The Metal Gear Diaries: Snake Eater

The setup for these posts is simple: I’ve never played a Metal Gear Solid game before, and I want to change that. I’m going to be writing my on-going reactions to the games as I go, and sharing them with the world. The Metal Gear Diaries are somewhere between a full critical essay and twitter gut responses, and will form an honest document of my shock, frustration and surprise at the events of, say it with me now, “Metal Gear?!” They will be packed with spoilers for all Metal Gear games!

Last time, we beat Sons of Liberty, and out poured thousands of words of reaction which barely covered the salient points. Metal Gear is the most dense thing, at least when it wants to be. But now, it’s time to step away from Solid Snake, to take a trip back in time, and finally meet the man behind the legend: Big Boss. That’s right, we’re moving on to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater…

Mission Briefing

Sons of Liberty’s ending was such that I can’t really imagine what a sequel to that game would even be, though I know I’m coming up on it soon! But for now, the various cliffhangers of that game are followed up with what at least seems to be a completely unrelated story. I’m sure it’ll end up being the key to every reveal in Guns of the Patriots, but going in, it’s definitely a strange choice, and I don’t quite know what to expect.

I like that the follow up to a game which consistently toyed with player expectation and entitlement is one that completely rejects being anything resembling a satisfying resolution. It stars completely different characters in a completely different time, because that’s the game that they wanted to make. It feels like the most honest way of continuing that story, and the ridiculous spirit of Metal Gear.

What I know about Snake Eater is way less than the other games. I know Big Boss is in it, I know it ends with a scene of he and the female lead bonin’, I know there’s a character called The Boss and I know there’s a sniper fight in some trees. Basically: it sounds like a bond movie, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been talking to Matt about Snake Eater a little, and he’s told me that 2 and 4 are these more cynical and post-modern games which are defined by the tension between them and their audience, but 3 is just the most earnest thing, and that’s why he loves it.

I hope that’s the case for me, because an earnest Bond Pastiche as a little break between 2 and 4 is exactly what I want. But we’ll see as we load up the game, and have the truth revealed for ourselves!

One more thing before we start: I ummed and ahhed for a long time about which difficulty to play Snake Eater on. It’s a game with multiple survival elements, and a key factor in the game is patience, far more than in the Metal Gear games that preceded it. I’ve heard stories of fifty minute boss fights sat waiting, scanning a sniper over the trees, ready to take that perfect shot. It’s both the most mechanically fascinating to me of the Metal Gear games, and the most time consuming if I choose to engage with that side of things, when I really want to see the story. After all, the Metal Gear Ray fight in Sons of Liberty took me at least half an hour and really distracted from the flow of that sequence.

But after considering, I think I’m going to play it on Normal. I’m curious enough as to the survival elements to want to see what it’s like to engage with them openly. And whilst I could beat the game and play it again, I’m writing these articles as I go, and I want my reactions to be down on the page for you all to read.

So that’s the plan. That’s the deal. It’s time to go. I’ve put starting Snake Eater off for a couple days, so I’m equal parts nervous and excited. It’s time to eat a Snake.

Let’s go!

Before You Hit The Ground

Metal Gear has had an interesting relationship with history. Twin Snakes uses the Gulf War as a cover story for its plot points about genome soldiers and genetic engineering. Sons of Liberty frames the entire Cold War as beneath The Patriots, as if all human concerns that we, the audience, are familiar with are just play theatre compared to the incomprehensible wars that these mythical figures are fighting out on our screens.

In that regard, Snake Eater is especially fascinating. It opens with a title card about the Cold War, and it’s set in 1964, far before the Metal Gear universe splintered from our own and became the sci-fi story that it is. This places it far more in the realm of Alternate History fiction, rather than something more speculative, and thus the relationship between “metal gear events” and “real historical events” becomes fraught. I wonder how Snake Eater will toe that line, ethically speaking, in the way that it incorporates fact into its fiction.

I don’t know if Sokolov is a real person, but I’m going to assume that he isn’t. His backstory, as given to you in briefings, is tragic, which is in line with how Metal Gear has treated the designers of its weapons in the past. Otacon and Emma, the two characters who designed Metal Gear and Arsenal Gear respectively, are good guys in the context of the story. As a series, it’s been clear that Metal Gear places the blame for the horrific use of nuclear weapons away from those who built the devices. It knows that the desire for technological progress comes from a far more selfless and inspirational place, and that desire is perverted and stolen by those that wage wars.

So I’m incredibly curious how Snake Eater is going to approach that as a game that can’t deal in outlandish weapons of mass destruction. Sure, Sokolov is developing something that is certainly going to be the first Metal Gear, but put so close to the very real nuclear arms race of the Cold War, I’m more than a little nervous that Metal Gear’s blunt storytelling will make things slightly uncomfortable, because a deft touch is required to make this stuff work.

But all that said, this is just my brain thinking “huh, I wonder what this game is going to be about,” I trust that I’m going to enjoy it! Snake Eater is the favourite Metal Gear game of a bunch of people I know, so I’m excited to see the way it toes these various lines, and what the game ends up being.

Cocktease

Added to that, it opens with no reference to The Patriots, with no hook to tie it into Sons of Liberty or a flash-forward that places it in context with the events we already know. It’s a deliberately distancing opening, very similar to the entrance to Big Shell, but a less pointed attack on the player. It’s far more playful.

The opening cutscene ends with the most in-your-face playful moment, when the HALO mask comes off, and the words JACK (DAVID HAYTER) come onto screen. You’re just fucking with me now, Kojima. Damn you.

I’ve seen enough of Big Boss to know he just looks like Snake, and I’m fairly sure Big Boss looked like Snake in the grainy flashback to your briefing with M. (I’m gonna call him M until his name is revealed, because come on). Seeing the body of Raiden whilst hearing the voice of David Hayter is going to be monumentally confusing, and I hope an explanation comes sooner rather than later, because I need to know!

It makes me wonder about the structure of Snake Eater — which I had assumed was just a single mission, like in Twin Snakes — are we going to get another moment like the end of the Tanker? Guns of the Patriots takes place over five distinct acts, this I know, so is Snake Eater a step in that direction, rather than a feint back to the more traditional style? Will I rescue Sokolov, the requisite Bond Theme begin to play, and fade to black before another related mission as a more traditionally designed Big Boss? Am I — Jack — going to grow into Big Boss, or am I a completely different person?

Now that I’ve written out those questions it’s clear to me this is going to be a Bond Cold Open, which is going to be amazing if they pull it off. Metal Gear has always had excellent Title Card moments, and I don’t expect it to stop now.

Additional Note: the cut to black DIRECTED BY HIDEO KOJIMA SCREEN? I laughed. Good job.

Oh, For The Love Of…

Snake immediately takes his Raiden mask off and gets the Naked Snake codename.

Well done, Kojima. You got me. Happy?

(I bet he is)

Where To Look?

The strangest thing about Snake Eater is the camera. Both The Twin Snakes and Sons of Libertylooked fantastic due to their control of the camera, placing it in high angles and allowing you to see the layout of the room ahead of you. It worked because of the environment, which was boxy and cramped, corridors and crates — Snake Eater is not that.

It has the traditional camera angle as an option, the standard video game third person angle was added in Subsistence, an updated version released a year after the original game. The traditional Metal Gear angle makes the game look better, with the behind the back analogue camera feeling a little like someone modded in a camera angle into a Metal Gear game. In general, I’m a big advocate for pre-rendered backgrounds and deliberately positioned cameras, because it gives a control over visual composition that video games don’t often value.

For now, I’m going to stick with the 3rd person camera. I want to get used to it, and I know by the time Guns of the Patriots rolls around there is no more option to play traditional Metal Gear. Hell, The Phantom Pain is a capital O Open World Game, which definitely worries me a little (it isn’t out at time of writing, we’ll see). All popular AAA franchise have been, on some level, a victim of evolution from a very specific thing to just another videogame (Batman says hello), and my big wish is that in the journey through these articles, I won’t find that happening to Metal Gear.

You stay you, Metal Gear. Be great.

Survival Of The Fittest

The first thing I did in Snake Eater was eat a Snake. David Hayter went “Tastyyyyyyy” and I earned a trophy for my troubles. Well done to each and every person involved in this decision.

Snake Eater’s survival and camouflage systems seem immediately overwhelming but incredibly cool. Twin Snakes and Sons of Liberty were games of acquisition of power. You start each mission in a very precarious place, and through the gaining of more effective weapons and keycards, gain a greater command over the space around you. Once you acquired power, you did not lose it, there was no emphasis on the maintaining of power or your own survival beyond “don’t get shot.”

