Critical Close-up: Metal Gear Solid 3

[Music] [Music] you know art is like a really hypocritical thing it takes the subjectivity of humanity's tastes and turns it into concrete permanent objects and most people's tastes change over time things that are made to look serious and relevant in their times are going to look more and more alien as those times change so if their attempt at seriousness does not hold up then they're gonna look artificial and hokey and naive they're gonna look campy you and camp art is not necessarily bad art it gets you to take ridiculousness seriously you can actually learn a lot from it to enjoy something for being campy is to love human nature to relish in all of its imperfections and flaws and that might be why one of the cam piest dumbest and silliest video games out there might be my favorite media art thing ever [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] how often do you get to hear me go on and on about something that I just totally love this game is on a whole new level for me it's like it breaks the law of diminishing returns or something it's been out for almost nine years and I still can't get enough I think the last time I gushed this hard over a game was during the Pepsi man LP like I don't think there's a single movie out there that'll get me as riled up as this thing like it's one of my favorite things ever right up there with fat tire and dogs thanks to complex and satisfying game mechanics set inside well-designed levels with a story made from top-notch production values and tight theming Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of the most completely entertaining games I've ever played if this game farted in my face I would still love it unlike the other games in the series there's a wealth of gameplay here with an overwhelming amount of mechanical interaction and lots of different ways to play with a whole lot of challenging incentives to prevent you from the lying on one dominant-strategy every different map takes advantage of all these gameplay possibilities leaving lots of room for you to experiment with the different ways you can interact with the system or in other words you are actually playing a game in this one you're not riding alongside the story's coattails but even if you were then that wouldn't be that bad either the sheer quality of the writing the pacing the characterization and the twists in this game are the peak of the series Kojima's competence at writing and editing is pretty spotty across the series but in this one he wisely chose to ditch the sequel baggage of the others it's a prequel with an entirely new cast of characters in a new setting that takes place a good 40 years before the previous game but you can still see how the developers use that experience from those previous games to make the most out of one set outside their sequential order in fact it's such a departure from the other games that you may not notice just how similar it is to the first one you know the one that all the fans light compared to Metal Gear Solid 2 after the negative reception of that game the next one goes back in time to adapt itself to the current times both in terms of what happens inside the story and what happens to the actual series in other words this is how Metal Gear Solid 2 wins honestly though you have played the game for a long time don't you have anything else to do with your time and this is how Metal Gear Solid 3 ends it's the first one but reimagined in a radically different time place and game like in the first snake sets up a communication network with a weapons expert a medic a commanding officer and a field survivalist who eventually betrayed him and happens to be a former mentor he meets up with the confused love interest rescues a scientist who wets himself he gets captured and thrown in a prison cell he's tortured and then he escapes with a woman while a high tech base blows up around them and after the credits of both games is revealed that Ocelot was actually an American spy the whole time but unlike the second wine it doesn't openly parody or critique this fact through the fourth wall it embraces it it uses it to strengthen its story and learn from the team's experience oh but all the metaphysical postmodern subtext is actually there it's just not shoved in your face this time unlike the second in the fourth game it doesn't drag on about issues outside of the plot so even though key cutscenes are about as long as those in the other games they don't feel as long and there are less of them on average it has a much higher ratio of gameplay to cutscene than any other Metal Gear Solid Plus these cutscenes are fun to watch they're full of kinetic action they have lots of expressive body language and character mannerisms right down to the eye movements they were just directed better than usual and that was probably because they were all motion capped by actors who were directed by Kojima himself complete with in-game props and scenery being reproduced on the soundstage so it's a story that gets to take full advantage of his skills as director while kind of elegantly restraining the qualities that undermine his skill as a writer like how the snake in this game is a new character that looks just like the old one but he also doesn't have the dark complicated backstory like the old one so that just leaves more room for you to relate to him in terms of what you liked from the old one so the game gets to take advantage of historical romanticism a likeable protagonist and also dramatic irony after all our main character is Big