Past, Tense: Metal Gear Solid 3

Among many, many other things, you could, for good or for ill, describe Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as a hard act to follow.  Which is probably why, on the surface of things, director Hideo Kojima decided maybe it was better, really, not to follow it at all.

The games in the Metal Gear series, Solid and otherwise, have always taken place in a future near enough to be immediately familiar, but futuristic enough for concepts like nanomachines and artificial intelligence, which seem (at least in the present) to be just around the corner, technologically speaking, to feel right at home also.  So I was more than a little surprised to see that for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Kojima was taking the story back to the Cold War, specifically to the mid-60s.  I was reluctant, if not exactly outright hostile to the idea, but I bought it anyway.  It was a Metal Gear Solid game, after all.  What was I supposed to do?  Not play it?

And it’s a good thing I did buy it, because it turned out to be my favorite game of the series so far.

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When last we left off, Raiden, Solid Snake, and Otacon initially seemed to have finally succeeded in exposing the identities of the Wisemen’s Committee.  Why this is significant is going to take some explanation, especially since, looking back, I apparently didn’t bother explaining much of this at all when I did my last write-up.

So!

The Wisemen’s Committee is essentially the leadership of an organization known as the Patriots, who secretly control America from the shadows by manipulating politics, the economy, the military, and the general flow of information.  There are layers upon layers to their operations, and the people who do their work at the “ground level” probably don’t even realize the Patriots exist, let alone that they’re working for them.  The Patriots have exerted such control that there are those who, thanks the alterations made to them by the nanomachines injected into them (we will have such fun with nanomachines in Metal Gear Solid 4, let me tell you), that they literally cannot hear the word “Patriots”.  They aren’t allowed to.  Whenever someone refers to the Patriots, these people hear the phrase “La-li-lu-le-lo”, which is apparently a “missing” set of syllables in Japanese.

Look, it isn’t very well explained.

It was Snake and Otacon’s plan all along to infiltrate Arsenal Gear (the mobile military base in which the final act of Sons of Liberty takes place) and steal information regarding the identities of the Wisemen’s Committee.   But this is a Metal Gear Solid game.  Nothing is as it seems, and it turns out in this case that one of the members of the Wisemen’s Committee is the biggest contributor to Snake and Otacon’s NGO named Philanthropy.  What’s more, all of them appear, somehow, to have died about a century prior. 

If you’re noticing that this doesn’t make much (or any) sense, then I’d like to say welcome.  This is Metal Gear Solid in a nutshell.  Stay awhile; have a seat, and some aspirin.

So while the personal story of Sons of Liberty’s main character Raiden ends on a relatively high note, the overarching plot of Metal Gear Solid as a series is essentially a huge downer.  It’s revealed toward the end of that game that the whole enterprise has in fact been a massive test.  What the Patriots (whoever they actually are) were trying to test was whether you could take a basic rookie like Raiden, train him extensively in VR, and then turn him loose on a real operation and have him succeed as well as a real operative with years of in-field experience.  So Raiden’s entire portion of the game was their test; the entire scenario, from start to finish, including all variables, was orchestrated to occur exactly as it did, mirroring all the beats from the original Shadow Moses operation that was the story of the first Metal Gear Solid, because they were deliberately copying that scenario.  And in the end, the Patriots won.  Oh, sure, Raiden beat the bad guy, Solidus – but that, too, was engineered.  It was exactly what the Patriots wanted in the first place.  Beyond the resolution of Raiden’s personal crises, the entire ending is a punch in the gut, leaving you with a feeling that you’ve been robbed of true victory against the external foe.  It’s not even remotely the same as the ending of the first Metal Gear Solid, which settled for implying that there were things happening behind the scenes of which the player (and the main characters) were unaware.  You could write that off as just a hook for a sequel.  No, this was a move deliberately calculated to throw you off, to upend your expectations, and make a point.

It’s really quite a feat, when you think about it.  Kojima raised the stakes of his story to astronomical heights, while at the same time sending his heroes screaming all the way back to square one.  In this context, it makes perfect sense that he wouldn’t want to dive right into resolving this thorny problem.  Or rather, that he would, but that to do so would require that he step back and elaborate on the greater context. 

Which brings us to 1964, and some of the worst spots of the Cold War.

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The story opens with an operative code-named Naked Snake.  He looks a lot like Solid Snake, aside from his more pronounced facial hair, but then, this is hardly a surprise in 1964.  The game’s promotional materials have not been coy about this, and anyone paying attention would deduce it fairly quickly: Naked Snake is the man who will go on to become known as Big Boss, also known as the greatest soldier who ever lived, also known as the template from whom Solid Snake and his unfortunate brother Liquid Snake would later be cloned.