This system has wildly different philosophies. You must acquire power at a rate greater than your natural loss of power, no longer is the game’s progression purely a fantastical act of gaining strength, but a more desperate one of survival. I wonder how adding this extra vulnerability will change the ways I play — no longer can I just wait for the guard to get into the right position, the clock is always ticking and my stamina always depleting. No longer can I shoot my tranquiliser gun as much as I want to, for soon it will wear down and everyone will be able to hear my shots.

I was curious as to how setting Metal Gear in the past would manifest, and these systems are exactly what I was expecting, so I’m fairly chuffed right about now. Losing the fantastical technology and putting the onus of survival onto the player fits right into Metal Gear’s technological themes, its continued insistence on making the player question the value and the role of technology, and never take it for granted.

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

The Boss is the one non-Snake character I knew about from Snake Eater. I know she shows up somehow in the finale of Guns of the Patriots, so I know she’s important to the story, but how or why, I couldn’t tell you. Her introduction positions her as Big Boss’ mentor, she fills the role he will go on to for Solid Snake.

What stuck out to me about this introduction, is how Naked Snake (I’ll call him that from now on, Metal Gear names are incredibly confusing) comes across as an inexperienced and naieve soldier. All that I know about Big Boss at this point is that he’s the greatest soldier there ever was, hence his selection for Les Enfants Terribles. But Naked Snake isn’t that yet, and whether he reaches that point by the end of the game, we shall have to see.

His first conversation with The Boss centres MGS on the role of The Soldier once more, after Sons of Liberty widened the series’ thematic scope as far as it could go. She points out to Naked Snake how his assumption that the mission is right and his lack of self awareness about who he is as a soldier is going to be his undoing — which it may well prove to be.

Naked Snake doesn’t want to give up his compassion, he doesn’t want to give up his empathy, he doesn’t want to suppress his humanity in order to become a perfect soldier. We, the audience, know where that path leads, and it leads to Solid Snake. A man who can do nothing but fight, a perfect soldier but the least human.

Up until now, the story of Big Boss has only been important as motivation for the actions of other characters, but now we’re stepping into his head and get to watch his tragic downfall for ourselves. In Metal Gear Solid, the game spent so much of its empathy and humanisation on the villains, portraying them not as inherent monsters, but as victims of the horrors of war. And now, we get to see that journey for ourselves, or at least the start of it. Whilst it seems initially like a strange shift in tone and theme for the series, which had been expanding second to second, taking a moment to step inside the head of a future villain, and see how they’re really not that different to the character we’ve come to call a hero is fundamental to Metal Gear’s identity as a work.

Over And Out

Wow, Snake Eater is a far more difficult game than Sons of Liberty. It’s very clear from the design of the first encounter — which comes a good hour after I’ve been sitting down at this television — that engagement is not a good idea. I died four times, and immediately quit the game.

Metal Gear’s stealth was defined in many ways by its mazes, a game you played on the minimap more than you played with the world in front of you. It was angular world, full of corners and boxes, places to duck and hide, a binary world in which seen and unseen were clear states with separate definitions.

Snake Eater changes the rules entirely, the above all else importance of Line of Sight completely thrown out the window. Now you hide in plain sight, your visibility determined as much by your choice of camouflage as it is by your positioning. You don’t navigate a maze, you test the boundaries of a system, pushing yourself closer and closer to the edge, figuring out the limits of possibility without being seen.

It involves a bunch of trial and error and incredibly patient play, turning Metal Gear into this more abstracted but more intense stealth simulation than it had ever been before, and it’s no surprised that so many people latched onto this system and love its design. I do too!

But I did just turn the game off and start over on Very Easy. Sorry game, but I can’t be engaging with a system this complicated while I’m itching for the next cutscene. I don’t have the time or energy, unfortunately, I’m just not fourteen anymore. And whilst I miss playing that way, my switch to playing most games on Easy has been a net gain for my stress and the amount of games I get through.

Maybe one day, when the story is completed and behind us, we’ll take a journey through Snake Eater’s stealth simulation, but it is alas not this day.

…

…

…

(this day we fight)

Old Movies

The entire Codec Crew in Snake Eater are delightful, so far! The Boss and Naked Snake have a fascinating relationship, and I look forward to see it developing, but Major Zero and Para-Medic are just cool characters to hang out with. It’s nice, after the trip down the self-referential hole that was Sons of Liberty for Snake Eater to present you with some characters that don’t have any obvious purpose other than to be cool characters. They are analogues to characters in the other games, but being analogues doesn’t appear to be the central focus of their being.

Major Zero is just a British Spy Dude, and that’s excellent, but the true standout of the crew is Para-Medic, who exists to spew facts about old movies and talk directly to the player as a person playing a video game in 2004. As much as Mei Ling is fantastic, this has to be my favourite save gimmick, because it contextualises the tone of Metal Gear incredibly well (as another silly fun story with a serious anti-nuke message), and also because it serves as advocacy for how awesome old movies are. It goes against all common writing wisdom to insert a character into your work solely to sing the praises of something you love, but it comes across as the most earnest thing. I should find the original Japanese version of Godzill! I will!

Plus the dig about “hey one day you’ll be able to play movies!” is hilarious, I’d like to congratulate the team for that.

Enter: Ocelot

AHHHHHHHH IT’S BABY OCELOT AHHHHH OMG AHHHHHHHH

Look at baby Ocelot, he’s a baby, he hasn’t even realised he’s meant to use a revolver yet! I was wondering two things going into the Ocelot scene, and they were:

1. When is this game going to truly kick off?
2. I wonder how much it’s going to be a series of references to future events?

The answers were: right goddamn now and almost all of it. We’re treated to a good long cutscene in which Ocelot and Snake showdown for the first time, Snake giving Ocelot the idea to switch to the revolver, and the two leaving each other with the kind of respect you only see from the first meetings of antagonists in a prequel. Was the person who just tried to kill you suspiciously familiar with you and left you alive for no real reason? Congratulations, you are starring in a prequel with someone you will later fight.

More fascinating than young Ocelot’s appearance, however, is the reveal of Snake Eater’s core plot: Russian Civil War. Which begs the question, if Sons of Liberty was a takedown of America, as well as its capitalist and individualist society, is Snake Eater going to be a similar analysis of Russian society? Obviously, 1964 is the year in which Khrushchev is replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin — this early cutscene sets up that power struggle as the machinations of Colonel Volgin, commander of the GRU. I assume the game takes place as Khrushchev is still in power, and the events we are about to see play out are going to be the decisive

It’s a little strange, framing the later conflicts of the Cold War as mere lies to be filled in with the new truth of Metal Gear, but it’s par for the course. The last game did have the reveal that the ideological concept of America gained sentience.

I’m still wary because of the ties to real events, alternate history Cold War fiction so often promotes a harmful view of that conflict, serving essentially as a subtle form of American Propaganda, but this is Metal Gear so at least I don’t have to worry about that in any way shape or form. But I do think that, as a crucial era of history that still sits so close to us, we have a responsibility to portray it and contextualise it in an honest manner. The Cold War was in many ways a war of propaganda in and of itself (it was also a real and bloody war, I do not intend to downplay the human cost of these awful years), and in that way it continues to this day. Just look at the cultural understanding of what socialism is and how far it is from any actually held left wing ideology.

Metal Gear is Metal Gear though, so like I said, I highly doubt the sequel to one of the most pointedly anti-capitalist works is going to be a work of capitalist propaganda, if anything it’s currently showing the ways that individual moves for power pathed the way for the Soviet Union to collapse, but I feel strange. Maybe it’s just because I learned about this period of history in school, and seeing Real World Things that I learned about and Metal Gear Bullshit rubbing up against each other is just going to be weird until the credits roll.

Any dissonance usually parts by then.

How Do I Open The Gate?

Sokolov just ran away. I’ve been trying to get through this gate for half an hour, where is it? WHERE DO I GO?

TELL ME WHERE PEOPLE

(don’t, if you’re reading this I found the way out)

(I just wanted you to know my pain)

I’m A Fool

You don’t go through the gate. You go back to the rope bridge.

Hey.

Go me.

[Anchorman Quote]

Everything happened all at once and I’m kind of left spinning at the whole thing. Snake Eaterstarts really low on objectives and antagonists, as far as Metal Gear games go, it drops you into Russia and says go find a guy. There’s no team, there’s no Big Bad, there’s none of the obvious Metal Gear things that usually come in that initial briefing. You don’t even get the goal of photographing Ray inside the Tanker that you do in Sons of Liberty.

They save all that for this one cutscene, in which The Boss reveals herself to have defected to the Soviet Union, and Volgin shows his face. I love The Boss’ sad attitude towards Snake, acting like he’ll understand one day why she made this choice, but he’s too naive now. And given what we know about what Big Boss does, we know that she’s right.