Boss in the prequel games you know that this guy just might transform into a villain by the end of the plot and doesn't that just leave you on the edge of your seat the whole production is paced in total extremes the game really began after you walk out of that factory and from then on it's a nerve-wracking rollercoaster ride of adrenaline rushes that gradually climbs sky-high before diving down into quiet contemplative moments of silence that shoots straight to the emotional core just take a look at your path towards the first boss battle with Ocelot the first map is just a quiet peaceful swamp with no enemies around in just a few animals and items the second map has a barricade of guards with about two primary entrances and two exits then the third map is a nonlinear base setup full of guards with different little supply depots that you can blow up in different ways to screw with the guards in different ways so at this point you're comfortable with the stealth system and you're sneaking around causing all sorts of trouble just happen the time of your life experimenting with all the gameplay and then BAM you have the boss battle with Ocelot and the music is so good and you finally get a chance to unload all the ammo you've collected and then snake takes a dive into a cave and you're back to having some quiet time with the animals again what I really like is how it does little crescendos like that throughout the whole game it gives you time to breathe and think after the most exciting scenes and the build-up to the most exciting scenes is always a long gradual uphill climb if you've ever wondered why that really really long ladder is there that's why to give you some quiet time after a ridiculous and surreal boss battle with the end you just climb a ladder for three minutes while listening to the theme song and all you can really do is just reflect on how weird the game actually is it's an intermission and there's no talk about the music dude this is one of my favorite orchestral game scores ever it just evokes the tone in the feel of the game so so well take the caution theme for example you can understand what the whole game is about just by listening to this one track just listen to it without any associated images and see what your head comes up with [Music] it has woodwind flutes that evoke a forest or jungle setting it has the military snare drums in the big band cinematic trumpets and later on it starts plucking a violin [Music] that's pizzicato it's Italian for plucked and it's a sound that's been used to accentuate mischief and sneaking for decades this is what you hear in cartoons when someone's tiptoeing through the kitchen and doesn't want anyone to hear but earlier in the song when everything's winding up there's a guitar that gets plucked - an awfully familiar tune [Music] is mission impossible the one from the 60s not the 90s and that's an important distinction to make here but that's still not all this track even describes the timing in the pacing of the gameplay how does it do that easy it's synced up to the countdown timer the fact that this music is such an overlooked detail of this game is a testament to how it does everything right you just can't listen to this music without wanting to sneak around and cause all sorts of trouble it's funny because after Metal Gear Solid 2 Harry gregson-williams actually joked that he wouldn't want to do another game unless it took place in the Amazon rainforest so Kojima who had already planned the game in a jungle just rolled along with that idea he happened to tap into the creative energy of a product that Williams wanted to do as opposed to just having to do now I know that I must sound like a raving lunatic at this point but I really feel like the wires crossed in all the right places with this one the circumstances of the last game's release and the negative reception of it were just pressuring Kojima into delivering hype was much lower with this one and the deadlines were tighter it released two quieter fanfare and lower scores but if it had really disappointed everyone then he might not have had another shot his solution was to disregard the moral of the story in the last game before swallowing his pride and just giving the fans what they wanted considering what we got I'm not ready to complain the fans got to play is the guy they wanted to the game shuts up after it's been talking too long and most interesting is that it lightens up when things get too serious the reason its music draws from corny or cartoony TV shows is for a very deliberate purpose the game sets you up to think that is silly mindless fun but by the time you're done with it you might notice that the emotional impact of that ending hits you even harder than all the cumulative moments of the last games craziness you know how when a movie deliberately tries to be campy it's not as satisfying genuine camp is about noticing an honest effort that's technically unskilled or misguided but it's got to have a heart of gold underneath all that it's not as easy to do it deliberately it's better as a fortunate mistake you end up appreciating the artists effort even though it's technically not very skillful I did not hit her it's not true it's [ __ ] I did not hit her I did not oh hi mark oh hey Johnny what's up when you laugh at something that's can't be you're not really mocking it you're enjoying it you're enjoying how artificial and fake everything is because camp taste is an appreciation of the artificiality of art and as a cheesy action video game Metal Gear Solid 3 is as fake as they come