Here’s To You: Metal Gear Solid 4

Many years ago now, my friend Wade and I watched through the anime Serial Experiments Lain in two sittings.  We meant to watch it in one, but at a certain point it got to be too heavy, too dense, and I had to call a time-out that wound up going for the rest of the evening, and we finished up the next night.  It was one of the last anime I watched for the first time before I left for the Army, so this would have been in either the late summer or the fall of 2000.

There’s a lot that Lain chooses not to explain about its story, its meaning, or its message.  Maybe that’s just a consequence of its economy.  It’s only 13 episodes long, and it has a lot of ground to cover.  But a lot of the time, honestly, it feels like that’s all by design.  At any rate, the explanations in Lain are there, but the story doesn’t go out of its way to explain them to you.  It doesn’t come right out and say anything.  It gives you facts as the story moves forward, and expects you to put them together as it goes.  For Wade, none of this was new.  He’d seen it before, and so a lot of things made more sense to him than to me.  Having seen the ending, he knew what to watch for, knew the clues as soon as he saw them.  My own understanding was much less complete.

“Was there anything you didn’t understand?” he asked.  I said no, I understood it, more or less.  There were lots of things I was uncertain about, or would be hard-pressed to explain, but I got a sense of the wholeness and the solidity of it.  It was a mystery, but it made sense.  Its parts seemed to fit together and move against each other correctly to do whatever it was that it was doing, while still retaining a nice sense of the unknown (though not necessarily the unknowable).  We talked about it for several hours into the night, which became the morning, and our conversations would drift back to it later on as well.  I sort of gradually pieced together a better understanding of the story until I eventually felt like I “got” it, but I was still left grasping for words, should anyone ever have asked what it all meant, and how.

I didn’t really have a way to explain this feeling, and then one day, reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, I did.

There’s a point in the sixth volume, Fables and Reflections, where Abel explains the reason – the real reason – why a collective of rooks is called a parliament.  As the keeper of secrets, it’s the sort of thing he knows.  His elder brother, Cain, berates him for this with all his usual fury:

"I keep telling you: It’s the mystery that endures.  Not the explanation.  A good mystery can last forever.  The mysterious corpse has a magic all its own.  Nobody really cares who-done-it.  They’ll peck you to pieces if you tell them, little brother."

While saying all this, he murders Abel.  This being The Sandman, though, that’s perfectly normal.  After all, this is Cain and Abel.  It’s what they do.

Before this, it was a thing I understood in a strange and inarticulate way, in that odd basement place we all have in our heads, which is older and simpler than higher functions like articulation.  Things are simply known in that part of the brain, without reference to logic or explanation or reason.  The ideas are just there.  They just exist.  It’s cold and reptilian and binary there; things are either certain or nonexistent.  It’s where feelings stand in for facts, and intuition runs through it.  It isn’t always right, but it is terrifyingly exact.

I would argue with Cain’s point – carefully, politely, and over a great distance (preferably by phone) – in one respect.  If you’re the one solving the mystery, there’s a great sense of satisfaction in knowing the explanation.  Watching it be solved, though, can be pretty disappointing.  Simply being handed the answers can get downright dreary and tedious.  In those cases, I would be inclined to agree with Cain.  The wondering is almost always better than the knowing.

Which is, in large part, most of the problem I have with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

*             *             *

Before we talk about the problems, let’s at least talk about all the things Metal Gear Solid 4 gets right. 

Guns of the Patriots was one of the first games that sold me on the PlayStation3, probably the first.  The others were The Last Guardian (which, frustratingly, has yet to materialize, and the chances of this changing any time before the heat death of the universe are getting ever more remote) and Demon’s Souls.  By this point, I didn’t need to see any screenshots or videos (though I did see a few).  I was good and hooked on the series at that point.  Knowing the next Metal Gear Solid, whatever it was going to be, was going to be a PS3 exclusive was enough.  If it had been on the Xbox 360 instead, I probably would have bought one of those a lot sooner than 2012. 

In fact, not only did I not need to know much about the game before buying it, I didn’t want to.  I actively steered clear of the hype as much as I could.  The bait-and-switch trickery Hideo Kojima worked with the hero of Metal Gear Solid 2 didn’t bother me much, but I went into that game knowing very little about it.  Part of that is down to the screwed-up way I got into the series, alternating sessions between Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2 until I got far enough in the second one to realize I was expected to have a good working knowledge of the story in the first.  My expectations for Metal Gear Solid 3 were basically nonexistent, beyond knowing that much of the action took place in the wilderness, and that avoiding detection was going to be harder.