Cobra Squad, The Boss’ requisite team of superpowered soldiers sure are ridiculous at first impression, and they seem to have a kind of natural theme? The Boss herself can control the weather, there’s a man who can command a swarm of bees, and Volgin summons lightning in order to charge up his makeshift knuckle duster made of Bullets. This makes sense, given that it’s the sixties and Metal Gear can no longer rely on its technological nonsense that it so loves. It didn’t reveal the powers and characters of all the Cobra Squad, it kind of lets them sit in the distance, ominous, letting you know that hey: you’re gonna have some boss fights in this game.

Having The Boss’ close personal ties to Snake be revealed pretty much from the off is going to colour the rest of the story in a light that I can get behind. So much of Metal Gear’s storytelling has been based on lategame twists, and whilst I’m sure that never changes, having the question not be “who are they to me?” and instead me “why did they do this to me?” is a monumental emotional change in the storytelling. I think I said earlier how I expected Snake Eater to be a more quietly sad game than any of the others, and it’s already proving true.

And. And! We catch our first glimpse at a Metal Gear here, which is far earlier than I ever expected, and far much more like a Metal Gear than I expected. The words aren’t used, but it’s definitely a Nuclear Tank that operates on its own and launches intercontinental missiles. Snake may not have said it, but I certainly growled “Metal Gear?!”

In many ways, its an identical first act structure to Sons of Liberty, the initial mission with the propulsive end of act cutscene, but I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s not about to follow this up with a Raiden style “fuck you” moment of its own.

Maybe I just play the rest of the game from this shallow pool of water with a broken arm. I hope I don’t do that though, that would be sad.

Healing

Dear God, I’m glad I’m playing on easy and touristing my way through. These survival systems are intense. And one day I’d love to see them! But for now, let’s patch ourselves up and move along.

The CURE system itself seems like overkill to me, the amount of things you need to keep track of in order to heal each wound is incredibly high, and they all put drains on multiple resources. Though, outside of this scripted instance I doubt I’ll have to heal this many wounds at once again, so maybe it wouldn’t actually end up being as bad as it looks.

It is a good way of making you feel fragile, of adding a routine into the process of healing; the act of complicating it more than just a single health bar in and of itself makes Snake feel more like a living, breaking human being, regardless of how abstracted it is. In fact, I’d say because of how abstracted it is. So much of Snake Eater’s approach to its systems is to provide a deliberately abstracted situation that has the effect of conveying tension and fragility without attempting to represent any of that literally. It’s all bars and resources and menus, but it most definitely works.

Russian Attack

I love the shots of The Boss and Naked Snake reaching out to each other as they fly away. They’ve already filled that relationship with a tragic pathos that they’ve not been able to get out of any other in Metal Gear. I just want them to hug and hang out, watch movies and then leave, respecting each other. They’re relationship’s far too maternal for them to hook up, obviously, but I’m sure that hasn’t stopped the internet.

Volgin launching a nuke on Russian soil was unexpected, because I thought the worst of it was over, and we only had to pick up the pieces. This is striking as I believe it’s the first actual nuclear blast in a Metal Gear game, which is a little odd for one of the most fervently anti-nuclear games I’ve ever played. The moment when it happens is appropriately shocking and shows Volgin to be an impulsive leader; it’s clear that was not a planned action.

Ocelot getting to act as the voice of reason brings excellent little touches to his character. He’s always been playing the long game in this series, working for The Patriots, feeding false information to Solidus, and it’s good to see that coming through in his early character. He can’t stand purposeless violence, violence that isn’t exact and deliberate, violence that isn’t explicitly designed to further a goal.

The ripples of the nuke fade away, and what comes next is still unkown.

Holy Shit, That Theme Tune

SNAKE EAT-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER

They really went all out on this one, didn’t they? Just the most amazing in your face Bond Theme with powerful horns and awesome abstract Snake visualisers. It’s a better bond theme than probably 80% of bond themes, when you consider that Bond Themes include this.

I’ve got a massive smile on my face. I mean, that final horn sting? Who wrote this, I need to look it up when I’m done. They got the tone spot on.

This game is excellent, let’s carry on!

Phone Call

Huh.

That’s something I definitely didn’t expect: an actual phone call between Khrushchev and President Johnson. Up until now, Snake Eater had been riding the line of history, inserting its fictional events and characters in between the real ones, and the tension that comes with the game’s Alternate History storytelling is my most talked about element during the last few posts, and I haven’t exactly been fully positive.

I think I’m onboard now. There’s something distancing about bringing in these two as Metal Gear characters, hearing Metal Gear dialogue come out of their mouths, that addresses the alternate history tension head on. It positions the Russian Premier as Metal Gear Khrushchev, and fully removes any sense that the story of Snake Eater is revealing the real story. Not that Metal Gear was ever doing that, I just think that establishing these real people as capital C Characters within the story is a far more honest act than sidestepping the issue, and definitely the right move.

The phone call itself is fascinating, because it’s a look at the people in charge, the people that so far have remained off screen in these games. So committed is Metal Gear Solid to portraying the effects of war on the Soldier, that a pull back to the people in power is a rarity for the series, and certainly frames Operation: Snake Eater in a different light than the other missions.

Clear Our Name

It’s all in service of setting up the stakes, and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been. I mean, they’re not, you’re going in to stop a nuclear launch as per usual, but they’ve been given a greater clarity and context than in either The Twin Snakes or Sons of Liberty. With The Boss’ betrayal last time, I’ve got a clear emotional hook into my mission, and with the political situation, I understand the wider context perfectly.

It gets the tone of an early Bond movie so spot on, with completing the mission and stopping the bad guy less important than navigating this knife edge relationship with the world on the brink. Naked Snake has to take out The Boss to clear his own name, he has to rescue Sokolov and destroy Soghod at the orders of America, and he has to take out Volgin at the orders of Khrushchev. And stepping an inch out of line in any one of these conflicts of interest could lead to world destruction.

And as we drop into Russia from orbit (this game is set in the past), we get the traditional eight-objective overload that comes from entering the main mission in a Metal Gear game. My ears perked up as I recognised the name EVA, who I know ends up getting naked with Naked Snake at the end of the game (she should be so lucky). I’ve never heard of ADAM before though, so he’s probably going to die.

Their characters sound fascinating, US moles who have been working their way up Russian ranks, and have been immersed in Russian culture and military systems for years. I wonder how much their characters are going to explore this duality or how much I’m setting myself up with false hope here. It’s happened before!

La-Lie-Lu-Le-Lo

FUCK

OH SHIT

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

You better believe that I made a noise when Major Zero just casually dropped “Who Are The Patriots?” and “La-Lie-Lu-Le-Lo” as Snake’s codewords. Where is this game going? What’s gonna happen? I’m on the edge of my seat now.

Here we go. Here we fuckin’ go.

Nightime

The sound design in Snake Eater is phenomenal. Silence is so key to the feel of moving through the jungle, amplifying every single press of my foot echoing through the trees, and the birds flying away from me as I approach. At once, it creates an atmosphere both serene and oppressive, calm in the moments of isolation and instantly tense when soldiers arrive.

Honestly, it’s great to see Metal Gear Solid nail this outdoor atmosphere so expertly when up until now it had been a game of steel walkways and metal crates. If anything, the atmosphere in Snake Eater is more assured than anything that came before. Big Shell had its Oceanside aesthetic, the wind blowing and bird perching, but it never managed to feel as coherent as it is here.

The Russian jungle feels so much more hostile in the night, too. Without light to peer through the trees, the environment becomes obscure, and it becomes impossible to tell at distance the difference between a threat and harmless wildlife. Hunting out for items is impossible when I can’t scan them out from the environment at a glance.

Let’s get to where we need to go. This is unsettling.

And The Horse She Rode In On

Hahaha, Snake just runs into a horse because why wouldn’t there be a horse there? Rather than assume the presence of a horse means that an enemy is nearby, he instead tries to pet it, because Naked Snake is a being of pure love and joy. LOOK AT HIM PET THAT HORSE. What a good horse. More petting in games please and thank you, in 4 can Old Snake stroke a cat?

I’m shocked that we have such an early confrontation between The Boss and Naked Snake. I was certain that we’d not be seeing her at least til the second half of the game, and probably towards the rear of that. But no, here she is, dispensing melancholy wisdom to our poor Snake, who wants nothing more than to not have to kill his mentor.

