TheLostBigBoss
Banned
So this might be a long one, but it's something I feel needs to be said.
Metal Gear seems to be in a major tonal shift with Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain. From everything we have seen it is taking itself extremely seriously, tackling contemporary issues from indefinite detainment in Gitmo to the torture of US prisoners in the early 2000's with the detainee program. Ground Zeros established this, it was very open about it.
We know the story of Big Boss, or at least where it's going to go. If Kojima keeps the course and limits retcons to a minimum, we will be recruiting child soldiers and using them to flame wars, creating a process of instability and further recruitment to bread into warriors, just to send them back into the slaughter for war profiteering.
Now, this isn't the first time a Metal Gear has tackled complex societal issues, in fact all the games have an over-arching story that dealt with contemporary issues(Peace Walker being absent from this list because I don't know what the fuck that thing was about). Metal Gear Solid was about Nuclear Proliferation. Metal Gear Solid 2 was about the impact of the internet and governments attempt to control it, although at the time the vast majority of people didn't know because the internet we know of today didn't exist in 2001 and Kojima is a time-traveler who forgot us mortals don't have the ability to look six years into the future. MGS3 was about how your enemies of today won't be your enemies of tomorrow, and cultures ability to shape things. MGS4 was about "War changing" with PMC's and global superpowers fighting it out via military proxy and cyber/economic warfare.
That was just a broad summary of the themes, from a story perspective. The thing is from my point of view, and many others, Kojima injects his own meta-narrative in his games, MGS2 and MGS4 being the most apparent. To keep it short at this time, if MGS2 was Kojima wanting to send the message of passing on a legacy, and leaving it to the next generation (IE no longer being the head of MGS, leaving it to the next person and accepting what ever comes of it), MGS4 was about his failure of that dream/hope, which is largely reflected in Snake. But we will get to that shortly and the implications that the cannonization of MGS2 had on the story as a whole.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is probably one of the best games ever made, but it's the game that damned Metal Gear to canonical hell. It's themes with information control coupled with his extreme meta-narrative were so tightly interwoven to the games story line, that it was hard for the vast majority of people to really get the story when it first came out. The Colonel's final speech went over everyone's head because it was 2001 and nobody at the time had any idea of the future of the internet and how powerful it was going to be. The ending was just the game going crazy, and people took everything at face value that these events actually took place.
If we actually look over the game and break it down it's very difficult to believe that these events actually transpired. At the very best the player is dealing with an unreliable narrator who is unable to distinguish reality from VR.
Just a few examples of things that are never explained. How was Rose able to talk to the Colonel during the mission if the Colonel was in part thought up by Raiden? She was at the crash site of Arsenal Gear, she knew about everything. How did she get there? How did Snake get to the Arsenal Gear crash site after swimming after Ray? Why did none of the civilians freak the fuck out after having a giant ship crash into Manhattan, with their former President dead at the feet of the Washington statue? Why do characters in the end of the game manifest themselves out of nowhere, specifically Olga on Arsenal Gear and Snake at the end, where he actually vanishes right in front of Raiden turning into a bird? Why does the platform of the Ray fight perfectly match a VR mission from MGS1?
Snake tells Raiden, "Don't obsess over words so much. Find the meaning behind the words, then decide." This is Kojima talking to the player about the game. He's saying you don't need to take it at face value, that we as players should find the meaning behind the story we just witnessed. The whole ending with Snake is simply a mouthpiece for Kojima to explain to the player what he just went through, to tell them that while the game went bonkers at the end and the player is begging for answers, they won't get the answer and that getting one was never the point.
That's the thing. We are told that this all happened by the game, while we are being thrown things that are completely contrary to that belief. It fits with the message of passing on what you believe. Did this event actually happen? Was this whole thing just VR? Was it a combination of the two? How does Vamp continue to return to life? How did Fortune deflect those rockets? We were never given answers to those things, we were forced to come to our own conclusions and pass down what we believed.This is why this story was never meant to be continued. Not just because Kojima said it would be his last, he set up the story and the ending to be completely inconclusive and impossible to continue. His final nail in the coffin was literally killing the Patriots at the end, telling "Snake" or rather the player that they have been dead for over a hundred years effectively killing off the only possible lead Liquid and Otocon had on the Patriots. That's it, the story is a dead end. It was meant to tell anyone who had a glimmer of hope of there being a sequel to this madness that it wasn't going to happen, there are no more leads and the story ended here.
