OH NO I MESSED UP IT'S SUNDAY OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I am actually pretty embarrassed about this. I wasn't expecting to miss a deadline until next Saturday, when Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain will have undoubtedly consumed my life with base optimization menus and Pablo Escobar-esque private zoos. Instead, because I'm literally this much of a nerd, I spent yesterday playing Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, the demo to Phantom Pain, because I'm too excited to not be playing Metal Gear. Since I'm literally that dang obsessed with the series right now (seriously guys Phantom Pain has a fucking SICK CARDBOARD BOX ENGINE) anything else I write about would be half-hearted and probably peppered with Metal Gear anyway. So let's talk about Metal Gear!
Well, the appeal of Metal Gear, anyways. Next week, after I'll have time to do some research (which for a series as ludicrously convoluted as Metal Gear is absolutely essential) and played through some of Phantom Pain (which promises to fill some of the remaining story-holes in the series) I'll talk about the story of the series. For now, I'm going to explain what about a series that initially seems to be a Splinter Cell-esque military stealth type-deal is so appealing to someone like me, who normally turns away from games without dinosaurs or things I can easily pretend are dinosaurs.
Ignoring the story of the series (which is something that, as a Metal Gear fan, I will have to flagellate myself later for typing out), Metal Gear's appeal stems from three main elements: its gameplay, its bizarre fondness for seemingly irreconcilable juxtaposition, and attention to detail that remains unsurpassed by any other video game series I can think of. Starting with the gameplay, the very first Metal Gear for the Japanese MSX computer and NES had a novel idea: what if, instead of murdering your way through soldiers and henchmen most likely just trying to feed their families, you weren't a giant chode and did so stealthily and non-lethally? In varying degrees, every Metal Gear game, from the Engrish-riddled NES entry to the 3D Solid games, rewards the player for proceeding stealthily with minimal loss of life, and punishes them for eschewing stealth and killing indiscriminately, whether by ramping up the difficulty through flooding the area with enemies or decreasing the player's mission rank. Stealth gameplay, as a concept, is already refreshing to me in video games, where so many are loud, aggressive bombast. But the Metal Gear games take it a step further: being sneaky is great, but it's even better to be sneaky and not treat human life as something as disposable as cardboard (hehehehehHEHEHEH.) As a result, merely succeeding in missions (which, with the series usable but complex controls, is fun to do in and of itself) is rarely rewarding. With superb level design, enemy placements, and enemy AI, it's very rare (for me, at least) to get through missions in any of the games without getting spotted at least once, or having to handle problems with the game's more effective lethal guns instead of the short-range, non-lethal "hush puppy" tranq gun introduced in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I always leave a section with my accomplishment tinged with regret. If I had just been a little better, I wouldn't have been spotted hiding under that truck, I wouldn't have had to kill that soldier. Rather than hurting the series, however, this helps it: it gives a strong incentive to players to replay the games over and over again, chasing the elusive specter of the perfect run. And when you finally get a run you're satisfied with, the feeling of satisfaction is beyond words, which I like because it means less work for me.
