Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

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IamLEAM1983
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Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

This is less a review and more of a general expectoration of near-complete loathing. Which is kinda weird, because I kinda liked Ground Zeroes and am at least mildly optimistic for The Phantom Pain.

But, yeah.

Hideo Kojima isn't nearly as good as some people think. He's the Woody Allen of video game directors: artsy-fartsy, pretentious, preachy, confused, and entirely unable to see just how problematic his maze-like mythos has become.

I guess I just have a thing for controversial opinions.

See, Kojima used to be just another programmer working in a Konami imprint for the MSX computer system, back in the eighties. Metal Gear (1987) started out as a fairly Commando-esque run through the secret installation that was Outer Heaven. Snake was more or less an amalgam of Kurt Russell's Iroquois Plissken and Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese, and he stood as the first protagonist of a stealth-centric game. That was unique, in an era that was largely dominated by side and top-scrolling running-and-gunning along the lines of Contra or Ikari Warriors. You played as a fairly typical eighties-era special operative, tasked with defusing and destroying the would-be omnicidal Mech of Mass Destruction that would be known as Metal Gear. You had a bunch of supporting operatives, some of which turned out to be double agents working for the enemy, and – of course – your own boss turned out to be in on the whole affair, seeking to claim the mech for his own power-hungry needs.

A second game reared up, then a third. Past that, the PSX era had begun, and Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998. The game's innovative use of cinematics and the way the increasing tech allowed for more complex narrative twists and turns. In turn, Solid cemented Kojima's reputation as an auteur, one of the first few Superstar Game Directors. In fact, quiz some people and I'm sure they'll chalk up Hideo on the same pedestal as Steven Spielberg.

The long and short of it is that the Metal Gear universe is Military-Industrial Complex Porn filtered through the lens of common Japanese fixations, a generalized love of speculative fiction and an absolute obsession with overdrawn conspiracy theories. What starts as “The Cold War, plus Mechs” in the Sixties-anchored Snake Eater (2004) becomes a fixation on PMC dominance, social control, nanotech and the general mythification of warfare in the public consciousness. Several times, Guns of the Patriots lands rather unsubtle jabs at its own nature as an entertainment product and enjoys pointing fingers at the CoD-bros and Battlefield zealots of this world. That same game sees future warfare as an unending succession of proxy battles, ideology and political tensions evacuated from the proceedings.

In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war. And stock market price hikes. And a ton of shell companies. And nanotech. Because Japan.

I don't like Metal Gear as a series. It's a set of sophomoric narrative efforts of whom the main writers have deluded themselves into thinking that their work has depth. It feels like the work of fourteen year-olds playing with G.I. Joe figurines, conjuring up plot twist after plot twist when their anemic lore tangles itself into a corner.

A college friend of mine raised a few points when he mentioned that Hideo Kojima is probably at least vaguely aware of Tolstoy's War and Peace, but no amount of intertext could ever justify the fact that the whole proceedings feels hackneyed.

A few weeks back, I borrowed my friend's copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the much-touted PS3 pièce de résistance, and went on a quick trawl through the mainstream review sites. The conseus is fairly clear; this is supposed to be an awesome game – a benchmark and a milestone for the medium.

I don't get it. Here's why.

Hard Drives Are a Thing, Hideo...
The first thing that comes to mind when you start playing is how Old Snake looks while he's smoking a coffin nail. He looks grizzled. World-weary, even. That's some pretty killer texture work, there, Fox Team! We're off to a good start!

There's just one problem: I'm stuck looking at an installer's progress bar for twenty minutes. The game is divided in five Acts, and I'll have to repeat the process each time, this stacking an extra ten minutes of install time between each segment.

Based on a few observations, the entire game weighs about ten gigabytes, and the starter hard drive clocked at eighty. Unless you're dead-set on keeping all of your games' uploaded files, you won't ever fill up all that space, even with all the saved games in the world. We really should have been able to install the whole fucking thing in one go. Team Fox has no excuse, because Uncharted streams everything from the disc and the later iterations of the series pack redundant data on the Blu-Ray's expansive surface. That cuts back on the loading times to a significant amount.

Did they ever consider that? Nope. Engineering Fail.

