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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.