But this time he gets thoroughly trounced, again, The Boss is stronger than him and could kill him with a thought if she wanted to. I love all of her dialogue in this game, it’s filled with so much more emotion than Metal Gear’s usual foreshadowing, not least because we know the discoveries that lie ahead for Naked Snake. She hints at the existence of greater forces (The Patriots, probably!), and bemoans Snake’s naieve view of warfare. We know the end of Big Boss’ path, and we know how the world ‘works’ in Metal Gear; Snake Eater uses the audience knowledge to colour its mystery with a far more emotional and tragic tone, and I’m really into it.

I’m Scared

I made it to the place where we found Sokolov before, and I’m scared out of my damn mind. Something’s going to jump out of me. I just know it. I’m going to look at this furnace and a dentist is going to slash my throat off.

Oh shit — the door shut behind me.

Save me. Save me please.

Help.

Eva Fallen In Love With Someone

God dammit, Kojima.

Eva’s introduction starts excellently, this tense scene right out of a horror movie, building up to the most indulgent fanservice climax as Snake yells “WHO ARE THE PATRIOTS?!?” over and over. And then she proceeds to strip down, as I can press R1 to look at that titty, while Snake gives a boyish giddy grin. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

I mean, it’s to be expected, Twin Snakes had all the awkward awful flirting you could want, and the stuff with Meryl certainly fits within this mold, but it’s still a shame to see it return. It’s just not what I come to Metal Gear for, because after all the only couple that matter are Snake and Otacon, video game boyfriends for life.

Plus, this scene comes after a bunch with The Boss, the series’ best female character so far, and I had been thinking for just a moment if this was going to signal a brief upward trend in Metal Gear’s relationship to women, but alas it was not to be. And it’s not like The Boss isn’t in the same writing zone as this, The Boss holds a maternal role and is thus sexless and her writing focuses entirely on Snake’s need for her approval. Eva holds a love-interest role, and is thus strong, feisty and sexual, but seemingly only in ways that centre on helping Snake.

I like to call this: the Steven Moffat approach to writing, and by god it hurts to bring that comparison in to a game series I like a lot so far.

That said, the scene where they totally fuck through their intimate and extreme descriptions of military hardware was hilarious, I can’t be hating too much today. Plus, considering Snake Eater is just a Bond Movie, Eva’s character is completely to be expected in its genre pastiche. Not saying that excuses the way she’s presented, but it does give it some historical context at least.

I’m sure there’ll be more to her revealed as we go. I hope so, at least.

Setpiece

The fight with the Ocelot unit is far more staged than any that have come so far, are we already through the stealth room portion of MGS and into the setpiece sequence? I feel like with each game, the time on standard stealth scenarios has gone down and down and the time on individually crafted setpieces has gone up.

Not that I’m complaining, it’s just bizarre to see a game in which an incredibly strong core gameplay conceit is developed, only to throw it out in favour of hey: shit’s happening now. But hey, that’s why VR missions exists! I wonder if Snake Eater has any bonuses like that, I know Sons of Liberty did but I do not have the time.

Everyone Dunks On Ocelot

Ocelot sucks.

He’s lost every fight that he’s stumbled into, and now he’s got beaten in a shootout with a bike. It’s kind of hilarious just how ineffectual young Ocelot has been (at least in combat), when you consider how important he becomes to the story in later games. Though, he is the very first boss you takedown in MGS, so perhaps this isn’t a surprising turn.

I also gotta admit: I laughed at “he’s still young.” They can’t kill Ocelot, he has to show up later, no matter how much more sense things would make otherwise.

Calculated Risks

I like Naked Snake’s inability to see Eva as someone who is/isn’t trustworthy in the face of Major Zero’s explanation of political espionage. Major Zero sees this as a job, as a game in many ways, one with risks and probabilities, one where the most effective option can be calculated and should be followed. Snake can’t stop seeing Eva as a human being (ironically, after her introductory cutscene), as someone who may or may not be lying to him, another human being. His propensity to establish human connections and define his actions that way is weakening his ability to be a soldier.

At some point, Big Boss is going to become a legendary soldier and transform into a myth himself, presumably by the end of this very mission. But right now, he’s torn between loyalties, unable to truly commit to the mission, because he can’t see the world as a series of objectives. Unlike Solid Snake, who is most definitely capable of this, Naked Snake feels raw and intensely human.

It’s impressive that the game can convey so much difference in character between these two Snakes, whilst keeping their mannerisms, attitudes and design almost identical.

Switching Sides

Good, Snake Eater does elaborate on the interesting elements of Eva’s character, the second that she and Snake talk in Codec. This is somewhat of a common occurrence in Metal Gear, the showy moments are in the cutscenes, but the real thematic depth is in the codec sequences, because there’s no need to rush, and characters can just discuss around the game’s ideas for as long as they feel is right.

Snake’s first thing to ask Eva is, of course, why did she defect? He uses her as a way to understand The Boss, rather than trying to forge a healthy relationship with her as an individual. Eva talks about the lies of nationalism, about cultural imperialism; how things that she’d been taught to believe as inherent truths were simply cultural assumptions ingrained in her by circumstance. Metal Gear has always held war up to be a sad and pointless act, so it follows that Snake Eater is firmly interested in the Cold War as an ideological war, trying to come to grips with how two sides of the world can go head to head over so very little truth.

As is his way at this point, Snake is still confused as to why Eva would question her loyalties, despite the game explaining to him every five seconds, he still can’t fathom why someone wouldn’t remain loyal, why someone would throw away those truths that Snake needs to survive and complete his mission.

And that has to be Snake’s breaking point, right? The moment where the ground falls out from underneath him and he realises that all he’s been fighting for and all he believes in is a lie — literally, due to the existence of the Patriots — but more metaphorically, due to the need to mature and accept culture as something more than a monolithic glob that belongs to you. I don’t think he’s going to be able to make that leap, and when the time comes, he’s going to become Big Boss as we know him, and decide the only solution is to burn the whole system down.

But we shall see! Such a prediction is based on a thousand assumptions and I don’t have anywhere near close to the information yet. I’m excited to see what the inevitable confrontation at the end of Guns of the Patriots is going to represent, ideologically, and what the eventual thematic battle of Metal Gear Solid will be between.

A Familiar Rhythm

Here we go. Now that EVA has given us our directions, and we have a shape of the mission ahead of us, Snake Eater has quietened down a bit, and let the game begin to move along at its own pace. I’ve sneaked my way through multiple large areas without interruption from Codec or Cutscene, and Snake Eater settles into that rhythm better than any other Metal Gear game. The atmosphere is just too good.

You better believe I damn near shat myself when I stood on a claymore, though. Jesus Christ. Now I’m never going to take these Claymores off.

Revolver

A Boss fight! Is that the first Boss fight of the game? They sure held off on this for a good long while. To be fair, so did Sons of Liberty, the first half of that game was sneaking rooms and the second half a Boss Gauntlet, but it did have that excellent Olga fight at the top of the game.

The fight with Ocelot isn’t quite as good as that Olga fight, it doesn’t play with perspective in anywhere near the same way, but it is a great twist on the concept of a shoot-out. For how often the primary engagement of so many games is just “shoot that guy,” they very rarely give thought to the pacing and spatial awareness in the way that these one on one duels do in Metal Gear.

I love the placement of the canyon in between Snake and Ocelot. It draws a physical line in the space where one usually only exists due to the relationship between the two warring bodies. It’s less a battle of firepower, but a battle of territory, as you find the cover best suitable for avoiding Ocelot’s blast, whilst finding the spots that give you greater perspective into his territory. You emerge victorious by having greater awareness of your own, and your opponents, space.

Two more tiny things:

1. Shooting down the beehives, I remembered that I had played this Boss Fight before. All I know about Snake Eater comes from an evening I spent at my friend Charlie’s house, where he showed me a few scenes, played The End boss fight, and I had a little mess around with the game. Apparently I made it all the way to this boss fight! I must have been skipping cutscenes.
2. Laughing forever at Ocelot fighting off a swarm of bees by twirling his pistols. Goddamn.

Cave Story

This cave is really, really scary, but nothing scary has happened. It’s super bold of Snake Eater to just stop its combat or exploration rhythms for a good twenty minutes in order to have this silent sequence where you can’t see a damn thing.

Incredibly affecting, too. Snake Eater’s environmental variety transformers the journey through the campaign as one of a journey, rather than one of greater power and influence over a single space (which is how I’d define the progression in Big Shell especially). It ties into the story arc of Snake Eater, a long walk towards a single inevitable moment, Snake’s confrontation with The Boss.

It’s actually remarkable how effectively every other relationship and piece of game design in Snake Eater is focused on building to that goal above everything else.

