Gear Solid 2 is art. Whether
it’s good art, whether it’s art you’ll
like, is an entirely different
question, and one I’m not qualified to answer, and never will be.
* * *
Mundane Stuff: Versions and
Availability
It occurs to me that, as I write about things, I should discuss their
availability for anyone who may be interested.
So. Metal
Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was originally released in late 2001 for the
PS2. It was eventually ported to the
Xbox under the new title of Metal Gear
Solid 2: Substance. This version
contained a few new play modes and mini-games (like a skateboarding game) to
tinker around with, as well as “Snake Tales”, which are brief missions you can
play through as Snake, to see what he was doing while Raiden was trotting back
and forth across the Big Shell complex.
The Substance version was
ported back to the PS2 at some point afterward.
Honestly, it’s probably not worth a lot of extra effort and cost to get
the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2. It’s worth having, but probably not worth
going out of your way for. If you can save
yourself money by getting the plain-vanilla version for PS2, then do that.
Later still, an HD version was made available for the PlayStation3, PS
Vita, and Xbox 360, as part of the Metal
Gear Solid HD Collection, where it comes packaged with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (the improved version of the
original Metal Gear Solid 3) and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The Vita version of this seems to omit Peace Walker. There is also, for absolutely completist
nutcases*, Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy
Collection, which includes basically every single Metal Gear game Kojima
ever directed up to that point (Metal
Gear Solid and its VR Missions
expansion are available through download vouchers), with the PS2-era games and Peace Walker remastered for HD.
*I am a completist nutcase, surprising no one.
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