Wanna go back and replay an Act? Reinstall everything, peasant!
There's no Chapter Selection screen, no “Demo Theater”, nothing that allows you to skip to the best bits of the game. If Guns of the Patriots has a specific soft spot you enjoy replaying (or, I daresay, rewatching), you have to uninstall everything and reinstall everything. From the beginning.

That sucks balls.

A Drunk Ubisoft Animator Could Do Better
The mocap segments are gorgeous and the character models are, as stated earlier, fairly snazzy. I'm a big fan of Liquid Ocelot's design and honestly bemoan his characterization and purpose. Been a fan since Revolver Ocelot, even. If Kojima goes so far as to actually get a gun-spinning and general Gun-Fu specialist for a character whose entire gimmick is venerating the Colt and being chronically unable to stop twirling his firearms, he earns a tiny bit of my respect.

In-game, though, things aren't so impressive. The Close Quarters Combat animations are stiff and robotic, characters still break their wrists while holding rifles, the running cycle is bizarrely floaty, and most collision animations only last a frame or two. Shooting someone with automatic weapons then triggers a herky-jerky display that feels honestly antiquated.

Stealth Game, Schmealth Game
There's seven hours of cutscenes and about six more of gameplay. In these, the much-ballyhooed stealth elements rear their heads. Nevermind that the HUD makes detection a difficult thing to determine, you have to be ungodly patient to hope to play through Guns of the Patriots with a no-kills approach. Not to make things easier, Drebin 893, our friendly flamboyant “gun launderer”, offers a metric fuckton of highly aggressive toys to try out, most of which proposing a baker's dozen of customization options.

Fuck “Tactical Espionage”, I'mma go Rambo on the fuckers!

Disappointingly enough, Snake and his enemies are both bullet sponges in their own right. Still, with a shoulder camera that's highly reminiscent of Resident Evil 4, it's clear that the game supports a very aggressive approach. The earlier games packed an interesting tension, this one just says “You know what? Pretend the US can't legally recognize this little murder spree of yours, Snake, spend five minutes bemoaning the indignities of war, and we'll call it even. Do that, and you get to kill as many PMC mooks as you want.”

Psyche! Nope, Hideo. That's not funny.
Snake's health is measured by two bars: a conventional Health-monitoring one, and a segmented Psyche gauge. Certain events remove out of its five segments, and each of them can be recovered with specific items like thermal compresses or cigarettes. A No-Psyche Snake moves sluggishly, barely regenerates health, and receives severe aiming and combat-related penalties. More often than not, the bar is influenced by things that make sense. Dodging a tank's blast by jumping aside and nearly ending up crushed by a tree trunk are good examples of that.

What isn't is being stuck with a momentary team member that has an acute case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome that's triggered by the sight of his sexypants field commander. What isn't is being denied a cigarette in the fairly explosive environment of an in-flight air transport. What especially isn't is being stopped from ogling the plot-articulating sexypants nanotech researcher and serial betrayer which is Naomi Hunter. Snake can regain Psyche by landing lucky first-person panty or boob window shots, if compresses run out.

I mean – Ugh. Kojima, please, for the love of fuck, grow up! This has been going on for the past three games! Loud stomach-churning noises and being stuck with a team member whose pants can actually turn brown in intense situations does not amuse me! Shit is not funny!

Characters? Motivations? Fuck that. Let's just cannibalize FanFiction.net
Old Snake, as with Solid Snake and Just Plain Snake before him, is nothing but a David Hayter-powered growl machine. He exists to parrot statements made by other characters back in question form, and to sit nice and pretty while excessive exposition is delivered. When he's not doing that, he's growling something about needing a smoke or being prematurely old. When someone annoying does something annoying, he grunts. When a character (usually female) tries to inject some hope into the proceedings, he growls that he's no hero. He's a hired killer with a government license. Not only that, but he says he is patently aware there is no hope left for him.

His on-site handler is Hal Emmerich, also known as Otacon. As his nickname suggests, he's an Otaku and as the popular perception of Otakus go, he's a hopeless shut-in. The unwitting genius who designed Metal Gear REX, the central McGuffin of 2004's The Twin Snakes, he's one of the characters who seems the most intent on atoning for his past sins. The problem is that he designed everything about REX and yet, somehow, ignored the fact that his favorite toy was designed to launch nukes.