the whole premise of the game makes no sense there are no tropical jungles in Russia the actual location where the game takes place looks like this hell even if it takes place in Tajikistan like the wiki says that still doesn't make sense this just isn't a part of the world that has jungles Camp eNOS is a way of putting sarcasm quotes around content and then pointing out the juxtaposition that content has with reality content like the Cold War or Russia or even still like the previous metal gears this one takes the concept of a presumably realistic military action and just throws a whole bunch of fantasy in there it even ramps up the hyper real uneasiness by setting it in real history during real political movements of the Cold War remember those two defecting NSA code breakers that snake is supposed to meet up with those were real people that was a thing that actually happened but then the game goes and gives everyone superpowers and there are no speeches about it being like a nightmare or anything it doesn't explain how or why these guys have superpowers you're just supposed to roll with it there's a guy who shoots bees at you from his mouth and you can't explain that there's a crumbling old man who's photosynthetic and you can't explain that there's no subtlety about how volgen can shoot lightning out of his arms like he's Emperor Palpatine but they don't explain that and no one seems to mind I mean sometimes someone will say it's weird but no one really questions where all those bees are coming from I'm coming in me what do you see this game do that most movies do not do is play up the camp for seriousness and not for Laughs back in 1964 when the game takes place Susan Sontag wrote a helpful list of justifications behind enjoying ostensibly tasteless camp but one thing she says is that camp is never tragic that those two qualities are incompatible oh no you might not notice it but this game does some pretty bold things it just comes off as really natural about it you might not be aware that the rules are being broken but those rules they are being broken the cigarette smoke is downright hilarious lyndon b johnson s voice acting as cringe-worthy the theme song is so cheesy that you can't not love it and all of Kojima's dry attempts at humor falls so flat that they're just adorable listen there are no such things as vampires they're just a stupid made-up legend if they do there's so much camp to it so many naive innocent attempts that don't meet the bar but they coexist with the central story that has played very straight and also played very well with lots of skilled writing acting and humor in it that is all very well done a lot of the things that make this game campy may not be delivered on Kojima's part but they still function to make the game stronger what that camp eNOS does and Metal Gear Solid 1 was really good at this too is disarm you for the hard-hitting emotional moments you see cinematic stories and video games kind of have a cringe curve that they got to overcome they got to use voice acting so you're gonna get a lot of crossover from the cartoon business and they're relatively cartoony to look at plus they don't really put the writers on the same kind of throne that they get in cinema itself so if you try to watch a few game cutscenes without the context of knowing what's going on it's probably gonna look and sound really silly who the [ __ ] is that kept you waiting on but after a few hours with these characters you're gonna get desensitized to this stuff and that's when you can take it seriously that's when you overcome the cringe curve and that's when you can start letting the writing stand on its own what you're good I can't wait again the game uses the kam penis and silliness of that cringe curve to effectively develop its characters all the way up to the end and once you pass that curve the ending drops a bomb that recontextualizes everything the combination of deliberate humor and deliberate camp and weird supernatural elements remove the expectations that the viewer has about a game with this setting in this tone it makes all that seriousness feel trippy and unpredictable and that just increases the tension movies generally don't do that they use camp for laughs not gasps this game breaks the rules of camp it breaks a lot of rules even those of its own series the game design follows an entirely different philosophy this time one that's all about customizing the players experience and embracing the wide possibilities of a liberating system here's an example about halfway through the game just before the boss battle at the end there's this house in the middle of the woods that you might have missed it's full of weapons supplies inside like a bunch of the super important silencers and an early grab at the light machine gun there are four different ways to get inside two doors and some windows at ground level plus a hole underneath the floorboard you can crawl underneath and sneak through there or you can climb up a tree to get a better angle at the guards inside and out or you can quietly snipe from a cliff place just above the house or you can blow up the nearby food storage shack causing a distraction away from the house and using the resulting hunger effect to lure guards away from their posts or you can just tranq and magazine your way through or just be patient and use no tricks at all and just jump in during a hole in their Patrol or if you're just not into sneaking at all you can just shoot everybody the fact that this house has so many different ways in and out and so many things