Directed and designed by Hideo Kojima
Produced by Hideo Kojima, Kenichiro Imaizumi, Kazuki Muraoka, and Yoshikazu Matsuhana
Written by Hideo Kojima and Shuyo Murata
Music by Nobuko Toda, Shuichi Kobori, and Kazuma Jinnouchi
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
Peace Walker is essentially Metal Gear Solid 5. The only reason it didn’t get a number is that it was designed for the Playstation Portable. Because of that, this game changes up the series’ formula in a big way, ushering in a new era. The games are much longer from here on out, with a lot more gameplay content (including what is arguably a good bit of filler). Following in the footsteps of Metal Gear Solid 3, these games actually care about being games now. It’s odd to see such long titles from Kojima, who was very insistent in his previous titles that gamers need to go outside, interact with people, and stop living their lives inside video games — but here we are.
This is actually the fourth Metal Gear game for PSP, following the two Metal Gear Acid titles and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops — none of which were directed or designed by Kojima, only produced by him. This game started its development as Portable Ops 2 — Kojima gave the team his ideas, but they weren’t quite getting what he was trying to do, so he decided to helm the development of a portable title for the first time. And thus, Peace Walker became its own thing, inspired by Monster Hunter and the genre it spawned. It still builds on many of the mechanics introduced in Portable Ops — both games feature only-slightly-animated comic book style cutscenes and base-building mechanics, but the latter has been massively streamlined.
Peace Walker barely engages with the plot of Portable Ops — there’s a single throwaway line about being ‘glad that San Heironymo nonsense is over’, and that’s it. While Portable Ops was based on Kojima’s plot ideas, he characterized the result as only partially canon. Peace Walker, on the other hand, is a mainline canon title which serves as the center of the prequel trilogy, which is centered around Naked Snake / Big Boss. The three titles in the Big Boss trilogy each take place a decade apart — Metal Gear Solid 3 took place in 1964, so this game takes place in 1974.
Peace Walker definitely suffers a bit from middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome. The purpose of the plot is mostly to further process the events of Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 and to set up Metal Gear Solid V. Big Boss is still reckoning with The Boss’s end a decade later. He has forsaken his country and decided to start his own nation in the form of an off-shore militia, called MSF (Militaires Sans Frontières), as a way of acting out his interpretation of The Boss’s will. The overall plot follows the standard Metal Gear Solid formula. It lacks the meta elements of the Solid Snake games and follows more in the footsteps of Metal Gear Solid 3 (right down to the jungle environments), featuring numerous flashbacks from that title. Nonetheless, it really drives home the emotional impact of Metal Gear Solid 3’s ending and may make you tear up all over again.
Because it’s a portable game with tiny levels, filling each level with codec calls wouldn’t really work. As such, the codec is now one-way and only used to give hints to Snake. Instead, all of those conversations have been separated out from the missions into cassette tape recordings that you can listen to in the menus as part of the mission briefing screens. There are hours upon hours of these tapes — I assume the idea was that you could carry the PSP around with you and listen to them while you do other things, but that doesn’t translate so well to the PS3 HD remaster I played.
The game is set in Costa Rica, and it puts a lot of effort into fleshing out the history, politics, and biodiversity of the region in the tapes. A lot of effort goes into educating the player about the situation with Somoza and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the local birds, legends of Unidentified Mysterious Animals from around the world, French cuisine, and other entirely random topics. The core topic that this game addresses is nuclear deterrence — which feels a bit full circle for the series, as it hasn’t been fully focused on the nuclear angle since the first game.
Snake has a fun cast of characters around him. Master Miller from Metal Gear Solid 1 is his right hand man, only with a retconned twist — while Miller was named McDonell Benedict Miller in the first game, here he is the half-Japanese Kazuhira Miller, raised in Japan. The game uses him to teach the player about Japanese culture. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two names, but they’re clearly meant to be the same character. Miller is constantly cracking jokes, womanizing, and causing trouble around the base.