The Pain

I killed The Pain, and I have pretty much nothing to say on it. It was a Metal Gear boss fight, not one of the best, not one of the worst, though definitely underwhelming. Bloody bee armour, hurry up and fuck right off, I wanna beat this guy.

What is strange, to me, is when a Boss in Metal Gear isn’t given a motivation. Vamp had lots of introduction, but he never had the requisite motivational monologue that defined Twin Snakesand for the most part lived on in Sons of Liberty. I don’t know what The Pain’s deal is, apart from the fact that the emotion he carries into battle is pain, which could mean any of a thousand things, without any elaboration.

By removing this element, the story gains greater focus — Snake Eater is all about Naked Snake’s relationship with The Boss — but it reduces the individual humanisation of the encounters that you find yourself in. Twin Snakes took the time to humanise Psycho Mantis, and it gave that game a real sense of heart.

I hope the rest of Cobra Squad gets to share more of their personality and motivations with the audience, and feel less like a series of props who surround the true main characters.

Swamp Snake

One of the most beautiful moments in this game has been leaving the cave and arriving into a beautiful sunset in a Russian Swamp. God, the journey through the landscape element of this game is phenomenal, nothing less. It eschews combat except for when it is directly necessary, and places the tense survival-spy simulation right up against the beauty of nature.

As you hide in the natural world, crawl through its bushes and wade through its swamps, Snake Eater imparts a greater appreciation for these natural and beautiful things.

Warehouse Blues

What must it be like to be a mid-tier Boss in a Metal Gear game? You’ve been dispatched to kill the guy, yet the plans of your employers specifically revolve around your death and failure. It must inspire a crisis of confidence, probably a full on depressive episode. It would in me, at least.

That hilarious genre conceit aside, the little peak you get into the goings-on of The Boss et al at the warehouse is an excellent moment. It doesn’t really add anything thematically, being neither reveal nor setup, but it’s nice to see the dynamics of the villains further cemented. Metal Gear has done a great job of letting you into the villain dynamics, for a group that you usually only see one at a time, to kill in order.

I Am A Scientist

One of the best areas in the game so far was the walk between the warehouse and the lab, an otherwise empty area of woodland, filled to the brim with traps. It emphasised being on my guard and aware of my environment in a way that brings out of all the best qualities in Snake Eater’s design. It is a game that works best when it enforces a paradoxically calm tension, a deliberate isolation.

But then I took about half an hour to find my way inside the laboratory itself, turns out there was a vent hidden in the grass! Oh! How comical! Whoopsie-daisie me. I’m glad they’re bringing back the in-disguise segment from Sons of Liberty, because it allows for this moment where your relationship with the space and the people in it is completely twisted on its head. To see these enemies no longer as obstacles but as peers, sharing the space with you, is an important moment to have in a game that dictates all other human beings be either avoided or destroyed.

As a moment of humanisation for the bodies that exist alongside you, it is crucial, and I wish more games which revolve around violence allowed for this kind of interaction too. It’s one of the key reasons why the party in Dishonored is far and away the most interesting level in the game.

Dishonored reminds me a lot of Metal Gear, it’s the western stealth game I most think of during Metal Gear’s stealth sections. Not because it has much mechanical similarity at all, but it nails the feeling of an ever expanding power set that allows you to progress invisibly throughout the space. I wasn’t a massive fan, but man, Dishonored’s a cool game.

Not Sokolov

Metal…

[camera zooms in]

GEAR??!?!?!?!?!

Well, it happened, and it happened in all the ways I least expected: out of nowhere, we meet the original concept designer of the first Metal Gear — Shagohog isn’t a predecessor to Metal Gear, it’s revealed to be a competitor. And the personal rivalry that comes from the warring arms developers causes Granin to leak his Metal Gear designs to Otacon’s dad! Ahhhh! I’m assuming slightly, but the picture on the wall made it fairly obvious, I think. If I’m wrong though, I’ll hold my hands up.

Granin comes across as incredibly similar to Naked Snake at this point in time, someone who loves his country and remains loyal to it, but whose loyalty leads him down paths that aren’t exactly wise. His love of Russia is why he can’t abide the path that it’s going down at the moment, and his only recourse is to send his Metal Gear design away, and level the playing field. Plus, he introduces the final “Big P” of the series: The Philosophers.

I don’t know who they are yet or what they’re role is, the game only offers a frustratingly vague description at this stage, but there are three P factions I had heard of before starting this: Philosophers, Patriots and Philanthropy. They’re similar words! As someone with no experience with the lore until now I got them confused all the time, it’s nice that the game breaks out their introduction. Though seriously, Metal Gear’s naming conventions are the most confusing on the planet. The lore gets real deep real fast and its presentation doesn’t do it any favours in terms of helping me remember it.

He also explains to us our endgame, which should come as no surprise: there’s a secret base! Go attack that, blow up the robot, fist fight your close relation to death.

So let’s go do that! Let’s make our way back to the warehouse and fight through the mountains. I can smell the ending from here…

Fear Is The Snake Killer

Apparently Snake Eater isn’t going to give its bosses any real individual characters beyond their core emotion? And it’s not going to even explain that? A shame, but understandable, there is so much more going on than there was in Twin Snakes. Considering Guns of the Patriots’ boss choice is “like before, but sexy,” it’s clear that MGS has now moved away from being a Boss focused narrative.

The Fear’s boss fight is intense, with the main challenging being keeping up with your healing resources. His arrows will fuck you up something fierce, so staying on top of his damage dealing is key to winning. The fight had a fantastic light-bulb moment, too, when I turned on my Thermal Imaging and could see him through his stealth suit (I thought this game took place in the 60s! Pah!).

Once I’d done that, the fight became a walk in the park, which is a sign of good boss design. The Pain required you to repeat a simple pattern over and over again, even after you’d figured out the trick, whereas The Fear’s design gave a more simple puzzle/solution setup, which all of Metal Gear’s most successful bosses have been. The interesting part of any fight is working out the how, the execution/war of attrition element is almost always a drag. Don’t talk to me about the 25 Ray Parade at the end of Sons of Liberty, holy shit.

I think we have three (human) Bosses left now! Three down, three to go, which means we must be close to the end, at least in terms of gameplay. But Snake Eater’s storytelling is probably about to explode any time now.

And I am ready for it.

The End’s End

The End is the boss fight that people talk about, when they talk about Snake Eater. And it’s obvious why: it is the perfect encapsulation of everything that the game is about. It’s a battle of patience, one in which the player’s will to not just throw their controller across the room to break the tension is far more important than any amount of technique. Through the fight, you come to intimately understand the environment that you’ve been placed in, and it is only through learning the space and keeping a lid on the tension that you are able to walk away from the fight.

Thematically, for the player, it expresses through silence all the things that Naked Snake needs to do to become the greatest soldier, it takes them (me) and him to the point where they’re ready to confront The Boss. Distractions will be the death of you in this fight, in order to find The End, you need to focus only on the mission, just like The Boss told us when we began the game.

It’s a stunning work of game design, and remarkable due to the sheer amount of restraint. There’s no objective other than “locate The End, kill The End,” and aside from that you’re walking around three similar environments over and over again. All it really is, is a way of framing the core interactions of the game, a single dial of tension being raised higher and higher, imperceptibly, as you sneak through beautiful woodland areas in silence.

And when the final shot rings out, the release of tension is palpable. I needed to turn the game off and sit down for a while, not because the game was overwhelming, but simply because the catharsis of the victory meant it felt right to step away.

The End’s death scene was sufficiently melancholy, too, the first real great post-boss scene of Snake Eater, which has been lacking in that area. It wasn’t the death of an enemy, it was the final moments of a worthy opponent, a fellow soldier deserving of as much respect as Snake. It didn’t have any of the rounding out of character or motivations that prior games stuffed into these moments, but it did effectively humanise The End in a manner that underscored both the ugliness and the beauty of the combat the player just participated in. Which is what Metal Gear is best a

Also, someone’s gotta explain why every Cobra Squad member is exploding upon their defeat, please. Help me out, here.

The Ladder

Is the ladder the secret best moment in the game? Honestly, I think that it might be. What a ridiculous moment of sheer earnestness, the terrific view of a chasm below you, as you climb a seemingly endless ladder, the game’s theme playing while you rise, reaching its crescendo as you reach the top.

If anyone asks me why I love MGS, I’m going to point to that moment. Not the ending of 2, not the boss fight I just did, but going up a ladder for over a minute as a fake bond theme plays.

Applause to all.

Eva’s Scars

I’m disappointed at the use of EVA’s character in this game. She’s a fascinating character, with so much potential behind her, as a codebreaker who defected and is now, essentially, defecting again. And they’ve probed into that in specific moments, allowing EVA to share her backstory with Snake via codec, but her primary role has so far been just “love interest,” and not even an interesting one. She exists not as a character, but as a reflection to bounce Snake’s character off of.