Until it didn't end there, and the madness continued.
Kojima failed in delivering his message. It was a combination of being too ahead of his time and creating a game was had too much mindfuckery for the average human to comprehend. I think everyone can a attest that they didn't "get it" on their first playthrough back when it originally came out. It took years for people to break everything down and get to the true themes of what Kojima was going for. It was just too much, and people were naturally begging for answers to something they just didn't understand.
But it's worse than that. It's not that people understood that they didn't understand it, they lashed out and shitted on MGS2. They completely rejected the meta-narrative and the reason for Raiden to be the main character. They were duped, we were all duped, but that was integral for the story. The player needed to see Raiden as a pathetic character and look up to the glorious Solid Snake we came to love in MGS. The vast majority of people didn't get it and were pissed. They demanded answers, and answers we got.
If Solid Snake of MGS2 is the hopeful and inspired Kojima of 2000, Solid Snake of MGS4 is the worn out, tired and bitter Kojima of 2005. He's tired of making MGS. Maybe he thought "This time it will be my last!", and just gave the people what they asked (Or threatened). He gave us the answers, oh did he ever. Horrible, mangled, stupid answers to questions he specifically created to never have answers. Canonizing all of MGS2 turned the whole of Metal Gear cannon into a hell hole. No longer could stories just be separate stories, everything now must be connected by everlasting questions and retcons. This is most apparent by making Major Zero into the main villain of the series and completely ruining the whole cast of MGS3 by retconning them into places they shouldn't be. "Hmm, Signet is black, let's make him the DARPA dude from MGS". "Well the doctor lady was a doctor, so lets make her the monster who experimented on Gray Fox". "Ehhh, let's just make Zero the bad guy and head of the Patriots, even though we have no logical reason to do so".
It was the eleventh hour twists that retconed everyone into place to give things meaning that didn't need to have meaning. It forced ridiculous explanations which forced technologies to be created to justify a story that was never meant to be. Even though MGS4 takes place far into the future, it's techno babel is clearly going to leak into The Phantom Pain. It's already leaked into games that take place in the past. Peace Walker featured sentient AI in the year 1975, a time where computers were the size of my room. It featured Mother Base R&D with fantastical like equipment that are clearly far ahead of it's time, all while the rest of the world is in keeping with it's own time period. Now I understand that Metal Gear has always had technology that has been ahead of it's proper time period, and I'm perfectly fine with that. It has it's own version of history, but it no longer holds the suspension of disbelief it once had.
Peace Walker is the epitome of what went wrong with MGS4 and it's ever lasting impact with the games cannon. It's Patriot AI bullshit will forever fester, starting with Peace Walker and having all the bosses be AI, with the final boss literally be a mapping of The Boss who then commits suicide because of things. Cipher is always watching, always in the background forever retconning things into place to explain things with the new revelation that the Patriots were always influencing things.
All theses completely out of place elements and baggage of past stories and canon will culminate with The Phantom Pain.
If we compare the fantastical elements of MGS and it's serious nature of it's story, it's really not all that bad. MGS established a universe that was grounded in reality with supernatural elements, but it played it pretty straight. That's why it was fun. It was kinda campy, but was still able to hit some powerful moments and have a real message. MGS2 was meant to take those elements of disbelief and stretch them till they fucking snapped right in half. It took itself completely straight in the face of unreal things that even in it's own cannon would be considered impossible. MGS3 was a return to form with MGS, putting a spin on historical events but with the MGS universe's own twist, and it worked. MGS4 went off the deep-end, with nanomachines controlling and suppressing emotion, turning soldiers into zombie like beings. AI's controlling the whole planet Liquid performing hypnosis on himself to trick said AI. Characters being created out of pure fanservice by combining bosses from past games, the apparent return of Psycho Mantis who forgot his own revelations when he died. It took the things of MGS2 that were meant to be heavily scrutinized and just said "Oh yea, those are real, that happened". From Peace Walker we had AI's who were mapped from the Boss to a female secret agent who posed as an underage teen which hijacked a Metal Gear with a Rail gun (In 1975) in her bikini to the beat of catchy J-Pop. In between all this we fought monsters in side ops, had a date with Paz, took pictures of her, fucked in a box and even had a little action with Miller on the side.