But appearances are deceptive.  This man may look like Solid Snake, and in terms of military skill and ability, it’s clear that Solid Snake’s apple fell quite close to the tree.  But Solid Snake, when we came to know him in Metal Gear Solid, was a bitter, world-weary cynic, for whom the phrase “Been there, done that” falls so short of the mark that it actually seems a little bit dishonest.  Solid Snake does what he does with a sense of grudging acceptance.  He doesn’t really like what he is or the things he does, but he does them because that’s pretty much all that’s in him to do.  It’s what he was designed for, after all.  For all the talk in Metal Gear Solid about rising above one’s genetic destiny, it seems like it was too much for Solid Snake in the end.

Naked Snake, on the other hand, is a little bit of a weirdo.

He geeks out over the modifications that have been made to some of the weapons he comes across.  He’s afraid of vampires and other supernatural creatures.  He looks forward to eating pretty much any and every creature he comes across in the field to survive, purely for the experience of it.  At one point, he expounds on the comfort he feels while hidden inside a box.

At the same time, he’s a consummate professional in his field, albeit with a certain odd sense of youth to him compared to his enemies.  He believes in right and wrong – he believes he’s fighting for his country, while the player (and pretty much everyone else in the game) knows that this just plain isn’t the truth, and it’s honestly a little heartbreaking to watch.  Even in the 60s, prior to the advent of much of the technology that makes the Patriots’ hold on the U.S. (and the world) possible, they have a pretty good grasp on things.  Naked Snake is comparatively young and innocent, surrounded by older, more experienced and more cynical people who have seen enough to know whose hands hold the reins of the world, and who have at least some idea how to fight back.  These people would either use him or destroy him for interfering, or both.  He is easily manipulated, and in well over his head.

This far into the series, there are certain iterative patterns.  Concepts introduced in one game are brought back for the next, but refined and changed.  So where Sons of Liberty gave us the Tanker and Big Shell chapters (essentially, the tutorial and the main game), Snake Eater gives us the Virtuous Mission and Operation: Snake Eater.

The Virtuous Mission sees Naked Snake sent on the world’s first HALO jump deep into the jungles of Soviet Russia.  Here, he is to retrieve a Russian scientist named Nicolai Stepanovich Sokolov.  This man, it turns out, was the real reason the Cuban Missile Crisis happened.  According to Snake Eater, Sokolov was trying to defect to the U.S.  The USSR was aware of this, and their moving missiles to Cuba was their way of threatening the U.S.; return Sokolov to the USSR, or else.  The President caved in, Sokolov was returned, and the missiles went back to Russia with him.  The Virtuous Mission, then, is portrayed as the CIA’s attempt to right this particular wrong.

In addition to his commander, a former SAS officer code-named Major Tom (later code-named Major Zero, after the inevitable failure of the Virtuous Mission), Snake is getting radio assistance from none other than The Boss, a female soldier who is the mother of special forces in the U.S., and a fantastically talented soldier.  She is Snake’s personal mentor, but is also something more.  How much more is left open for debate.

Things start to go sideways almost immediately upon Snake finding Sokolov. 

Unbeknownst to Snake, there is a coup in the works.  The current Russian government under Nikita Krushchev is threatened with violent overthrow by a military commander named Colonel Volgin.  Almost as soon as Snake makes contact with Sokolov, a team of Volgin’s elite soldiers, called the Ocelots, make a strike on the compound where Sokolov is being held.  Sokolov is a developer of weapons.  In particular, he is working on a new type of tank called the Shagohod, which can cross virtually any kind of terrain, and will be able to fire a nuclear missile.  For a hawk like Volgin, this is too tempting to pass up.

The Ocelot unit has little concern for their regular army compatriots; in fact, they slaughter the soldiers currently guarding the compound just to get at Sokolov.  The player recognizes trouble when he sees it, and it takes no time at all to realize that the leader of the Ocelot unit is a young man who will later go on to become the second coming of Lee Van Cleef, in the form of Revolver Ocelot.

Snake and Sokolov’s escape from the Ocelot unit is short-lived, however.  As the two make their way across a rope bridge over a very deep chasm, they are confronted with none other than the Boss herself.  Her earlier assistance to Snake was a ruse.  In truth, she’s defecting to the Soviet Union, and she’s taking a handpicked group of soldiers, known as the Cobra Unit, with her.  Not long after this, Volgin arrives by helicopter, along with the rest of the Cobra Unit, to witness the Boss beating the holy hell out of Snake.  In addition to recapturing Sokolov, the Boss has a gift for her new commander: two nuclear warheads, and a “Davy Crockett”, a portable launcher.  The Boss tosses Snake over the bridge and into the river below, seemingly knowing he’ll survive.  As Volgin, the Boss, and the Cobras depart, Volgin decides he wants to try out his new toy, and fires one of the nukes.