Seriously.

“I'll design a giant mecha with two big railguns on it and its own nuclear power plant, and it'll be used for peace!

“Uh, bad news, buddy. My brother Liquid's hijacked your baby and US intel says it was designed to launch nukes...”

“Metal Gear launches nukes?! No, it can't be...”

You designed the motherfucking thing, Emmerich. How the fuck could you not know?!

So he teams up with you and falls for the next nutcase in our cast, Naomi Hunter. She's a nanotech specialist, who, obviously, started with the hopes that her expertise would be used to create a better world. Quicker than you can say militaristic greed, her efforts are abused by five PMCs that are all under the control of a central body, which Snake's sources identify as a new incarnation of Outer Heaven, now named Outer Haven.

Confused, much? Me too. She betrays Liquid Snake and joins the Scoobies, then betrays the Scoobies and returns to Liquid's side because her pithy boyfriend Vamp (an undying nanotech-boosted knives specialist who has an intensely melodramatic death wish) deserves to die. Then, we learn that her betrayal was really an attempt to give the Scoobies an upper edge against Liquid's PMCs, and then we learn that Liquid profits from it as well and that Hunter had reasons enough to actually betray Snake because of prior events in early games, and – AUGH.

There is such a thing as being succinct while putting together. There is also such a thing as an audience's limits and its maximum capacity to give a shit about what's going on. Nevermind that Hunter is voiced by Jennifer Hale's excellent delivery, her motivations are a mess. No amount of parrotting things about being unable to escape your true fate will ever excuse this.

Then, we have Raiden, alias Jack, a bishonen cyborg samurai who exists to provide cinematic combat awesomeness to the proceedings and to generally add his extra layers of glumness and generally miserable countenance. Roy Campbell, Snake's old friend and US representative, stole his would-be wife away after the accident that condemned him to massive physical augmentation. The skeezy couple pops in during Codec conversations and generally rubs it in. Predictably, Raiden soon bemoans his lack of any significant others in his life.

“It even rained when I was born,” he says, pulling out the World's Smallest Violin. “You don't get it,” replies Snake. “You were the lightning in that rain.”

Get it? 'Cause Raiden. Oh, Kojima-san, you so clever.

Ocelot. Motherfucking Ocelot.
Then – Liquid Ocelot. Or Liquid Snake. Or Revolver Ocelot. Whichever.

So the Cold War saw a super-awesome female unit commander called The Boss trounce the Soviets. Wanting to end war and not able to trust Mankind to generally save itself, she raised her son, the first Snake, so that he'd become FOXHOUND's Big Boss, who worked closely with a number of other oddly-named operatives such as “Para-Medic”, SIG-INT, and a bunch more. Big Boss takes his mother's wishes to the next level and assumes that total control is needed, and that perpetual warfare would end warfare as we know it.

Wat.

Wanting to preserve the Boss family's super-awesome military prowess for all time because of reasons, Para-Medic clones Big Boss twice in a project she calls “Les Enfants Terribles” - because quoting Émile Zola equals intellectual legitimacy, natch. The first clone, Solid Snake, falls to American hands and becomes our protagonist. The second, Liquid Snake, is brought up to believe in the Boss family's kooky philosophy, which involved the creation of five AIs, each named after one of the presidents that adorn Mount Rushmore. Each of them controls a segment of the world, from pushing the stock market this way and that, or astroturfing news on a global scale. A sixth AI, John Doe, controls the rest.

During the events of The Twin Snakes, former FOXHOUND member Revolver Ocelot has a hand chopped off by Frank Yaeger the original cyborg ninja. Solid kills Liquid with the helpful intervention of the FOXDIE smart virus, and Ocelot figures it'd be a good idea to graft one of Liquid's hands onto his stump. Liquid's soul somehow survives in that hand, and soon takes over Ocelot's body, because nanotech. The end result is a guy who looks like Sam Elliott with an impeccable Urban Western fashion sense, an eye for designer sunglasses and a serious thing for jazz-hands and overly dramatic fist pumps.

