Metal Gear Solid 4

I got the chance to play through MGS4 about four years after the fact. And I have to say I’m disappointed.

Is it a system seller? No, not even for those of us who have played every one since Metal Gear Solid and for those who know nothing about nothing, they’re just going to turn off the console because they didn’t expect cutscenes that last for half-an-hour. Speaking as a fan, the problem with Metal Gear Solid 4 is how un-metal gear solid it is. You go around the world, visiting multiple locations, while in previous installments you were more or less wandering around one, like Shadow Moses or Tselinoyarsk and their environs. There are only two people you can call on the codec and saving is done in a menu. The missions, and I can’t believe an MGS has missions plural instead of a mission like Operation Snake Eater, are all linear. There is no backtracking. It’s like the second these old series jumped on to the new generation they dropped most of their established conventions, the conventions that made them, to make the jump. Resident Evil suffered from this exact same thing. This linearity hurts all the new features they put in. There is a ton of guns with customizable parts, you can roll onto your back while crawling and your camo, to my disappointment, is automatic. The worst travesty however is the utter removal of an MGS staple: procure on site. There’s a damn store in your pause menu to buy any and all guns and the necessary ammo. And you can take the weapons of dead enemies and use them, after unlocking them of course. But in truth, you don’t need all these new features to beat the game. They’re superfluous. Very, very superfluous. Once I got the M14 I got through the entire game with just it, I didn’t need any other gun nor did I need all those cool attachments. For the boss fights I used the Saiga 12 loaded with the rubber ring ammo to get the facemasks and that gun doesn’t even have customization. I only once rolled onto my back on the last mission and that was by pure accident. The only time I used the oil drum was when I got it and that only amounted in rolling around in a circle before I got bored and shot someone. Unlike in Metal Gear Solid 3, where you needed to keep your stamina up, you needed to dig out the bullets and sew those cuts close; you don’t need all this new shit.

The plot. Well. At it’s core it’s just two old dudes having a tiff and by the end of it you just kinda want Otacon to cart Snake into a retirement home and be done with it. I kind of get why Snake was made in to this old geezer, to give the game a sense of finality as it is said to be the last MGS, but at the same time, I kind of don’t. Couldn’t they just roll with FOXDIE and use that as the reason why Snake doesn’t have long to live? Or was Ocelot too old for a younger Snake to beat the living crap out of? And why did the bosses have to be these fucking gorgeous women? I’m not really complaining, but I had to shake my head at the second stage of the fight: they just saunter up to you and try to hug you. And you’re supposed to, what, blast them with an auto shotgun? Right. Or you can just run away, a very hilarious concept, from the stunning women wearing skin-tight high-tech bodysuits that show off their mesmerizing curves and wait for the fight to teleport to a white room where if you take your camera out, these babes start posing for you. Then stuff your friend’s Ps3 hard drive with risqué photos for three minutes and you insta win. I honestly thought the Cobra Unit, which was just about the only thing that I felt was bad about MGS3, was kind of shit but the Beauty and Beast Corps take the cake.

The game also suffers from a particular type of sequelitis. The need to throw in as many references, some more or less blatant, from past installments. The whole REX vs. RAY thing is a prime example. Also another symptom is called Chekov’s Something. There was no character in the overall story that didn’t have some place in the grand scheme of things instead of just having them just be some guy. Johnny is a prime example of this.

So you can see why I was disappointed. Somehow, I had managed to keep myself from spoiling most of the game for four years while hoping in vain it would be released for the Xbox 360, something that I still begrudge the people behind this game for and speaking of being pissed off…

The first new Metal Gear to be released on the Xbox 360. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Just no. It looks like shit and it’s made by the same guys who made Bayonetta. MGS: Rising looked amazing a couple of years back, they even had a cool presentation of its cut anything system. Then they pull the plug, saying it took way too long to just come up with the cutting mechanics so they hand it off to a company that’s biggest contribution is Bayonetta, a game so fucking close to an MGS you can fucking get. Just fuck off.