Acid08, NeoGaf.com forums: "MGS's story raises the bar because of the themes it deals with. The whole military becoming a privatized corporation is completely believable and gives us a haunting look into what might be our future."
In one post, forum member X puts forward the chilling plausibility of MGS 4's plot and scenarios. In another, he lashes out at anyone with the audacity to hold him to it. 'Why should soft science fiction strive for realism?' he asks. And the answer is that it shouldn't. I'm challenging your claims, not MGS 4 producer Hideo Kojima and company's.
Part of a schizophrenic's paranoid soliloquy may contain cause for legitimate concern. But before he can consider the matter, he's carried away to larger, more sinister conspiracies, one on top of another until ultimately he arrives at something like the script for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In MGS 4, a world in which corporations alone wage war becomes one in which those corporations use the Thetans of nano-tech to control the minds and bodies of their contractors, which becomes one in which artificial intelligences command the corporations along with the world's economy and media. Non-voters in the audience take refuge in the assumption that an all-powerful and despotic Illuminati is pulling the strings that pull the strings in an arrangement that ascends to someplace between a Prime Mover and blind destiny. Responsibility absolved.
Shane Bettenhausen, 1UP Yours: "When I see MGS transcending the medium, pushing the envelope... When I hear [people complain that there are] 'too many cutscenes,' I think, 'you're a peasant.' MGS 4 made me think about PMCs -- which, in a way, I hadn't before. The fact that [Kojima] brings up these real issues and brings them to light for people who don't really think about them...."
What exactly is it encouraging us to think, though? We're certainly not asking ourselves who pays Metal Gear's private military companies or how this take on a total war economy sustains itself. In the world we live in, the U.S. State Department spends American money to pay for security contractors. If in MGS 4's world, failed states are the PMCs chief clients, we should ask why. Smart money says the answers would involve "nations, ideologies, or ethnicities" -- the very motivators that almost everyone of the game's characters continually says are moot in an age of "endless proxy battles."
Nor are we asking who these militias are or what they're fighting for. Not once does the game give these militia members a face or voice. When twenty die beside us in battle, we don't see corpses; we see guns and unredeemed Drebin points -- a missed opportunity, considering the sense it makes for a living relic (Snake) to sympathize with rebels who defeat nano-tech stormtroopers and their battle bots with nothing but old-fashioned human resources and bulldozers.
Regardless, I have a "real issue" for Shane: Since when does indifference to Saturday morning melodrama, and lines like "If you won't be a prisoner to fate, then go fulfill your destiny!" make someone a peasant? Isn't it more incriminating to look at MGS 4's good fun as though it were a window on our future? And what about needing its flimflam to awaken an interest in the world around us? I'll leave that to NeoGaf's Linkzg, who jokingly writes, "I didn't understand that Nazis were evil until I came face to face with Hitler in a mech suit in Wolfenstein 3D."
Implausible stories can and do spur serious thought on important topics. But Wolfenstein 3D is not Brave New World, and until someone bothers to make a case that MGS 4 has something more to say about PMCs than that a Cheshire Cat arms broker profits up to the point that a rogue agent grabs control of the computer that runs the planet, then Guns of the Patriots is not 1984. If anything, Universal Soldier is the appropriate analogy. Or Battlefield Earth.
IGN review: "Is it possible to give a game an 11? If so, this would be the game that would merit that score. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a title that exceeds all the hype that was attached to the title."
GamePro review: "Every once in a long while a game will come along and change all the rules. Final Fantasy VII transformed the RPG genre, Resident Evil helped create a new sub-category of gaming -- survival horror -- and GTA III single-handedly reshaped the gaming landscape. And now comes Metal Gear Solid 4, a game whose potential influence on the current state of gaming is nothing short of tectonic."
GamePlayers review: "Gamers should be eternally grateful that such a game exists."
I can't believe my ears when, on 1UP Yours, Ryan Payton of Kojima Productions comments that "with triple-A titles, its almost like it's inherent [for reviewers] to start tearing down [a game's] different aspects." He's complaining about Edge magazine's 8-out-of-10 review score which sticks out where over a dozen 10-out-of-10s from other outlets don't. He's ignoring the many, many critics who sound more like a paid audience offering infomercial testimonials. MGS 4, they preach, is a rule-rewriting, paradigm-shifting, earth-moving, bar-raising, wheel-reinventing tour de force that presumably relieves headaches when applied directly to the forehead. We've left our own world at this point and find ourselves in a parallel dimension where man has invented fire, Alf, and little else. Throw in the insight of message board visitors like ThePure -- who, on Gametrailers.com's forums, posts that "Solid Snake is by far one of the best heroes of our generation, though it takes wise people to see this" -- and we've entered an alternate time line where Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Theresa never lived and the measure of humanity is a gun-toting Houdini.
I respectfully disagree that reviewers are overly critical of triple-A titles and believe that the evidence in reviews of MGS 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty 4, and BioShock backs me. All of these are excellent games with big budgets. Critics gushed and gushed over each, and practically apologized after pointing out any of their problems. If MGS 4 doesn't sell by the millions it won't be for scathing reviews. The trouble, if there is any, lies in leading readers to believe that a videogame is the Second Coming...even if it is a lower-case fourth.