All I knew about Metal Gear Solid 4 going in was that much of the game took place in actual warzones, and that avoiding detection would be harder still.

This much, at least, is generally true.  Avoiding notice is less about observing the routines of patrols in the area and finding a good spot to hide in, and more about furtive lurking in shadows, constantly dodging from place to place, never staying in one place for too long for fear of being spotted there by either of the hostile factions.  But this is hardly the only thing that’s been changed.

The controls have been overhauled in Guns of the Patriots.  The previous two games largely just built on the control scheme of the original Metal Gear Solid, adding more capabilities by way of ever more esoteric button combinations.  While there was a lot you could conceivably do, doing much of it could be a tremendous pain.  I mean, I was able to get through the game with little trouble, but as the controls got decreasingly intuitive, I hit a point where I might try to do something like, say, hold an enemy at gunpoint to get information from him, but I had to struggle to remember the exact combination of what I had to do and how I had to do it, and I finally would just say, “oh, fuck it, never mind” and just shoot the guy.

I’m not an idiot (or so I keep being told), but games get frustrating when I have to think much about how to make the character do something.  It’s one thing to think “How do I sneak up to that hill?” in the sense of what actions need to be taken, in what order, with what timing.  It’s another thing to have to consider the various button combinations that need to be pressed to do a particular thing that seems simple on paper, and to have to recall this process every time.  I don’t like having to think about individual button combos to make my character move or act.  It’s one thing for the controls to be difficult at the beginning.  But past that point, they should be intuitive enough that they become reflexive.  I should be able to think, “I want to do this thing,” and I already know how to make the character do it.  And there are certain (thankfully optional) actions in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 that require a certain tedious amount of thought.

So when Guns of the Patriots revamped the control scheme to fall more in line with what we expect from, say, a twin-stick third-person shooter, the difference was much appreciated.  Initially confusing, granted, given my experience with the series up to that point.  But much appreciated.  For the first time, it felt really intuitive.  A lot of the commands were made context-sensitive, also, which helped quite a bit. 

The game also looks gorgeous.  I don’t recall if it was Kojima’s stated intent to show off the capabilities of the PS3, but it might as well have been.  Even today, there are PS3 games that don’t look as good as Guns of the Patriots.  This was one of the first games I ever played (the other was Mass Effect) that demonstrated just how much of a jump it was, going into the first HD generation of consoles.  Here we are in 2015, the twilight of the PS3’s life, and quite frankly there are still games coming out for the system that don’t look this good.

Of course, this is something of a double-edged sword.  It isn’t actually impossible to play the game on a standard-definition TV.  I know this because my first time through, that’s how I played it.  When it comes to on-screen text (usually text telling you what weapons you’re picking up, how much ammo you have, etc.) that you’ll have to resign yourself to missing.  Much of it is plainly unreadable on an SD set.  A certain amount of managing your resources becomes educated guesswork.  Thankfully, all the important stuff is still satisfactorily visible.

The mechanics and structure manage to keep the game fresh.  Rather than have a single large area in which the game takes place like Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear Solid 3, or most of Metal Gear Solid 2, Guns of the Patriots takes place in five acts.  Each act is a self-contained environment with its own mission, and is actually fairly linear.  But even compared to the previous games’ tendency to give you a huge environment and just let you go in it (albeit with some direction), Guns of the Patriots’s linearity is actually something of a boon.  The pace of the game is different.  There are very few places to hide for more than a few moments, and it’s like Snake Eater in that sense, but with the important distinction that at least in Snake Eater you had the distance inherent to wide-open wilderness spaces on your side.  You could wait for enemies from a way off, trick them into poisoning themselves, use the environment against them.  Guns of the Patriots sees you often in more cramped urban environments.  You constantly need to be on the move.  There is little hope in staying put; a given spot is typically only safe because the enemies happen not to be looking there at the moment.

The level of stress ramps up accordingly.  You tend to feel sort of beleaguered after a while, harried and harassed.  Being pushed forward is almost a blessing.

Guns of the Patriots also tends to feature more set-piece encounters and gimmicks.  The second act features a lengthy section where you’re barreling across the landscape in an armored vehicle firing a mounted machine gun at gekkos (these are basically sort of like robotic, autonomous mini-Metal Gears, part machine, part synthetic biology, without the nuclear launch capability).  Later on, you’re shoving your way through a crowd, all need for stealth thrown to the winds in the mad rush simply to escape.  Later still, you’re sneaking through a city in Eastern Europe that’s been put under martial law.  You’re out after curfew, trying to locate members of a resistance movement, and remain undetected both by the resistance and the soldiers.  And so it goes.