The game begins when an unlikely duo, Professor Galvez and his 16yr old peace-loving student Paz, bring Snake and Miller a mission for their militia. Snake and Miller immediately smell that something isn’t right, but Galvez plays them a tape with the Boss’s voice, which convinces Snake to pursue the mission and discover the truth. Snake teams up with the Sandinistas along the way. He earns the trust of Amanda Valenciano Libre by rescuing her younger brother Chico, and so both of them join the MSF. Chico is obsessed with the aforementioned Unidentified Mysterious Animals, or UMAs, like Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster. He essentially serves the role here previously occupied by Para Medic’s movie obsession in the third game, or MeI Ling’s quotations in the original.
The main villain is a CIA operative named Hot Coldman. No, I’m not kidding. Kojima continued this naming strategy in Death Stranding with characters like Die Hardman and Heartman, but we’ll get there later. Hot Coldman is responsible for a new Metal Gear ironically called Peace Walker, which he had scientist Huey Emmerich design as a nuclear deterrent — only now, he plans to use it to demonstrate its power, and so Snake must stop him. There are, of course, multiple twists and betrayals along the way — it all gets very convoluted in classic Kojima fashion. You’d never see a plot like this in an American game — it’s incredibly refreshing to play a game where the CIA is a villain (just like real life!).
Because the Snake-Otacon dynamic was so popular in the Solid Snake games, they decided to reprise it here. Huey Emmerich is Otacon’s father. They’re very similar characters in a lot of ways, even voiced by the same actor. The main difference is that Huey is paraplegic, which explains his fixation on creating bipedal walking robots. He is partnered with a lesbian AI researcher named Dr. Strangelove, who he has an unspoken crush on. She is obsessed with The Boss, and puts all of her energy into trying to recreate her via AI. (This game may be a bit more normal than previous titles, but it’s still a Kojima game!) Both eventually join your base and work together to develop a Metal Gear for the MSF, thus bringing them further towards becoming the villains.
Because Peace Walker is a portable title, it’s scaled down in some ways. The graphics are worse than Metal Gear Solid 3, but they get the job done just fine. Enemies are practically blind and very easy to sneak around. You can no longer hide in grass, as prone sneaking has been removed from the game, which makes the pace a good bit faster. You have to set your camo and choose your weapons before each mission, and cannot change them during the gameplay (but camo is less important than it was in Metal Gear Solid 3). There are QTEs in some of the cutscenes, which naturally reach their height in the inevitable torture scene, forcing you to mash the controller so hard and fast that you feel like you might break it.
The game has a mission-based structure and the levels are designed to be bite-sized. Each level consists of a few small interconnected areas. The goal here is to expand your militia, which entails not only rescuing Sandinista hostages, but also capturing as many enemy soldiers as possible. To do this, you knock them out, attach what is basically a helium balloon to them, and a helicopter comes and picks them up (note that this can inexplicably also be done indoors, where they zip through the ceiling with no problem). If they object to being part of your army, they get thrown in the brig until they agree. Pretty messed up! In any case, this is a big improvement from the base-building mechanic in Portable Ops, where you had to tediously drag every soldier you wanted to recruit to a particular spot in the level.
And so the basic gameplay loop is a bit less dynamic than in past games — you basically go through each level, knock everyone out with a tranquilizer pistol, and ‘recruit’ them. There are plenty of other toys to play with and possible approaches, but the game incentivizes this one play style so heavily that it’s likely going to be the only one you engage with for the most part. All of this is pretty easy, but the challenge comes from the levels where you can capture vehicles to add to your army. Snake doesn’t just single handedly fight one tank or helicopter this time around — he does it over and over again with a wide variety of large military vehicles (though he can also enlist the help of his militia in the form of co-op).
These vehicles are always protected by a team of heavily armored infantry, plus several rounds of reinforcements. You can always treat these encounters like boss fights and blow up the vehicle, but the real aim is to survive multiple waves of infantry until the driver of the vehicle gets frustrated and pops out to try and attack you, at which point you can knock him out and commandeer the vehicle. These encounters can get frustratingly difficult at times, and there are quite a lot of them in the game. You may also end up having to replay them if the vehicles you captured get destroyed later, which is probably my least favorite thing about this game.