So: We have the failed defection of a Russian scientist who was working on a mobile nuclear launch platform; the defection of the top American soldier, not to the USSR, but specifically to Colonel Volgin, who threatens to take over the entire Soviet Union and turn the Cold War hot; and a nuclear explosion well inside the borders of the USSR, courtesy of a U.S.-designed missile.  In the political field, I think the phrase they use for this is “a shitstorm”.

After a tense call on the red phone between Nikita Krushchev and Lyndon B. Johnson, a plan of sorts is worked out.  The U.S. will send an operative (Naked Snake, naturally) back into Russia to eliminate both The Boss and Volgin, thus proving that the Boss’s defection to Volgin’s faction within the Soviet Union was the act of a rogue soldier, rather than a plot by the U.S. to destabilize the Soviet Union.  Major Zero, meanwhile, sees this mission as a sort of proof of concept for the Fox Unit he has for some time been trying to form.  The Virtuous Mission was supposed to be that, of course, but now this mission, Operation Snake Eater, will serve instead.  Of course, the unspoken threat is quite clear: If Snake Eater is a failure, none of them will be around to do any kind of soldiering again.

And as always, nothing is what it seems.

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The thing about the story of a Metal Gear Solid game is that I can never really tell when to stop talking about it.  There’s a fine balance to be struck between explaining enough to demonstrate the complexity of it, and explaining too much and giving it away.  I think I’ve got it, but I’m stopping here anyway, just to be sure.  So let’s talk about actually playing the game.

The first time I did, I was just about paralyzed with anxiety.

The thing that’s different about Snake Eater is that it takes place largely in outdoor environments.  Previous games in the series took place mostly indoors.  The outdoor areas were basically small segments of land between buildings, and were functionally indistinguishable from indoor areas.  The exceptions to this rule were generally setpieces, such as tank battle and the sniper duel in Metal Gear Solid, or the much different sniper section in Sons of Liberty.  The main action in those games involved sneaking around inside buildings, where sight-lines were relatively short, and opportunities to duck around a corner and into a locker or an air duct were plentiful once you knew what to look for and where to find it.

Snake Eater, by contrast, throws you into the middle of the open wilderness, with enemies whose camouflage is not just part of a uniform, but is actually functional.  It can be damned difficult to spot enemies in the distance, and with this being the mid-60s, Snake’s radar isn’t available yet.  You have a motion tracker, but this operates on a limited battery (which thankfully can be recharged), and only shows the last known location of moving entities, not all of which are enemies (a large portion of these may in fact be animals).  More so than either of its predecessors, Snake Eater demands that you slow down, use all of your tools, and plot your course of action carefully.

Enemies are also smarter.  If they detect any sign of your presence, or hear sounds like bullets striking surfaces nearby (even if the weapon itself is silenced), they will call for backup first, then go looking for you.  Likewise, the Alert and Evasion phases of heightened security are longer and also more stressful, as there are generally fewer nooks and crannies to hide and just wait it out.  To a certain extent, you could bumble your way through Metal Gear Solid and Sons of Liberty simply by running away and finding hiding places where enemies couldn’t follow you if you got spotted, and your radar made detecting and predicting your enemies much easier.  Snake Eater requires that you make a greater effort to avoid being spotted in the first place, as there are few impregnable hiding places – sometimes none.

The game also strives to be more realistic.  Where previous games had the relatively straightforward video game-y mechanic of health that you lost when being injured and restored by using certain items (typically rations), Snake Eater has two different gauges: one for health and one for stamina.

Health can’t be restored directly.  It naturally regenerates over time, but this process is slow.  It goes faster depending on how much stamina you have.  Stamina can be regained by eating certain kinds  of food (different food regenerates differing amounts of stamina), which ranges from military rations to whatever you can capture and kill in the field.  Rotten food (such as animals you’ve killed but haven’t eaten quickly enough) will actually damage your stamina, or even make you sick.  Which adds a whole new layer to the survival mechanic Snake Eater is trying for.

If you take damage severe enough – getting shot, stabbed, sliced, beaten with blunt objects, catching a cold from spending too much time in the water, betting burned, getting leeches stuck to you from crawling through the swamps, or getting sick from eating rotten food – you’ll have to fix yourself up.  There is a Survival Viewer menu you can access which will tell you what’s wrong, and will allow you to use the different first aid items you will occasionally find to fix the problem.  For instance, if you get shot with a bullet, you’ll need to first use your knife to fish the bullet out, then use a disinfectant to sterilize the wound, then use a styptic to stop the bleeding, then use sutures to sew the wound shut, then use a bandage.  Thankfully, all of this is as easy as just selecting the relevant items from a menu and pressing a button, but even so, it can get tedious.

