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More MGS4 reality check. I haven't played it all yet, neither has the SO, but sometime I'll try it out myself:
NOTE: Some spoilers.
NOTE: Some spoilers.
This is an article I didn't think I wanted to write. I've struggled with Metal Gear Solid 4 all week long, vacillating between admiration for its first two acts of extraordinarily open-ended gameplay to feeling suffocated by its diarrhetic flow of cutscenes. I wanted to like this game. In the early parts I thought I did like it. The deeper I got into the game, I began to realize that I loathed MGS4. I loathed watching 50 minute cutscenes filled with long awkward silences, dime store soliloquizing, Hong Kong kung fu, and a glut of exposition reminiscent of old serialized fictions where writers were paid by the word. MGS4's gameplay is as good, or better, than any 3D game I've ever played, but its arcane cinematic presentation crushes the joy out of playing. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a game that straddles three generations and does a disservice to all of them.
It's impossible to separate the history of videogames over the last twenty years from the evolution of processing technology; from the meager 8-bit systems of the mid-eighties to the multi-core beasts of today. In the same way that early films had to resort to intertitles for dialogue, the original Metal Gear Solid used cinemas as a way to communicate the epic scale that was still technically impossible to communicate with gameplay. It was a cheat, but one appropriate to the time and style of the game. Kojima's narrative tendencies have always veered towards the maudlin and ridiculous (Otacon's love for Sniper Wolf, Naomi's relationship to Gray Fox, Liquid's possession of Ocelot…), but using the pixilated puppets of the PSX-era to recreate a John McTiernan movie was undeniably charming. In the same way that Hitchcock's The Lodger and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, incomplete works in and of themselves, pointed to the bright potential of their medium, the original MGS was an inspiring proof that games would one day evolve into a medium capable of epic interactions and human drama.
Now that we've arrived at a point in the technical evolution of gaming where we're finally playing cutscenes, the utility of that decade old convention is suspect. In the first two acts of MGS4, moving Snake around the maze-like battlefield with almost complete freedom, cutscenes actually lessen the immersive scale. As mortars explode all around, rebels and PMC's fight each other in epically scripted battles, the camera shakes and dirties itself with random war grit, how much more drama can a cutscene add? The drama is in the players hands. It is built on their choice of which side to help, how to do so without being detected, what tools to use, whether or not to kill combatants or inoculate them, and the fantastically reactive AI that brings everything to life.
Yet, in the twenty hours it took me to beat the game, I only spent five or so of them engaged in that brilliantly empowering and morally ambiguous play. The gameplay of the last three acts are, in contrast, disappointingly linear; composed of an overlong following sequence, some on-rails shooting, and some linear corridor crawling that hearkens back to the first MGS, both literally and figuratively. It's all very pretty and intuitive, but it's an evolutionary step backwards after the open battlefield concept of the first two acts. And then there are the ten or so hours of cutscenes. Some critics have claimed that MGS4's cutscenes are the best to have ever appeared in a game, but they made me angrier and angrier as I progressed. I can appreciate the huge investment of time and talent that has gone into the creation of the cutscenes, but now that the pixilated abstraction of the first game is gone, we're left with something sadly literal.
While muddling through MGS4's cutscenes I kept asking myself: what is this about? Beyond trying to decipher the incomprehensible yarn ball of a plot, I wanted to come to some metaphysical center point in all the poetic rambling and techno-chop suey. Forget about nanomachines, the Patriots, plots to rule the world, double agents triple and quadruple-crossing each other: what does MGS4 really mean? Where is the game's Rosebud; the game's "That's my family, Kay. It's not me;" the princess in another castle; the game's outcast clinging to the pelt of a colossus to bring his love back to life? There's a lot of sun imagery, eggs, slimy humanoids trapped in neo-fetish military equipment. There's talk of cloning, war, freedom of choice, the will to live, the necessity of self-sacrifice. But there's nothing at the center of it all. MGS 4 is about nothing.
The rules in the MGS universe are arbitrary and totally dependent on the creative whims of Kojima. Characters die over and over only to reappear again, motivations are rewritten on the fly, and plot points are discarded if they prove too difficult to answer. There was an argument for this kind of randomness in earlier games, as they wallowed in the bizarre dream logic that offered a kind of sub-conscious catharsis. The center of the first three MGS games was manipulation, both of Snake and of the player. The games advanced as irrational kaleidoscopes in which you could safely assume there was something dishonest about everything you were seeing. The DARPA chief was really FOXHOUND; Naomi really poisoned Snake, but then she took it back; Liquid and Snake are really brothers; there's a third Big Boss clone who happens to be the president. These stories weren't any more believable than anything in MGS4, but they had the luxury of deepening the confusion with conspiracy and foreboding.