In short Guns of the Patriots goes out of its way to ensure that the act of playing the game is thoroughly enjoyable.  If the story surrounding the game weren’t so lamentably told, I wouldn’t even have a problem. 

*             *             *

Before I start talking about its problems, I do want to clarify that, on the whole, I like the story of Metal Gear Solid 4.  Or at least, I like the idea of it.  Despite the way I’ve been alluding to it this whole time, it isn’t actually a complete shit-show.

In the main, the story of Guns of the Patriots is one of endings.  There is a subtle sense all throughout the game that, although neither you nor the characters are sure of when or where or how, the forces that have been moving and shaping the story of Metal Gear Solid are coming into a kind of final state.  There have been many feints, many dodges, many decisive blows struck by one side or the other, but the final move is not just coming.  Not just coming, but imminent.  There is a sense of desperation, of urgency, of a mad scramble to expose the conspiracy once and for all, before it’s somehow too late.  There is a feeling that you’re always just a half-step behind the enemy, one twist or turn of the plot away from pulling down the whole façade.

And like all endings, there is the bittersweet sense of wishing farewell to an idea, a group of people and a place who meant something to you, and now all of them are going away, perhaps for good.  It seems strange to say it, given the high-octane cynicism that runs through much of the overall Metal Gear Solid story.  And when the characterizations get a little unbelievable – when Snake and Otacon look at each other in confusion about the finer points of frying an egg, because apparently having a Y chromosome and a penis makes cooking impossible for any group of grown men, or something – you kind of just shake your head and go “Oh, well.”

To be honest, very few of these people would be fun to be around.  Otacon’s indecisive to a fault, and a borderline doormat.  Snake’s  a miserable old bastard (admittedly, he’s miserable at least in part due to his being old well before his time, but he had other issues well before that).  And yet, you sympathize anyway, because when it comes to games, that’s part of what’s great about them, and also a little unfair.  Before you judge someone, so the saying goes, you should walk a mile in their shoes.  And we’ve walked (and crawled, and fought) for God knows how far in Snake’s shoes already.  So when we watch him throw his hacking, wheezing, sometimes barely ambulatory body into the thick of it once more, it does hurt a little.

The story does overdo it a bit with the melodrama, though.  Between the shady arms dealer monologue-ing about each member of the Beauty and Beast Corps (who serve as the game’s bosses, and take certain thematic queues from previous games’ boss enemies and encounters), and about how they were driven to their mad obsession with war, and the out-of-nowhere revelation that one character from a prior game has cancer, and will die of it very soon (as in, within minutes) without so much as a hint of foreshadowing, it all feels more than a little ham-handed.  You get the distinct impression that Hideo Kojima was reaching as far as he could, to inject as much feeling into the story as possible at every turn, and to demonstrate the human cost of war, while forgetting occasionally that some justification is necessary.

It’s tempting, thinking about this, to say that even if it’s a bit too much, well…  Metal Gear Solid has always been a bit too much.  It’s always been a little like what might happen if you stripped all the superficial and outright silliness out of G.I. Joe, while still leaving in all the fantastical nonsense, and then piled on layer after layer of grimness and darkness in the name of “grit” and “realism”.  In some ways, Guns of the Patriots is just the logical extension of all of that.  It’s doing what Metal Gear Solid has always done, only more and bigger.

But even with something that’s normally over the top in the first place, you can go too far.  The action scenes seem to borrow from the worst excesses of the fight choreography seen in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (a Gamecube-only remake of Metal Gear Solid).

Still, there’s something very satisfying in watching plot threads laid down years ago finally coming together.  In seeing old characters and old ideas resurface with new purpose and new meaning.  In watching all these wildly disparate elements come together to form a single, unified whole.

It’s a shame it wasn’t better handled.  But then, we were talking about ham-handedness…

*             *             *

I’m not the first person to make this comparison, but if the shoe fits…  When it comes to the plot of Guns of the Patriots, it honestly feels like Kojima wrote down a giant, comprehensive list titled “Questions Currently Unanswered in Metal Gear Solid”.  And then, one by one, he proceeded to answer those questions.  When he was done, he looked up with grim determination and began to plot what sort of story could contain all those answers.

Okay, in fairness, it’s probably not quite that dire.  And Guns of the Patriots is, in pretty much every other respect, a really excellent game.  But it’s too obsessed with giving straight and frightfully granular answers to a lot of previously unanswered questions that were frankly more interesting as questions, in the unanswered state.