inside and so many guards patrolling around it is surprising because it's entirely optional it's a sidequest it's off the main path of the game I missed it entirely during my first playthrough when it blew my mind when I found it on my second can spend a good hour in there just playing with how many different ways you can rate it and that's the design philosophy that the whole game follows I first heard the term vertical slice from Chris Avallone it's a pre-production buzzword that's used to describe a demo level that encompasses all of the system mechanics of the full game it's a slice of the whole that throws all of the abilities that the player is ever gonna have into one space to make sure that they all feel good and work well together and that little house in the middle of the woods is a great example of what a vertical slice looks like in fact nearly every single map in the game is designed to include all the minut elements that support its large amount of mechanical interactions there's a particular focus on playing with food you have a hunger meter in this game so you have an incentive to stalk around the woods hunting and eating animals but even that simple action is executed with a generous degree of player customization which is both helped and hindered by a big bloated interface of slow menus you can capture a live snake in the beginning of the game give him a name and love him for the whole game and then throw him in a guard at the end of the game and that's actually a legit tactic you can capture a dead snake and use him as food to distract hungry guards and that's a legit tactic too you can creep guards out with poisonous insects you can feed one of the bosses poisonous animals and even that is a legit tactic that will actually help you beat this boss the games been out for almost a decade now when I never knew you could do that but I just accidentally discovered it by experimenting with stuff and that is beautiful just how many new things am I discovering in this game after nine years it's blowing my mind you guys it's been almost a decade and I never knew that the science uniform you get for Grenon e Gorky also works in grozny grad I just now discovered that you can use poisonous or rotten food to sneak past guards or even that you can get the ak-47 early in the game from the abandoned Factory did you know that you can rotate snake in the survival viewer to make him vomit did you know that you can use that as a legit tactic seriously it'll help you escape the prison cell that's just how deep this game design goes every level is full of animals that you can capture or eat and I mean every level even the clean polished interiors of a high-tech weapons lab will have some kind of wildlife inside of it there's always plenty of opportunities to use your camo there always more than one way to make it through a stage there's always a way to do it without any weapons or tricks and there's always an abundance of these statuesque animals and what I really like is that your characters condition is constantly degrading in some way like how the stamina meter decreases faster when you're running up hills are flipping around everywhere or how every shot you take with a silencer degrades the silencer using electronic radar burn goggles uses up your batteries so no matter what you do you're always running out of something your actions are all incorporated into that survival system there's a tiny little bit of consequence to every single movement you make everything you do is mechanically significant in some little way so the whole game is a stew of significant interactive possibilities it even takes it to a level where every single guard has something to say if you can sneak up on them and interrogate them and doesn't that just make you want to sneak through the whole game and catch them all it's like a really deep sandbox game that plays out on a really small scale if Skyrim is an ocean that's ankle deep then Metal Gear Solid 3 is the Mariana Trench even the boss battles follow the same design philosophy they're not won by environmental triggers or repeating patterns of attack most of them are actually just straight-up skill challenges that can be won in tons of ways and two of them are not the end and the sorrow are like anti bosses that slap conventional boss wisdom right in the face and it would be great if there wasn't one optimal strategy over powering all your other options but that's unfortunately not the case there are two doomsday devices buried somewhere in this inventory and the first one is probably the quietest weapon of mass destruction that again has ever had it's the tranquilizer the second in the fourth game suffer from this problem as well this thing arguably breaks the game your goal in a Metal Gear game is to sneak through areas undetected and a secondary goal of the Metal Gear Solid games is to do that without killing anyone so the tranquilizer is something that more or less functions like all the other firearms except it puts people to sleep rather than killing them and when a guard finds a sleeping body he doesn't raise an alarm like he does with a dead body it just slices through the challenge of both those goals so when you're casually first timing the game on normal mode there's really no reason to use any other weapon or gadget on the harder modes they try to balance it out by making guards wake up sooner and having silencers degrade faster and that really feels like the proper way to play this game the weird improvisational strategies that you conjure up without the tranquilizer are