And I get it, the central relationship of the game is that of Snake and The Boss, so obviously EVA and Snake’s relationship would merely be a method of examining the other more closely. The questions EVA asks are all to do with The Boss; Snake is a detached character, who doesn’t let himself care about other people lest it impact the mission, but there’s nobody he cares about more than The Boss. Who was she to him, EVA wonders, was she his mentor, his mother figure, or his lover? Snake dodges the question, and seriously seems to imply that the answer is all three, which… uhhhhhhhhhh (c’mon, we’ve made it this far without anything as strange as the E.E. incident, let’s not be breaking the streak).

I’m meant to be rooting for them to get together, both because EVA is a hot girl throwing herself at the player non-stop, but also because she represents Snake’s ability to love someone other than The Boss. Snake can’t concentrate on EVA’s making out with him, because he’s too wrapped up in his head, too wrapped up in the mission, too wrapped up in The Boss. I like this element of it, because it underscores just how well the game is building to this final confrontation, but man oh man, if only EVA was a more developed character herself.

It’s revving up for a great James Bond ending, though, with the base ahead of us and EVA planning for her and Snake’s ridiculous escape. When viewed through the lens of “they are just making a bond movie,” EVA’s character makes a whole lot more sense, but taking direct and uncritical inspiration from gross source material doesn’t excuse the problems within your own work, so, there you go.

Cold War

Granin’s death scene is somewhat uncomfortable for me to watch. Metal Gear has had torture before, but Volgin’s brand of sadism, and the glee with which the game takes in showing you just how fucked up these fucked up things are, makes me uncomfortable. And yes, I know, there’s a lot more where that came from in future games, so I know what I’m in for. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Volgin and Ocelot’s discussion is fascinating with the knowledge of what Ocelot becomes in the future of this story, which is to say a lying liar who plays all sides. Yet right now, he can’t abide Volgin’s iron fist of control, he cares about loyalty to his countrymen, and without it he can’t see what they’re even fighting for at all. On the other hand, Volgin speaks like Ocelot does in Sons of Liberty; this is not just a war of weapons, this is equally a war of ideas, and it is fought with information. Information — and the fear of information being shared with people working together against his cause — is a constant thorn in Volgin’s side.

Snake Eater hasn’t revisited that idea much, it was the central theme of Sons of Liberty and I was beginning to suspect specific to that game, but I’m glad that it’s now a core thematic tenant of the series, rearing its head in various ways throughout the scenes.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Legacy

The Boss’ horse returns! A fan favourite character who everyone surely loves. Of course they do, because it’s a freaking horse! Everybody loves horses.

This is the second time that the game has hinted at The Philosopher’s Legacy, and I need, I need need need to know what it is. It has to have something to do with the Patriots, there have been enough winking references to them that I’m convinced the game is going to end with Naked Snake confronting the realities of their existence (but given the password, Major Zero is also in on The Patriots at this point, so who knows how high it goes!).

And right then, as I’m contemplating what The Philosopher’s Legacy might actually be, the game makes it explicit that EVA is Tanya, Sokolov’s wife that Volgin tortures on the regular, and I feel like an idiot for not putting that together sooner. For one thing, they look the damn same, but then I wouldn’t put it past Metal Gear to just have near identical design of women’s faces [insert Frozen joke here].

I hope it makes EVA more interesting! But on some level this reveal feels like “oh my god, the sexual and forward woman is the same woman as the demure reserved woman!” which feels incredibly lazy and trite. I mean, it introduces interesting possibilities, and now there’s ways to read EVA’s role as a comment on performative femininity, and the ways that men assume they know women and slide them into boxes based on how open they are with their sexuality. Nobody (except Ocelot) suspects Tanya might be the spy, because she behaves exactly the way the patriarchy says she is meant to behave, and so Volgin sees her as helpless. He doesn’t suspect for a minute that she might have thoughts and feelings of her own, let alone working against him.

Such a reading is definitely there, and I don’t want to play it down, but on the other hand her character has been presented so consistently as an object for the player’s affection that I don’t know if this counts as an interesting and aware twist on those ideas. Metal Gear has had, shall we say, a fraught relationship with women, and I’m not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

If You Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Apollo Program

It wouldn’t be a Metal Gear game if one of the boss fights wasn’t “basically Bomberman,” and the order of the day is more Bomberman than ever. But The Fury is more than just a Bomberman riff, they might be the strangest Boss in a series practically defined by the strangeness of their Bosses.

The Fury gets a little motivational speech! Hooray! (I know I’m the only one that really cares about that ol’ chestnut continuing to show up, but it makes me warm and fuzzy inside). He’s an astronaut that went to space and saw the enormity of the universe, and the sheer dose of mortal terror was enough to drive him, well, furious. Now he devotes himself to ending it all for the good of all mankind. So far, so JRPG villain, so good.

The fight itself is fine — I died a bunch because I’d equipped The Fear’s camo suit and didn’t realise that totally fucks your Stamina gauge (no camouflage is worth that trade off), but after I sorted that out I dispatched him in good time. After The Fear and The End, The Fury was a passable but mediocre Boss, it didn’t cut to the game’s thematic core or engage with any puzzle elements, so it was never going to reach the highs of what came before, simply as a piece of Snake Eater’s game design.

But. But. The Fury has an amazing death scene, ho-ly shit. He raises himself into the air, and begins communicating with Mission Control, and the familiar sounds of spaceship radio chatter play as he blasts into the ceiling and explodes. And then Snake has to escape from the flaming, screaming eternal two storey ghost of The Fury, who collapses the exit behind him?

w… what?

After the ending of Sons of Liberty, I didn’t think it was possible for Metal Gear to surprise me with just how nonsense it got, and it managed to do so in the best way.

What a delightful series.

Welcome To Metal Gear

The entrance to Groznyj Grad is momentous, and it feels like the game is welcoming you home. After an entire game of crawling through jungle, wading through swamp and trekking up mountains, you find yourself in a military base with boxes and sentries and locked doors. I know that Guns of the Patriots final act is a surprise return to Shadow Moses (I’m still grumpy about how thoroughly I’ve been spoiled on MGS4’s surprises), so I’ve not reached the peak of Metal Gear’s final act full-circle moments, but even so it brought a big smile to my face.

And then I started to crawl under crates to take out guards, and I realised that Snake Eater just isn’t built for old ass Metal Gear Solid. Specifically, removing the mini-map completely changes the relationship to the space, and with the third person camera, it’s clunky and awkward to navigate these angular environments, in which line of sight is the most important factor in stealth.

It’s a testament to just how much Snake Eater has improved upon the previous two games from a pure systems perspective, and how through changing the technological context, it gains its own unique identity. To play Snake Eater is to approach a stealth game in a radically different fashion than either of its predecessors, so bringing the design back to its roots does it a dramatic disservice.

Everybody Loves Raiden

Capturing Raikov is so cool. Giving you an objective more complicated than merely “go here” or “shoot that guy” is nice enough, but combining that with another disguise sequence adds even more to the humanisation of the space. You’re not just looking for an NPC patrolling, you’re looking for a specific NPC patrolling, and when you take him out you have to ensure that he is not found by the others. It gives a real sense of persistence and humanity to a space clearly populated by basic AI routines who forget seeing a walking cardboard box next to a top secret nuclear device after ten whole seconds have passed.

Plus, hilariously, the Colonel is clearly Raiden, leading to one of the best exchanges in anything ever:

Snake: “How’s my disguise?”
Major Zero: “It worked. You’re beginning to irritate me already.”
Snake: “This look should make me more popular!”
Major Zero: “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Ahhhh, good times good times. One of the best MGS factoids is that Raiden was designed to be a character with greater appeal to women, a factoid that makes total sense from his character design, but none at all from a writing perspective. Unless they thought women would relate to Rose and want to be the only ones to understand this broken man? Which is based on a thousand gross and awful assumptions, so it’s no surprise that everybody hated him. Only a few lucky people hated him for the right reasons.

I did like Raiden by the end, though. Jack’s gonna be alright.

I’m Lost

I’ve run all around the base, oh no where do I go? WHERE DO I GOOOOOOO?

There isn’t anywhere left for me to –

Oh, nevermind, it was in the locker room all along. I’m good at video games.

For A Sneaking Mission, Snake Gets Caught A Lot

Sokolov’s tragedy mirrors Solid Snake’s tragedy, which in turn mirrors Raiden’s tragedy, which mirrors the central tragedy of every single character in Metal Gear Solid: choice, or lack thereof. Those that create these deadly weapons do so with the purest of intentions, and their artistic or scientific desires irrelevant to the whims of the state, just as Snake’s humanity is on the battlefield.