There are seemingly endless amounts of cutscenes (which, themselves, feel like they might go on forever if this weren’t classified as a game and therefore it’s required that the player be allowed actually to play now and again) devoted to pulling back the curtain, again and again, and explaining every question, every niggling little inconsistency in the finer details that most of us probably even didn’t remember until the game went out of its way to bring it up just to answer it.

For instance: All the way back in the original Metal Gear Solid, Vulcan Raven tell Snake that he knows Snake is partly Japanese.  Yet Snake is cloned from Big Boss, whose ethnic background, while not gone over in any real detail, seems to be pretty definitively white all around.  So Guns of the Patriots goes out of its way to explain that Snake’s surrogate mother was Japanese.  On the one hand, I can understand the need to have all the parts of the whole fit together.  I’m at least obsessive-compulsive enough to understand the almost physical feeling of discomfort when something’s out of place and you know it’s out of place.  Once you see it, you have to fix it.  You just do.  You’ll hate it because it’s a tremendous pain in the ass and because there’s no fun in it.  There’s joy in the act of creation, but there’s rarely any to be found in fixing a stupid mistake you made while creating.  But even though you’ll grit your teeth and roll your eyes and mutter obscenities under your breath, you’ll do it, because the alternative is to have that one error sticking out, practically laughing at you.  It doesn’t matter if nobody else notices it, either.  You’ll know.

And honestly, I feel sometimes like that’s the real root of the problem in the storytelling of Guns of the Patriots.  It feels at times as if the overriding sentiment was “Let’s just get the fucking thing done, okay?”  Hideo Kojima has said at various times that he wants to stop making games in this series – I may have mentioned this before – but it seems that this sentiment comes through most clearly in Metal Gear Solid 4.  Some of the story sequences are rock-solid.  Some of them – usually the ones expounding on some tiresome bit of backstory or series lore – are little more than abstract or symbolic graphics accompanying lengthy lectures on the topic of the moment, and embody the worst excesses of Kojima’s style of storytelling.  There is occasionally almost a documentary feel to the proceedings, the most hands-off approach possible in a medium that is intrinsically hands-on.

And yet, you can’t really skip this stuff, either.  I mean, you can, technically, but you shouldn’t.  It’s really part of the overall experience.  The story is almost practically divorced from the act of playing the game in most senses.  Without all the exposition, the actual playable sections would, taken by themselves, constitute the most disjointed and bizarre story.

And that’s really my main gripe with the story of Guns of the Patriots.  It’s exciting and entertaining to be made to work for the answers, but boring to be simply given them.  And to be grabbed by the collar and have one’s face mashed into them, well, that gets to be galling.  And all the while, the story slaloms back and forth between pure, dry exposition that feels almost like a souped-up PowerPoint presentation, and raw, unfettered batshit-crazy spectacle the likes of which Jerry Bruckheimer can only dream.

So: Guns of the Patriots.  At its worst, it’s disappointing and somewhat tedious, but the tedious bits aren’t really offensive because they require no effort.  They’re completely passive.  You really just sit through them.  And at least the acting involved is some of the best in the industry.  At its best, it is sincerely masterful.

*             *             *

So…  Versions and release history.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was originally released in 2008 for the PS3.  At the time, it featured its own version of Metal Gear Online.  This feature has since been taken offline, and Konami patched the game to remove the option to select Metal Gear Online from the game’s main menu.  Metal Gear Solid 4 is also part of the package Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection, which is a PS3 exclusive, and the version of Metal Gear Solid 4 that comes in this package already has the option for Metal Gear Online removed.

In all likelihood, this is the last we’ll be seeing of Solid Snake.  The other main Metal Gear Solid games, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker star Big Boss in the cold war era, as does Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.  There are the Metal Gear Ac!d games for the PSP also, but while they feature Solid Snake, they’re card-based games of some sort, which means I’ve had little to no interest in them beyond general curiosity.

Chronologically, there’s a Metal Gear story set after Guns of the Patriots, titled Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, but it stars Raiden exclusively (to the best of my knowledge, anyway; I haven’t really dug into it, but I figure if there was a surprise cameo by Solid Snake, I’d have heard about that by now), and Revengeance doesn’t seem to really involve itself with the themes present in the larger series, and was in fact developed by a different studio altogether.

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.

*             *             *

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.

*             *             *

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.

*             *             *

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.

*             *             *

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.

*             *             *

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.