And you have to pay attention to all of this, because leaving these conditions untended will cause your stamina to fall, which in turn will cause your health to drop.  Some of these conditions also have more immediate drawbacks.  Major injuries will bleed, and enemies can follow a blood trail.  Likewise, having a cold will cause you to sneeze occasionally, while more gastrointestinal problems (sickness or just plain hunger) may cause your stomach to gurgle.  Of course, these things tend to happen at the most inopportune times.

To be fair, though, Snake Eater gives you a lot more tools than previous games.  You have multiple camouflage patterns and face paints that you can use to hide yourself well enough that enemies can walk right by you without seeing you, unless you’ve done something to make them want to look for you.   Catching food is easy (indeed, it’s why food going bad is such a problem; you’ll be burdened with an excess of it until you get a feel for how much and how often you need to eat, and what works best), and there are ways to use your rotten food to make your enemies sick. 

Likewise, the game is fairly flexible, and offers quite a number of opportunities to affect how later sections play out.  Destroy a supply depot, for instance, and enemies in a later section of the game will fire at you more sparingly, since now they have to conserve ammo.  While straight-up firefights are still generally something you want to avoid, you can be more openly aggressive in dealing with enemies than you could previously.  Metal Gear Solid 3 gives you quite an armory to play with compared to the previous games.  Even some of the boss encounters can play out with major differences (one can be sidestepped entirely, if your reflexes, aim, and timing are good in a certain section of the game), which adds to that all-important replay value.

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If Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty helped to whet our appetites for all that the PlayStation2 could do in 2001, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, coming three years later almost to the day, was a more refined game that helped to demonstrate some of those capabilities.  This wasn’t quite the end of the PS2’s lifespan, but it was getting there.  The limits of the system were no longer just hypothetical.  At the same time, developers were getting better at hiding the zipper in the monster suit.  The somewhat plastic-y, rigid look of Sons of Liberty was softened by desaturated lighting and better textures by the time Snake Eater rolled around, and the animations felt more natural.  It was clear at this point that, of the three systems in the console race in that generation, the PS2 was lagging behind Nintendo’s GameCube and Microsoft’s Xbox in terms of sheer capability.  But just because it wasn’t as capable in many ways, that doesn’t mean games for it looked bad, not by any stretch.

I tend to think that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a game that showcases the best of what the PS2 had to offer.  Not only in technical capabilities, but in the ambition of its design, and the way it merges its storytelling, mechanics, and structure.  Certainly, it shows Hideo Kojima at the height of his storytelling powers.  As much as I love Metal Gear Solid 4 – and I do love it, in a sort of backhanded way at times – that game glories in its excess, and it’s one I have to be in the right mood to replay.  And while that’s true of all but a few of the games I like, it’s especially true of that one.  Snake Eater, by contrast, tells a story that’s complex without resorting to a lot of flash and techno-babble.  The result is a story possessed of real depth and a sense of meaning.  It’s also clever without showing off its cleverness, which is quite a trick in itself.  Its end – probably one of the better final encounters in the entire PS2 library – brings together the narrative and mechanics of the game so perfectly that you almost don’t notice it.  You’re too busy to notice much, really; it tests pretty much everything you’ve learned over the course of the game.

The best final encounters tend to be like that, though.  A sort of final exam that demands you put together all the skills you’ve been learning and perfecting throughout the game.  And even at the end, Snake Eater retains some of that flexibility that truly makes it special.

Ultimately, it boils down to this: Snake Eater is one of the short list of games that, all by itself, justified owning a PlayStation2.

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So, let’s talk about versions.

In addition to the plain-vanilla edition that was originally released, Konami eventually released a version of the game titled Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence.  Like the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2, Subsistence is packed with extras for Metal Gear Solid 3.  But this is a far more substantial offering.  At the time of its release, it included a new online game mode, Metal Gear Online (now defunct), as well as a series of short videos (mostly absurdly comical sequences), new camouflage patterns, and translated versions of the MSX2 editions of the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.  Those last two alone justify buying the Subsistence version.  But even without all of those things, there’s one other thing that makes Subsistence worth owning, and that’s the fact that the Subsistence version allows you to control camera movement for the first time in the series.  While this is a feature whose absence is a tremendous pain in the ass for Metal Gear Solid 2, its continued absence in the original version of Metal Gear Solid 3 was downright tragic.

The Subsistence version of the game is the one offered in later digital editions, such as those found on the PS3 (Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection), Xbox 360, and PS Vita.  These versions, however, do omit some of the extra content.