Out of all the Metal Gears to date, Peace Walker was the least serious in tone, which is why Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain is going to suffer heavily from that.
Spoilers for Ground Zeros
So we take Paz, who was a double agent for Zero, who we screwed on side ops and fought with J-Pop blasting, taken hostage and tortured. Not only that, but it's later revealed that not only was she raped and molested by the evil Skull Face, they forced Chico into raping Paz as well to break him. Now we all know how fucked this is, it's actually surprising it got past the ratings board. The issue is the huge 180 tonal shift from Peace Walker to Ground Zeros, and the characters that we dealt with then in this setting.
It just doesn't work. I will forever know Paz as that J-Pop singing chick who Snake fucked in a box on the beach, who was then raped by a dude named Skull Face and put a bomb up her vagina. Forever we will be reminded that Cipher is watching, that these actions will have something to do with the future games in the series, that everything is connected. The characters we met in Peace Walker, the least serious game in the series are now getting maimed and tortured in the most serious game yet. Kojima wanted me to take Peace Walker serious, and now he wants me to take Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain just as serious? He wants me to take the story as a serious revenge story, with Big Boss killing and recruiting kids all while a dude named Skull Face hunts him down, with the Illuminati watching and setting things into place?
TL
R
I always wanted an MGS to be extremely serious in nature, specifically when it came to Big Boss's fall from grace. To have it be almost devoid of it's silly shenanigans and fourth wall breaking things. To be a true, down to earth gritty story of the implications of Child Soldiers and the horrors that Big Boss will commit. But the story is too far gone, they have established to many ridiculous things as cannon to take this universe serious anymore, especially with the themes and acts they will commit in The Phantom Pain. Kojima should have truly finished off Metal Gear when he had the chance, instead of turning it into the current joke it is with it's cannon and over-arching plot. At the very worst Ground Zeros should have been a reboot, at the best it should have simply been a new IP that left the baggage of Metal Gear cannon behind to start new.
The Set Up
Metal Gear seems to be in a major tonal shift with Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain. From everything we have seen it is taking itself extremely seriously, tackling contemporary issues from indefinite detainment in Gitmo to the torture of US prisoners in the early 2000's with the detainee program. Ground Zeros established this, it was very open about it.
We know the story of Big Boss, or at least where it's going to go. If Kojima keeps the course and limits retcons to a minimum, we will be recruiting child soldiers and using them to flame wars, creating a process of instability and further recruitment to bread into warriors, just to send them back into the slaughter for war profiteering.
Now, this isn't the first time a Metal Gear has tackled complex societal issues, in fact all the games have an over-arching story that dealt with contemporary issues(Peace Walker being absent from this list because I don't know what the fuck that thing was about). Metal Gear Solid was about Nuclear Proliferation. Metal Gear Solid 2 was about the impact of the internet and governments attempt to control it, although at the time the vast majority of people didn't know because the internet we know of today didn't exist in 2001 and Kojima is a time-traveler who forgot us mortals don't have the ability to look six years into the future. MGS3 was about how your enemies of today won't be your enemies of tomorrow, and cultures ability to shape things. MGS4 was about "War changing" with PMC's and global superpowers fighting it out via military proxy and cyber/economic warfare.
That was just a broad summary of the themes, from a story perspective. The thing is from my point of view, and many others, Kojima injects his own meta-narrative in his games, MGS2 and MGS4 being the most apparent. To keep it short at this time, if MGS2 was Kojima wanting to send the message of passing on a legacy, and leaving it to the next generation (IE no longer being the head of MGS, leaving it to the next person and accepting what ever comes of it), MGS4 was about his failure of that dream/hope, which is largely reflected in Snake. But we will get to that shortly and the implications that the cannonization of MGS2 had on the story as a whole.
The Mark
Metal Gear Solid 2 is probably one of the best games ever made, but it's the game that damned Metal Gear to canonical hell. It's themes with information control coupled with his extreme meta-narrative were so tightly interwoven to the games story line, that it was hard for the vast majority of people to really get the story when it first came out. The Colonel's final speech went over everyone's head because it was 2001 and nobody at the time had any idea of the future of the internet and how powerful it was going to be. The ending was just the game going crazy, and people took everything at face value that these events actually took place.