When he says that he’s tired, and he no longer wants saving, it really hit me. Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have characters that simply can’t continue to go on in the face of insurmountable unfairness and heartbreak. Its characters find the thing worth fighting for in the end, they find what they need to keep going, but Sokolov’s situation gives a thought to those that simply can’t make that leap. And really, can you blame him? Like he says, he’s tired.

EVA’s character is becoming more and more interesting by the minute, at last, with her apparently working for Khrushchev, and seemingly planning to double cross you? Who knows how that will actually play out, but I’m glad they’re finally fleshing her out and giving her more than just wanting to fuck Snake really really bad. I’m intrigued and ready to see where her character ends up at the end of the day.

The cutscene itself was harrowing, the level of violence when Volgin batters Snake astounded me, and I was genuinely shocked when it cut to black. Much like the earlier scene with Granin, the game is indulging in the shock value of its violence to an extent that I don’t think I’m comfortable with, but is at least purposeful. Snake’s beating here reduces him to his core, he’s never looked or sounded rougher than at the end of his scene. He is walking out of this mission a different man.

Also strange: an implication that Raikov and Volgin were lovers? Volgin checks Snake’s junk as a way of making sure that he’s an imposter, and says that he knew the colonel better than anyone else. I’d love for Metal Gear to be including queer characters at all (though, the read that Solid Snake is asexual is common and valid, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that here), but it’s not exactly a good faith reveal. It comes across a little bit “ha ha, the evil sadist torturer is also A GAY! Wow!”

But maybe they’re going to expand on this in ways that humanise Volgin’s character? I wouldn’t be surprised, given the respect that Metal Gear has for its villains, but I would be surprised, given the extreme heteronormativity of the franchise thus far. We shall see! I’m lying unconscious on the floor, so maybe this is it for me. Naked Snake meets his end right here and the time paradox becomes real.

An Eye For An Eye

And I thought I was through the worst of the violence in this game, oof. Snake’s torture scene is uncomfortable to watch, not just to the level of violence, but because of how much they spend playing with expectation. Snake Eater knows its heading into its final act, and it knows that you know it too, and it enjoys toying with you. Is The Boss going to cut out Snake’s eye? No, but damn they’re going to hold on that shot for a long, long time.

In the end, Naked Snake loses his eye protecting EVA from Ocelot, gaining what will become his core visual identity as Big Boss not through a tragic moment in the game’s central relationship, but an act of heroism and humanity. Which surprised me, knowing what we do about Big Boss’ actions in the future, and how much of this game has revolved around his relationship with The Boss.

The big reveal in this scene, however, was that of The Philosopher’s Legacy: billions of dollars of gold, stored inside this very facility. The Philosopher’s Legacy was setup by the allied powers after World War 2, and it allows Volgin free reign to persue whatever weapons development he desires, for money is now no longer an issue. I think my exact reaction was just: “huh,” because it’s a strangely undersold reveal. For some reason I just expected more than “a fuckton of money,” but the more I think about it the more I appreciate it.

Sons of Liberty was explicitly about capitalism as a system that limits the agency of those within it, so free from the constraints of capitalism, Volgin is able to devote limitless resources into his nefarious ends, and the weapons become more and more powerful.

Perhaps we shall see a greater elaboration on what The Philosophers were later in this game, or in Guns of the Patriots, because I feel so much of the explanation around that has been really vague? I don’t mind, though, the game’s expositional lightness (by Metal Gear standards), serves to increase the singular focus on the sad relationship of Naked Snake and Big Boss.

Naked Snake

The requisite “no equipment” section of Snake Eater is an excellent climax to the game’s thematic and systemic arc. So far, you’ve been consistently building in power, using your resources in order to sneak past enemies, not truly having to rely on principles of line of sight. And in Snake’s moment of desperation, his eye lost, mission success slipping from his grasp, he is stripped of these powers, and reduced to the core of his being.

If we see this game as the transition from Naked Snake to Big Boss (which I do, I don’t know the ending exactly, but it’s clear that’s the man that’s going to be walking away from this situation), this moment of breaking Snake down is crucial before he can build back up into his new persona. And forcing the player to play without their gadgets and equipment reinforces the power of this moment.

And when you reach the end of the path, Snake falls from the sewers, eye shut and arms spread, finally calm. Ready to be reborn.

A River Of Sorrow

Wow, okay, I didn’t realise just how literal my interpretation of the last segment was about to become. Snake is literally born again in the river, as he confronts the souls of all those he has killed along the way. It’s a sobering and powerful ‘boss fight,’ bringing Snake Eater’s melancholic tone to the surface, and focusing — aptly — on the sorrow of the events of the day.

Metal Gear has tried a moment like this before — Liquid’s callback to the tower sequence at the end of Twin Snakes — but never has it been as explicitly sad as this. Here we have an entire level, dictated to the tragedy that is the loss of any life, as the emotional climax of a shooter and a stealth game.

The only way to win, is to make it to the end, where the game forcibly kills you, and use your own revival pill on the game over screen to bring yourself back to life. It’s a cheeky moment of playing with the game’s artifice and assumptions, but it’s also a key point in the arc of Snake Eater — to be reborn you first have to die, to become Big Boss we have to stop being Naked Snake.

We awake on the riverbed disorientated, our goal incomplete, the status of the mission unknown. What happens now? We shall find out soon enough. But one thing is certain: no one walks out of this the same as they came in.

The Snake Is My Penis

Before, you saw Snake and EVA fuck by talking about the specifications of their weaponry. Now, you get to see Snake and EVA fuck by performing impromptu surgery and shadow-dancing. It’s weird — but pretty great. Way more fun than a standard sex scene might be.

EVA’s monologue about how much she needs her bike is probably my favourite moment so far with her character. It gives credence to the read of her as someone trapped by her performative femininity, someone who is always pretending to be themselves. I’m glad this is coming up more, because it frames her interactions with Snake as deliberately playing a role to manipulate him, rather than as a heteronormative fantasy for the presumed-male player.

Hopefully there’s a big double cross coming, but I know the game ends with them totally doing it James Bond style, so I doubt it. But I’d love there to be more to her character than I think there is! It’d make me very happy.

Now You C3, Now You Don’t

The tone of this final (I assume) sneaking section is excellent, being able to walk around the Shagohod undetected and in disguise is perfect for the James Bond pastiche and also for the climax of a Metal Gear game. You feel the enormity of this weapon, the relationship between it and the people that surround it, you get a sense of how it exists in this space and how, like everything would, it becomes just another piece of metal.

I set the final charge, and everything goes to shit…

The Legacy

Wait, I thought they’d already explained The Philosopher’s Legacy? It’s money put away by the three allied powers — China, America and Russia — in order to give them control over the future. But it is super important, so it gets a proper reveal with live action footage and a two minute monologue, because if there’s one series that doesn’t do a single thing by half, it’s Metal Gear Solid.

The Legacy is money, but it may as well be magic — it is a MacGuffin of power. Whoever gains access to the legacy has the power to shape the world as they see fit, and the microfilm is the key to that power. How The Patriots will play into this yet, I don’t quite know, the only reference to them has been that one throwaway line with Snake and Major Zero, and that totally could have been a joke or a red herring.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe communism is.

I’m sorry. I, let’s move on –

Bye Bye Groznyj Grad

The weird thing about Snake Eater’s final act is how sparse it feels in terms of actual content. It’s a thrill ride at the moment, a ridiculous and amazing one, with at least three separate car chases and two boss fights! It’s a fantastic and propulsive sequence that captures the cascading and exhausting feel of an action movie’s final act.

There’s no more reveals of motivation, just a series of feints and near-misses that build up to the final defeat of the bad guy. And what a defeat — the boss fight with both Volgin within Groznyj Grad is dull and lifeless, so I’m glad we got that final Shagohod battle. I took him out with a sniper shot to the head, and it drained the remaining half of his life bar that he had standing. It was one heck of a satisfying end.

Though, Snake saying “Fried by a bolt of lightning… a fitting end” was hilarious. C’mon Snake, you’ve seen like twenty thematically on the nose deaths in a row.

It’s Over

I sit before my keyboard having completed the game, having seen the final cutscene play, and knowing it is time to write down my impressions.

I’m no longer in a dream, I’m now standing on the edge. It’s time to dive into the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater…

Gut Reactions

Fuck.