MGS4 is, for whatever reason, a game that feels compelled to explain away the whole series, from the first Metal Gear through to the last. Fans of the series have basked in the exhaustive scope of Snake's final narrative, which creates an expository through-line that finally connects more than 50 game years of Metal Gear shenanigans. According to Kojima's grand finale, a self congratulatory talk between Snake and his father Big Boss in a cemetery where it's suddenly revealed that Snake has been the bad guy all along; that every supposed enemy he fought throughout the years was actually trying to do the heroic work of destroying the Patriots.
What were the Patriots to begin with? A group of wealthy military entrepreneurs who wanted to control the world then split up, and accidentally created a Matrix-like AI that would control the world as soon as nanomachines could be injected into everybody. If anybody thinks there is anything in a storyline like this which could, in any way, speak to the political realities of the world we live in, I'm going to take up smoking full time just like Snake. From Iraq to Zimbabwe to the darkest recesses of Western China the problems in our world are terrible and filled with horrors. Equating the horrors of people's hands and feet being chopped off as a result of voting for the opposition with a Matrix-style fantasy about computers one day ruling the world is dishonest and distasteful.
Computers don't run the world, people do. MGS4 is so in love with its own various mythologies that it can't bear to hold anyone accountable for their actions. There are no villains in MGS4, not even Zero, who is ultimately a pathetic and fallible corpse trapped on life support. Likewise, there are no consequences. Raiden loses both arms in the course of an absurd tangle with a giant submarine ripped straight out of a Superman comic book. But his loss isn't much of a sacrifice because he miraculously gets two brand new arms stitched back onto his carcass at the end of the game. Snake is given a death sentence with a mutating virus that is, somehow, going to destroy the whole world, and then it's okay again. He shoots himself in the mouth, credits roll, and then somehow he's still alive.
Since no one ever really has to pay the price for the actions, what is ever at stake during all of the pain-stakingly concepted cutscenes? Where is all the drama coming from? And why retreat to such an omnipresent form of story-telling to choke the life out of a core gameplay model that, at long last, is finally perfected? The game finally looks as good as a cutscene, so why not tell the story in the game? After a breakthrough year of games that told arrestingly cinematic stories without ever taking away player control (i.e. HL2: Episode 2, Bioshock, Portal), why are the story-telling conventions in MGS still celebrated? As cinema, Kojima has achieved a Michael Bay level of spectacle but little else. As a writer Kojima has reached the level of Anne Rice's goth-pop elipticisms, "Everything has its beginning, but it doesn't start at one… The world isn't born from zero. The moment zero becomes one is the moment the world springs to life." Apparently production value and some homoerotic kung fu is all it takes to elevate these outmoded tropes, long-since irrelevant in other media, into something the average gaming fan soaks up with a man-sized bib.
From the start in 1987, Kojima had no plans to make sequels for Metal Gear. Each subsequent game in the franchise has been an improvisation that loosely expanded on the titles before it. As the gameplay has evolved across each iteration, gradually elaborating on and perfecting itself, the story has unraveled into an ungainly mess. I can't help but wonder what the results would have been if Kojima had applied all the systems of play in the first two acts of MGS4 and applied them to an original game that wasn't weighed down with all the cinematic baggage of the Metal Gear franchise. Kojima has long suggested he is ready to move beyond Metal Gear, but the brand is too valuable to both Konami and Sony to let die. So it's kept alive, like the skinless corpse of Big Boss, on a life support of convoluted cutscenes and circular plotting that has needlessly been carried over across three generations of home consoles.
MGS4 could have been something brilliant, but instead it's a hybrid freak. Half-revolutionary, half-trapped in a legacy of the past that has no place in modern day gaming. The time of the cutscene-driven game narrative is over. It served a vital purpose in its time, but watching ten hours of cutscenes while playing a game seems masochistic in 2008. There are some terrific splitscreen moments where players can see what's at stake in a cutscene on half of the screen while they continue to play on the other half. Likewise, there are plenty of button prompts where players can "interact" with the cutscenes by going into first person to stare at a woman's breasts or trigger subliminal flashbacks to previous games. Leave it to Kojima to mine gameplay mechanics from CD-ROM games of the mid-90's to make the cutscene seem relevant.
I didn't originally want to write this article because I don't think MGS4 is a bad game. The parts where you actually get to play are, at best, revelatory. What is so profoundly disappointing is that this is only half of the game. Kojima has insisted on framing this evolved new way of playing in the tattered rags of a story that has never worked as a literal pot boiler. It makes me wonder if anyone even reads anymore? Is this story of vampires, nanomachines, unkillable characters, and technophobia really among the best our medium has to offer? Does Kojima have a place alongside Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Nabakov? Is he even in the same universe? In the buildup to the game's finale Mei Ling quotes Richard the Second, "Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain." In a game so swollen with cutscenes, how much of that storytelling is the vanity of a film student who took a left turn into the game industry? All of it.