what makes the game so fun the other item tipping the scales in your favor are the thermal goggles these things break two bosses the fear and the end it turns the fear into an anti climatic shooting gallery that can be won in a matter of seconds and it also highlights the footsteps of the end turning that battle from a long drawn-out sniper duel into a speedy chase the goggles also discredit the game single boldest move which is the removal of the radar they added so many new gameplay features to this one but remove the iconic soliton radar system and also amplified the sight lines of guards to a much more realistic level so difficulty is spiked across the board instead of circumnavigating guards by using an easy-to-read map in the corner of the screen you're supposed to use a combination of three harder to read radar systems Anja's supplement the rest with your own senses and since guards are wearing camouflage uniforms you really have to learn how to pick them out of the background but a quick scan with these goggles reveals everything and that takes a lot of fun out of that challenge it's interesting the visibility plays such a huge role in this game because the increased visibility of the guards kinda sorta triggered an entire re-release of the game Metal Gear Solid 3 has always had visibility issues nowadays this camera feels a bit too zoomed out and a bit too slow to pan around but it's a hell of a lot better than the top-down camera angles that the original version shipped with it was designed to look like the camera angle from the first two games but since they greatly increased the guards viewing range in the third it just meant that you got spotted by a whole lot of guys who are out of frame the difference between the two angles is so vast that it's like playing a whole different game and a much better one at that so if you're one of the three people haven't play this game just make sure that the box either says subsistence or HD or Legacy Collection on it you don't want the box that says Snake Eater even though the name of the game is still Snake Eater also this game has always had a problem with animation cycles which is another weird transitional issue that comes from opening up its game design while keeping some archaic restraints in place snakes robotic rigid Stan Singh doesn't really flow with the new movement system and it's more organic geometry you need to do a lot more crawling in this game than the last but is still mapped to that weird crouch plus movement function that makes for a pretty unwieldy control scheme but the fortunate side effect of having hard controls on top of really libertarian game design is that once you get used to those controls you start to feel a real sense of mastery over the game soon it becomes a game more about playing with AI and garde routines than actually beating stealth challenges you can usually tell that a game is doing something right if losing is fun and every time I play Metal Gear Solid 3 I always get snake killed and purposefully lose the game if I get caught it's just a weird little self-imposed challenge that I don't have to do but want to do anyway it's an awfully specific kind of fun that the game is cool with letting me have and it's not even that hard I beat European extreme mode and a few nights no problem but my god I was having the time of my life while I was doing it this is one of those games with a high skill floor and a high skill ceiling it's one where you can really notice the differences between low level gameplay and high level gameplay and high level gameplay looks something like this and low level gameplay looks like this make you make it come on it's right there snake oh my god [Music] you know there are a lot of people who think this game is just like a stupid apology for Kojima trying to sound smart in Metal Gear Solid 2 and it's not like they're wrong that just kind of dismisses a lot of intellectual value that the game actually has this was the game where Kojima came out with his theming scheme for these things if the central themes of the previous two games were meme and gene then the third one is seen and despite the enormous amount of content and detail in this third game it can all be interpreted as relating to that one overarching theme scene so it's really pretty fortunate that he picked a very vague word is time in place the time is the 60s particularly during the weeks following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the place is a non-existent fictional jungle setting that crosses over with real history the plot follows snake and the boss as they have a painful experience adjusting to their newfound time in place the gameplay is all about devising improvisational strategies from environmental mechanical cues the music is deliberately orchestrated to evoke cheesy 60s PI themes in the creepy catalyst behind all the plot twists is the painful progression of history and that metaphor can actually be extended to the state of the series itself outside of the games after all the disappointing reception of the last game meant that Kojima had to redeem himself and prove his innocence in the eyes of fans and isn't that the story inside the game as well snake has to prove the innocence of his government against a storm of misinformation ultimately by adapting with the changing times and doing stuff he doesn't want to do so Kojima had to swallow his pride and just give the fans what they wanted even if the camera system wasn't good enough that meant that he had to re-release the whole game over again in that time it even