I spent so long defining the theme of Sons of Liberty as: you do not matter. And Snake Eater had been treading on such different ground, it hadn’t stepped into the same areas of individualism vs collectivism, or pulled back to the sheer scope of ideology that Sons of Liberty had. And by the end, it still hadn’t, it was laser focused on three (well, two) characters, but it all built to this one singular moment, one perfect and heartbreaking gut punch to show how much that theme remained true: you do not matter.

Sons of Liberty ends in such a more hopeful and defiant place that it will always speak to me the most, but there’s something singular about the tragedy of Naked Snake, now truly Big Boss, walking out of the White House in silence as a broken, empty man, that may make that moment the defining moment in the entire series. Because ultimately, that’s what Metal Gear is, it’s the story of men who realise their place, of soldiers who realise their role, of people coming face to face with the enormity of the status quo and the irrelevance of their own individuality.

What’s remarkable to me is how Metal Gear continues to dive into those themes without becoming a conservative fantasy. The idea that it’s even possible to write a story where The Soldier is good and The State is evil fused with this optimistic and anti-capitalist narrative about collective action is amazing. On paper, Metal Gear should be this awful militaristic fantasy and it ends up being the complete opposite — yet abstracted enough that I the anti-american and anti-war sentiments get lost on an alarming number of people. I chalk this up to Metal Gear being a Japanese work, a work from a country that explicitly isn’t America and has an incredibly different relationship to ideas of war, of individualism etc. It’s the kind of critique that can only come from the outside looking in.

What I’m saying is I loved the ending of Snake Eater in a very different way to Sons of Liberty, I knew it was the origin story of the series antagonist (protagonist? With the concept of The Patriots, Metal Gear completely eschews traditional ideas of villainy), but knowing that V is on the horizon and is supposedly the full downfall of Big Boss, I didn’t expect the ending to be quite such concentrated devastation.

I was so, so wrong.

The Patriots

It’s remarkable how long Snake Eater waits to slot all the piece in together. It doles out the reveals earlier, and then only gives you the true context with a scroll of text on the screen at the end. The Philosophers and The Patriots are one and the same — at least in American terms. The Philosophers’ legacy, for all intents and purposes, is The Patriots’ legacy, and you’ve spent the entire game filling in the mysteries that 2 laid out.

What’s remarkable about the answers is how much of a hole they puncture in the state of the world that Sons of Liberty sells. The Patriots present themselves as omnipotent, as if they have always been that way, but they haven’t. The fight for The Philosophers’ Legacy was a messy one, and The Patriots are merely one side of that struggle. Maybe in the 50 years they go on to win the fight, and with the end of the Cold War the world does become made whole again under them, but their fight was one as conflicted and human as any other, driven by selfish needs and conflicts of interests.

And in the end, as ever, it all came down to money.

But The Philosophers and The Patriots roles in their respective games are identical, to drive home to the player character that they are merely a tool for their own ends. And I have so much more to say about that, but there’s other things to tick off the list first.

Revolver, Revolver

Let’s talk about Ocelot. Let’s talk about how he just jumps into a Plane because he’s flying on some alien powered drone in 1964 because who cares, he’s Revolver Ocelot and who are you to say no?

I’d completely misread Ocelot’s character for the entire game, but to be fair they do save the reveal of his true identity until the final second. All this time, I’d been operating on the assumption that he was, at least for now, a loyal member of the Soviet Union. He states in Sons of Liberty that he became disillusioned with Russia during the cold war, and abandoned such a struggle for something far more important, to serve The Patriots.

And so, I naturally assumed that we were witnessing his growing disillusionment, his rejection of Volgin’s ways, his witnessing of the violence and short-sighted stupidity of Volgins Nationalism and rejecting it out of hand. Because Ocelot’s smart, but he’s not a mastermind. He’s a character that susses out what’s going on and knows how to best position himself, but at the end of the day he’s never going to hold all the cards, and you get a sense that he knows it. He’s got a strong sense of survival by knowing his place as a soldier, by knowing what’s expected of him, and doesn’t allow ambition to be his downfall.

And whilst that was definitely there, I don’t consider my reaction to be an ignorant reading of the text, the reveal that he was in fact ADAM and had already defected from the Soviet Union changes everything. It makes his respect for and interest in Naked Snake click into place, and how his repeated failed attempts at murdering the man were never that at all, they were sly little tests as he attempts to suss out someone who will one day be his ally in the Patriots. (Or, such is the plan).

Snake Eater made Ocelot cool. Ocelot was always cool, in a detached villain way, but he was always a villain and due to his nature as a Patriot lackey he never had the weird tragic non-villain relationship that the player had with Fortune or Solidus, for example. But now we’ve got to see young Ocelot, we see him raw, we see him fuck up and we see him care. It’s an important humanisation to his character, showing him as shrewd and selfish but also with a sense of consistency and respect that Volgin never has.

I wonder how any of this will play into Guns of the Patriots Ocelot, or if we’ll even see him. Has Liquid Snake taken over completely? WHO KNOWS? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

(I bet he gets a monologue. I bet fucking everybody gets a monologue)

A Welcome Betrayal

EVA did have something going on after all! Hooray! Her betrayal of, and ultimate victory over Snake is what finally sold me on actually liking her character. The introduction of the Chinese into the equation was really interesting too, because they’re a country so often forgotten in Cold War politics, despite being an important and crucial world power in the dynamic of that history.

EVA — or whatever her true name is, whether anyone knows it at all — was always pretending. Her mission was to play all sides and get away with the truth, alone, because there is power in keeping the truth hidden. In fact, that is the core of The Philosophers (and later The Patriots) power, so much so that in 50 years they will build an arsenal to keep it that way. But for those affected, for the individuals used as tools, there is power in sharing the truth. There is a shared bond that EVA, Snake and The Boss share, as soldiers who know the truth, as people who have no power and yet at the same time, all of it.

I don’t have too much to say about EVA however, because in the end her function is what it always was, to provide more light into the central relationship of the game, into the one thing that Snake Eater is and always was about: Snake and The Boss.

She provides you with The Boss’ truth, a truth that will change the world, forever.

The Boss

Where to even begin? Now that I’m here, at the most important part of the game, ready to talk about… everything, I don’t know what to say. The Boss’ is truth is the heartbreak at the core of Snake Eater, it is the inciting incident of everything that happens afterwards. It is the fuse that lights the fire that is still burning, and the ashes of which will be seen in the next game. (Just stopping for a high five on that tortured metaphor! Yeah!)

The Boss wants to make the world whole again, The Philosophers must be reunited for order to be returned to the earth. The international squabbling that this once great organisation has been reduced to is the causing an arms race like which has never been seen before, and it has to end. When the world is made whole, the world will be great once more.

It’s the same philosophy that The Patriots’ AI espouses at the end of Sons of Liberty, the need to fight the separation of ideas by creating the context for a singular line of progress, for the betterment and advancement of mankind. And The Boss believes in this idea, this so clearly flawed idea, so much that she is willing to die for it. She sacrifices herself to her own pupil, in the expectation that he will take her place.

But he doesn’t. And we don’t, as the audience, want him to. The Boss’ story is tragic, and her character can be seen as nothing other than a hero, but when looking at the bigger picture, it’s impossible not to see this all as a waste. She sacrifices herself for people who don’t care about her, to further the power of those who already rule, and Snake walks into their arms a hollow man and accepts his new title. He is now Big Boss, a hero who killed a hero, a child who killed his parent, a man who fought a fight that wasn’t his.

So when he walks out, and we see him take the steps towards his destruction, we take them with him. This system is fucked, it takes the lives of good people, chews them up and spits them out, then pits them against each other just for kicks. In that moment, it doesn’t matter how much pain it’s going to cause, how Outer Heaven is just the start of a cycle that can never truly end, he’s making the only human decision that anyone could.

All this time, I had expected The Boss to be a character who despised this system, someone who knew the truth of The Patriots and said no more. And Snake would stop her, learn the truth himself, and then go on to say the same thing. Metal Gear’s ridiculous naming conventions, as well as its repeated focus on similar themes and events reoccurring led me to believe that this relationship would be far more cyclical. But the truth was far harder.

The Boss truly believed in The Philosophers’ ideals, so much so that she played her part as a pawn, and Big Boss, well, seeing someone he loved submit themselves to something so abhorrent, it broke him. As it breaks us. The Boss’ truth is Metal Gear’s melodrama writ large, heightened and overwrought, operatic and earnest, it is the thematic ideas of the series refined and placed into a single moment.

I salute you too, Boss. You won’t be forgotten.

We’ve done it! We’ve finished Snake Eater, and we’re sitting ready to begin Guns of the Patriots. I couldn’t be more excited, I need to know, I need to know all the truths. I need to know how much of what I know is true and how much is just complete and total bullshit based on false assumptions and misheard bullshit.