Liquid Snake, now Liquid Ocelot, wants to seize control of the insanely non-secure globally distributed RFID system that's in place across all of the world's PMCs by 2018. All weapons are ID-tagged, and if you're not part of the system, no amount of pressure on the trigger will fire your piece. As the soldiers themselves are tagged, someone who has access to the core of the system can push a kill switch across entire regiments.

Essentially, Liquid intends to seize control of the PMC and Web-based world and turn everlasting warfare into the new dominating paradigm, and feels pretty okay with the idea of revealing the fact that the entirety of American democracy as of the fall of Nikita Kruschev has been a tech-based sham.

Because nanotech. Conspiracies and nanotech. Somehow, condemning us to nuke ourselves into oblivion seems like the perfect way to return to an autocratic and harmonious society, according to him.

I think a couple billion brain cells died from the sheer stupidity of this. My brain feels numb.

Everything About the Plot is Pedantic and Unfair to the Player's Intelligence
Woody Allen likes to write movies that mostly turn around the basic conceit of life being generally shit, or turning to shit after showering you with castles in Spain. Hideo Kojima likes to regurgitate concepts from better books, movies or games, slather them with scantily-clad chicks, nanotech and mecha, and bask in the stellar reviews that are sure to follow.

He shows a clear misunderstanding of post-traumatic shock, all because he wants to make a call-back to some of the series' cornerstone boss fights. The various “Beauty fights” centering on traumatized women stuck reliving the horrors of their war experience while trapped in various overdesigned exosuits are blatant fanservice. Defeating a Beauty once breaks down its bestial appearance, and sticks you with a short cutscene that has the hapless pilot writhe on the floor in a skintight suit and generally spout crap based on her theme.

Laughing Beauty was driven insane and now laughs at warfare's caused bloodshed. Raging Beauty wants to FEEL YOUR ANGER while pelting you with missiles from her Future Tech-based harpy wings. Crying Beauty, naturally, wants to see you cry. Defeat each of them and you earn a useless exposition dump by Drebin as to the horrors each woman suffered.

They're just boss fights, dude. I don't care about how C.B. carried the corpse of her dead infant brother through the African savannah, reached a refugee camp, went insane with the cries of other babies, and slaughtered everyone at the turn of midnight.

Characters flip their lid at the drop of a hat, melodramatic moments occur when a given character's death shouldn't trigger melodrama, but rather a general sense of “Good fucking riddance!” and some off-kilter couples are made just because. One character has the sole purpose of being the Quirky Little Girl With the Odd Hair Color, the requisite Moe fodder. She cooks eggs during each opening mission segments, hums a tune while reciting the Pi number, or switches it up with a little ditty based on the Periodic table. She's a genius, of course, and lives inside the Web. Or so Otacon says.

Of course, Naomi “I love playing Musical Chairs” Hunter uses her time spent in Casa Snake to bond with Sunny the Moe Gothling prodigy and to teach her how to not fuck up her eggs. Because she's also a fortune-telling whiz who uses sunny-side-up eggs to divine the Grimdark portents of the incoming levels.

Wat.

This Thing Fucking Burns Me Out
I read bad fanfics for fun and I enjoy it. I love it when my favorite terribad scriveners know they're not perfect, but their passion keeps them going. They ask for constructive criticism, but only receive notes from fellow teenagers who have makeout fantasies they'd like to see realized. On the other hand, I hate fanfic authors who take themselves too seriously.

Guns of the Patriots feels like that, plus a budget and snazzy graphics. I'm convinced Hideo Kojima did okay in the days of Snatcher and Policenauts, back when his means were exactly paired up with his ambitions. Now he has inflated ambitions and an unlimited lease on the PS3 and PS4's tech pool. The whole game feels as though someone never thought to go beyond basic continuity check-ups, because the series is in dire need of an injection of raw, basic sense.

As a game, it's okay. Any Splinter Cell title would do better by miles, however. As a piece of fiction, it's over-indulgent and downright masturbatory. The series as a whole fits with Liquid Ocelot's posturing.

It's big, self-absorbed, prone to excessive preening and posturing – and ultimately empty. Whatever bits of content it does possess are misunderstood or poorly used. I'm not American and I have to roll my eyes at the uses found for DARPA and the CIA. That should tell you something.
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