It's impossible to separate the history of videogames over the last twenty years from the evolution of processing technology; from the meager 8-bit systems of the mid-eighties to the multi-core beasts of today. In the same way that early films had to resort to intertitles for dialogue, the original Metal Gear Solid used cinemas as a way to communicate the epic scale that was still technically impossible to communicate with gameplay. It was a cheat, but one appropriate to the time and style of the game. Kojima's narrative tendencies have always veered towards the maudlin and ridiculous (Otacon's love for Sniper Wolf, Naomi's relationship to Gray Fox, Liquid's possession of Ocelot…), but using the pixilated puppets of the PSX-era to recreate a John McTiernan movie was undeniably charming. In the same way that Hitchcock's The Lodger and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, incomplete works in and of themselves, pointed to the bright potential of their medium, the original MGS was an inspiring proof that games would one day evolve into a medium capable of epic interactions and human drama.
Now that we've arrived at a point in the technical evolution of gaming where we're finally playing cutscenes, the utility of that decade old convention is suspect. In the first two acts of MGS4, moving Snake around the maze-like battlefield with almost complete freedom, cutscenes actually lessen the immersive scale. As mortars explode all around, rebels and PMC's fight each other in epically scripted battles, the camera shakes and dirties itself with random war grit, how much more drama can a cutscene add? The drama is in the players hands. It is built on their choice of which side to help, how to do so without being detected, what tools to use, whether or not to kill combatants or inoculate them, and the fantastically reactive AI that brings everything to life.
Yet, in the twenty hours it took me to beat the game, I only spent five or so of them engaged in that brilliantly empowering and morally ambiguous play. The gameplay of the last three acts are, in contrast, disappointingly linear; composed of an overlong following sequence, some on-rails shooting, and some linear corridor crawling that hearkens back to the first MGS, both literally and figuratively. It's all very pretty and intuitive, but it's an evolutionary step backwards after the open battlefield concept of the first two acts. And then there are the ten or so hours of cutscenes. Some critics have claimed that MGS4's cutscenes are the best to have ever appeared in a game, but they made me angrier and angrier as I progressed. I can appreciate the huge investment of time and talent that has gone into the creation of the cutscenes, but now that the pixilated abstraction of the first game is gone, we're left with something sadly literal.
While muddling through MGS4's cutscenes I kept asking myself: what is this about? Beyond trying to decipher the incomprehensible yarn ball of a plot, I wanted to come to some metaphysical center point in all the poetic rambling and techno-chop suey. Forget about nanomachines, the Patriots, plots to rule the world, double agents triple and quadruple-crossing each other: what does MGS4 really mean? Where is the game's Rosebud; the game's "That's my family, Kay. It's not me;" the princess in another castle; the game's outcast clinging to the pelt of a colossus to bring his love back to life? There's a lot of sun imagery, eggs, slimy humanoids trapped in neo-fetish military equipment. There's talk of cloning, war, freedom of choice, the will to live, the necessity of self-sacrifice. But there's nothing at the center of it all. MGS 4 is about nothing.
The rules in the MGS universe are arbitrary and totally dependent on the creative whims of Kojima. Characters die over and over only to reappear again, motivations are rewritten on the fly, and plot points are discarded if they prove too difficult to answer. There was an argument for this kind of randomness in earlier games, as they wallowed in the bizarre dream logic that offered a kind of sub-conscious catharsis. The center of the first three MGS games was manipulation, both of Snake and of the player. The games advanced as irrational kaleidoscopes in which you could safely assume there was something dishonest about everything you were seeing. The DARPA chief was really FOXHOUND; Naomi really poisoned Snake, but then she took it back; Liquid and Snake are really brothers; there's a third Big Boss clone who happens to be the president. These stories weren't any more believable than anything in MGS4, but they had the luxury of deepening the confusion with conspiracy and foreboding.
MGS4 is, for whatever reason, a game that feels compelled to explain away the whole series, from the first Metal Gear through to the last. Fans of the series have basked in the exhaustive scope of Snake's final narrative, which creates an expository through-line that finally connects more than 50 game years of Metal Gear shenanigans. According to Kojima's grand finale, a self congratulatory talk between Snake and his father Big Boss in a cemetery where it's suddenly revealed that Snake has been the bad guy all along; that every supposed enemy he fought throughout the years was actually trying to do the heroic work of destroying the Patriots.