came complete with an online multiplayer mode and both of those features were actually practice for the camera and the multiplayer in Metal Gear Solid 4 so in a way the series was adapting to the current times to prepare for the future and while he was arguably just selling himself out to fanboys it's still a Metal Gear Solid game at heart that postmodern depth is still there you just won't notice it because it's underneath layers and years of confidence and charisma so much charisma this cast is just full of attractive personalities even the villains it's such a strong and well-rounded group of characters and it manages to pull that off by using some classic cinematic tricks like building characterization and symbolic meaning through repetition film students get this all the time Chinatown is a favorite example to study how repeating actions words and behaviors can gradually give certain elements of a story more importance than others without having to explicitly tell that to the viewer because you know how it goes show don't tell in Metal Gear Solid 3 there's this weird significance of repeating things three times you can tell that Ocelot hypocritically cares for his countrymen because he remarks on it three times you can tell that Volgin is a sadistic villain with no shade of gray because he seemed torturing people three times you can get a sense for just how overpowering the boss is because she beats up our hero three times and you can tell that eva is out to seduce snake because she gets unnecessarily undressed on three different occasions there are even sub sequences of this repetition of threes like when they first meet she tries three times to seduce him first was some very deliberate unzipping second was some suggestive dialogue and third with a colt 45 pistol that snake just gushes over oh and you can definitely tell the snakes a gun nut because he goes on these rants three times and if you've ever bothered a call SIGINT up there's a lot more where that came from so we have a bunch of characters that are defined by repeating their notable traits three times with three villains in the third game and my god these villains are just completely despicable and the two heroes are like the coolest prettiest people around and watching the sexual tension between these two is almost as entertaining as playing the game itself and I mean if Kojima wanted to make a character to appeal to the ladies then I don't know why he didn't just get that whole Raiden thing and go straight to this guy cuz you know he's not exactly hard to look at I mean don't take that the wrong way I'm just saying he's a he's a good-looking character that's all the snake in this game is the father of the snake in the other games but since his game was made after and since he wasn't very well care anyway they pretty much just copy pasted the old snake on to the older snake but the sly handsome devil is in the details the snake in the previous games didn't emote he had a flirtatious personality but he was pretty stoic in monotone which fit with the flavor of his brutal patricidal backstory the new snake on the other hand comes in in the middle of the series doing a game with a lighter tone it's all about camp and nostalgia the new snake smiles and laughs he exhibits a variety of human emotions that the old one doesn't he lusts after Eva and despite being such a manly macho gun nut he has a merciful streak and when you call up the paramedic you can see that the both of them share a really weird sense of humor by the way does that mushroom recharge your batteries when you eat I mean it seems like you can eat a glowing mushroom it might recharge your batteries or something you should come inside the box man I don't know what you mean it's funny that he's a new main character in a prequel game that looks just like the older more beloved character but I actually think he's a better character if the old Solid Snake is a Japanese hybrid of James Bond and Rambo then Naked Snake definitely leans further towards the James Bond end of the spectrum while looking more like Rambo and appearance it's just stronger characterization in general he comes off as an entertaining Lee over the top but also likeable male hero he's a rugged outdoorsman who will man up and sling himself through the mud and shrug off serious injuries it's actually a bit overwhelming just how much of a pedestal he's put on and don't forget that he's full of dramatic irony he's gonna turn into a villain in one of these games if he hasn't already so the setup is just classic it fits right into the comic era of the cartoony or James Bond's and it bills itself as such just in case the theme song wasn't settled enough the characters themselves make sure to remind you double-o 7 is the biggest thing to come out of England since of Mayflower you have two likable sexy heroes who are up against a bunch of sadistic villains who have ridiculous physical qualities and there's even a scene where the bad guy explains away his secret plan before trying to kill the hero well I'll explain it before I kill you and what I really like is that despite such a conventional setup the story doesn't really fall for conventional traps all of those James Bond cliches are there but they're also subverted and all the characters have really rocky complicated relationships with one another and there's a lot of questionable morals that gray up the whole conflict it's campy and entertaining but it's also a serious period piece with a story that features complicated problems about globalization sex politics motherhood