If we actually look over the game and break it down it's very difficult to believe that these events actually transpired. At the very best the player is dealing with an unreliable narrator who is unable to distinguish reality from VR.
Just a few examples of things that are never explained. How was Rose able to talk to the Colonel during the mission if the Colonel was in part thought up by Raiden? She was at the crash site of Arsenal Gear, she knew about everything. How did she get there? How did Snake get to the Arsenal Gear crash site after swimming after Ray? Why did none of the civilians freak the fuck out after having a giant ship crash into Manhattan, with their former President dead at the feet of the Washington statue? Why do characters in the end of the game manifest themselves out of nowhere, specifically Olga on Arsenal Gear and Snake at the end, where he actually vanishes right in front of Raiden turning into a bird? Why does the platform of the Ray fight perfectly match a VR mission from MGS1?
Snake tells Raiden, "Don't obsess over words so much. Find the meaning behind the words, then decide." This is Kojima talking to the player about the game. He's saying you don't need to take it at face value, that we as players should find the meaning behind the story we just witnessed. The whole ending with Snake is simply a mouthpiece for Kojima to explain to the player what he just went through, to tell them that while the game went bonkers at the end and the player is begging for answers, they won't get the answer and that getting one was never the point.
That's the thing. We are told that this all happened by the game, while we are being thrown things that are completely contrary to that belief. It fits with the message of passing on what you believe. Did this event actually happen? Was this whole thing just VR? Was it a combination of the two? How does Vamp continue to return to life? How did Fortune deflect those rockets? We were never given answers to those things, we were forced to come to our own conclusions and pass down what we believed.This is why this story was never meant to be continued. Not just because Kojima said it would be his last, he set up the story and the ending to be completely inconclusive and impossible to continue. His final nail in the coffin was literally killing the Patriots at the end, telling "Snake" or rather the player that they have been dead for over a hundred years effectively killing off the only possible lead Liquid and Otocon had on the Patriots. That's it, the story is a dead end. It was meant to tell anyone who had a glimmer of hope of there being a sequel to this madness that it wasn't going to happen, there are no more leads and the story ended here.
Until it didn't end there, and the madness continued.
Kojima failed in delivering his message. It was a combination of being too ahead of his time and creating a game was had too much mindfuckery for the average human to comprehend. I think everyone can a attest that they didn't "get it" on their first playthrough back when it originally came out. It took years for people to break everything down and get to the true themes of what Kojima was going for. It was just too much, and people were naturally begging for answers to something they just didn't understand.
But it's worse than that. It's not that people understood that they didn't understand it, they lashed out and shitted on MGS2. They completely rejected the meta-narrative and the reason for Raiden to be the main character. They were duped, we were all duped, but that was integral for the story. The player needed to see Raiden as a pathetic character and look up to the glorious Solid Snake we came to love in MGS. The vast majority of people didn't get it and were pissed. They demanded answers, and answers we got.
If Solid Snake of MGS2 is the hopeful and inspired Kojima of 2000, Solid Snake of MGS4 is the worn out, tired and bitter Kojima of 2005. He's tired of making MGS. Maybe he thought "This time it will be my last!", and just gave the people what they asked (Or threatened). He gave us the answers, oh did he ever. Horrible, mangled, stupid answers to questions he specifically created to never have answers. Canonizing all of MGS2 turned the whole of Metal Gear cannon into a hell hole. No longer could stories just be separate stories, everything now must be connected by everlasting questions and retcons. This is most apparent by making Major Zero into the main villain of the series and completely ruining the whole cast of MGS3 by retconning them into places they shouldn't be. "Hmm, Signet is black, let's make him the DARPA dude from MGS". "Well the doctor lady was a doctor, so lets make her the monster who experimented on Gray Fox". "Ehhh, let's just make Zero the bad guy and head of the Patriots, even though we have no logical reason to do so".