Brutally long cutscenes aside (which we'll get to next week) the Metal Gear games are a joy to replay, in part because the mechanics and levels are so finely crafted, but also due to the series' outrageous attention to detail. Every game has done absurdly thorough research about its setting; if soldiers are dressed a certain way, equipped with certain weapons, and move with very deliberate maneuvers, it's because that's exactly how soldiers in that country in that time period did things. Series creator and insane person Hideo Kojima gives his military advisors top billing alongside character designers and writers, and considering that one of them has been arrested for illegal arms dealings in Japan, you know they're incredibly knowledgable military advisors. On top of this, Kojima is willing to spend absurd amounts of time and resources on things people probably never Metal Gear Solid 2, for example, takes place largely inside a facility known as the Big Shell. The tutorial section of the game takes place on an oil tanker in a rainy New York night. Despite this tutorial comprising of a tiny minority of the game, Kojima still created what is probably the best rain effects of any game for years so that the thirty or so minutes the player spends on the tanker feel like they're in the rain. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater tracked how hungry enemy soldiers were, which let players strategically blow up stores of food and force enemy soldiers to prey on wild animals like vultures, which players could use to dispose of dead bodies, thus tricking soldiers into cannibalism. Phantom Pain reportedly has a body-odor system, where players must balance the amount of showers they take between being too clean (thus wasting time, and water I guess?) and being so filthy and disgusting that flies begin following you around and your soldiers ambush you with pails of water. This overall sense of detail is overshadowed somewhat by the literally hundreds of easter eggs in the Solid games. While easter eggs in most games are simple, one-off, extraneous affairs--a teaser for a sequel, perhaps, or a developer's name hidden somewhere, most of Kojima's easter eggs are actually tied into the game in a relatively organic way. Solid Snake can stare at the pin-up poster hidden in a soldier's locker in Metal Gear Solid 2, and if he stares long enough, his contact Otacon calls him up and tells him to quit being creepy and get back to the mission. Snake's response, verbatim, is "hhngh, hnngh, hnngh," and then the conversation ends until the player decides to leave the locker. Metal Gear Solid 3 has a "medical viewer" mode where Naked Snake can examine himself for injuries, represented by a 3D view of the soldier that the player could spin around. If the player spins Snake too quickly for too long, when they exit the viewer Snake will throw up from dizziness, which depletes the hunger meter the game also has. Elsewhere, if the player turns off the game after Snake's conversation with a support operative that reveals he's afraid of vampires, the next time they turn the game on they'll be playing a 3D beat-em-up about vampires. This is coded with completely different controls and a completely different engine from the main game, and only serves to exist to explain that Snake is having a nightmare based on the conversation. The amount of work put into stuff that well over 90% of players probably never even saw is astounding, and something I can't help but admire about the Metal Gear games.
My descriptions of dedicated military realism alongside vomit-based mechanics are already an excellent example of the way the Metal Gear series revels in taking several thematically disparate elements and somehow molding them together into a strange, beautiful whole. Normally, one would expect a game dedicated to military realism to try to constrain its narrative and mechanics within that aesthetic for the sake of consistency. Similarly, games where antagonists include several different quasi-sentient bipedal nuclear tanks, a living human beehive, a whale made of fire, a hairy vampire-man with a dick-knife, a cat-themed gunman with ricocheting bullets who's obsessed with the wild west, and that same cat-themed gunman possessed by a ghost living in a transplanted arm, to remain wacky and bizarre throughout rather than trying to ground itself in realism. Metal Gear, on the other hand, doesn't hesitate to place its bizarre characters within otherwise hyper-realistic settings which still tackle (often successfully) themes as grim and complex as nuclear proliferation, information manipulation, living with post-traumatic stress disorder, and reconciling idealism with realpolitik, all while forcing the player to question their agency and responsibility in the game's events, both as members of developed societies and as the ones forcing the character to pull the trigger. It is no exaggeration to say that the subversive elements in games like Hotline Miami and Spec Ops: The Line owe a lot to Metal Gear, a series that rivals their thematic depth and skillful execution while simultaneously containing a Soviet cosmonaut that can turn himself into a giant flaming skull that chases you while yelling "FURY!" His name is "The Fury." The juxtaposition between the serious and the absurd absolutely should not work, but somehow it works amazingly well, and creates a series more memorable, interesting, and unique than anything else that knows the difference between an AK-47 and an AK47u. The closest analogue I can think of to this mix of weirdness and concrete detail is magical realist fiction. I don't know if Kojima's works are the equals to those of Borges or Márquez, but I definitely know that I would give an arm and a leg to listen to a podcast where the three of them have a conversation.
It's been a long time since I gushed like that. If you liked it, don't worry! When I start explaining the plot of the series, the gushing will reach new, epic, disgusting levels. Stay tuned next weekend!
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