The proper bosses this time are no longer a crew — they’re a series of AI vehicles. Metal Gear Solid 3 already minimally fleshed out its bosses, and this game found a way to avoid having to flesh them out at all. The AI theme is a bit anachronistic for 1974, but here we are. These bosses are designed to require you to call in supply drops to defeat them, where cardboard boxes with ammo and health items are dropped by helicopter onto the field — there’s no way to enter the fight with enough ammunition. You can also call in airstrikes, but calling in too much support will cause your heroism level to drop. This isn’t something you need to be worried about — the only benefits of having a high heroism level are that it causes more soldiers to volunteer for your army (you already get more than enough without volunteers) and that it unlocks new battle cries for the game’s online mode.
Only around half of the play time is spent on the actual gameplay. The other half of the game takes place in menu screens. Listening to cassette tapes and base management are the main events here. You assign all the soldiers you’ve, uh, ‘recruited’ to different departments (combat, R&D, mess hall, medical, and intel). Each soldier has a skill set which makes them better suited for certain tasks, so you want to assign your soldiers to maximize the level of each department — but you can also use the auto-assign function if you don’t feel like doing that for every individual soldier. You can then send your soldiers and vehicles (later including your Metal Gear) on work-for-hire militia ops for extra money. These are not interactive, but you can watch a very boring 2D replay if you want — you’ll probably do it once and then skip it every time after that, especially since the game tells you which troops and vehicles were killed/destroyed in action afterwards. You then use the money you raised for the R&D department to develop new gear.
This basic loop takes 10–20min, and then you basically just do that over and over again, which makes sense for a handheld title. I don’t necessarily love how it breaks up the main plot — I definitely preferred the more continuous approach of the previous games rather than constantly interrupting the flow of the levels and plot with menu games and side ops. It’s a fun loop, but it can get grindy in a way I don’t love if you let it, especially when it comes to capturing vehicles. Thankfully, the grinding is mostly optional, but you can really let it stretch things out if you want to. Despite the short levels, this is by far the longest Metal Gear Solid game thus far — I quit after 35hrs, but howlongtobeat.com says it will take 95hrs to finish everything.
There’s loads of side content here which gets more interesting and diverse as the game goes on — shooting galleries, ghost levels, dating simulators, Monster Hunter crossovers, and more. The dating simulator parody leads to an awkward moment where Snake gets inside a cardboard box with a character who claims she is 16, and then the box bounces around a bunch. There’s also one where Snake does the same thing with his right-hand man, so I guess it’s just a weird sort of parody that is lost on an audience that doesn’t play all the dating sims that are so popular in Japan but never make it to the US.
The game was designed as an interesting single player / multiplayer hybrid. I didn’t get to explore the online aspects, as there’s not much of a player base left. Part of my difficulty with the vehicle battles is that they were really meant to be played co-operatively with up to four players. Most of the game can be played with a second player. I bet this was incredibly fun and made the frustrating bits a lot more enjoyable — I wish I could’ve experienced it, as there are whole sets of squad actions which can be executed in co-op, including multi-person cardboard ‘love boxes’ to sneak around in.
As such, Snake isn’t the only playable character this time around — each mission can be played using any member of your militia. You can trade militia members with other people, as well. There’s also a 6-player versus mode with the usual array of deathmatch and capture missions. The PS3 HD version I played also includes a ‘transfarring’ feature, allowing you to move your saves between the PS3 and the PS Vita. The HD collection also includes the second and third titles, which both also include this feature, though Peace Walker is the only one truly designed to utilize it.
Overall, Peace Walker is an excellent game. Unlike the Solid Snake trilogy, which were half cutscenes and barely wanted to be games at all, the Naked Snake/Big Boss trilogy are truly games, and very fun ones. It’s easy to get a bit addicted to this one. While the overall plot is less compelling than previous titles, and the game feels like it has less to say, all the details make the game and its cast come to life. As a portable title and the middle of the trilogy, it’s not going to be as memorable as Metal Gear Solid 3 or Metal Gear Solid V, but it provides an important piece of the story — Metal Gear Solid V doesn’t make any sense without it. As such, it’s an essential part of the Metal Gear Solid canon.
