Title: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Platform: Playstation 3
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Kojima Productions
ESRB Rating: M for Mature
As many gamers know the 1998 release of Metal Gear Solid on the Sony Playstation was not the first game in the series or the beginning of what has become an extremely complicated story. No, the series was first introduced with the 1987 release of Metal Gear on the MSX2 in Europe and Japan with a subsequent port made to the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. That was the first time many of us played as the well-armed stealth operative Solid Snake, as he ventured on his first mission for FOXHOUND to infiltrate the mercenary-run compound of Outer Heaven and destroy the first Metal Gear. It's not uncommon for games to reach across multiple platforms and reinvent themselves on new hardware but what is uncommon is for games to preserve their existing continuity as they do so. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4) represents the finale of the longest running videogame narrative in history and the best production value I've seen in any game.
20 Years. Five Systems. One Story.
The narrative is both this game's strength and its curse. By this point in the series the Metal Gear mythology is, needless to say, complex. This last chapter in the saga opens with a prematurely-aged Snake, now using the name "Old Snake" while sporting grey hair and a mustache, getting deployed into a Middle-Eastern warzone where his clone/brother/nemesis Liquid Ocelot, who's actually comprised of the body of one villain bonded with the arm and consciousness of another, was recently sighted.
Wars are now fought by private military companies (PMCs) that use nanotechnology to enhance their mercenary soldiers and keep them loyal. Snake's team of cohorts think Ocelot is going to attempt to take control of the computer that instructs the nanomachines inside each soldier, granting him control over a private army large enough to challenge anyone in the world. Of course this is just dipping a toe into the grand story that involves the mysterious all-powerful group known as the Patriots and the events of all the other Metal Gear games.
MGS4 is burdened with not only explaining the new events as they happen but also with explaining the connections to the events in all the other games. It's a lot to absorb and unless you're a Metal Gear devotee or have some reference material handy you're not going to get it all. This should not be your introduction to the series. Looking back on the story as whole it's really quite ludicrous in a videogame-comic-book sprawl kind of way. With evil twins, shadowy multi-nation conspiracies, nanotechnology, intra-family love affairs, possession, psychic manipulation, an apparent vampire, artificial intelligence, clones, bloodline revelations and the high percentage chance that any character killed will come back from the dead more than once, the Metal Gear story ends up being a hi-tech soap opera.
Old Snake looks for the best path to his objective.
The fact that MGS4 can offer any satisfactory resolution to this monster of a story is astonishing, but it manages to do so. What the game really has in its corner are the characters, specifically Solid Snake. Over the years we've grown attached to this character and now we're driven to see how and if he gets through it all. Snake's health is an obstacle right from the onset and it deteriorates steadily as the game goes on. His declining well-being adds another layer of drama - as well as gameplay in the form of the psyche and stress meters that can affect Snake's performance - to this series' final chapter. The game does right by its story but even the hardcore fans may find the ending to be too drawn out. This game has more epilogues than "Return of the King."
As far as the cinematics go, you've honestly never seen anything like this in a game. I'm a big fan of game cinematics. I love them. And as someone who laps up cinematics I thought MGS4 was a tad excessive. Some of the cut-scenes take a long time to say very little. Visually they are amazing most of the time and you'll often transition in and out of them seamlessly with an elegant camera move and UI fade. But when the big information bomb needs to be dropped they go from beautifully rendered movies to a PowerPoint presentation with drawings and voice over. As a firm believer in gaming's power to be a storytelling medium I applaud the ambition and the effort to manage this epic story, but experiencing the story should always be fun. MGS4 occasionally gets bogged down with minutia.
NEXT PAGE: Cinematics Over Gameplay and Snake's Limited Mobility
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