What were the Patriots to begin with? A group of wealthy military entrepreneurs who wanted to control the world then split up, and accidentally created a Matrix-like AI that would control the world as soon as nanomachines could be injected into everybody. If anybody thinks there is anything in a storyline like this which could, in any way, speak to the political realities of the world we live in, I'm going to take up smoking full time just like Snake. From Iraq to Zimbabwe to the darkest recesses of Western China the problems in our world are terrible and filled with horrors. Equating the horrors of people's hands and feet being chopped off as a result of voting for the opposition with a Matrix-style fantasy about computers one day ruling the world is dishonest and distasteful.
Computers don't run the world, people do. MGS4 is so in love with its own various mythologies that it can't bear to hold anyone accountable for their actions. There are no villains in MGS4, not even Zero, who is ultimately a pathetic and fallible corpse trapped on life support. Likewise, there are no consequences. Raiden loses both arms in the course of an absurd tangle with a giant submarine ripped straight out of a Superman comic book. But his loss isn't much of a sacrifice because he miraculously gets two brand new arms stitched back onto his carcass at the end of the game. Snake is given a death sentence with a mutating virus that is, somehow, going to destroy the whole world, and then it's okay again. He shoots himself in the mouth, credits roll, and then somehow he's still alive.
Since no one ever really has to pay the price for the actions, what is ever at stake during all of the pain-stakingly concepted cutscenes? Where is all the drama coming from? And why retreat to such an omnipresent form of story-telling to choke the life out of a core gameplay model that, at long last, is finally perfected? The game finally looks as good as a cutscene, so why not tell the story in the game? After a breakthrough year of games that told arrestingly cinematic stories without ever taking away player control (i.e. HL2: Episode 2, Bioshock, Portal), why are the story-telling conventions in MGS still celebrated? As cinema, Kojima has achieved a Michael Bay level of spectacle but little else. As a writer Kojima has reached the level of Anne Rice's goth-pop elipticisms, "Everything has its beginning, but it doesn't start at one… The world isn't born from zero. The moment zero becomes one is the moment the world springs to life." Apparently production value and some homoerotic kung fu is all it takes to elevate these outmoded tropes, long-since irrelevant in other media, into something the average gaming fan soaks up with a man-sized bib.
From the start in 1987, Kojima had no plans to make sequels for Metal Gear. Each subsequent game in the franchise has been an improvisation that loosely expanded on the titles before it. As the gameplay has evolved across each iteration, gradually elaborating on and perfecting itself, the story has unraveled into an ungainly mess. I can't help but wonder what the results would have been if Kojima had applied all the systems of play in the first two acts of MGS4 and applied them to an original game that wasn't weighed down with all the cinematic baggage of the Metal Gear franchise. Kojima has long suggested he is ready to move beyond Metal Gear, but the brand is too valuable to both Konami and Sony to let die. So it's kept alive, like the skinless corpse of Big Boss, on a life support of convoluted cutscenes and circular plotting that has needlessly been carried over across three generations of home consoles.
MGS4 could have been something brilliant, but instead it's a hybrid freak. Half-revolutionary, half-trapped in a legacy of the past that has no place in modern day gaming. The time of the cutscene-driven game narrative is over. It served a vital purpose in its time, but watching ten hours of cutscenes while playing a game seems masochistic in 2008. There are some terrific splitscreen moments where players can see what's at stake in a cutscene on half of the screen while they continue to play on the other half. Likewise, there are plenty of button prompts where players can "interact" with the cutscenes by going into first person to stare at a woman's breasts or trigger subliminal flashbacks to previous games. Leave it to Kojima to mine gameplay mechanics from CD-ROM games of the mid-90's to make the cutscene seem relevant.
I didn't originally want to write this article because I don't think MGS4 is a bad game. The parts where you actually get to play are, at best, revelatory. What is so profoundly disappointing is that this is only half of the game. Kojima has insisted on framing this evolved new way of playing in the tattered rags of a story that has never worked as a literal pot boiler. It makes me wonder if anyone even reads anymore? Is this story of vampires, nanomachines, unkillable characters, and technophobia really among the best our medium has to offer? Does Kojima have a place alongside Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Nabakov? Is he even in the same universe? In the buildup to the game's finale Mei Ling quotes Richard the Second, "Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain." In a game so swollen with cutscenes, how much of that storytelling is the vanity of a film student who took a left turn into the game industry? All of it.
, but the S and 360) over the PS-2. I have friends who disagree.
Looking forward to that. Many interesting games coming out on WiiWare and it's equalients on the other platforms. A great thing to make it so easy for small companies that can afford to experiment to try out their ideas.
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