and masculinity and it's all nicely wrapped inside the conflict between nationalism and patriotism the write and cameo gets you to think self referential II the time paradoxes gets you to think metaphysically in the weird meta boss fights gets you to think critically it's an explosive cinematic by-the-numbers military action game that plays out nothing like your typical by-the-numbers military action game it's the Joseph Campbell hero's journey turned on its head you have a call to adventure that sends our hero over a threshold into a new world complete with a supernatural ghosts help Iran the complacent love interest but the typical hero's journey also requires the hero to have some kind of mentor and in this game that mentor goes over to the other side and starts complicating everything a lot of the game's sophistication is there thanks to the boss whose defection is the pivot of the plot and also a great source of tension for every cutscene she's in no one knows whether or not to trust her she's like an unpredictable wild card who's also cold collected and tragic she also screws with the transformation and homecoming parts of the hero's journey as well by conquering our main character through her death instead of that going the other way around unlike your usual military action game this story is character driven not event driven the individual actions of Vulcan and the boss set the plot in motion not external orders or politics it's a character drama at its core with the political backdrop it also holds back on the scripted events typical to the genre all of the gameplay areas excluding that motorcycle escape are unscripted sandboxes including the boss battles they're filled with lots of potential for the players to experiment by themselves rather than being railroaded along scripted sequences it throws in a bunch of humor and supernatural elements into a realistic setting that Criss crosses with actual history all that xenophobia against Russia that you see in James Bond and modern military games is subverted as well both the US and the USSR are depicted as equals there are no monologues about the merits of capitalism or communism in the longest speeches languish the arbitrariness of picking a side between the two in fact unlike the last game the Russian characters in this one don't have an accent they're all played as equals the typical binary morality of heroes and villains isn't really applicable here either Volgin is totally a wash up bad guy he has no redeeming values whatsoever but he's next to two very different kinds of villains who round out his simplicity with their complexity Ocelot plays a role that's more like a playful rivalry with snake meanwhile the boss lingers behind the two of them and just graze up the place even the sexual politics of James Bond are both relished in and criticized here first starters the song sequence doesn't have naked ladies dancing across it instead it has a naked snake the boss might just be the best example of a strong supporting female character in all of gaming she's not sexualized she's shrewd and competent and her gender is not insignificant it's an important part of what makes her such a tragic character she's the pivot of the plot and is wiser and stronger than everyone else in the cast but opposite of her you have Eva who plays two roles of the I can deal of interest and then throws herself on snake for apparently no reason at all in the James Bond movie is the usual Bond girl makes a move to show herself to bond before being consumed and tossed away by him the particular version of ideal masculinity shown in the Connery movies is one of rapey chauvinistic empowerment but in all the movies and the books Bond plays sexual law enforcement with deviant women implied promiscuity or homosexuality is punished and it's up to him to correct it usually through sex or violence enjoy good squeeze remember that timing goldfinger when [ __ ] Galore has sex with James Bond and that somehow turns her straight and also makes her switch sides sexually transmissible are punished in James Bond and he'll transgressive men are too and this game is very much an homage to James Bond so here we have Eva who's a promiscuous vixen who has to get punished and corrected and good lord does she get punished she gets banged and battered about as bad as snake himself but it's interesting that snake isn't the one doing that unlike bond he's not the sexual law enforcement in fact he spends most of the game acting disinterested I need you I need you I can't fly to wake by myself he's not seducing her he's not consuming her and she's also not disposable to him that whole process is kind of reversed here the end of the game recontextualizes everything up to that point we do see Eva kicking some major ass by herself she's competent on her own and clearly has her own motives which are up to the ending unexplained but she repeatedly gets captured by Ocelot and when she's undercover as Tatiana she acts like she's totally helpless but at the very end of the game with only a few more minutes left we learned that she was actually a Chinese spy sent out to snatch secrets from both the Americans and the Russians from right under their noses and most importantly she ends up conquering snake and ditching him instead although it's an homage to James Bond this plot actually more resembles Hitchcock's North by Northwest which is really interesting to watch nowadays because it's a spoof on the James Bond character from the novel's before they turned him into movies in both stories a presumably manly man