It was the eleventh hour twists that retconed everyone into place to give things meaning that didn't need to have meaning. It forced ridiculous explanations which forced technologies to be created to justify a story that was never meant to be. Even though MGS4 takes place far into the future, it's techno babel is clearly going to leak into The Phantom Pain. It's already leaked into games that take place in the past. Peace Walker featured sentient AI in the year 1975, a time where computers were the size of my room. It featured Mother Base R&D with fantastical like equipment that are clearly far ahead of it's time, all while the rest of the world is in keeping with it's own time period. Now I understand that Metal Gear has always had technology that has been ahead of it's proper time period, and I'm perfectly fine with that. It has it's own version of history, but it no longer holds the suspension of disbelief it once had.
Peace Walker is the epitome of what went wrong with MGS4 and it's ever lasting impact with the games cannon. It's Patriot AI bullshit will forever fester, starting with Peace Walker and having all the bosses be AI, with the final boss literally be a mapping of The Boss who then commits suicide because of things. Cipher is always watching, always in the background forever retconning things into place to explain things with the new revelation that the Patriots were always influencing things.
All theses completely out of place elements and baggage of past stories and canon will culminate with The Phantom Pain.
The Execution
If we compare the fantastical elements of MGS and it's serious nature of it's story, it's really not all that bad. MGS established a universe that was grounded in reality with supernatural elements, but it played it pretty straight. That's why it was fun. It was kinda campy, but was still able to hit some powerful moments and have a real message. MGS2 was meant to take those elements of disbelief and stretch them till they fucking snapped right in half. It took itself completely straight in the face of unreal things that even in it's own cannon would be considered impossible. MGS3 was a return to form with MGS, putting a spin on historical events but with the MGS universe's own twist, and it worked. MGS4 went off the deep-end, with nanomachines controlling and suppressing emotion, turning soldiers into zombie like beings. AI's controlling the whole planet Liquid performing hypnosis on himself to trick said AI. Characters being created out of pure fanservice by combining bosses from past games, the apparent return of Psycho Mantis who forgot his own revelations when he died. It took the things of MGS2 that were meant to be heavily scrutinized and just said "Oh yea, those are real, that happened". From Peace Walker we had AI's who were mapped from the Boss to a female secret agent who posed as an underage teen which hijacked a Metal Gear with a Rail gun (In 1975) in her bikini to the beat of catchy J-Pop. In between all this we fought monsters in side ops, had a date with Paz, took pictures of her, fucked in a box and even had a little action with Miller on the side.
Out of all the Metal Gears to date, Peace Walker was the least serious in tone, which is why Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain is going to suffer heavily from that.
Spoilers for Ground Zeros
So we take Paz, who was a double agent for Zero, who we screwed on side ops and fought with J-Pop blasting, taken hostage and tortured. Not only that, but it's later revealed that not only was she raped and molested by the evil Skull Face, they forced Chico into raping Paz as well to break him. Now we all know how fucked this is, it's actually surprising it got past the ratings board. The issue is the huge 180 tonal shift from Peace Walker to Ground Zeros, and the characters that we dealt with then in this setting.
It just doesn't work. I will forever know Paz as that J-Pop singing chick who Snake fucked in a box on the beach, who was then raped by a dude named Skull Face and put a bomb up her vagina. Forever we will be reminded that Cipher is watching, that these actions will have something to do with the future games in the series, that everything is connected. The characters we met in Peace Walker, the least serious game in the series are now getting maimed and tortured in the most serious game yet. Kojima wanted me to take Peace Walker serious, and now he wants me to take Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain just as serious? He wants me to take the story as a serious revenge story, with Big Boss killing and recruiting kids all while a dude named Skull Face hunts him down, with the Illuminati watching and setting things into place?
TL
RI always wanted an MGS to be extremely serious in nature, specifically when it came to Big Boss's fall from grace. To have it be almost devoid of it's silly shenanigans and fourth wall breaking things. To be a true, down to earth gritty story of the implications of Child Soldiers and the horrors that Big Boss will commit. But the story is too far gone, they have established to many ridiculous things as cannon to take this universe serious anymore, especially with the themes and acts they will commit in The Phantom Pain. Kojima should have truly finished off Metal Gear when he had the chance, instead of turning it into the current joke it is with it's cannon and over-arching plot. At the very worst Ground Zeros should have been a reboot, at the best it should have simply been a new IP that left the baggage of Metal Gear cannon behind to start new.