accidentally tumbles his way through a dangerous and exciting spy adventure while being constantly patronized every step of the way by the two leading women one double agent named Eve and the other his mother except even North by Northwest has a happier ending to this game at least the hero there gets the girl in the end and sure Eva doesn't have the heart to shoot him but between seeing this guy constantly get his ass handed to him by his mother figure and then having this MacGuffin microfilm stolen by the love interest there's a lot of surprisingly emasculating plot developments for a Bond homage it's also important that she's the one who tells the truth to him about the boss the boss didn't affect she was actually on an undercover mission to infiltrate volcans ranks and grab the microfilm and once the Russians blamed her for nuking the lab in the beginning of the game she was given orders to be killed by Naked Snake in order to maintain her cover as a defector but the boss doesn't tell him this Eva does after seducing him stealing his government secrets and then riding off into the sunset she is also the one who triggers his grief over the boss's death which sets in motion his path to the dark side so in this game the stand-in for the ideal chauvinistic male gets consumed and thrown away by a woman and from dramatic irony we know that that's what turns him into a villain later on in the canon remember how I mentioned this game does little crescendos to highlight the emotional uppers and downers of the story the incredibly lengthy two-hour climax is probably one of the reasons why the preceding int cutscenes dive so far down you know I could go on and on about a few other reasons why this ending it's so hard but the underlying sexual politics that lead up to it are devastating they play with the presumably male players own sexual and securities to completely shatter a character that they're supposed to strongly identify with the game spends a good 18 hours building up this guy as the perfect man as a likable larger-than-life hero who represents all the qualities we want to see in a fictional badass commando but then the last 30 minutes are spent just tearing him apart he comes back from his adventure disillusioned and broken after the tape from Eva he has no more speaking lines no more words just a single tear and then the game is all over and remember Susan Sontag said that camp and tragedy are incompatible for all no no no no Metal Gear Solid 3 is an earnest attempt of seriousness that falls flat in just enough places to make it adorably entertaining but it's earnest attempts in making likeable charismatic and tragic characters worked really really well the interplay between these five core characters is timeless the story still stands strong and it still hits hard today there just aren't many games out there there is fun to play and watch is this one the gameplay itself is deeper and more satisfying than any other game in the series and the story is both more coherent and more skillfully told I really think that the wires just cross in all the right places here like this is one example where the triple a sequel Factory actually worked it's a big dumb action game that actually respects the players intelligence and has something interesting to say and doesn't railroad them through linear gameplay it reveals fascinating cultural and historical insights without coming off as preachy or pretentious it's actually a really smart game that just looks fluckey so really it's just entertaining so there you have it I've been around for a year and granted I haven't had many opportunities to rant on and on about something that I just genuinely thoroughly loved but you know this game does have some problems with bad controls and a bloated menu interface but it's so much greater than the sum of its parts and it just makes me so happy so I hope this wasn't too gushy because it was basically a really long explanation behind how and why I love this game but come on after a year of this stuff it had to come out eventually so if you've been following bunnyhop since the beginning thank you for an excellent year and I can only hope that I get another opportunity to go on and on about something I love some time soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] and in the [Laughter]

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 1,060,161

Rating: 4.9046664 out of 5

Keywords: Metal Gear Solid, Kojima, James Bond, Review, Bunnyhop, George, Hitchcock, North by Northwest, Sex, Funny, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Video Game), metal gear solid 3, mgs3

Id: N_-jyF987MQ

Length: 43min 29sec (2609 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Nix-7c0]

My first search told me that these videos were only ever posted to this sub once, two years ago. After posting, I went to look for that thread and its helpful links, and I've found that this video is posted every few months. So, please forgive me for the repost.

Nonetheless, I suppose I'll leave this thread up, since the videos really are amazing, and I hope every fan out there happens upon them.

[u/[deleted]]

I rarely get to hear SBH gush about something he loves, but boy does it make me smile. I never really noticed just how Bond-esque this game was until I watched this video. The cliched villain with superpowers, the witty and charming main character, the HALO jump and bike chase, and a rival villain just makes me grin.

Honestly, MGS3 is better than most of the more recent Bond films.

[u/SlamRobot658]

George still has the best review of MGSV.